The Burden of Shame

By Jane O'Reilly

At last, amends for World War II internment camps?

"When I heard rumors that all Japanese would be interned, I couldn 't believe it. I kept saying that I was a loyal American citizen and that it just couldn't happen in a democracy." --Testimony of Mabel Ota

It did happen. In the months after Pearl Harbor, more than 110,000 "persons of Japanese ancestry" (those with 1/16th Japanese blood or more) were forcibly relocated from the West Coast to inland internment camps in desolate areas of Wyoming, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Arizona. Most were American citizens. One-third were resident aliens born in Japan and therefore, under the law of the time, ineligible for citizenship. No act of espionage or sabotage was attributed to a Japanese American during World War II. They were summarily imprisoned and their constitutional rights suspended solely because of their race. One thousand Aleut Indians were also interned, simply because of their "proximity to a war zone."

Now, nearly 40 years later, the process of understanding what happened and making reparations has begun. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, created last year by Congress, is holding a summer-long series of public hearings. Last week in Los Angeles, the audience listened with hushed respect to stories almost too painful to remember, but too important to forget.

The spring of 1942. They had little notice, perhaps a week. Given numbers and allowed to bring only what they could carry, they were herded into "assembly centers" at fairgrounds and race tracks stinking of manure and animals. Finally, they were transported to ten barely habitable camps for the duration of World War II. Mabel Ota, now 64, was sent to Poston, Ariz. She would, after the war, become the first Asian school principal in Los Angeles, but would spend her life believing that the camp's poor diet and worse medical care caused her father's death, and her daughter to be brain-damaged at birth.

Dr. Mary Oda, 61, now a San Fernando physician, was torn away from her first year at medical school. In the Manzanar, Calif., camp, dust whirled through gaps in the floor boards; nine people shared one cramped room, sleeping on bags filled with straw. Her family lost their farm, their equipment and one another. "We became separated during the evacuation and we never lived together as a family again."

Terrible ironies haunt the history. Fourth of July celebrations were bravely held behind barbed wire, in the shadow of sentry towers. Parents wasting away in tar-paper camp shacks proudly displayed starred banners indicating that their sons were American soldiers. Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans) members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which fought gloriously in Europe, were sometimes required to have Caucasian escorts when they visited their interned families. (About 33,000 Japanese Americans served in the U.S. military during the war, some of them drafted right out of the camps.) After the war, many of the detainees found they had lost everything. Clarence Nishizu left his farm in the care of a "neighbor friend"; the friend kept the profits and bought the land. "I had no place to go--I received nothing. Finally I found a house in San Fernando, where I went into gardening." Of the total property loss to the internees, estimated to be $400 million in 1942 dollars, the U.S. Government eventually repaid $38.5 million.

There are explanations, all of them ugly. Economic greed. Racism. Wartime hysteria. Americans of German or Italian ancestry did not suffer mass incarceration, but the shock of Pearl Harbor inflamed the century-old hatred of Oriental immigrants--the "yellow peril."

The public, President Franklin Roosevelt, even the Supreme Court, rushed to trample Japanese Americans' claim on the Bill of Rights.

But explanations are not excuses. One major question facing the nine-member commission is: What can be done to compensate the victims? Japanese-American groups are recommending financial restitution. Suggestions range from individual payments of $25,000, to money for scholarships and communities. The idea of repayment is controversial, even to some Japanese Americans. Testifying last week, California Senator S.I. Hayakawa, who was born in Canada and spent the war years in Chicago, said demands for monetary reimbursement are "absolutely disgusting" and "not Japanese." But some commissioners clearly favor reparation.

Judge William M. Marutani, a commission member from Philadelphia, put it bluntly to Hayakawa: "The Bill of Rights, as you will recall, provides that ... citizens can petition the government for redress of grievances... We understand, sir, do we not, that we are in an American society where any redress of grievances is customarily by some monetary means?"

The commission's final report is due next year. Along with specific recommendations on how to make amends, the commission will address a larger, more important issue: making sure that due process is not stampeded again. Exclusion from the law causes deep and lasting personal harm. Many of the Japanese-American internees were able to speak of their pain and bitterness only at the prompting of their children, who were raised during the decades when the civil rights movements vastly enlarged our understanding of democracy. Poignantly, Dr. Oda explained why it had taken so long: "I did not want my children to feel the burden of shame and feelings of rejection by their fellow Americans. I wanted them to feel that in spite of what was done to us, this was still the best place in the world to live."

--By Jane O'Reilly.

Reported by David S. Jackson/Washington and Jeff Melvoin/Los Angeles

With reporting by David S. Jackson/Washington, Jeff Melvoin/Los Angeles

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