THE Lost Years

Among the 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry interned at relocation centers from 1942-’45 were Stanford University history professor Yamato Ichihashi and his wife, Okei (Kei). Yamato was 64 and Kei was 50 in May 1942 when they were sent from their home to a series of camps.

Both were isseis, born in Japan. Yamato had immigrated to the United States at 16 on a student visa, arriving in San Francisco. His excellent high school grades led to his acceptance at Stanford in the fall 1903 class. In 1913, having completed studies for his doctorate at Harvard, he began teaching Japanese history and government at Stanford. In 1921, his endowed chair became the first in the university’s history. One of the first academics of Japanese descent in the United States, Yamato over the next decades at Stanford maintained close ties with his homeland and wrote numerous books and papers on subjects including the immigrant experience and race relations.

At camp, he recorded the evacuees’ lives in diaries, essays and letters--their humiliation, their hardships, and the conflicts between the issei and their American-born nisei children. His papers, and a few of Kei’s letters, in storage at Stanford for 25 years, have been compiled by Gordon H. Chang, associate professor of history at the university, as “Morning Glory, Evening Shadow,” to be published in March by Stanford University Press.

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Santa Anita Assembly Center, Arcadia, June 1, 1942. From a letter from Yamato to Stanford colleague and close friend Payson Treat and his wife, Jessie:

We arrived here safe and sound, although the train ride was the worst I have experienced here or abroad. We went without lunch the day we arrived; at 5 p.m., much hoped for supper came. But, alas, the mess hall sounded like a battle, with booming and banging of metal dining service; the worst was yet to come. Supper consisted of a small quantity of baked spaghetti, a small potato, a little rice and water. What a comedown, even for a professor! Our living quarters is a small portion of woodshed of cheapest type. We hear everything that goes (on) on either side . . . there is no privacy.

June 7, to the Treats:

The [Assembly Center] has a population of 18,400, each numbered for identification; I am No. 5,561. Of course aside from mails, we have no contact with the outside world. The population is mixed: citizens and enemy aliens . . . an impossible combination. Many of the youngsters have been appointed [to administrative jobs] and they act like petty bureaucrats. In management of the classless community, the government has apparently adopted the lowest conceivable standard of treating human beings; thousands are still housed in stables; a stable of an animal is now occupied by from five to six persons. They are still odorous and poor of ventilation. We have become veritable animals. There is one doctor to each 3,000 persons . . . so far, one death, but babies are born every day, often three or four.

Diary entry, June 10:

Camouflage net-making (no aliens) is being done by citizens. Workers are supposed to be volunteers but were practically drafted. The materials used are poisonous and yet masks are only partially provided.

Letter from Kei to Jessie Treat, June 13:

We have only one laundry for the entire community. In early mornings, sometimes at 5:30 a.m., mothers and daughters carry their washtubs and washing boards and clothes on kiddy wagons to and fro the distant laundry; these make terrible noises. People say women work harder here than men.

Yamato to Jessie Treat, June 19:

Management faced its first real headache on the 16th; camouflage net workers struck. Newspapers made a joke of it, saying that the workers objected to sauerkraut served at lunch, it being a German dish. This is a lie. [Workers] are paid $8 per month (in reality, none has received a penny); conditions under which they work are bad: hot, dusty, poisonous.

My chief interest at present is in the schooling of children; there are more than 2,000 below 16, and most are wild rustics and difficult to discipline.

[In August, the Ichihashis were moved to Tule Lake, south of the Oregon border, where they joined their young adult son, Woodrow.]

Tule Lake, October 1942, essay excerpt:

As compared with our 8-by-20-foot quarters at Santa Anita, the present one is roomy (20-by-100). However, the campground, about 1,000 acres, is a sandy lake bottom drained about two decades ago, and so when a strong wind blows, sands penetrate and dirty the interior.

On Aug. 22 an FBI agent, accompanied by the Tule Lake police chief, a local cop and Woodrow, came to the room and told me that I was “under arrest.” I asked [what] was the charge and he replied no charge, as far as he knew. I was told to pack.

[Yamato was one of 2,000 “suspect enemy aliens” temporarily detained and questioned at Immigration and Naturalization Service detention centers during the war. He spent six weeks at Sharp Park, a camp near San Francisco.]

Letter to Payson Treat from Tule Lake, Nov. 20:

There [have] arisen a number of difficulties. Some of [the issei] are hard on nisei citizens. . . . The oldsters do not like to be ruled by kids, especially their own sons and daughters!

Letter from Kei to Jessie Treat, Dec. 5:

We are leading a very monotonous life, as usual. However, there are many classes for the grown-ups, especially for women. . . . English class, flower arrangement class, sewing, flower making. . . . Some ambitious women attend different classes day and night. Before they were evacuees, they had to work very hard every day, so most of them did not have enough time to learn anything, even English.

