Bitter Page From Past : Japanese-Americans Seek Redress for Imprisonment

Moto Asakawa was 27 that spring of 1942. He and his family had toiled long hours, day after day, planting carrots, celery and spinach on their 30 acres in Mission Valley. The hard labor was finally done, and all that remained was a wait to reap the harvest.

He never got the chance.

“The wartime evacuation order came in on April 1, 1942,” said Asakawa, referring to the American-government decree that branded him and other Japanese-Americans who were citizens of this country as “enemies of the United States.”

“The government didn’t give us much time . . . maybe about a week to pack up and leave. So we left the fields just like that, left all our farming equipment behind. We left everything behind,” he said.

Asakawa and almost 2,300 other Japanese in San Diego County were instructed by the government to bring only what they could carry, packed into a sealed railroad car at the Santa Fe depot and shipped off to an “American-style concentration camp” in hot, dusty Poston, Ariz. And they weren’t wanted back.

The county Board of Supervisors in 1942 asked the federal government to remove all Japanese-Americans and their descendants to a “concentration camp.” The San Diego Chamber of Commerce approved a resolution in 1943 that said, in essence, that the Japanese should never be allowed to return to San Diego.

Question of Redress

But now, 45 years later, it seems possible Asakawa and others who suffered like him may get something for that lost harvest of so long ago.

Support in Congress is growing for legislation providing $20,000 to each person of Japanese ancestry who was interned during World War II. Two weeks ago the bill passed the House Judiciary Committee, 28-6, and if it continues to progress smoothly, may be presented before the entire House as early as this fall.

The bill’s momentum has awakened San Diego’s 12,000 Japanese-Americans, many of whom describe themselves as “reserved and conservative,” and mobilized them into a quiet, yet effective backer of the legislation.

“You don’t hear much of the Japanese community in San Diego. It’s not their style to go out and conduct loud, vocal protest marches,” said Don Estes, a political science professor at San Diego City College. “But I don’t think I’ve ever seen them so mobilized.”

Estes is the preeminent historian of San Diego’s Japanese community. In 1971, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to trace the community’s beginnings, and he is a former San Diego chapter president of the Japanese American Citizens League.

Asakawa is 72 now, the retired owner of a retail business and a real estate firm. He has done well for himself since those dark days in Poston. Like many other local Japanese-Americans, he is in the upper middle-class income bracket. So it’s not the $20,000 he’s after.

He wants a flaw in the Constitution corrected.

“We (the Japanese-Americans) represent the one glaring time the Constitution collapsed. If the Constitution fails again at any instance, now or in the future, somebody, some group, will be victimized. That has to be corrected so it never happens again,” Asakawa said.

The fear that history may repeat itself, more than any other reason, has prompted action from this “sleeper” community, said Marleen Kawahara, redress committee chairwoman for the San Diego chapter of the JACL--a civil rights advocacy group.

The JACL and the San Diego Redress and Reparation Committee--a local branch of a national coalition supporting the bill--have intensified a letter-writing campaign to legislators, conducted fund raisers to finance a lobbying effort in Washington, organized an archive of internment documents and lectured at schools.

“It’s important that people realize the Japanese community is not just complaining about something that happened more than 40 years ago,” Kawahara said. “We want to address the loss of constitutional rights . . . that due process never occurred. It’s important to educate and explain to others that this issue is not for the Japanese only. It is a concern for everybody.”

The Japanese, many of whom said their cultural upbringing have made them quiet, private people who keep their feelings and emotions bottled up inside, have shed that portrayal to share their internment experiences with others.

“We have addressed schools and several community organizations, and we’ve talked to many ethnic groups, like the Chicano Federation and the United Jewish Federation,” said Kawahara, 43, who was born in the Poston internment camp. She also oversees the redress issue for the JACL’s Pacific-Southwest district, which includes 35 chapters.

Asakawa, a former two-time president of the JACL, is planning a lesson of his own for his fellow members of the Kearny Mesa Rotary Club. Early this fall Estes and Asakawa will conduct a seminar at the club.

“Most of my friends in the Rotary Club are in their 40s,” Asakawa said. “They have no concept of what the Japanese evacuation was like. To them it’s just a rumor.”

