ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES George Iseri, 81, is Ontario’s unofficial historian. His family was originally from South King County.
Posted on 02/18/2002 11:18:08 AM PST by CounterCounterCulture
This order from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt enabled the establishment of "internment camps" for 110,000 Japanese Americans and others deemed "enemy aliens".
| EXECUTIVE ORDER NO. 9066 The President EXECUTIVE ORDER AUTHORIZING THE SECRETARY OF WAR TO PRESCRIBE MILlTARY AREAS WHEREAS the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities as defined in Section 4, Act of April 20, 1918, 40 Stat. 533, as amended by the Act of November 30, 1940, 54 Stat. 1220, and the Act of August 21, 1941, 55 Stat. 655 (U.S.C., Title 50, Sec. 104); NOW, I THEREFORE, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Commander may impose in his discretion. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommoclations as may be necessary, in the judgment of the Secretary of War or the said Military Commander, and until other arrangements are made, to accomplish the purpose of this order. The designation of military areas in any region or locality shall supersede designations of prohibited and restricted areas by the Attorney General under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, and shall supersede the responsibility and authority of the Attorney General under the said Proclamations in respect of such prohibited and restricted areas. I hereby further authorize and direct the Secretary of War and the said Military Commanders to take such other steps as he or the appropriate Military Commander may deem advisable to enforce compliance with the restrictions applicable to each Military area hereinabove authorized to be designated, including the use of Federal troops and other Federal Agencies, with authority to accept assistance of state and local agencies. I hereby further authorize and direct all Executive Departments, independent establishments and other Federal Agencies, to assist the Secretary of War or the said Military Commanders in carrying out this Executive Qrder, including the furnishing of medical aid, hospitalization, food, clothing, transportation, use of land, shelter, and other supplies, equipment, utilities, facilities, and services. This order shall not be construed as modifying or limiting in any way the authority heretofore granted under Executive Order No. 8972 dated December 12, 1941, nor shall it be construed as limiting or modifying the duty and responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with respect to the investigation of alleged acts of sabotage or the duty and responsibility of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, prescribing regulations for the conduct and control of alien enemies, except as such duty and responsibility is superseded by the designation of military areas hereunder. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT February 19, 1942. , l [No. 9066] [F. R. Doc. 421563; Filed, February 21, 194Z; 12:51 p.m.] Federal Register, Vol.7,No.38,p.1407(Feb.25,1942) |
This Exhibit features images from approximately forty photographs taken for the War Relocation Authority and vividly depicts life in Arizona's two camps.
Two of the larger camps that received the trainloads of evacuees were located in Arizona. One was the Colorado River Relocation Center (April 1942-March 1946), on Colorado Indian lands near Poston, 12 miles southwest of Parker in La Paz (formerly part of Yuma) County, that had a peak population of about 18,000. The other was constructed at Rivers, on leased Pima-Maricopa Indian lands in west central Pinal County, and was known as the Gila River Relocation Center (May 1942-February 1946) with a population of about 13,000. While extant, these sites became two of the larger centers of concentrated population in the state. Until it closed offices on June 30, 1946, the Authority carried the responsibility of housing, feeding, employing and otherwise providing services for citizens who had been hastily and summarily placed in an alien social and geographical environment by their federal government in a fevered time of world war.
The engineers typically designed the fenced camps in block arrangements wherein each block contained 14 barracks, 1 mess hall and 1 recreation hall on the outer edges, and ironing, laundry, and men's and women's lavatories on the interior. Households were assigned space in the spartan 100 by 20 foot family structures of wood and tar paper according to the number of people in their household. Other structures in the camp were designated for dry and cold warehouses, car and equipment repair and storage, administration, schools, canteens, library, religious services, hospitals, and post office. Cooperatives purchased and distributed merchandise; efficient work groups formed around the manufacture of camouflage nets and ship models used as training aids for naval personnel; vegetables and fruit were cultivated for camp and commercial consumption; and livestock was bred and raised. At one camp, a honeymoon cottage was set aside for the exclusive use of newlyweds; at another, 662 babies were born while 221 adults spent their last day on earth behind the wires.
