Artifacts Of Internment -- Through Their Own Memorabilia, Japanese- Americans Tell How It Was

Unlike most museum exhibits, the Wing Luke Asian Museum's coming "Executive Order 9066" will be created less by professionals than by a community telling its own personal, painful story. On display will be memorabilia that ordinary people have kept quietly and privately for 50 years, in remembrance of an experience that profoundly changed them.

"Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and 50 Years After" opens Feb. 19 at the museum - exactly 50 years from the date President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the order authorizing the internment of about 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

The exhibit will continue through July 19, then made available to other public institutions. Camp internees and their descendants have offered most of the more than 1,000 items being considered for the exhibit.

Research coordinator Sally Yamasaki (whose father was interned at Minidoka, Idaho - where most of Seattle's Japanese Americans were sent) says the exhibit will include a re-creation of a Minidoka barracks room;model of Camp Harmony, the temporary assembly center at the Puyallup fairgrounds; re-creation of a prewar Japanese-American pharmacy storefront; and a reading room with newspapers, documents and books from the era.

The exhibit also will include photos, artifacts and documents illustrating 100 years of history of the Japanese Americans in Washington state.

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-- For its February exhibit, the Wing Luke Asian Museum is seeking a pot-bellied coal-burning stove of the kind used in Minidoka barrack rooms, and "beaver board," the cheap composite lumber used to build barrack walls.

Donations of regular lumber and cash are also sought ($56,500 still must be raised). Call the museum at 623-5124.

---------------------------------------- A TEEN'S DIARY OF HIS `LOUSY EXPERIENCE' ----------------------------------------

Tsuguo "Ike" Ikeda -- Before the war: He was 17, living in Portland. His dad cleaned a restaurant and ran a small hotel; his mother was a dishwasher. He volunteered when the call came to set up a temporary internment camp near Jantzen Beach. "I was very innocent," he said. "It was the helpful thing to do."

-- Artifacts: Voluminous scrapbooks with everything from camp-block dance invitations, to mess-hall menus, to a diary from 1942 to 1944. "When camp came, I felt I wanted to keep a record. I knew it was a lousy experience and I wanted to keep a record of any aspect of it."

-- Memories: One searing memory he never wrote in his diary: At the evacuation center outside Portland, he was "just fooling around" one day when he saw a guard shoot a cook who strayed too close to the fence. "I heard a bang, and saw the blood shoot out. I ran." He never talked about the incident to family or friends. "You just didn't talk."

-- Postscript: He left the camp for Salt Lake City, then moved to Kansas, where he briefly attended college and was drafted into military intelligence. After the war he was asked to extend his enlistment to go to Japan with American occupation forces. He and others said they would only if they were given the same rank as their white counterparts (lieutenants, rather than privates); the Army wouldn't do it. Eventually he moved to Seattle, became a social worker, and retired several years ago as director of the Atlantic Street Center.

From Ikeda's diary

(Note: In many entries, Ikeda began by naming a popular song of the era.)

-- May 2, 1942. Evacuation North Portland Assembly Center. . . . The family arrived with new hopes and thoughts. . . . I started work as soon as I got here. Mom got a little car sick but she is feeling better now. The place seems plenty big and empty. . . . Sure had a queer feeling having soldiers guarding us all around the road. We got our picture in the Oregonian.

-- Sept. 10, 1942. "Skylark." My family and myself arrived in Minidoka 8:30 p.m., tired, hungry, many problems and worries. . . . I still can feel the rocking of the train. . . . After dinner in Mess 31, which I ate in a hurry, I went with Hank and Toshio to a dance sponsored by Portland - old friends there. Tough time finding the way home - no lights.

-- Sept. 11, 1942. Our family woke 7:30 (slept like a log) - camp was plenty quiet. After breakfast Akira and myself walked 2 miles or more to the canteen with no guide. . . . Start work in 32 mess hall - tired feet - dirty - hope - no electricity - nothing to look at around camp - camp is still not done, roads are just dirt.

-- Sept. 13, 1942. "Under Blue Canadian Skies." I found out I was on the payroll at $16 a month.

-- Sept. 23, 1942. In Mess 34 they had food poisoning and many went to the hospital.

-- Sept. 26, 1942. Hot water in Block 30.

-- Sept. 27, 1942. I went to Sunday service in the morning and night. I still got a touch of diarrhea from a couple of days ago. I go to sugar beet farm tomorrow.

-- Nov. 13, 1942. "When the Lights Go on All Over the World." "White Christmas." Worked hard (in sugar beet fields 35 miles outside of camp). Willy got a birthday cake from a friend. We all had a piece and the rest he gave to Mr. and Mrs. Ortal (the beet farm owners). We were asked to come in and sit and listen to the radio. Boy, it was sure swell. Home is something we all miss.

