The same day that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, Chiye Tomihiro’s father was arrested by the FBI. She was 16 at the time and remembers speaking to her high school friends through a barbed-wire fence. She was ashamed and humiliated, as her family was forced to live in the animal stalls of a barn. She tearfully told her story, at age 87, breaking her silence: “We pledged allegiance to the flag every morning … ‘for justice and freedom for all,’ they said, but it did not apply to us.”
The bombing of Pearl Harbor piqued an already-building anti-Japanese hysteria. President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9006, authorizing the arrest and internment of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — a majority of whom were U.S. citizens. At least half of Japanese Americans interned were women, most between the ages of fifteen to thirty. Prisoners in the camps immediately lost all their civil rights.
The FBI told Japanese American families that if they did not cooperate, their family members would be separated. They were considered prisoners of war.
Japanese American families had as little as 24 hours to a week to pack their belongings and report to internment camps. In her book Nisei Daughters, Monica Sone describes the experience of Toshi T., from Brawley, California:
When we were evacuated, we were only allowed to take one suitcase. I was just a little girl at the time, so I stuffed as much clothes as I could into the suitcase. At the train station, the hinges on my suitcase broke and all my clothes spilled out everywhere. I started to cry, but my father stayed very calm and helped me with my clothes. Everything around me seemed so chaotic and I was scared.
While politicians and corporate media accounts of life in the internment camps portray a cheerful environment of communal meals and cooperative living, the opposite was true. Dust storms, extreme temperatures, food shortages and misery were pervasive.
The prisons were misnamed “assembly centers,” or “internment camps,” located in dusty desert environments such as Topaz, Utah; Amache, Colorado; Manzanar and Tule Lake, California; Heart Mountain, Wyoming; Minidoka, Idaho; or in the swampy areas of Arkansas. In Nisei Daughters, Kinue describes how her family was forced to stay in horse stables:
“First we were put into the Santa Anita racetracks. We stayed in the stables. Straw mattresses. We had to stuff them with straw and the smell and the stench of the horses, and the urine, and all that junk. And then from there we were sent to Arkansas, the bayou. Of course, they set up these camps in very desolate areas.”
The camps were designed and managed in a way to strip Japanese Americans of their sense of dignity, pride, expression and culture.
Mixed feelings of anxiety, anger and humiliation were overpowered by the sense of resignation to life in the camps, and immense fear. Family units deteriorated in the makeshift communal facilities and overcrowded barracks. Cramped 20 by 100 foot barracks were divided into 6 parts, with two families crammed into each part. This meant no privacy, lots of noise, shared communal bathrooms and showers, and tensions between families, who could hear each other over partitions.
When interned, Japanese Americans were forced to answer a “loyalty questionnaire,” which demanded they “agree to take up arms against the enemy,” or face imprisonment. Many Japanese American men enlisted to prove their loyalty. Many fought with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, one of the most highly respected units in all of World War II. Their wives and small children were left in the camps alone.
Women, who were already relegated to traditional Japanese gender roles, were even more vulnerable to sexual harassment, violence and even murder in the camps. Women were discouraged from speaking out, and when they did, they were not taken seriously by the authorities. Women’s reports often led to public shaming, social isolation, or defamation.
Nina Wallace wrote an account in Densho, an online blog, that attempts to preserve Japanese American internment camp experiences; “Women were often harassed, followed, threatened by white guards. At ‘home,’ instances of domestic violence and sexual abuse were often audible in neighboring barracks and became common knowledge around the camp.”
Despite the extreme racism and traumatic family strain Japanese American women faced, they held onto the strength and discipline of their parents. In the camps, women found a wide range of work, though for very little pay —working as food servers, secretaries, and hospital staff. Some attained college educations going on to become teachers, nurses, social workers, and writers and artists for the camp newspapers. These women courageously took on the cruelest environment and found ways to challenge traditional cultural norms such as arranged marriages, seeking jobs and educational opportunities, and keeping morale up in the camps through weekly columns. They resisted the best way they knew how — creating support networks, and becoming self-reliant and independent.
On April 3, 1946, six months after the end of WWII, the War Relocation Authority released Japanese Americans from the internment camps with no apology, a one-way train ticket home, small amounts for money for some, and nothing more. Families had been torn apart as they had been moved around various camps and separated. It took years for many women to eventually reunite with their families. The trauma from humiliating forced relocation and imprisonment has had a painful and lasting impact on the lives of generations of Japanese Americans, especially on Japanese American women. Toshi T. remembered:
“When we were let out from camp, some of us were given $100 to start our lives over again. Some people weren’t even given that, it was very difficult to find work. My cousin, who had graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, couldn’t find a job and was so depressed. He eventually hung himself.”
While incarcerated many Japanese Americans homes, businesses and farms were ransacked, defaced and looted by their white neighbors. Some even reported finding their former homes inhabited by strangers. For most there was virtually nothing to come back to. In addition to facing financial instability and emotional trauma, Japanese Americans struggled to regain acceptance as U.S. citizens. Years after WWII ended, racism against Japanese Americans was rampant. Those fortunate to have preserved their homes and farms were left unprotected from racist attacks of vandalism and arson. The U.S. government had no intentions for restoring any of the $400 million stolen from the Japanese American community.
Young Japanese Americans fought tooth and nail for decades to obtain restitution and acknowledgment of the injustice of the internment. The Nisei (second generation) and Sansei (third generation) women organized and played a leading role in obtaining restitution from the U.S. government. Women joined the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), which in 1978 demanded redress of $20,000 for each person incarcerated. This led to the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Additionally, Nisei women took part in the 1970s’ women’s liberation movement, demanding housing rights, fighting the nuclear arms race, and for abortion rights. Patsy Mink of Hawaii became the first Nissei woman to win a seat in the House of Representatives in 1964. Nisei Japanese American women were recruited to organize with the National Council of Japanese American Redress (NCJAR), which took the quest for redress to a legislative level.
The U.S. government ripped Japanese people from their homes. The racist corporate media and politicians humiliated and criminalized them. The effects of this deep trauma led to decades of fear of expressing and sharing Japanese culture and traditions with younger generations. But exploitation and oppression were always met with resistance. The Redress movement broke the silence surrounding the horrific and harmful experiences of interment. It paved the way for Japanese Americans to share their truth and change how history was recorded, and for reparations and memorialization to happen.
