“We have no one to go to for help. Not even a church. Anything goes, now that our President Roosevelt signed the order to get rid of us. How can he do this to his own citizens? No lawyer has the courage to defend us. Caucasian friends stay away for fear of being labeled ‘Jap lovers.’ There's not a more lonely feeling than to be banished by my own country. There's no place to go.”
― Kiyo Sato, Kiyo’'s Story: A Japanese-American Family’'s Quest for the American Dream
In 1942, my good friend Hana and her family were given less than two weeks’ notice that they were going to be relocated to a relocation center. I, like most other fourth graders, had no idea what that announcement meant. Then, suddenly, she was gone.
Gila River internment camp, AZ
Public domain, National Archive Identifier: 536000
It took me a while to get any answers. Over time, I learned that Hana, her family, and everyone else with Japanese lineage had been forced out of their homes, forced to leave everything behind except what they could physically carry, and move into a rudimentary internment—concentration—camp. In an example of history repeating itself, Executive Order 9066 called for the relocation of Japanese Americans to the Gila River Relocation Center, located on the Gila River Indian Reservation, which had been established almost eighty years earlier, in 1859, by Congress to contain the native Maricopa and Akimel O’otham tribes.
While I continued with my fourth-grade education, 13,348 interned Japanese Americans lived crowded in rooms that were 20 feet by 25 feet and with no running water. There was one latrine and shower building for every twenty-eight families, one laundry building for every fifty-five families, and one mess hall for every fifty-eight families. They shared the desert with rattlesnakes, scorpions, and Gila monsters, which kept Butte Hospital busy. The lives they had before—the kids’ schooling, the adults’ jobs, the community projects and budding relationships and well-tended gardens—were frozen, stolen, for three years, until the end of World War II.
When I found out that Hana and her family had been interned and learned what internment meant, I was confused, angry, and sad. It did not make sense to me. It still doesn’t. There was just no way I could ever be convinced that anyone thought nine-year-old Hana was a Japanese spy or saboteur. Nor her dad, who was working at the Goodyear Aircraft factory alongside my dad, making airplane frames to fight the Axis Powers across the ocean.
I brought my confusion to my mom, hoping a trusted adult would be able to shed some light on what was happening. After a brief discussion, I asked if Germans were going to be interned, too.
“No,” she answered simply.
“Why not?” I asked. Inside my head, I was hearing my grandparents’ oft-repeated saying, What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If we were scared that there might be Japanese spies in our midst, wouldn’t we be scared that there were German spies, as well as Italian spies, too?
“Well, it would be hard to tell who are Germans and who aren’t,” my blue-eyed blonde mother said, “because they look just like us.”
I wasn’t too young to understand what her answer meant, though I couldn’t quite articulate it. Looking back, it’s obvious: race was the real reason we were stealing from and imprisoning Japanese Americans. At its core, no matter what euphemisms they used, the actions of the United States government were motivated by prejudice, greed, and fear.
Hana’s internment so devastated me that it woke me up. She was my friend, had sat beside me in school, read the same books, ran around the same playground. She wore bows in her hair just like the other girls, laughed at jokes and ate lunch and did her homework just like the rest of us. This injustice and my own helplessness in the face of it, plus my personal loss of a good friend, planted the first seed of discernment in my mind, showed me just how silly and terrible it is to judge a person based on a general classification, not by who they are.
These days, I like to quote Afghanistan War veteran, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and one-time presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg when he called out Vice President Mike Pence for his opposition to Pete’s same-sex marriage, saying, “If you have a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me—your quarrel, sir, it is with your creator.”
In the 86-plus years I’ve been on this planet, I have seen glacial changes in racism and “scientific” bigotry. The American Jim Crow laws, established after the Civil War in order to maintain a racially oppressive status quo, were not abolished until the mid-1960s, and only after the enduring efforts of activists in the Civil Rights Movement. As the summer of 2020 begins, after a long, difficult spring in which much of the world sheltered-in-place to contain the Covid-19 virus, we as a nation, and global community, are at a major crossroads, one that looks different but is very much the same. Bigotry and racism are not new, nor are the Jim Crow-inspired inequities and abuses of the criminal justice system. Now, however, 90-plus percent of people carry a camera on their person, and with a couple taps they can upload videos and photos on social media (a technology that few of us alive during World War II could have ever imagined).
In May, a seventeen-year-old girl showed great courage when she stood approximately five feet away and filmed the slow, torturous murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers. That video sparked demonstrations around the world, which have gotten the attention of elected officials and the police—in Seattle, a few miles away from where I live, protestors created the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” shutting down the police department’s East Precinct and building upon a global conversation. For me, it also raised the question: How far away are we, really, from the Japanese internment, a government-organized terrorizing of a group of people based on race, of almost eighty years ago?
Not far enough.
How will parents explain George Floyd’s murder, as well as the ongoing systemic racism and violence against people of color, to their kids today? However much I love my mother, I hope that their explanations are better than hers was. I hope that we come up with better answers, like reallocating funds from the police to social services that lift struggling people up and help those under duress, rather than criminalizing them. And, for this year’s fourth-graders, I hope that, eighty years from now, they will be able to tell their own kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids that they did something different, that they and their families and communities brought about real and lasting change.
Recommended Reading and Watching
Kyuhoshi, Top 10 Books About Japanese American Internment Camps
Daisaku & Kaneko Ikeda Library, Soka University of America, Japanese-American Relocation and Internment: Films