-- Nov. 23, 1942. "Mister Five by Five." I went to register for high school. It took all morning and half the afternoon just to get my program. I practiced table tennis. I ate at two mess halls.

-- Nov. 29, 1942. "Paper Doll." I acted as guide to a Christian group from Rupert . . . The grounds were ankle deep with water. . . .

-- Dec. 2, 1942. Tonight I attended a discussion about Minoru Yasui and his principles of civil rights and what the U.S. Constitution stated. It was one of the best patriotic meetings I've been to. (Yasui, a Portland lawyer, unsuccessfully challenged the curfew order against Japanese Americans on the West Coast. He lost at the Supreme Court.)

-- Jan. 18, 1943. 14 below zero today. My ears felt as though they were going to drop off as I hurried to school. This morning Mom got the room decorated with sagebrush and paper flowers, making it look more like home.

-- Feb. 9, 1943. "Candlelight and Wine." Tonight I went to hear Mr. Stafford (camp director) speak about voluntary enlistment at Mess 35. A capacity crowd attended. It all came down to the point: for your own good, volunteer.

-- Feb. 13, 1943. I passed out the tickets for the dance at 29. All afternoon I went looking for a date but no luck till 6:30 p.m. when I found Jenny.

-- March 4, 1943. Since the boys were smoking and gambling in the social hall, Mr. Light (school principal) is going to close the social hall for a while.

-- March 10, 1943. We left for Burley, Idaho (the camp's boys glee club was allowed on a special trip to sing for a school on the "outside"). Boy, it was plenty cold. We all sat down on the floor of the car. It really was a thrill to be able to go into a high school. The program went over with a bang. The students were all sociable - strawberry ice cream soda, and hamburgers, potato chips, pickles.

-- April 30, 1943. Report cards. Mass chorus of 200 voices sang "America." Drum and Bugle Corps played. First volunteer group from Minidoka left for Salt Lake City for their physical. . . . Had impressive flag-raising ceremony.

-- Aug. 12, 1943. Got an indefinite leave - I'm in Salt Lake. . . . Bigger than I thought. Long blocks and hilly like Seattle.

-- Aug. 15, 1943. Today I became 19 years old.

-- Aug. 27, 1944. Arrived Hunt 11:40 p.m. Mom sure wants me to stay out of the war. It sure feels great to come home even though it's only a camp.

------------------------------------ FOR THE CAMP PAPER, POIGNANT COLUMNS ------------------------------------

Cherry Kinoshita -- Before the war: At 17, she had just graduated from Lincoln High School, one of a handful of Japanese Americans there. Her father had a dry-cleaning shop by Green Lake; they lived in the back (they had to abandon it when the internment order came). She planned to attend college (a dream she would finally realize at age 60).

-- Artifacts: A nearly complete set of The Minidoka Irrigator, the camp newspaper. As Cherry Tanaka, she wrote the "Feminidoka" column. Her assignment: fashion and other "womanly" concerns. But she found this "meaningless drivel. . . . How can you talk about fashion in a camp?" She worked in her own sensibilities, with some poignant columns subtly but unmistakably questioning the internment.

In those days, she says, it wasn't their style to be direct or rebellious. The paper had to show any stories dealing with the running of the camp or its administration to a white public-relations man (a policy instituted after national authorities saw a satirical column by a fellow writer about the assistant director, said to be a ladies' man). However, she says, she recalls no censorship.

As a reporter, Kinoshita had more access to the white camp administrators than most internees. She recalls that the director, Harry Stafford, "was considered pretty fair. Probably in his heart we didn't need to be there. Some of the others . . . well, I don't want to say anything, some may still be alive." They considered Minidoka one of the better-quality camps; there were no riots, more conforming - "if you want to call conforming a better quality."

-- Memories: Her strongest memory of newspaper days was the sadness of the later years: "There was issue after issue, filled with so-and-so-is missing, killed. . . . It showed how decimated the 442nd (the famed all-Nisei battalion) became at the time. They were a suicide battalion."

-- After the war: In August 1944, when her health finally allowed her to leave camp, she got a job as a domestic near Fort Snelling, Minn., where two brothers were in military intelligence language school. She brought her parents there, too, after the camp was closed. She married an Oregon man she met at camp, returning to Seattle in 1950. Eventually she led the national campaign for redress of internees.

`Feminidoka,' July 17, 1943

A young mother looked up from the pictures her seven-year-old son, Teddy, had so laboriously drawn . . . to remark: "Just take a look at these pictures and you'll probably understand my anxiety to relocate and get back to normal living as soon as it's possible."