These interned citizens represented a broad spectrum of the Japanese community in America at the time including Issei, the elders who arrived in the early 1900s, the Nisei, the second generation born in America, and the Kibei, also second generation born here but educated in Japan. The melange of individuals and administrators in the camps, coupled with the social, political and psychological dissonances of the relocation conditions, engendered numerous responses in their combined efforts to construct community from chaos. An anonymous poem circulated at the Poston camp, entitled That Damned Fence, illustrates the despair felt by the evacuees.
http://www.library.arizona.edu/images/jpamer/poem.htmlTHAT DAMNED FENCE They've sunk the posts deep into the ground They've strung out wires all the way around. With machine gun nests just over there, And sentries and soldiers everywhere. We're trapped like rats in a wired cage, To fret and fume with impotent rage; Yonder whispers the lure of the night, But that DAMNED FENCE assails our sight. We seek the softness of the midnight air, But that DAMNED FENCE in the floodlight glare Awakens unrest in our nocturnal quest, And mockingly laughs with vicious jest. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, We feed terrible, lonesome, and blue: That DAMNED FENCE is driving us crazy, Destroying our youth and making us lazy. Imprisoned in here for a long, long time, We know we're punished--though we've committed no crime, Our thoughts are gloomy and enthusiasm damp, To be locked up in a concentration camp. Loyalty we know, and patriotism we feel, To sacrifice our utmost was our ideal, To fight for our country, and die, perhaps; But we're here because we happen to be Japs. We all love life, and our country best, Our misfortune to be here in the west, To keep us penned behind that DAMNED FENCE, Is someone's notion of NATIONAL DEFENCE!
Posted on Sun, Feb. 17, 2002
Katie Hironaka is an elegant woman of 82, whose soft voice remains serene, even as she talks about the dark chapter of American history when she and others of Japanese ancestry were forced into internment camps. Yet, six decades later, one irony still pierces her polite diction with pain.
``They kept my husband in the service, fighting for this country, while our newborn baby and I were locked in a concentration camp,'' said Hironaka, of San Jose. ``They should never have locked us up, but if they felt they had to, they should have let my husband come home to be with us.''
For Japanese-Americans, Tuesday's 60th anniversary of the internment order -- often referred to as the ``Day of Remembrance'' -- remains an open wound.
On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which would force some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry away from their mostly West Coast homes, jobs, farms and businesses and into 10 internment camps for the duration of World War II. Not until 1989 did the U.S. government formally apologize and make reparations to internment survivors.
In May 1942, in the Santa Clara Valley, 3,000 Japanese-Americans and their children were ordered to close their affairs and dispose of all personal and real property. Abandoned cars lined South Market Street for a massive public sale. Locals were pre-registered in the gymnasium at San Jose State University.
Soon, trainloads of innocents were rolling down to assembly centers -- for months, many lived in horse stables at race tracks -- and then on to desolate, military-style camps.
``How could the country do such a thing?'' asks Hironaka, who joined several others recently in recalling their memories of the camps. ``I still don't know, and I probably never will.''
At 21, Katie Hironaka's husband was in the Army. She was pregnant and working as a live-in cook and housekeeper for a San Jose family.
``When the news came, I got frightened and confused,'' said Hironaka, whose husband was not allowed to contact her. Meanwhile, the family she lived with wilted under the pressure of angry neighbors harping about ``that Jap girl.''
Believing that there were ``white zones'' in central California where internment could be avoided, Hironaka and her in-laws scurried away from San Jose in the middle of the night. They stayed on the move until government orders caught up. Shortly after giving birth, Hironaka was sent to Heart Mountain, Wyo., where she moved in with her parents and her brothers.
