I see a proud American woman and child, about to be sent to an American Concentration Camp, because her fellow citizens could not see past her ethnic heritage. What do you see?
Disclaimer
For the record, I didn’t want to be the first person to travel to all 10 American Concentration Camps by electric vehicle. Some here call me an arrogant, self-aggrandizing elitist (although they have to use smaller words). I really don’t care. I’ll be dead and forgotten soon enough. Most of the time, I didn’t want to be in those places at all. They’re all sad, remote and lonely, and going there to witness suffering and to question the basic morality of my fellow Americans is depressing. But it is necessary, now, for me to write this summary and for you to read it.
Underbelly of Bullying
In 2004, an author named Iris Chang killed herself, seven years after her book, The Rape of Nanking, was published, while she was working on another book, The Bataan Death March. While I will never write a best-seller, I understand a bit of the human toll that it takes to face the truth of cruelty. After studying Japanese culture at Harvard, I lived in Japan, Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia for years, visited Nanking and the Bridge over the River Kwai, and I often wondered how the highly civilized Japanese had engaged in such wartime brutality. Eventually, I learned to see beneath the veneer of polite, orderly Japanese society, where there is an underbelly of bullying, that can drive racist, mass hysteria.
義理—Giri—Duty
When I began visiting US national parks to raise awareness about zero carbon travel, I only planned on visiting three Japanese Internment Camps, out of hundreds of park sites, and moving on quickly. But I felt some affinity for the subject, having relied on the kindness of strangers in Japan, having overcome the barriers of language and culture and sometimes racism, I felt a duty to understand what happened. My father justified the internment when I was a child, as necessary for security, both for the US and for the Japanese themselves. As an adult, trying to make sure my own biracial children understood how someone (above)—who looks surprisingly like their mother—could be locked up without trial, despite having a US passport, I knew I had to try harder. So, it became a minor obsession to visit all 10 camps, take tours, read stories, listen to testimony, test my Japanese, see dusty rock gardens, suitcases, jail cell graffiti, paper cranes, museums, dolls, ruins, poems, military honors, memorials and cemeteries. It’s not easy, as the story is broken into many different jurisdictions, each with their own points of view and biases. But the more I learned, the more ashamed I became of this forgotten history, because we did this, not to the people of Japan, but to ourselves.
How It Began
The day after Pearl Harbor, an angry FDR called it ‘a date which will live in infamy’, and he began to restrict the rights of Japanese Americans. First there was a curfew, then bank accounts were seized overnight, businesses shuttered, homes were searched, guns were collected, cameras and radios were taken, Japanese language schools were closed, and travel was restricted. US citizens of German and Italian descent were free to live their lives, but US citizens of Japanese descent were not. Then, at noon, on 30 March 1942: any person of Japanese descent found on Bainbridge Island—opposite Seattle—would be arrested and charged as a criminal. Families were given short notice, allowed two small bags—or one and a baby—, and were sent to the state fairground at Puyallup—near Tacoma. Barbed wire fences and armed soldiers surrounded the ‘assembly centers’. There, they were lined up by family, with their family number tags tied to their clothes, oldest in front, youngest in back.
Where They Went
San Francisco residents went to Tanforan—now a shopping mall on the peninsula. Los Angeles residents were sent to Santa Anita or Pomona. Some were housed in racetrack horse stalls, which they needed to clean out themselves. California and half of Washington, Oregon and Arizona were declared ‘exclusion zones’ by the military, and no person of Japanese descent was allowed to remain there. Instead, they were transported from the assembly centers to one of ten camps. The American woman and her baby above were sent to Manzanar in California and then to Minidoka in Idaho. Others went to Amache in Colorado, Rohwer & Jerome in Arkansas, Topaz in Utah, Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Poston & Gila River in Arizona, and some were sent to the ‘segregation camp’ at Tule Lake in California near Oregon. Some male inmates were ordered to build their own barracks, latrines and other buildings. Women prepared meals for thousands. Guard towers were raised along barbed wire fences with searchlights and machine guns pointed inward. There was no privacy, not among family, not at meals, not in the group latrines and not in the group showers. The camps were in remote, desolate, dusty, unpopulated areas away from towns, many were deserts, some mountains, with extreme temperatures, and all were sabishii—lonely and forsaken.
Government Propaganda
Many Americans, including those incarcerated, were lied to about the program in newsreels by our government: “temporary”, “for your own safety”, “normal” and “happy”. Even today, the program is referred to as “Japanese Internment Camps”, but the vast majority of those incarcerated were not Japanese, they were US citizens, mainly by birth, many never having been to Japan. Propaganda films lied and stated that “household belongings” were shipped to “pioneer villages”, that only those “within a stone’s throw” of military bases were forced to move, that people were “given jobs and more space in which to live” and “managed their own security”. The program was sold as being exemplarily generous, that the military provided for all needs and that the Japanese Americans “approved whole-heartedly”. Journalists and others were periodically given limited access only to the barracks of the most cooperative inmates. Dorothea Lange’s photographs were seized and remained unpublished until 2006.
