by Maleeha Syed / Cross-cutting net
Republished with permission
During World War II, the United States uprooted hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans. Eighty years later, the scars of Washingtonians are still there, and their families have all experienced it.
February 19 marks the 80th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which led to the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II. The order came after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and fears that Japanese-Americans posed a threat to the country. A month later, on March 24, 1942, the Army issued its first civilian exclusion order (which the Japanese American Citizens Union considered a euphemism for a detention order) for the residents of Bainbridge Island.
In the months that followed, Japanese Americans were sent to rally centers (also a euphemism for a temporary detention center, according to the Japanese American Citizens Union), like one in Puyallup , sometimes called Camp Harmony. The team was then sent to 10 camps scattered across the country, including Minidoka, Idaho, where many Washingtonians and their families were held during the war. About 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, lived in concentration camps.
“We were taken from our Seattle home by the government and moved to Puyallup,” recalls Atsushi Kiuchi, 92, who spent three years in Minidoka and now lives in Washington. “In August 1942, we were transported by train to Idaho.”
Eileen Yamada Lamphere was a product of Executive Order 9066.
Lanfield’s parents met in Minidoca, gave birth to her a few years after the war, and raised her in Kent. Langfield, 72, didn’t fully understand what a Japanese-American incarceration camp was like until he grew up.
In separate interviews with Crosscut, the pair reflected on the impact of the order, describing a history of shame and a lack of progress since.
These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Did your family see jail time coming, or did it surprise them?
Minetown
Kiuchi Chun: We know something will happen to us. We didn’t realize it was going to be a kind of imprisonment and loss of liberty and all that stuff until about February.
The Army decided we could be a disruptor and have an adverse effect on the security and defense of the nation.
Eileen Yamada Lamphere: I remember them thinking their parents would be taken because their parents could not be citizens by law.
I think there is always an expectation something will happen, but it will be for one percent [the first generation—those not born in the U.S.]. So, I think, for the most part, as a U.S. citizen, it surprises people.
What was it like for those in your family who went through incarceration? Are there any prominent accounts?
Kinuchi: You lose all freedom. You have to stay behind barbed wire fence.
Especially in Puyallup, you have a lot of people who have been there. People would drive by, look inside the camp, look inside the barbed wire, point and laugh at us.
No privacy. There are armed guards walked on both sides of the fence.
Erin Yamada Lanphel
Lanfield: When they came back from the war, they collectively decided they wanted to be Americans. In the eyes of the Japanese, go to jail, go to jail, only bad people can go to jail.
So even if they do not understand what happened, but also the kind of shame. So you did not talk about those shameful part of your life.
I always knew I was Japanese-Americans. I didn’t know what this really meant in terms of politics until later in life. My parents, I would overhear conversations about camp, they never told me lies, but they made me believe what I thought camp was like.
And I think like a Boy Scout camp camp, right? Marshmallows, campfire and campers.
They never corrected me.
Has your family ever thought about leaving the U.S. after incarceration ended?
Kinuchi: We are busy making a living.
Some people do. Sadly for those who wanted to be sent out, they did come back to Japan.
They found a very, very difficult situation as they were still recovering from the war.
For those who choose to return to Japan of the Japanese from the United States, there are also serious prejudice or bias.
Has your family considered leaving the area or country after being in prison?
Lanfield: No, in my father’s side and mother’s side.
I know my father’s brothers, they were released from the camp to help eliminating Oregon Ontario where farmers. So they get a work permit, after the war they stay in Ontario.
Ontario, Oregon is a very unique community. There’s already a Japanese community out there and they haven’t been removed. So the Japanese community there supported people getting out of the camps, and so did their merchants.
Is there anything you would like to add that you think people don’t understand or are they wrong?
Kinuchi: The official cause of all this is, first, racial prejudice. Second, wartime hysteria. Third, the failure of our political leaders.
Now, these three things you used to think about today. What happened in the past 25 years and now, even in a corner, some remote corner of the world today, even now as we speak.
Unfortunately, these three issues will always be with us. We should learn something, but we did not. We are still making the same mistakes.
Lanfield: I think a lot of the general public believe that it is a camp. But they do not know what these camps.
They were surrounded by barbed wire. They have only one light bulb and a big belly stove. No running water. No closet. No chest of drawers. There were metal cribs and some of them had to stuff their own mattresses with straw.
This is what is happening now. You’ll even see photos of those located in border Tacoma detention center.
Unless you are an American, or we will say that this happens is because they are not citizens. I just need to let people know what happened and what is happening now. This will be our legacy it?
life after war
The United States took a few decades to accept their approach to Japanese Americans. Kiuchi describes the cultural hostility and prejudice when people return to their homes on the West Coast.
According to the New York Times, people who used to live in refugee camps were given “$25 and a train ticket to wherever they wanted.” Once they were released from Minidoka, the Kinuchi family started anew in a small farming community in Idaho.
In the years that followed, incarceration was not necessarily a secret, but it was also rarely discussed, he said.
“Even with our parents, we didn’t talk about the fact that we spent three years as American prisoners,” he said. “When I go to school …… I’m ashamed to tell me I was in a camp.”
In the decades that followed, the country’s leaders acknowledged the harm done to Japanese-American families. President Gerald Ford described the issuance of Executive Order 9066 as “a sad day in American history.”
“On this 200th anniversary, we are commemorating the anniversaries of many major events in American history,” he said in a 1976 announcement. “However, an honest reckoning must include acknowledging our national mistakes as well as our national achievements. It is not pleasant to learn from our mistakes, but as a great philosopher once warned, if we want to avoid Repeating the same mistakes, we have to do it.”
A decade later, President Ronald Reagan echoed Ford’s sentiments in his 1988 remarks about the incarceration of Japanese Americans.
“Yes, at a time when the country was at war and fighting for survival, today we should not judge those who may have erred in this great struggle,” he said. “However, we must recognize that the detention of Japanese-Americans is just that: a mistake.”
Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988, formally apologizing to those who experienced incarceration and paying $20,000.
“It didn’t do my father any favors,” Kimuchi said. “Because my father is dead.”