To talk among friends is one thing for the Japanese to do, to talk among strangers, like government officials, is quite another.

But the gravity of the Constitution’s failure has convinced many Japanese nisei--the children of immigrants who bear the most bitter memories of the internment, like Dr. Harry Hashimoto--to testify before the federal Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians.

Hashimoto, 73, went to Los Angeles when the commission held hearings there six years ago, when the reparation issue was first moving forward, and he reflected about his internment in a camp in Amache, Colo.

“We were citizens by birth, but were targeted as enemy aliens. We were denounced and tossed aside. About 120,000 Japanese were segregated and placed behind barbed wires,” he said in a recent interview.

“What was ironic is that all the residents of the camps were required to fill out a loyalty questionnaire. We had to declare our allegiance to the United States and be willing to serve as combat soldiers for the country, but at the same time we were caged in the camps and branded as alien enemies of the U.S.

“The deepest thing that hit me was the mental anguish of not knowing why my own government was treating us like a herd of cattle. I felt like a man without a country and that’s a hard pill to swallow,” said Hashimoto, who has lived in San Diego since 1958 and manages the Kiku Gardens in Chula Vista, a senior citizens’ facility sponsored by the Japanese community.

And what often comes as a surprise to the public unaware of the redress issue is that Hashimoto, Asakawa and many other nisei credit the younger sansei--the third generation, most of whom never experienced camp life--for helping them unload the bitter memories they carried like a “heavy burden” for so long.

“I believe many of the nisei have tried to forget about those years in the camps,” Hashimoto said. “For many, it is a terrible nightmare. But no matter how hard you try to throw it out of your mind, something always lingers. It is the sansei who have finally freed us from this heavy burden,” he said.

This fusion between the young and the old, appropriately during the 200th anniversary of the Constitution, has given the redress issue the legitimacy and strength it lacked before, said Estes, the college instructor, who has lived in San Diego since 1939.

“It was not until the sansei started reading brief paragraphs about their parents internment in high school textbooks that questions about the internment were raised.

They would come home from school and say, ‘Mom and Dad, weren’t you in those camps? What was it like?’ And for the first time they would see their mother cry,” Estes said.

Hearing those accounts triggered a wide range of emotions among the sansei, from shame to intense anger, Estes said. It was those feelings that were channeled and used to fuel the push for reparation, he said.

“It is this younger generation that was raised in the civil rights movement and the ethnic activism of the ‘60s, that provided the voice for the redress movement. They were the ones who first brought up the issue before legislators. But they were also easily brushed aside by lawmakers who said, ‘What the hell do you know about the camps, kid?’ ”

“That scenario has changed,” Estes said. “The nisei, who in the past were so busy rebuilding their lives after the war, didn’t have the time or didn’t want to talk about their experiences. But now many of them are retired and financially well off. They are secure and have no more worries. And with the younger generation’s urging they’ve come out to talk. Now, with that kind of combined effort, the legislators have to listen,” Estes said.

It is the JACL’s lobbyist in the nation’s capital--Grayce Uyehara’s goal to make sure that they do.

The redress legislation, if passed, will give “token” reparation to about 60,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry who were interned between 1941 and 1946, and will cost $1.3 billion. It will also establish a fund to educate the public about the internment, and issue an apology on behalf of U.S. citizens.

“Opponents claim with our country’s huge budget deficit we cannot spend that kind of money,” Uyehara said. “They say, ‘Isn’t it good enough if the nation apologizes and educates the people?’

“Giving just an apology lacks teeth. We are a nation of laws, laws that guarantee that when one is unlawfully arrested, one be redressed for such injustice,” Uyehara said.

“The Japanese lost over $500 million in belongings, at dollar value in the 1940s. This is just a token payment to re-emphasize this nation’s commitment to individual freedom and one’s right to choose where you want to live,” Uyehara said.

Hashimoto expressed the importance the Japanese place on the redress bill’s passage, when he said: “I believe it takes a great nation to own up to its mistakes and right its wrongs. If our government can’t do this, our Constitution has no (more) value than the value of the piece of paper it is printed on.”