Never Forget, Never Again
Tanforan, Tule Lake, and the Legacy of Executive Order 9066
Can Chinese Americans and Muslims be interned and incarcerated against their will and without due process? Unfortunately, the candid answer is yes. On the eve of the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, the legal authority to have the President incarcerate and round up communities based on national security concerns without due process is still the law of the land. We must never let this happen to another community of Americans ever again.
Here is the Story of My Family
Long ago, my grandfather Manabu Shinagawa came from Hiroshima, Japan, and labored in the sugar cane fields of the Big Island of Hawaii. There, his two brothers worked alongside, cutting the sugar canes and converting them into sugar and molasses. For several years, they made a living in this U.S. colony and sent their remittances back to the home country.
Eventually, all the brothers decided to leave Hawaii. One left to Mexico; another went back to Japan and eventually settled in Brazil. To this day, I have relatives in both countries. Indeed, the Japanese Diaspora is world-wide, and my family is a mini-portrait of the dislocations and migrations brought about by the Meiji Restoration. Like most who left Japan in the late 19th and early 20th century, they came from the Southern prefectures.
My grandfather moved from Hawaii to the mainland in the early 1900s and worked initially repairing the railroads that had earlier been built by the Chinese. It was hard and dangerous work, and many Japanese could only find work as servants, laborers, and cooks at first. Luckily, and unluckily, Japanese immigrants had a strong nation that backed them. Japan had quickly industrialized during the Meiji Restoration, and by 1905, it had fought a war against Russia which it had won. It became the first nation of color to ever be victorious against a White nation. The repercussions were felt worldwide.
Japan soon was recognized as a country to be reckoned with and feared. It went on a reckless course of territorial expansion and imperialism, and modified the racial order of the West to its own purposes. For Westerners, Japanese were given a special status. They would be, per the League of Nations, “honorary Whites.” In fact, for most of the British-origin countries, that status of honorary White status would give Japanese and Japanese Americans more opportunities than most other Asians and racial minorities.
With this special status, and because Roosevelt didn’t want to have a war with Japan, Japanese in the U.S. could enter White schools and universities — a “privilege” not given to Chinese and other Asians. With this small concession, Japanese in America soon entered higher education in disproportionate numbers. By the 1940s, most young adult Japanese Americans were either going to college or had graduated. By census year 1940, Japanese Americans like my grandfather’s family had achieved a socioeconomic status unheard of in all American history till that date — they had achieved higher educational attainment and household income than the average White family in the U.S.
On the eve of World War II, Japanese Americans owned hundreds of thousands of acres of prime real estate throughout the West Coast and Hawaii. Most of what we know as Silicon Valley were owned by Japanese Americans prior to the war. Much of Southern California, Willamette Valley, and Seattle region were the same. A bustling, energetic Japanese American community was vibrant and economically prosperous from trade between the U.S. and Japan as well as their own entrepreneurship — they became the primary fishermen, farmers, and food distributors of the West Coast.
This was done despite the widespread racism of the West Coast. Numerous laws were passed to discriminate against Asian Americans, including Japanese Americans. For example, the Alien Land Laws had forbidden Asians from owning businesses and from operating corporations under their name or their children’s. Racist netting ordinances prohibited Japanese and Chinese from fishing competitively. Laundry, servant, and cleaning ordinances were passed by local jurisdictions to harass Asian Americans, including Japanese Americans. By the 1940s, most of the West Coast had restrictive covenants that made it difficult or impossible for most Asian Americans, including Japanese, from residing or setting up businesses where they chose. On top of that, since the 1850s, bans on interracial marriages prohibited Japanese Americans and others from marrying easily people of their own choice.
In spite of it all, Japanese and other Asians came to America because it provided opportunities that were unimaginable in their home country. They can start with nothing, and with hard work, diligence, education, luck, and pluck, they could make something of themselves. Some came so they could be dissidents and to remotely help bring about change in their home country.
Everything changed on December 7, 1941. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by the Japanese led to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declaring war on Japan and subsequently against Germany.
Three weeks after the declaration, my grandfather was arrested and carted away by FBI agents and was interrogated, beaten, and tortured at an unknown facility. By that time, my grandfather was an elder of the Japanese Buddhist Temple and was one of the older civic leaders of the Japanese community. The FBI just barged into his office, took him without warrants, and our family had no idea where he was. After two days, he was dropped off and returned to the family, but he was already injured and bruised from the interrogation techniques.
It was then that he told our family that we would all be rounded up and imprisoned, and that our fate was in jeopardy. He was right. On February 19, 1942, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, which gave the legal authority to round up over 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast and to place them in what was euphemistically called Wartime Relocation Centers. Against their will, and without due process, our families were told to sell all our belongings or place them in custodianship, and then to report to a specified location where buses would take us to an unspecified destination.
We had no idea where we would go. My grandparents had nine children, and the nine ranged in age from two to twenty-four-year-old. We were originally told that each person would be allowed to bring two suitcases with us, so our family placed many of our cherished belongings such as ceremonial swords, kimonos, China, artworks, etc., in the large luggage containers bundled with our clothes.
Once we arrived at the bus station in San Francisco, we were told by the military officers that we could not bring that many suitcases or bags. We had misinterpreted the instructions to mean two bags per person, but it was meant to be two bags per family (although there could be exceptions). Suddenly, hundreds of Japanese and Japanese Americans were left at the bus station having to sell all their cherished belongings to hawks and vultures who bought them for pennies to the dollar. Many of the ceremonial swords, Samurai crests, Japanese porcelain and ceramics, and kimonos were stolen from us that day.
