Infamy (28 page)

There was a page devoted to a letter from Ralph Merritt, the director of the camp. He wrote, “Each of you can find a place in this country for normal living as free citizens. Of course this depends on your cooperation and courage and initiative.… Never was your future as bright as now.”

There were no soldiers, or guns, or fences shown until the last two pages of the yearbook. There were no words on those pages, just one full-page photograph that showed a hand with garden shears trying to cut the barbed fence and another of a guard tower along the barbed-wire fences enclosing the camp.

That same summer, Ted Hirasaki, who had graduated from San Diego High School six years before, was moved after witnessing a Poston camp graduation. He wrote to Clara Breed about this, the first graduating class of Parker Valley High School. That day, graduates “marched into the partially constructed school auditorium and received their diplomas. They looked splendid in their caps and gowns. The boys were in blue and the girls, in white.”

Hirasaki reported that Poston III High School had become an accredited high school that spring, and the name was changed to Parker Valley High School. “If I am not mistaken I believe Parker Valley High School is the only relocation center high school that has been so honored. It is magnificent the way the students have striven for higher education.”

He went on to describe the growth of this school, writing how in the first year students had made do in makeshift barrack classrooms, but then:

When construction of the school began the whole community volunteered in making adobe bricks for the school buildings. Even school children helped so that school could open in time for the fall semester of 1943–1944. Yes, the students can rightfully be proud to say “It’s my school” for they built it with sweat and toil. The class gift was a beautiful American flag.

Many of the young graduates were anxious to adjust to new lives outside the barbed wire and watchtowers. “This will probably be my last letter written to you from the fair city of Poston, Arizona,” Fusa Tsumagari wrote to Miss Breed that spring. “My mother is going to join my father in Crystal City Texas. It is now almost 2½ years since we last saw him.” Crystal City, originally built as a migrant labor camp, was one of the few Justice Department facilites that held both Japanese and German aliens—and, after late 1943, their families. The population there, more than three thousand, included the 1,500 Japanese seized in Latin America, mostly in Peru, as well as more than 1,000 Japanese aliens and almost 900 American Germans.

There was great irony in Tsumagari’s next paragraph: the Japanese men on the FBI’s “potentially dangerous” lists, and Germans on similar lists, were often treated much better than the confused innocents sent to the high deserts of the West.

Crystal City, according to various letters we received, is a very wonderful place. It is quite an improvement over Poston. The buildings are white (not this black tar paper), each family cooks for themselves, have a shower in each barrack to be shared by the families occupying the barrack, well furnished, and a nice canteen. So much is allowed per person per day for food and this amount is given them in certain coins only good at the local store, and they tell us food is ample.

Tsumagari was not joining her parents in Crystal City; she headed to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her next letter, in June, reported on her new life. “As you know, I am living with my ‘sis’ and her husband. All three of us are working; they in Heinrich Envelope Co., and I in L.S. Donaldson Company, a dept store.” Tsumagari was working there as a typist in the mail-order division. She reported, “The work is monotonous and rather tiring at times, but I enjoy it. There are lots of things to learn, people are nice, and my typing has increased in speed and my accuracy is getting better. We’re slightly swamped with work and consequently have little time to fool around, like in camp, but time passes fast.”

Tsumagari was planning to attend business school and then aiming to take the civil service exam. As she looked ahead, she still thought of the past. She wrote, “Last Sunday Ikuko Kuratomi (do you remember her?) called me. She is living in St. Paul and attending Hamline University. She is coming over this Sunday for dinner and we hope to do some reminiscing and [put together the] patchwork of our life pattern.”

While some young workers compared their lives after camp to their earlier lives behind barbed fences, others compared their fates with those signing up with the army. Ted Hirasaki wrote to Clara Breed in the summer of 1944, “I had hoped to be a barber at Camp Savage, Minn. I had an offer. In a routine checking of the arm, the doctor advised me that the arm bone is in a rather dubious state and that it would take some time before the condition would clear up. I could have walked under a snake’s belly, I felt so low.” He was hit hard by that blow, and had started to feel sorry for himself. Still, he couldn’t help but look to other Nisei: “Then I read some articles in the Pacific Citizen, the JACL newspaper: It told of the heroic deeds of the
Nisei
soldiers, of the hardships they suffered—I woke up.” He realized that what he was going through was “nothing compared to the fighting man on the front. I am back in training now. I am taking weight-lifting to condition my body.”

