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17 February, 2003
Life during wartime
The history of Japanese Americans puts a heavy emphasis on internment as a crucible and a mass defining moment that affected not only the 120,000 whose lives were disrupted, but also the generations that have followed.
 Barracks at Amache -- we know what life was like inside the internment camps, but what about the lives of Japanese Americans outside the camps? |
Sometimes it seems as if all Japanese Americans should feel empathy with internment, whether or not they actually have internment in their family history.
Internment has surely marked our community - it was a travesty and it should never happen again. But I've also started to be curious about Japanese Americans who didn't live along the West Coast in regions that were designated after Executive Order 9066 as being important "military areas." I wonder about the families of Japanese immigrants who lived in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Nebraska -- the entire Midwest, South and East Coast - before World War II, and how their lives played out.
When the evacuation orders were first announced, some people simply packed up and moved to state in the US interior just to avoid the pain of being forcibly removed. Matilde Honda, a high school valedictorian for the class of 1933 in Brawley, California, was a nurse when war broke out. A Caucasian doctor arranged a job for her in Denver, and she fled California in the middle of the night with her sister to start a new life in Colorado. Now, half a century later, Tillie's married to Dr. Jim Taguchi and is very active in the local community.
The Sakaguchi family, who farmed in northern Colorado, accepted many relatives who came out to Colorado to avoid internment, and they all lived on the family farm together during the war.
I've begun to hear some of the stories of these lives, and they make me want to hear more.
Some older Japanese Americans have told me they didn't remember facing any prejudice during those years after the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor. They tell me their lives were essentially like any other American during the war, struggling with rationing and nightly blackouts.
|
Extra reading Speaking
Out for the Past -- This is the main story of a package I
wrote that ran in the Denver Post that also includes this
sidebar. The main story is about Camp Amache, the Japanese
American internment camp in SE Colorado; the sidebar has profiles
of area JA leaders. I've also added an
extra article I've written, about Dr. Satsuki Ina, and the
powerful work she is doing with "The Children of the Camps." |
But their memories must be selective, because even if they didn't face direct prejudice on the streets outside their homes, they couldn't really live their lives like other Americans. They couldn't listen to the latest news of the war on their radios, for example, because they had to hand over their radios to authorities - they could have been used for espionage purposes, after all. And they couldn't take family photos during holiday celebrations, because they had to hand in their cameras too. Other Americans' freedoms were guaranteed, but not if you looked like the enemy across the Pacific.
Jim Hada, who grew up in Fort Lupton, Colorado, recalls that Japanese Americans weren't allowed to drive farther than five miles without alerting authorities about their whereabouts and plans. He had to get permission to make the long, slow drive in a truck from his family's farm to visit Camp Amache in Southeast Colorado. His parents were separated, and his mother was in California when she was rounded up and carted off to the desolate plains east of Lamar, Colorado.
"I just went to the gate and she met me at the gate. I wasn't allowed to go into the camp," he recalls. "We talked briefly, and I brought her to the farm for a couple of hours and then I took her back. That was all my contact during the war years with my mother."
Hada now leads the Denver Central Optimists Club in efforts to preserve Camp Amache.
You didn't have to be in Colorado at the start of the war to enjoy its freedom: Many internees were allowed to leave their camps, either to attend college, or find a job (all away from the West Coast, of course). Bill Hosokawa, one of the most celebrated Japanese Americans and the author of "Nisei: The Quiet Americans," was interned at Heart Mountain in Wyoming for a year and a half but then found a job with a newspaper in Iowa.
Carolyn Takeshita's family was interned in Poston in Arizona, but her father got permission to take his family to Colorado to help during the sugar beet harvest, and after the season the family was allowed to stay.
Her family in fact has deep roots here. Her grandfather helped found the original Simpson Methodist Church in the 1920s, before he went back to Southern California. At one time, he worked a farm that was located on the current site of National Jewish Hospital, out on East Colfax Avenue. She remembers a thriving "Nihonmachi," or Japan Town, in downtown Denver along Curtis, Champa and Arapahoe Streets during and especially right after the war, when internees from all the camps settled here before moving back to California after a few years. Takeshita's now very active in the local community, and with the efforts to preserve the Heart Mountain camp site.
But for every success story and every person who doesn't recall facing prejudice, there are stories of hatred and racism aimed at Japanese Americans outside the camps.
Erin was told of one woman who was walking home with her two young children after grocery shopping one day, when she was kicked in the back and sent sprawling to the sidewalk, groceries spilled everywhere.
And Mariagnes Medrud, who was just a teenager when her family was sent to Minidoka, remembers where she was on VE Day. Her family had left camp to live in Utica, New York. She and her sister had just visited a hospital full of terribly injured Nisei soldiers from Hawaii who were recuperating before being shipped home, and were waiting for a bus when the news of Germany's surrender was announced. Medrud recalls just standing there amidst the impromptu celebrations, still stunned by the horrors of the young men she had visited, when a woman began screaming at her. "You goddamned Jap, you don't have a right to be here, get out or I'll kill you!"
I want to hear the stories of life outside the camps. Our community can't be truly complete until we know all of our history - both good and bad.
NOTE: People who were not interned are welcome to share their experiences with others who were interned, at the Day of Remembrance/Children of the Camps workshop, Sat. Feb. 22, 1-5 pm, Tri State/Denver Buddhist Temple, 1947 Lawrence St., free, more information 303-200-0031 or erin@empowerful.com.