Internment of Japanese Americans Still Hurts

Mits Usui was telling a triumphant story, about the founding of his local Japanese American Community Center, when he suddenly began to cry.

“You don’t know what it means,” Usui said to me as tears streamed down his face. “You don’t know what it means to pick up the paper and see the names Julie Tamaki and Evelyn Iritani and Tim Kawakami,” he said as he ticked off the names of my Japanese American colleagues who also write for The Times.

“After throwing us in internment camps and so many of us dying during the war, fighting to prove we were loyal, you don’t know what it means.”

Seeing Japanese American journalists working at a paper that had once printed stories about the local “Jap peril” gave Usui reason to think that his generation’s suffering through World War II internment had not been in vain.

But that interview with Usui in Pacoima also made it clear that his generation has never forgotten its encounter with xenophobia, the government-ordered imprisonment of 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. And that many of the Japanese Americans who came before me have hidden their pain away; but they have not lost it.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the military evacuation of people of Japanese ancestry--most of them U.S.-born American citizens--from the West Coast to 10 internment camps. The internees, viewed as a subversive threat to the domestic war effort, lost more than their freedom from 1942 to 1945.

Many of them also lost their livelihoods, including valuable businesses and farms; others lost their sense of being accepted by the white society around them.

There were many men like Usui, who even as his family was being interned in Colorado, volunteered to serve in the U.S. military in an effort to prove the loyalty of all Japanese Americans. They are credited with helping to bring about an official U.S. apology, though not until 1988, and redress payments for those who were in the camps.

Despite the apology, Japanese Americans still struggle to understand the internment, myself included.

When I was growing up I would ask my mother, who also had been interned, what it was like.

“It wasn’t so bad,” she’d say to me in her most reassuring voice. “I was so young at the time and I just remember all of us kids playing together.”

I think my mom believed what she told me. But even if she didn’t, she would never have said otherwise for fear of upsetting me. The day would come, however, when there would be no denying that the experience had deeply affected her.

She and my aunt and older sister had come to visit me in Los Angeles and we spent the day in Little Tokyo dining on udon noodles and browsing among the Japanese dish shops. On a whim, I suggested we stop by the Japanese American National Museum.

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After touring the museum, we headed outside and over to an exhibit of a barracks from one of the internment camps. A group of former internees had dismantled the barracks at its former site, Heart Mountain, Wyo., and brought it to Los Angeles, where they reassembled it to inform future generations about the internment.

The barracks had once stood just four blocks from the one where my mother and her family had lived. Our tour guide, who had also been imprisoned at Heart Mountain, began recounting how the drafty, wood-frame structures lacked insulation and ceilings and how they were instead covered with tar paper on the outside.

Sometimes temperatures would drop to 30 degrees below zero. As I stared at the barracks, I imagined my mom and her family being forced to abandon their farm in Washington state to live in such a miserable place.

My mother listened, too, with an expression that I’d rarely seen on her face: anguish.

By authorizing the internment, Roosevelt forever redefined what it would mean to be Japanese American.

Even to my generation, it means the pain of knowing that at one time being an American did not guarantee citizens’ civil rights. It means the rage of a wrong that despite reparations has never been fully repaid.

And it means knowing that many Americans once stood by and did nothing as their fellow citizens were being banished.

The ancestors of many of my friends also escaped from barbed wire. But in their cases, they were escaping the barbed wire of other countries to come to the United States.

My ancestors found the barbed wire here.