I . . . glanced at the first. In orderly juxtaposition, six black barracks, each with the proper number of chimneys served as the background for the figure of a man holding something in his hand. . . . Teddy offered the information that the man was just going to ring the dinner gong.

The next vividly hued drawing was the unmistakable mess hall scene - with rows of oddly proportioned people all deeply engrossed in eating. And the last had brown spots covering the entire page while someplace under it all I could barely make out the form of a woman - or was it a tree? Again, Teddy enlightened me . . . the figure was "Momma" going to the laundry room in a dust storm.

The reasoning behind the mother's words came to me in sudden clarity . . .

Those scenes he had chosen seemed peculiar, for in the remembrance of my own second-grade period, I had somehow expected to see trees and houses with gardens and little path . . . instead I saw tar-papered barracks row on row. . . . Instead of a family group enjoying their meal in the dining room - a community mess hall. . . . Instead of a mother hanging clothes in the yard - a laundry room and a dust storm.

And all the other little Teddies and Alices whose vocabulary consists of "mess halls and laundry room" instead of "dining room and basement" - have they, too, become so enveloped in center life that they have forgotten the meaning of family life - the normal life?

----------------------- TAMING THE `WILDERNESS' -----------------------

The Irrigator was Minidoka's newspaper. Here are some excerpts.

Sept. 10, 1942. Editorial: Eyes on Tomorrow. The stage on which the Irrigator introduces itself is 68,000 acres of untamed wilderness.

Minidoka, as we know it now, is a vast stretch of sagebrush stubble and shifting, swirling sands - a dreary, forbidding, flat expense of wilderness . . .

We are not here by choice. But it is not likely that protest will alter the fact that we are here, or dissipate the probability that we will be here until we win the war.

We, the ten thousand then, can have but one resolve: to apply our combined energies and efforts to the grim task of . . . converting a wasteland into an inhabitable community. . . . Our future will be what we make it, and there is no reason to despair . . .

Item: A total of 114 Pierce and King County voters cast their absentee ballots for the state primary election . . .

Sept. 25, 1942. Self-Government to Begin. Some form of self-government is essential to the well-being of this community. It is important to colonists that this government be self-government - of the people, by the people, for the people . . . - Harry L. Stafford, Project Director

Oct. 28, 1942. Item: Boy Scout Troop 123, formerly of Portland, will play host to a center-wide Hallowe'en Jamboree . . .

Oct. 31, 1942. Barbed Wire Seen for Community. The eight watch towers will not be ready for operation by the MP, pending completion of electricity and telephone connections, the administration announced . . .

Nov. 14, 1942. Editorial: A Crop Is Saved. Hunt residents especially can feel justifiable pride in the fact that more than 2,100 of its workers . . . were in Idaho, Oregon and Montana beet fields . . . barred from participation in defense industries, evacuated by "military necessity" to relocation centers and hooted at, even assaulted by unthinking outsiders, the Japanese here have, nevertheless, contributed in no small way to the nation's victory program and have proved that they, in the only way possible, are loyal Americans.

Irate Women Storm Schafer - Official Quakes as Coal Shortage Spurs Females. (Assistant project director Philip Schafer) made vague promises. The women stayed. He made halfway promises. The women stuck. And THAT, in short, is how the people of Block 6 got their promise of plenty of coal.

Nov. 25, 1942. Thanksgiving editorial: It is a thankful thought to realize that we are living in a country where humanitarianism and justice are the beacons guiding its every action . . .

Jan. 29, 1943. EXTRA: Army will admit Nisei. American citizens of Japanese ancestry will soon be admitted to the army of the U.S., the War Department announced Thursday.

Dec. 18, 1943. Holiday Hi-Jinx slated to appear soon on local stages. Hunt feels pride as letters from Pacific reflect meritorious deeds of Nisei there.

July 1, 1944. Nisei farm workers attacked by Buhl youths - local newspaper raps narrow-mindness of attackers.

-------------------------------- A SUITCASE FULL OF RECOLLECTIONS --------------------------------

Aki Kurose

-- Before the war: She was 17, just out of Garfield High School. Her family owned an apartment building nearby; her father was also a railroad porter.

-- Artifacts: A small suitcase she took to camp; her mother had bought it at the Kress Ten-Cent store after getting the order to take only what they could carry. Also: A white linen camp towel, imprinted with Minidoka's picture, and a greasewood walking stick her father polished (carving and polishing greasewood was a common pastime of the older Japanese). Her mother had saved these items, believing it important to do so, and recently passed them on to Kurose, the child who was "interested in history."