``It was one, big, ugly room,'' she recalls. ``Nothing I wanted for my first little child.'' The camps, alternately freezing or sweltering, were physically and psychologically hard on mothers, ``because they were the ones who had to keep the families together'' in settings that mimicked small towns. There were stores, police and fire departments, postal service, even schools with diplomas and graduation ceremonies. But with human confinement also came human rage, discomfort, love, rivalries and violence -- without the option to leave.
After her release, Hironaka moved to Mountain View in 1945 and met her in-laws, who'd been in a camp in Arizona. They farmed together until Hironaka's husband came home from the Army. Today, after two late husbands and four daughters, she lives an active life near San Jose's Japantown.
``What was done to us was wrong,'' said Hironaka, ``and yet, there was so much prejudice and ignorance, who knows how many Japanese homes would have been burned, how many citizens would have been hurt or even killed if we had been around? In that way it was good, and yet it was so terrible as well.''
In 1936, Dave Tatsuno graduated from the University of California-Berkeley and continued working with his dad at Nichi Bei Bussan, a San Francisco store the elder Tatsuno opened in 1902.
But by March 1942, like Japanese businesses all over California, the Tatsunos were having an ``Evacuation Sale,'' nearly giving away, even burning, merchandise -- especially Japanese-inspired goods.
``We tried to liquidate everything, and what little we had left we stored in our garage,'' recalled Tatsuno, 88.
Assigned to Topaz, in the Utah desert, Tatsuno rallied, using his professional experience and personal philosophy.
``It was disturbing,'' said Tatsuno, ``but it happened to 120,000 people, so I couldn't just feel sorry for myself.''
Being a Christian, he taught Sunday school and established a YMCA in the Topaz camp. Being a retailer, he logged more than 20,000 miles doing the difficult job of buying for camp stores.
``There was a wartime shortage, and I'm a Japanese whose home address is behind barbed wire,'' he said. ``I overcame all that by selling myself. `I'm an American,' I said many times on trips. `We are locked up, but we didn't do anything.' People were mostly sympathetic.''
He is also known for shooting rare color camp footage with a smuggled 8 mm camera.
``I was not doing it as a spy, but as a hobby,'' he said. Still, he believes the film can play an important role in the current war.
``I hope the same thing doesn't happen to the Middle Easterners,'' said Tatsuno, who for half a century ran Nichi Bei Bussan, now in San Jose's Japantown. ``Most of them are innocent like we were. The country has to be careful to never again fall into the trap of condemning a people due to ancestry.'
The seventh-grader's 12th birthday celebration was on Feb. 18, 1942. The next day, the world came crashing down on the farm girl from Turlock.
``Everything happened so fast,'' said Betty Haruko Nishi, 72. ``My dad's new tractor, we had to leave behind. We couldn't take anything Japanese, so we had to destroy my mother's beautiful kimonos and lots of photographs. It was horrible.''
In the final desperate moments before leaving home, Nishi grabbed her black leather violin case because, ``I just had to have something familiar to hold onto.''
The parents, five boys and two girls went to a filthy assembly center in Merced for four months before moving to Amache, near Granada, Colo. The stress of Merced made Nishi's mother go temporarily blind and her siblings got pneumonia, ulcers and illness from typhoid shots. ``They inoculated us like we were going to another country.''
At Amache they shared two stark barracks rooms and countless indignities, such as the drafting of many young men directly from the camps. Ultimately, the all-Japanese 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team suffered the highest casualty rate, and became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history for its size and length of service.
And though Nishi's mother remained miserably ill due to confinement, when her son Johnny turned 18, and was drafted, she told him, ``You are an American. You do what's right.''
``Looking back I remember the deep well of pain the experience caused my parents,'' said Nishi, who has lived in San Jose for 51 years, is married and has a son and four daughters. ``It is something that will always be in my heart.'
``December 7, 1941. We had completed a profitable harvest of celery for Thanksgiving and were looking forward to Christmas and New Year's,'' wrote John Hayakawa, 83, of the day that changed so many lives. He was working the orchard-rich Santa Clara Valley.
