UPROOTED, HERDED AND IMPRISONED

Local Japanese-Americans recount bitter memories of World War II camps.

During World War II, 120,000 West Coast Japanese-Americans were imprisoned by the United States. The government's reasoning was that if Japan tried to invade the United States, it would do so on the West Coast. Because many Japanese-Americans lived there, the government feared that some were spies and would help Japan.

These Japanese-Americans were allowed to bring only the things they really needed. They left behind most of their belongings, friends, homes and jobs.

Children's Express recently interviewed three Japanese-Americans to learn about their direct experiences and to see how the internment changed their lives. Jean and George Umemura were interned as teen-agers. Doris Maeda's in-laws, who were living in California, were placed in the camps. All three contributed photos and artifacts to the recent Children's Museum exhibit, Children of Detention Camps 1942-1946.

George Umemura was born and raised in Seattle by Japanese parents. When he was 18 years old, his life changed significantly when he, his two sisters and his parents were forced to go to an internment camp in 1942.

"My dad had to dispose of the inventory at the grocery store he owned and operated," Umemura explained.

He spent only a brief time in the camp. He was going to college and was able to continue his education in Ohio. Nonetheless, he suffered.

"I was 18 at the time, so I was not a child. It was a very traumatic moment in my life to realize that (I) had to give up where I was living, give up my school, give up my friends, give up my neighborhood, see my home dismantled.

Losing freedom

"You were just being (herded) off to camp and realizing that you were indeed losing your freedom - the most precious commodity we as American citizens have," he added.

The government action wasn't the only reason he felt unwanted. He also felt ashamed of his culture and background because of the attitudes of the people around him.

"Under the anti-Asian sentiment that prevailed on the West Coast, I grew up not wanting to have anything to do with my Japanese background," he said. "To that extent, I guess you would say I was ashamed or embarrassed of my Japanese. And so I refused to learn the Japanese language."

His wife, Jean, also was born and raised in Seattle.

Like her husband, it was a very difficult time in her life when she was sent to the Penelope detention camp just outside of Seattle along with her twin brother, older sister and parents.

"I was 15 at the time when we were evacuated, had to leave our homes and we could only take what we could carry," she recalled. "So we had to leave many, many things behind. The items that were left behind were either sold, given away or lost. So it was a very hard decision when we had to decide what we had to take."

Jean Umemura was sent to two camps. After Penelope, which was a temporary camp that was built inside a baseball stadium, her family was moved to Minidoka Relocation Center in Hunt, Idaho. About 10,000 people lived in Minidoka, which was one of 10 internment camps that were built in desert areas of several states.

It wasn't like a camp that children go to for the summer. She described some of the conditions she lived under.

"We lived in a one-room barracks - all of the families lived in one room. The rooms were not that large. They didn't have any facilities to cook.

"The barracks were all situated so there were something like 20 barracks, perhaps, in a block. And in one block we had one washing facilities where you bathed, went to the bathroom and did your laundry.

"And another building, called a mess hall, was where we were to eat - all of us."

Weather woes

The barracks were primitive, with black tar paper covering the outside. It was very hot in the summer and cold in the winter, the Umemuras said.

"All these camps were built in the middle of the desert, so that duststorms took place frequently, and the dust then would come into your room through the cracks in the wall and the windows," Jean Umemura said. "In the wintertime, because there wasn't any grass, you would have a lot of mud whenever it rained."

The worst, though, was the barbed wire encircling the camp and the sentries and guards that patrolled with rifles.

Doris Maeda remembers the guards. Because she and her husband, James, lived in Dayton, Ohio, they were not interned. However, James' parents were sent to Tule Lake Relocation Center in northern California, near the Oregon border.

The Maedas went to Tule Lake as soon as they received word that James' parents were there. Maeda remembers that the guards seemed to have mixed emotions about their jobs.

"The sergeant checking us in . . . apologized for the fact that he had to search our luggage and things like that," she recalled. "He took the film out of our camera, but he still apologized for doing it."

Nevertheless, she said Tule Lake, like all the camps, was "a very barren, miserable place."

Jean Umemura agreed. She remembered missing her home, her friends - and her privacy.

"I could hear everybody's conversation, it just was not very pleasant," she said. "You could hear your neighbors complaining, arguing, fighting."

Her father helped her to get through this crisis.

"I was at an age where I wanted privacy, so that's one of the reasons why my father . . . made it possible.

"I had a sheet around my bed, so that whenever I sat on my bed, I had privacy. It was a nice feeling to have that privacy."

Little control over their lives

The detainees had no furniture besides their beds, so they used their imagination to make their rooms livable. They created their own chairs and tables with any scrap wood they could find. They also used scraps to make pins and statues.

They did what they could, because they had little control over their lives. They weren't even allowed to fix their own food and had to eat what the camp cooks served. Some cooks were better than others.

"I would ask my girlfriend, who lived in another block, what were they going to have for dinner. If their menu sounded better, I would stay at her house and go to their mess hall," Jean Umemura recalled.

Detainees worked willingly to keep from being bored. "The camp had to be self-sustaining, and so all of the activities that take place in normal life had to be assumed and done by someone," George Umemura said.

His first job was topping sugar beets on a private farm near the camp. "Because of the wartime effort and shortage of manpower, the government prevailed upon the camp detainees to help out in harvesting the crop," he explained. "I can unequivocally say that was probably the toughest job I ever did in my life."

His wife worked, too, first making baby food in the mess hall and later being a clerk at the camp office. "It was more exciting to be doing something, even if what you were doing is not to your liking," she said.

Education at the camps wasn't very good. The detainees were taught little because the government feared they would find out about U.S. actions in the war. They often ended up teaching themselves.

The government tried to get everyone to sign a loyalty oath. "If you signed it, you were going to go in the Army, and in my husband's family this happened," Maeda said.

Feelings of humiliation

Even after the detainees were released, they were still hurt by the experiences in the camps.

"It was such a devastating and traumatic kind of experience that most people of Japanese ancestry were reluctant to talk about it," George Umemura said. "We never even talked about it at home."

"It was shameful to us that we were tabbed as the enemy alien and treated as enemies, so it took a long period of time before something like this came bubbling to the surface," his wife added.

The hurt was especially bad because most of them were American citizens, Maeda said. "Many of the sons and daughters were in the military."

Some people think that the Japanese deserved to be put in the camps because the United States didn't know who to trust. Maeda does not agree.

"It was racist, it was power, it was panic," she said.

While George Umemura will never forget what happened, he may be beginning to forgive.

"I did leave camp and come out of the war with a bitter attitude, but in more recent times, reflecting about what we went through, I've come to realize that . . . no government is perfect," he said. "As much as I believe in this country, the government itself is an imperfect institution."

In 1988, the government tried to make up for the wrong done to these Japanese Americans. It gave $20,000 to every person who had been removed from his or her home.

"That may seem like a lot of money to you folks, but when you know you lost your whole way of living, your life, your home, all the possessions, you just can't put that in any sort of monetary sense," Jean Umemura said.

When people think about internment camps, they think about the Jews. But we must remember that the Japanese suffered too. Not as critically, but they suffered.

EDITED BY: Cassie Anies, 10