-- Memories: About 1980, Kurose took her mother back to Minidoka for the first time since camp days: "She stood by the river and said: `So much has happened to our lives; whoever thought we would be put in barracks like prisons?' She watched a leaf float down the river, and said, `Life flows on.' I thought it was very poetic."

Last year, when her mother was in the hospital, a Caucasian worker recognized their last name. She thanked them for "the beautiful things we've had all these years, that you were so kind to give to our family." These were the Japanese treasures - kimonos, plates, dolls - that Kurose's family had entrusted with a man who was supposedly caring for their apartment. He later had claimed the items "disappeared" during the war. Kurose's mother signaled Kurose not to tell the kind, innocent woman the truth. Afterward, she said: "They've taken care of these things and treasured them. If we had kept them, with all the moving we had to do, we couldn't have cared for them. Now I can die in peace." She died the next day.

-- Postscript: Before the war's end, the family followed Kurose's father to Utah, where he had gotten a restaurant job. Kurose's older sister got relief from the incessant dust, which because she had asthma had kept her in the camp hospital much of the time. An older brother, who had been a University of Washington student, volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and later returned home safely to finish college. Kurose got a job as a maid and had been promised the opportunity to go to college, too, but her employer wouldn't allow her the time to attend. Years later she would become an award-winning science teacher; she continues to teach elementary-age children.

------------------------------------------------------- FROM MINIDOKA TO TULE LAKE: SOME FACTS ABOUT INTERNMENT -------------------------------------------------------

-- In 1942, about 14,400 Japanese and Japanese Americans lived in Washington state, 9,600 in King County. Japanese population of Seattle: nearly 7,000.

-- Everyone with at least one-sixteenth Japanese blood was to be evacuated.

-- A total of 12,892 people of Japanese ancestry from Washington state were interned. Generally, Japanese and Japanese Americans in Seattle were sent to the Minidoka, Idaho, camp; those in King County outside of Seattle, Kitsap County, Tacoma and other Western Washington counties were sent to Tule Lake, Calif. Those in Yakima Valley and surrounding counties were taken to a camp in Heart Mountain, Wyo.

-- The 6,247 internees from the Seattle area at Minidoka were joined by 2,800 from Oregon and a few from Alaska.

-- Minidoka's 500 barracks were arranged in 44 blocks, each block with two sections of six barracks, served by one mess hall and a central H-shaped shower and toilet facility. Family rooms varied in size, averaging 16 by 20 feet. Each had a pot-bellied stove and cots.

-- The residence area was 2 1/2 miles long and a mile wide, about equivalent to the area from the base of Queen Anne Hill to South Dearborn and from the waterfront to Seattle University. Seattle was mostly evacuated by neighborhood, so most neighbors were housed in the same block.

-- Three hundred men from Minidoka volunteered for the newly formed all-Nisei U.S. Army battalion, more than from any other camp. A total of 33,000 Japanese Americans served in the war, most in Europe.

-- The 100th Infantry Battalion was eventually absorbed by the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The 100th/442nd suffered 9,486 casualties, with 680 killed in action. Of all the camps, Minidoka suffered the greatest number of casualties.

-- For its size, the 100th/442nd was the mostly highly decorated unit in the entire war.

Source: The official booklet of the Wing Luke Asian Museum exhibit, "Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and After, a History of Japanese Americans in the Seattle Area," by David Takami.

--------------------- INTERNMENT MILESTONES ---------------------

-- Feb. 19, 1942: President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of "any or all persons" from designated military zones and transferring authority over civilians from the government to the military. The West Coast is divided into 108 exclusion zones.

-- Mid-March, 1942: Authorities establish 8 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew for Japanese and Japanese Americans.

-- March 30, 1942: Bainbridge Island Japanese become the first group in the nation to be evacuated.

-- April 28, 1942: Seattle evacuees are sent to temporary assembly center at Puyallup fairgrounds, called "Camp Harmony."

-- Aug. 10, 1942: Beginning this date, most Seattleites are sent from Puyallup to the Minidoka Internment Camp near Hunt, Idaho.

-- January 1943: U.S. Army, reversing previous policy, admits Nisei volunteers.

-- Early 1943: Government begins promoting resettlement of Japanese in the Midwest and East Coast.

-- February 1945: Japanese are allowed to return to the West Coast.

-- Late October 1945: Minidoka is shut down; 2,000 remaining internees are evicted.

Source: The official booklet of Wing Luke Museum exhibit, "Executive Order 9066: 50 Years Before and After, a History of Japanese Americans in the Seattle Area," by David Takami.