[Two issues elevated tensions at Tule Lake. One was that of military service for nisei. Japanese Americans had not been inducted into the armed forces since March, but in January 1943, the government announced an all-volunteer Japanese American fighting unit. The other issue was a War Relocation Authority (WRA) mandate that all camp residents “register,” which included swearing allegiance to the United States.]

Diary entry, Feb. 15, 1943:

[Camp director Harvey] Coverley said he was informed that I was engaged in an organized movement against the “registration” . . . warned me to be careful. What a nonsense! I have tried exactly the opposite, to calm the excited people.

Diary entry, Feb. 21:

News reached us that about 10 soldiers equipped with machine guns and bayoneted rifles arrested 34 nisei [31 of whom had signed a statement of refusal to register]. Forty-two percent of the residents either refused or answered “no” to two critical [loyalty] questions on the form. Tensions mounted rapidly with authorities eventually taking into custody 140 persons, many of whom were subsequently sent to special concentration camps or convicted and jailed in regular prisons. “You can’t imagine how close we came to machine-gunning the whole bunch of them,” a camp official was quoted as saying. “The only thing that stopped us, I suppose, were the effects that would have had on the Japanese holding our boys in Manila and China.”

Diary entry, April 30:

It is rumored that the atmosphere outside against Japanese has become worse to the point of being dangerous.

Letter to Payson Treat, May 4:

[Yamato is replying to Treat’s letter inquiring whether the Ichihashis might seek repatriation. Though Yamato and Kei were on a list of nationals submitted by the Japanese government for exchange, he insists he is not important enough to be a priority for exchange.]

As to what we may do after the war, we have not made our decision. Who can tell whether this country will be an agreeable place for us to live. Unlike Jews, we have our native land, of which we are still citizens whose rights will be protected and respected. I cannot and will not be content to exist in a place I am not wanted.

Diary entry, May 24:

The movie: “Invisible Agent.” American-British propaganda picture but not clever enough to go over--Gestapo cruelty and mutual hatred between Germans and Japanese. At its best infantile and amusing to children, perhaps.

[A San Francisco Chronicle reporter visits camp on May 25, 1943, interviews Yamato and writes: “A little Japanese professor who once was ridiculed by thousands of his American college students is today called the ‘Emperor of Tulelake.’ He is the colony’s man of mystery . . . accepted by some high intelligence officers as a helpful, pro-American alien, suspected by others as a sinister, dangerous fifth columnist.”]

In a letter to Payson Treat on May 29, Yamato, who cannot defend himself in the matter of the newspaper article, observes:

“My philosophy of life does not change despite what fools may do to me or say about me.”

Letter from Kei to Jessie Treat, June 15:

Just a few days ago, a woman hanged herself. This is the first case of suicide in this project.

[About 6,000 evacuees identified as “disloyal to the United States” were soon to be relocated from other camps to Tule Lake--which would be designated a “segregation center”--displacing “loyal” citizens who would in turn be sent elsewhere. In this atmosphere, Yamato is increasingly controversial, accused of being pro-Japanese, anti-Japanese and even an FBI plant.]

Letter to Payson Treat, July 18:

The segregation is a bombshell, to put it mildly. No one seems to like the idea of joining the “black sheep” camp, even if one is a black sheep. The saddest aspect is the necessity of separating members of the same family.

Letter to Payson Treat, July 25:

Why are Italians and Germans given such freedom and rights or privileges, and why are loyal Japanese citizens and aliens denied the same freedom? The present treatment of the Japanese on racial grounds has bad implications for all the colored peoples of the world.

Letter to Payson Treat, Aug. 11:

Many agents and propagandists from the WRA and elsewhere are now in this camp to encourage the free people, in particular nisei, to resettle in the Midwest and East by drawing glowing pictures of the marvelous conditions for work opportunities. I think that the government is trying to make the nisei get out of the camps to avoid the constitutional question of evacuating them without due process of law.

Diary entry, Aug. 24:

Informed that 146 died here since the beginning; of these 94 had post-mortem operations. The WRA pays $75 per each, the funeral expenses, but in fact it is the price paid for the body. It is sent to Portland from where a couple of teaspoons of ashes are sent here, but nobody knows how the body is disposed. Such is the fate of those who die here.

[Woodrow, drafted into the Army, tells his parents of his secret marriage to another evacuee. Yamato is furious, considering her a social inferior. He and his only child will not speak for 20-plus years; his stance also causes a rift between him and Kei. Meanwhile, Yamato is fingered as a camp troublemaker and the Ichihashis are moved to Amache, a camp at Granada in Southeastern Colorado.]

From an essay written by Yamato in late October at Amache:

[This] camp literally sprang overnight on a desolate prairie where only sagebrush, cactus and Russian thistles survive the winter snow and the hot summer sun. [Nonetheless, he says he and Kei do not find it intolerable and have settled in.]