``I was 23 years old, but for some reason did not panic. I had to meet my clients who expected me to fill their orders. I was making money. I had just bought a new car. I was courting a beautiful, intelligent young lady. I was happy.''
But in May 1942 the ``young lady'' -- Alice -- was taken away and nothing else mattered. Alice was sent to the PomonaLos Angeles County Fair Grounds in Pomona for processing, while he was sent to Santa Anita Race Track in Arcadia.
``We corresponded to boost our morale. . . . Those were lovely letters. . . . I still have every one.''
For Hayakawa the humiliation of internment was deflected by love. If Alice was going to frigid isolation in Wyoming, that's where he wanted to go.
``After three months of not seeing her, I was overjoyed on my arrival in Heart Mountain. Alice worked in the Evacuee Property Office. I was an officer in the Fire Department. Our happiness was doubled when we were married on October 9, 1943. . . . Our son was born in August 1945.''
While Hayakawa may condemn internment, he simply refuses to say anything negative about it. Perhaps because he and Alice, his ballroom dancing partner, are still doing a zesty tango, after 58 years.
``Patience and optimism,'' wrote Hayakawa, ``has its just rewards.''
Source: San Jose Mercury News
ONTARIO, Ore. — They're serving Dungeness crab out here in the country. Mounds of pink legs piled high on paper plates. Iceberg salad. Cold cans of Coors. The annual crab feed has drawn a largely Japanese-American crowd to the Four Rivers Cultural Center.
Tonight's guests — even the building itself — are intimately connected to a little-known chapter of World War II history, a moment in time when racial tolerance and acceptance were sorely tested in this tiny farm town.
It was 60 years ago this week that President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, setting in motion an unprecedented roundup of Japanese Americans and those of Japanese descent.
But Ontario, just a speck on the Oregon-Idaho border, chose to snub fear and gamble on strangers.
At the beginning of the war, 134 people of Japanese ancestry lived in Ontario and surrounding Malheur County. At its close, the farming community had invited and recruited 1,000 Japanese Americans. Many stayed and built new lives.
Exactly why the migration to tiny Ontario occurred, whether driven by economics, morals or a more subtle combination of the two, is unclear.
Maybe it's just that farming communities, as one local theorizes, are different from big-city towns. Perhaps people here just felt it was the right thing to do.
| ALAN BERNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES George Iseri, 81, is Ontario’s unofficial historian. His family was originally from South King County. |
Internment, then freedom
George Iseri was a young newlywed when he arrived in Ontario with that first wave of Japanese Americans. Now at 81, his voice has grown raspy. The local businessman, who favors bolo ties, is Ontario's unofficial historian. One wall in his office is devoted to newspaper clippings, photos and letters.
"There was really no reason for people to be nice to us," he says. "But they were."
The Iseri family, like thousands of other Japanese Americans on the West Coast, was swept up in fear. An estimated 120,000 people, mostly Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry, were forbidden to remain on the West Coast after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Within months, they were corralled into the tar-papered internment camps across the West.
Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942. California and Western Washington and Oregon — basically everything west of the Cascades — were forbidden zones to those of Japanese descent.
But areas of eastern Oregon and Washington, considered minor and remote, were "free zones." Clusters of Japanese Americans already living there were allowed to stay, and for a time Japanese living closer to the coast could voluntarily relocate to these areas.
Most, though, did not.
The Iseri family — mother and father, George and 11 siblings — lived in Thomas, a small farming community in South King County. One-quarter of the population was Japanese.
In the early years of war, the Iseri family was interned at Idaho's Minidoka and California's Tule Lake camps. One son, Mike, fought in the famed 442nd U.S. Army Regimental Combat Team and died in battle. The eldest son, Tom, was a businessman and knew someone at a California celery-packing plant — a connection that would later prove invaluable to the family.