At the time, my grandfather was too sick to join us. He had been beaten so severely that he remained in a temporary hospital in San Francisco, suffering from respiratory problems, as well as tuberculosis, which he had contracted at the hospital. His condition was worsening, and later he was sent to San Bruno Hospital, in South San Francisco, where he was denied medical services because he was an alien ineligible for citizenship. The nurses there refused to change his bedpans. My second oldest uncle, who had been attending medical school, was given an authorization to periodically visit him, and it was only then that his bedpans and sheets were changed.
My uncle was despondent. He loved his father and mother, and was horribly confused by what had happened to all the Japanese and Japanese Americans. The only home he ever knew was the United States, and he could not believe that Americans could do this to fellow Americans. He begged and pleaded with the doctors at the hospital to give his father penicillin, which had recently been discovered to be effective against tuberculosis and pneumonia. Again, the medical and military authorities refused. My uncle had no choice; he asked for his father to be sent back to join the entire family at Tanforan Assembly Center, where the entire Shinagawa family was sent after the buses had dropped us off there.
At Tanforan, Japanese and Japanese American arrived at a converted gambling race track. The Tanforan Race Track had been closed and made into temporary shelters for the arriving Japanese Americans. Dozens of horse stalls were “remodeled” to hold the incoming people. Each family was usually given two horse stalls. Since my family was larger, we had four. The horse stalls stank of horse urine and feces and the Japanese women cleaned the floors and the men painted the facilities. The stalls had no insulation, so in the foggy cold air of South San Francisco, people shivered and felt the biting wind at times.
Outside the quarters was a running ditch nearby with running sewage. The latrines were guarded by military personnel and the Japanese women were not allowed to cover the front of their lavatory stall. It was humiliating and unclean. Japanese American women created temporary covers made from leftover wood, pinned cloth, and used papier Mache wire hanger covers fashioned from newspapers and dried rice gruel paste.
Eventually, my grandfather died of his injuries and infections in the horse stall surrounded by his family and friends. My grandmother now had nine children to take care of all by herself. The two older brothers, for a time, agreed to share those responsibilities to maintain the family. My own father was too young to take any. He was only 7 years old when he was incarcerated. My family was devastated. The military watched over the camp and placed restrictions on meetings, segregating the men from the women, the children from the adults. Elders were not allowed governing opportunities (a humiliating situation), and younger Japanese American adults were given the authority to run the civil affairs within the incarceration center. The world had turned upside down.
My second oldest uncle rebelled against the unsanitary conditions in Tanforan and called for reforms. He was imprisoned, beaten, and placed in a pit for recalcitrants.
The actions of my second oldest uncle, the feelings of my grandmother, and the ambiguous attitudes about loyalty or disloyalty to the U.S. among our family members led us to be classified as a troublemaker family and to be ultimately brought to a camp for hard-core dissidents — Tule Lake Relocation Center. When my family arrived at this desolate camp, my grandmother cried and cried, and she then resolved herself to never cry again. I later remember her for her stoicism, and her determination that she would survive whatever was given her. I remember so many times what she would always say to me, her grandson — “Shigatakanai — it can’t be helped.” When I was a young man, I couldn’t believe her attitude. I wanted to say, “let’s fight this!” However, as I grew older, I’ve come to understand that that was her way to cope with the sadness and suffering, and for us to be tough and to survive.
To make a long story short, and there is much more, my family eventually left Tule Lake and slowly restarted their lives after WWII. Their businesses, properties, and lands had been confiscated and sold for pennies to the dollar. They never ever got real restitution. My second oldest uncle took the major responsibility for the extended family until his death at age 76. He was a man of quiet dignity and great resolve. He was an active participant of the Japanese American Citizens League and worked tirelessly for social justice for all. Because he was deported for a while to Japan, he could not complete his medical degree, but later decided to work in medical supervision.
To this day, Japanese Americans were found to have never committed one single act of treason against the United States. Against their will, strictly because they were racially distinct, they were rounded up, put into concentration/incarceration/segregation camps, and left there during the duration of the war to a life of limbo and uncertainty. Our families never recovered from the war. It took Japanese Americans 45 years before they once again achieved levels of social and economic status that they had before WWII. However, their communities would never return to the cohesiveness and vibrancy that once marked the West Coast communities of Americans of Japanese Ancestry (AJAs).
So, on the eve of the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, we must never repeat the mistakes of the past. We are a nation that believes in democracy, liberty, freedom, and the promise of America as a land of opportunity and equality. When our nation forgets these American principles, we all suffer as Americans. We are in it together. What happened to Japanese Americans during World War II can happen again in 2018. EO 9066, despite courageous Fred Korematsu’s Supreme Court contestation of the efficacy and legality of it, still stands as a form of executive action that is still constitutionally recognized as the law of the land. Today, the President of the United States has the authority to round up any group without due process and to segregate, detain, and remove populations against their will.
Chinese Americans, Muslim Americans, and other minorities can easily become the next victims of racial intolerance, military “necessity,” and hysterical nativism. Members of the Japanese American community stand with all Americans who support civil and human rights in saying, “Never forget, never again!”