Letter to Yamato’s friend Tule Lake resident and former Stanford student Noboru Shirai, Jan. 15, 1944:

[The residents here] are so conspicuously gari-gari [beggarly, needy]. They are content with the lowly standard of living imposed on them with such miserable meals and such primitive shelters and such heartless treatment. They are being handled like a bunch of buta [pigs]. They have been rendered or are passive beyond imagination and, in fact, dead except physically. This is a dead town. Yet it is inhabited by Dai Nippon Teikoki Shin-min [Subjects of the Greater Japanese Empire.] What do you think of such a group?

Diary entry, March 22:

The Pioneer [camp newsletter] carried the following: 17 draftees in Amache received March 27 induction orders. 203 taken into custody by U.S. Marshall because they failed to respond to physicals--handcuffed and taken to the federal institution of correction.

Letter to Payson Treat, Sept. 22:

Of course, the fundamental problem of the evacuees is that of resettlement to a normal life. It is generally agreed that only 10% to 15% could immediately return to their “homes” in the Western states. There are still living more than 80,000 Japanese in the nine centers. Most of the evacuees, whether issei or nisei, have lost most of their possessions. They have no home to return to, no money to start a normal life again, and most of the issei are over 60. They are in a tragic plight.

Diary entry, Oct. 27:

[Yamato comments on a camp resident’s drive to collect money for the 750 Japanese prisoners of war in the United States.]

Citizens should refrain from doing anything which might appear pro-Japanese to newspapers and hostile public to avoid hurting themselves.

[Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been elected to a fourth term. The war has turned decisively against Japan with a major U.S. victory at Leyte Gulf.

[Still, Yamato writes in his diary, “No news of importance”--and retreats into his study of ancient Japan.]

Diary entry, Dec. 17:

The whole camp is pervaded with reactions to announced policy permitting return of evacuees to the West Coast states [after Jan. 2, 1945]. All tend toward putting the inevitable off to the last day . . . afraid to face it, like a necessary but painful surgical operation.

From an essay:

It is an essential fact that the issei have been denied American citizenship [this was true until 1952] and are citizens of Japan, but many are Americanized in spirit (especially the Los Angeles people) and all are Americanized to some degree in behavior. But it is not to be expected that all sentimental ties to Japan have disappeared. Their rejection by our government and people has thrown them back on their sentimental ties to their country of origin and resulted in extensive dream fantasies of the beauties and virtues of their home of long ago. Without being overtly disloyal, they cannot help feeling that their destinies are tied to the fate of Japan. They are not yet thoroughly convinced that they will not be deported to Japan after the war, so they prefer “to remain in the center and be neutral.” Others have been waiting in expectation of a Japanese victory.

[Outside, anti-Japanese sentiment ran high. Evacuees had no financial incentive to leave the centers--the U.S. government offered to pay their transportation plus $25 per person. Yamato postponed his return to Palo Alto to record the final days of the relocation saga.]

Letter to Kenji Ito, a prewar friend and fellow evacuee, Jan. 15, 1945:

[The issei] cry, “We are too old and our young sons have been taken away from us, and we can no longer face a hostile world.” Nonetheless, it is a philosophy of despair unworthy of the Japanese people in America with their historical background.

Essay, date unknown:

Those who have the best prospect of reestablishing in the West Coast are land-owning farmers who kept their properties by leasing them . . . they even made money due to high prices paid for produce in 1942-’44 during their absence. But in most cases, the leases have been renewed for 1945 [so they] cannot return even to their homes. Another group which can resettle in the West Coast are those who work by the day, house-cleaners and gardeners, provided work is available. Their chief problem is that of “housing.” The Japanese face many difficulties in filling jobs; racial prejudice is employed against them.

[In April, U.S. troops landed on Okinawa. At Amache, Yamato devoted himself to counseling fellow evacuees on resettlement.]

Letter to Payson and Jessie Treat, April 19:

I now feel confident that I am no longer needed here. We are to take the California Limited on Friday the 27th to San Francisco . . . are likely to reach Palo Alto the morning of the 30th.

Stanford University, May 30, letter from Yamato to Sakae Kawashiri, who had been a close friend at Amache:

Home, our home, from which we had been absent for three, long years; we almost wept.

[In his diary on Aug. 6, 1945, Yamato noted the weather in detail--as he always did--followed by this brief entry:]

An atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

[On Aug. 14, Japan surrendered.]

Diary entry, Aug. 14:

What a tragic end for Japan after a stupid, stupendous folly--a bad dream.

[Past retirement age at the war’s end, Yamato devoted his time to research and reading. In March 1953 he went to Japan--alone--for a last visit. He died in Palo Alto in 1963; he was 84. The widowed Kei, who began acting increasingly irrational, went to live with Woodrow, his wife, Alyce, and their children in Chicago. But she became hostile and violent and in 1963 was committed to a state hospital for the mentally ill, where she died in 1970 at the age of 78.]