When war was declared, all available manpower went to the country's defense, emptying Malheur County of its farmhands and leaving thousands of acres of sugar beets, onions and potatoes unharvested.
The war effort needed food, and Congress, realizing it couldn't ask farmers to increase production if they didn't have enough field hands, approved Public Law 45 in April 1943, according to the Oregon State University Archives. Emergency Farm Labor programs were used to recruit, train and place workers. Oregon farms received 900,000 city dwellers, businessmen, Mexican and Jamaican migrant workers, German prisoners-of-war and Japanese-American internees.
By late that year, Japanese Americans were also allowed to leave the internment camps to take farm jobs provided they had proof of sponsorship.
With his celery-plant connection, Tom Iseri was able to leave Minidoka for a job in Weiser, Idaho. He then secured jobs for the rest of his family, which subsequently led to their early release, and helped find employment for other internees as well.
Weiser was OK, but there was some hostility, George Iseri says, recalling a time he was chased by a monkey-wrench wielding shopkeeper.
By then, word had spread through the Japanese-American community that nearby Ontario was a more hospitable town.
Under the leadership of Mayor Elmo Smith, who also was publisher of the Eastern Oregon Observer newspaper, Ontario decided early on that it wanted the internees.
"If the Japs, both alien and nationals, are a menace to the Pacific Coast safety unless they are moved inland," said Smith, according to an Associated Press report, "it appears downright cowardly to take any other stand than to put out the call, 'Send them along; we'll cooperate to the fullest possible extent in taking care of them.' "
Just across the Snake River from Ontario, in Payette, Idaho, "No Japs Allowed" signs were hoisted at the town's boundary. But in Ontario, Smith hired Japanese Americans to care for his children. Lee Cables, a local Chevrolet dealer, and Jess Adrian, a real-estate broker, helped the new arrivals settle in.
"Elmo Smith encouraged the community to be compassionate to us, to understand that they needed us," says George Iseri. "He said, 'These people are Americans. They're legal residents. They did nothing wrong.' He just had a lot of common sense."
In the spring of 1943, the Iseri family moved to Ontario. Two brothers worked at the Cables Chevrolet dealership. George Iseri farmed sugar beets and potatoes and then, with the help of Adrian, the real-estate broker, opened a radio and appliance retail shop on Ontario's East Side.
When the war ended, a number of people who left the camps, having heard stories about Ontario, opted to settle here instead of returning to the coast.
By 1950, Malheur County had a larger percentage of Japanese Americans than any other county in Oregon.
 NATIONAL ARCHIVES Executive Order No. 9066. |
Fear and prejudice
Which isn't to say the arrival of hundreds of Japanese into tiny Ontario went perfectly.
"There was a Chinese restaurant and a real-estate office that had a sign that we weren't welcome," says George Iseri. "There was a bowling alley that let us bowl, although it cautioned us against coming into the bar. They were afraid there could be fights."
Joe Saito has been living in Ontario since 1930. He also fought in the 442nd regimental during the war. Upon his return to Ontario, he longed to be a part of the social clubs in town. But the rules prohibited him from joining for several years.
Saito, a longtime onion farmer, eventually became a Mason and a Shriner. One time, though, at a lodge meeting, he spoke out on behalf of U.S. citizenship for Japanese immigrants.
"I was accused of making a political speech," he says. When he passed out a petition, some of the friends he was certain would support the issue did not.
Hugh and Lorraine Lackey, both 77, are fourth-generation Ontarians, the descendants of folks who literally helped build the town: A Lackey constructed two of the brick buildings on Ontario's main street.
"The Japanese at the time had this big Japanese hall," Lorraine Lackey recalls. "We were all a little suspicious." "We were wondering if they had a radio and if they were talking to the Japanese," Hugh Lackey says.
He continues: "We felt safe, though, that we weren't going to get shelled."
"No," Lorraine Lackey says, correcting her husband. "No, we didn't feel so safe."