The drafting of young evacuees continued to be the major topic of conversation—and conflicts—in the camps. Many aging Issei parents thought their sons’ first obligation was to them, not to the country that imprisoned them. And many young men decided to defy any military orders as long as their basic rights were being mocked. “I am a No-No boy,” said one teenager who refused to answer questions 27 and 28. “I am going to say ‘no’ to anything as long as they treat me like an alien. When they treat me like a citizen, they can ask me questions that a citizen should answer.”

“Those of us who volunteered were ostracized,” said another. “There were catcalls and we got into fistfights. The
Kibei
, those born in America but educated in Japan, threw food at us in the kitchen, and my poor mother, with three sons who had volunteered, was castigated mercilessly.”

The talk and the situation were about the same in all the camps, except for Tule Lake. “Speaking of the draft problem,” wrote Louise Ogawa from Poston to Miss Breed in San Diego, “quite a number of boys are being called for the army and together with the relocation this camp is slowly becoming empty. There are quite a number of boys refusing to appear for induction. I just can’t imagine young boys just out of school being picked up by the F.B.I. and taken to jail. It just doesn’t seem right.” Ogawa went on, writing, “Maybe I am too Americanized to see their view point but on the other hand I know I should respect them for their decision and determination to carry out what they believe should be.”

Tom Kawaguchi at Topaz, like many other Nisei, enlisted in the army against his parents’ wishes. “I joined,” he said, “because I always felt very strongly about patriotism. I felt that this was my country. I didn’t know any other country.” To him, his choice was straightforward. “When war broke out with Japan, I was ready to fight the enemy, and I had no qualms about whether it was Japanese or German or whatever. This was my country and I was ready to defend it.”

Stanley Hayami felt the same way. His older brother Frank was already in the army, and after graduation Stanley was ordered to report for his army physical in Denver. “After taking the exam,” he wrote in his diary, “Mits Kawashima, Calvin Kawanami, Lloyd Kitozono, and Mas and I roamed around town, ate a big T-bone steak, saw [the film] ‘Guadacanal Diary,’ then we went to a hotel to sleep.”

By August, Hayami was headed to active duty. He wrote in his diary on August 20, “Probably this shall be the last time I will write in this book in a long time.” In this entry, he described the news of the past three months of the war: “Well, France has been invaded and the allies are now close to Paris. Saipan Island in the South Pacific has been taken with the result that Premier Tojo and his entire staff was forced to quit. Hitler has been almost killed.”

He wrote about American Japanese fighting in Europe, as well. “In Italy the Japanese-Americans are doing a wonderful job. The 100th is the most decorated outfit in the army.”

Like many others who departed the camps, Hayami felt an odd nostalgia.

Heart Mt. has been a dead place, a wonderfully live place too. Dust has blown through it and snow storms too. Someday, from a foreign battlefield I shall remember it with homesickness. Mother, Father, brothers, sister, friends, mess hall, movie theatres, ice skating, swimming, school, weightlifting—all shall try to well up in my throat at once.

On August 22, 1944, Hayami reported for induction at Fort Logan, Colorado. Within ten days, Private Hayami was in Florida, complaining about the heat and sweat in his letter to his family. It was his first full day after arriving and “already they had us drill all morning and then this afternoon they gave us our rifles. I spent most of the day cleaning it.”

“Today I got my sharpshooter’s medal, but I don’t feel like wearing it,” Stanley Hayami wrote to his parents that fall. “In a regular
hakujin
[Caucasian] company a sharpshooter is rated very high, but in our company it is doing just average. In fact it is doing below average because almost half of our company got experts medals.… Our company did so damn good that we broke the Camp Blanding record!”

