Play Reflects Painful Era : WW II Veteran Finds Poignancy in Story About Christmas in Detention Camps

Harold Harada won the Bronze Star in World War II when the Japanese American served as a medic in bloody fighting across Europe.

But back in this country, his mother, his father, and his wife-to-be were all living behind bars--simply because they were Japanese Americans. Even Harada was forced to live in that same desert internment camp for almost two years before he was allowed to join the Army.

“Tears came to my eyes to see barbed wire, guard towers and soldiers with machine guns guarding us,” Harada said. “We said the Pledge of Allegiance almost every day and learned American history. But the camps really brought out the feeling that we were different . . . that we were the enemy.”

Fifty years later, the retired Culver City dentist and his wife, Chiye, are seeing their painful wartime lives mirrored on stage in a play at the Japanese American National Museum in Downtown Los Angeles. “A Jivebomber’s Christmas,” which ends Sunday, is set in an internment camp similar to the one Harada and his family were taken to in Topaz, Utah. In the play, a brother goes off to war to fight for this country while his relatives in the camp struggle to keep up their spirits during the Christmas holidays.

Across the street from the museum is an original barracks from the internment camp in Heart Mountain, Wyo., that was dismantled and transported to the museum by a group of Japanese Americans who once lived there.

Saachiko Magwili, a co-writer and co-director of the play, was 3 when she, her mother and her sister were taken to the Heart Mountain camp. Both her uncles served in the same segregated battalions as Harada, helping to form the most decorated unit in U.S. military history.

“How do you celebrate Christmas and (be in a relocation) camp?” Magwili asked. “You’re talking about a heart with barbed wire around it.”

During the war about 30,000 Japanese Americans served in the U.S. military and about 120,000 lived in the internment camps. “I lost both my parents in camp,” Harada, 71, said. “But the good thing is I met my wife and I’ve been married to her for 46 years.”

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As Harada watched a rehearsal of the play Wednesday night he recalled with some sadness what it was like for him and his family during the war. ‘The camp story needs to be told and retold,” he said.

In an effort to prove their loyalty, the Niseis, or second-generation Japanese Americans, enlisted after answering “yes, yes” to two questions asking if they would renounce any allegiance to Japan and if they would fight for the United States. Harada answered in the affirmative but felt disheartened by the questions because two-thirds of the internees were born in America and most had no allegiance to Japan.

The few hundred who refused to join were nicknamed “no, no boys” by the Japanese American community because they answered no to the loyalty questions.

“It was upsetting that they were out fighting for freedom when we didn’t have any back home,” said Chiye Harada, 73. Even though she was upset about living in the prison-like conditions, Chiye Harada said she never felt that “it was a permanent situation.”

Letters from the separated loved ones sustained them, Harada said. The play often uses letters to tell its story. “This is no adventure, this is hell,” one soldier writes his family in a camp. “It’s thinking of you guys that’s getting me through.”

During the war, Harada said, he and his wife shared emotions like that about once a week.

“One of the reasons the 100th Infantry Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team was so valiant in combat was because they thought of their families who were incarcerated,” Harada said. “They needed to prove by their daring feats that the government was wrong in incarcerating American citizens. They wanted to show their citizenship by making the supreme sacrifice so that the U.S. and all nations would be rid of bigotry, prejudice and discrimination.”

Actor Darrell Kunitomi still reads the letters his uncle wrote from the front lines and said he uses them for inspiration as he plays two roles, that of a 442nd soldier who agreed to join the U.S. Army and a ‘no, no boy” who refused.

“What they did is hard for somebody in the 1990s to grasp, especially for those born in the age of Vietnam and Watergate,” Kunitomi said.

His 18-year-old uncle was killed in the fighting while his parents were interned at Heart Mountain.

“They stepped out behind barbed wire and literally marched off to war and then engaged in some of the most ferocious fighting with unbelievable casualties,” Kunitomi said. “That was an era when you believed in causes and you were willing to go out there and lose your lives over it.”

That spirit has made the veterans icons in the Asian community. Many credit their bravery with influencing the eventual overturning of anti-Asian laws that until 1954 did not allow Japanese immigrants to become U.S. citizens. Their testimony before Congress in 1988 helped persuade the government to award those interned redress payments.

“War has no glory as far as I’m concerned,” Harada said.

“I think the acceptance of not only Japanese Americans but all Asians after the war was better,” he said. “It came about mainly because of those men who made the supreme sacrifice. But I believe the stoicism of those interned, the young as well as the old, (contributed) to the acceptance of Japanese Americans, and all the Americans.”