Married since 1944, the couple says the Japanese were good farmers, helpful people who never got into any trouble. And they spoke English, Lorraine Lackey points out, which is a lot different, she adds, from the Mexican immigrants who have arrived here in the past decade.
Stories about race relations are often told in the extremes: hate-filled or Pollyannish.
But ask locals who have been here long enough to feel some connection to the place, Asian and white alike, and they'll acknowledge an acceptance, a tolerance, a welcoming of the evacuees. They say this matter-of-factly and without a tone of triumph.
"After the war, I went to my old hometown," says Connie Shimojima, 82, once a truck farmer in South King County. He'd haul his lettuce, peas, cauliflower to Pike Place Market.
"But people there had changed. I said, 'Life is too short for this.' So we said we'd come here and stay."
A farm town changes
In these parts, Ontario has always been a hub. Decades ago, when he was a kid, Hugh Lackey says, the place had a certain popularity because of its pool halls and bars.
These days, Ontario has a community college, the Four Rivers Cultural Center, a hospital, a prison and a Wal-Mart. If teens get their way, it'll have an improved skateboard park.
Locals swear the land still produces some of the best sweet Spanish onions in the country, a reputation nurtured in part by early Japanese farmers.
A tour of Ontario hints at the changes coming.
The Mexican community is growing, though the Japanese-American presence can surely be seen in such things as a Buddhist church and the Ore-Ida Judo Club, which has claimed to be the largest in the United States.
On the East Side of town, where the Iseri retail shop, a photo studio and other Japanese-owned businesses once thrived, only the East Side Cafe still stands. Now there's the Casa Jaramillo and Saddles and Spurs.
Years ago, a trio of community leaders met for coffee at Rusty's Pancake and Steak House, a church-turned restaurant that still has stained-glass windows. They got to wondering: What makes Ontario unique? Their answer: its sizeable Japanese-American community.
They turned to George Iseri to figure out why, says John Kirby, a hardware-store owner.
Dreaming big, the town decided it needed something to commemorate its past and future.
Four Rivers Cultural Center opened in 1994, funded with $4 million from Congress and another $4 million from local fund raising. Initially, its focus was to be the Japanese-American experience. But the town's Japanese-American community wanted it to be inclusive, according to Kirby. The museum now observes the history of the northern Paiute Indians, European pioneers, Basques and Mexicans.
In recent years, Four Rivers has seen high-school class reunions and gatherings of the Ducks Unlimited club and Pheasants Forever chapter. Earlier this month, it hosted the crab feed and auction to benefit the local chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League.
As guests crunched crab and drank pop, they bid on Oregon State T-shirts, gift certificates to a Mexican restaurant, a carving board, and a case of automotive oil. In the kitchen, third- and fourth-generation Japanese Americans tossed salad and handed out cups of ice cream.
The event was a fund-raiser for college scholarships. Like teenagers in small towns everywhere, most Ontario kids see a future far from here.
There just isn't much for them, acknowledges David Murakami, of the well-known Murakami onion family, as the auction got under way and the students bused the tables.
Fewer than 500 people of Japanese ancestry now live in Malheur County. The community is disappearing, Murakami says. Then again, the hope of that first wartime generation was that the children would do better. That this latest generation is moving on, he says, could be regarded as success.
SOURCE: The Seattle Times
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/hrq/17.4renteln.html
I read recently that Roosevelt (more likely his advisers) had hard intelligence from our MAGIC decrypts that a substantial Japanese espionage network was in place on the West Coast. Supposedly, the interment was ordered to stop the Japanese agents without tipping Japanese counterintelligence to the fact that we were reading their codes.
Have you heard of this?
Tony
I have seen the aftermath of an actual terroist/ espionage ring in the US. i.e. the 9-11 WTC and Pentagon attacks.
Should GW Bush round up all the : Muslims, or Arabs, or Saudis?
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Note: this topic is from February 18, 2002. The 68th anniversary approaches. Thanks CounterCounterCulture. |
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