Back “home” at Heart Mountain, Private Frank Hayami, Stanley’s older brother, was on furlough for Thanksgiving, but it was a sad time. Ted Fujioka, the first student body president of Heart Mountain High School in 1943, had been killed while “on a special mission” in France. Stanley, his basic training cut short, was at Heart Mountain for Christmas, one of twenty-one soldiers on holiday leave at the camp. By then more than five hundred Heart Mountain families had little flags with blue stars in their windows, indicating they had sons in the service. The Fujiokas were the first to display a gold star, indicating a son had been killed in combat.

Stanley was there on December 30, 1944, when the
Heart Mountain Sentinel
, the camp paper where he had worked, announced that Japanese and Japanese Americans were free to return to California. But it was too late for many of them: they were afraid and they had nothing left back there.

Some American Japanese, like Stanley’s sister Grace, studying at Hunter College in New York City, were building new lives in the Midwest and farther east. While many of those younger people missed the charms of the West Coast, they also shared the fears of their parents of the hatred along the Pacific.

Louise Ogawa had moved to Chicago and was cheered by her new life. “Chicago is certainly a large city. It seems like a world all by itself! It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to walk the streets side by side with all creeds of people again!” She was enjoying her job doing office work at A. C. McCluy & Co. in the Correspondence Department, and anticipating what she hoped would be her first white Christmas, having never experienced snow back in Southern California.

But as winter came, Ogawa was thinking of San Diego, writing, “I have heard people are returning to California. I am so happy that we are being accepted again in our cities where we spend much of our happy moments. I, too, would like to go to San Diego and yet hesitate.” Ogawa paused. “With public sentiment as it is, I think it might be best to start life anew in a new community. Life would be so wonderful if all this hatred and racial discrimination was abolished from the earth.”

9

“GO FOR BROKE”

THE LOST BATTALION: OCTOBER
30
,
1944

When Pearl Harbor was attacked, there were 1,432 American Japanese in the Hawaii Provisional Battalion, a National Guard unit. They were American citizens defending the nation, even though they were denied voting rights. On May 28, 1942, they were activated and protected from discharge by the clever (and probably illegal) bureaucratic maneuvering of the military commander of the islands, General Delos Emmons. They were transported to San Francisco on June 5 and designated the One Hundredth Infantry Battalion—“One Puka Puka,” to the Hawaiians—of the United States Army.

Nikkei
in Hawaii were never evacuated, although several hundred Issei, community leaders called “possibly dangerous,” were on FBI lists and interned without charges in prisons and camps. Islanders were subject to martial law but there were just too many Japanese on the islands, more than 150,000 people who made up more than 40 percent of the territory’s population, to be considered for evacuation. There was no way they could be evacuated or incarcerated without destroying the economy of the islands. Besides, despite Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was not ripped by the racism, the political hysteria, and the white greed that swept the West Coast. The One Hundredth’s next stop was Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, where their exceptional performance in training did not go unnoticed in Washington.

Because of the One Hundredth’s training success, there were plans being debated inside the War Department to form a combined Hawaii–West Coast Japanese American segregated regiment to fight in Europe. The United States needed more combat troops and Elmer Davis, director of the Office of War Information, again told President Roosevelt that the incarceration of Japanese Americans continued to be an important propaganda tool of the Axis powers. Asian press and radio controlled by Imperial Japan brought up the camps whenever Americans or the British talked of death marches or the murderous conditions in Japanese prisoner of war and slave-labor camps in the Pacific.

To be sure, there were American Japanese, Ben Kuroki among them, already serving in the army, usually secretly. Many local commanders ignored or bent Washington rules that barred service for Japanese Americans. Hundreds of invaluable MIS translators were already in the Pacific. Twenty-six Nisei attached to the One Hundredth were secretly billeted for five months on Cat Island, Mississippi, in the Gulf of Mexico, for smell tests conducted by Caucasians using dogs; the theory was that Japanese smelled different from white soldiers.