Emotional Ito Recalls Family’s War Internment

Abandoning his stern demeanor in the O.J. Simpson trial, Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito struggled to control his emotions Thursday as he described his family’s experiences while held behind barbed wire in bleak internment camps during World War II.

Ito, whose parents met at the Heart Mountain, Wyo., internment camp, told how after the war, they took him on a tour of the German Nazis’ Dachau concentration camp, an experience he called “one of the most profoundly moving” of his life.

Ito also related that his first name is drawn from a San Francisco lawyer who unsuccessfully sued the federal government to recover property his family lost while interned. His middle name, Allan, was that of a Hollywood minister who looked after one of his parents’ homes while they were imprisoned.

Ito’s voice broke, and he paused several times to regain his composure as he described his maternal grandfather, who also was interned. After the war, his grandfather became an insurance salesman, but lost his job and later committed suicide.

Ito joined several other Japanese American judges at a panel discussion sponsored by the Japanese American National Museum and the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles in discussing how internment affected their lives and legal careers. Ito, 44, was born after the war and was never interned.

“When my parents came back from the relocation experience, they were unable to pursue their professions and their goals and education,” Ito told the audience of about 150, many of them elderly Japanese Americans who had been interned.

“I have to tell you,” he said. “I agree if it can happen to us, if it can happen to you, it can happen again.”

Only months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry--two-thirds of them American citizens--were sent under armed guard to a string of Spartan camps in remote areas of the West.

Of the trip to Dachau, where the Nazis systematically killed Jews and other “undesirables,” Ito said: “My parents thought it was very important to share the other experiences.” He said he went back to the German camp with his wife last year.

Before his five-minute speech, Ito and the other judges inspected a rotting wooden barracks from the Heart Mountain camp.

The barracks recently was dismantled in Wyoming by former internees and reassembled in a parking lot outside the museum. During the war, internees huddled behind the tar-paper walls as temperatures sometimes plummeted to 30 degrees below zero. Barbed wire surrounded the camp and guards with machine guns watched from towers.

Ito and the other judges were given a tour of the barracks by former internee Buddy Takata, 66. Takata told the judges that meals often consisted of boiled squid over rice, prompting Ito to smile wryly and comment, “Nothing like it,” as other judges laughed.

U.S. District Judge Robert Takasugi said he was 11 when he was sent to the Tule Lake camp in Northern California.

“Even at that age, I knew, hey, something is wrong here. This isn’t what I learned in grammar school,” he said.

When a photographer suggested that Takasugi stand inside the barracks for a shot, the judge demurred, saying: “I don’t want to go back in.”

“A lot of people say, do you think it will happen again,” he said, referring to the internment, whose constitutionality later was upheld by U.S. courts. “My comment to that is, why did it happen in the first place?”

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki was 6 when his family was uprooted from their West Los Angeles home and shipped to the Manzanar camp in the Eastern Sierra foothills.

Fujisaki said the camp experience has affected his actions on the bench.

“Today I probably have a strong feeling about people being taken advantage of,” he said. “The experience enabled me to empathize. “