American Concentration Camps
Tule Lake calls the sites “American Concentration Camps”, although most other sites choose not to use the term “concentration camp”, due to its association with the Holocaust. One of the incarcerees in the award winning Heart Mountain film uses that term plainly, the then Wyoming Governor used the term in arguing in favor of the program, and that was the term used most commonly at the time, in print and in public. Many of the Americans who were sent to the “Wartime Relocation Camps” had never seen so many people of Japanese descent in one place at the same time. What else are you going to call a facility that literally concentrates one group of citizens based on their racial/ethnic identity into a prison camp?
“The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized’, the racial strains are undiluted.” “A Jap is a Jap.”
— Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, Program Architect & Overseer
Reality
In fact, there were water shortages, food shortages, food poisoning, unsafe living and working conditions, military brutality, unfair punishments, false charges, and inmates fatally shot, including a dog walker at Topaz, a truck driver at Tule Lake, and two protesters at Manzanar where guards fired at Americans seeking to petition their government for redress of grievances. Some elderly patients had been taken to the camps from their hospital beds, and over 1,850 died of disease and medical problems, including many infants. Complaints were discouraged or mocked. Pressure campaigns were used to enlist men into active combat in Europe, where they fought fanatically, with a 250% casualty rate, as their families were imprisoned. And always, anyone suspected of being disloyal was encouraged to renounce their citizenship and leave the country. In this system, particularly at Tule Lake, some reacted to their treatment by trying to be more Japanese, organizing protests and yelling Banzai—‘long live the Emperor’—at the guards.
Constitutional Rights
They were Americans, and their Constitutional Rights of speech, to be secure in their homes and to due process were all violated for years. The root of this program was racism. Governor Carr of Colorado opposed the program in speech to a hostile audience, calling it “race hatred” and saying “if you want to harm them, you must first harm me.” Americans of Japanese descent were assumed to have loyalty to a foreign power, and even when they were natural born American citizens, they couldn’t be trusted and would have to prove their loyalty again and again. The Issei—1st generation—chose this country rather than the one of their birth. The Nissei—second generation—were born here, but some parents sent their children back for schooling in Japan to preserve their language and culture. These children were called Kibei—returnees to America—, indicating that their parents wanted them to live here. All were Americans, either by their own choice or by their parents’. Only their fellow citizens refused to see them as truly Americans.
“And it became normal for me to go to school in a black tar-paper barrack and begin the school day with a pledge of allegiance to the flag.
I could see the barbed wire fence and the sentry tower
right outside my schoolhouse window as I recited the words, ‘with liberty and justice for all’.”
— George Takei, 2018 at Rohwer
The Fallacy of the Melting Pot
A few of Roosevelt’s advisors opposed the program, including Eleanor Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover, who saw neither the need nor justification. The Supreme Court issued split opinions late in the war, deciding for military authority to arrest citizens but against indefinite detainment of ‘loyal’ citizens, which doomed the program. (Neal Katyal issued an apology in 2011 that the DOJ suppressed evidence in the cases.) But FDR and many other Americans believed in the ‘great American melting pot’—meaning melting metal to forge steel—, the theory that Americans had a duty to assimilate and that their cultures would be purified into one American culture. But the price of citizenship does not include giving up one’s culture, whether your name is Ohara or O’Hara. Forcing people to give up their culture or to adopt a particular set of social customs is bullying and typically bigoted.
The Threat Today
Imagine something happens in the future, and people of your family background are herded up and sent to Guantanamo. Even though you did nothing wrong, your guilt is suspected based on your family cultural background. Your communications are censored, and you are treated the same as foreigners or prisoners of war. And if and when you finally are freed, all your property has been taken, ‘opportunists’ have taken your farms and businesses, and nobody will help. Don’t think it can’t happen here, since it already has.
Trump has threatened our allies, generals, judges, prosecutors, journalists, Muslims, immigrants, women, blacks, Jews, gays, Democrats, “vermin” who oppose him, election officials and law enforcement, among others, with violence including arrest and execution. He plans to take dictatorial power, has threatened a “bloodbath” and supports militarized deportations of millions. All he needs to do to make that happen is to scare people with lies and promise security.
Remember, and Don’t Let It Happen Again
The 10 American Concentration Camps are usually empty. One is only open during the summer. Several have no facilities beyond a stone marker. One is only open for family members, due to a machine gun attack and other abuses against tribal land. Barracks were scavenged by locals after the war, and many of the fields have been plowed. But there was one witness who saved the jail cell bars in their barn ‘so the real story might someday be told’. And there was the prisoner who left her estate for ‘something to be done’. A volunteer project folded 100,000 paper cranes—orizuru—, now sitting in storage in Utah. And there was a group of high school students who spent years volunteering to clean up a site, before Joe Biden preserved it. And there are those who wrote books, like Farewell to Manzanar, Only What We Could Carry, Journey to Topaz, Snow Falling on Cedars, and They Called Us Enemy, among many others. We never should have forgotten so much of this history. We need to remember it now, urgently, and make sure it never happens again.
“We have no common race in this country, but we have an ideal to which all of us are loyal:
we cannot progress if we look down upon any group of people amongst us because of race or religion.
Every citizen in this country has a right to our basic freedoms, to justice and to equality of opportunity.
We retain the right to lead our individual lives as we please, but we can only do so if we grant to others the freedoms that we wish for ourselves.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt, after visiting Gila River inmates
