Prologue: Breaking the Silence
One sunny day my brother, Yoneichi, and I sat on a log floating in front of our home at Shawnee Beach on Vashon Island, Washington. I was four years old and he was six.
That day in 1929 as we peacefully rode the gentle tide of Puget Sound we could not know about the impending tsunami of World War II. Thirteen years later a wave of anti-Japanese prejudice swept across the United States and forced my family to leave our secure island home and succumb to the will of a hostile and turbulent world at war. Little did I know the political storms and social upheavals that would beset my family, tear us away from our home, and confine us in internment camps simply because we looked like the enemy.
During World War II Japanese-Americans endured the wholesale violation of our civil and human rights as residents and citizens of the United States. Many would lose their homes, livelihoods, and dreams, and left with pain, confusion and shame. This legacy has shadowed my entire adult life.
Some seventy-five years later I gaze at this photo, long and hard, recalling my innocence, joy, and security. With what I know now, how I wish I could have held that little girl in the photo and reassured her, "Have faith in your family and the ultimate goodness of people. Especially have faith in yourself to survive the catastrophic events yet to come. In spite of all the terror, pain, depression, and tears in your future, you will reach a final hopeful conclusion."
With the hindsight of age, I have learned faith, hope, and love in a world gone crazy. Over the years I have carved out a life marked by reason and hope for myself and for my three children. I also learned the importance of speaking, telling my story, in the hope that history will not repeat itself.
Historians have referred to the interned Japanese-Americans as the "silent generation" because most of us did not speak about our experiences--even to our children. Years after the end of World War II, whenever I met someone whom I suspected of having been a prisoner at an internment camp, I might ask, "Were you in one of the camps during the war?"
If the response was "Yes," I continued. "Which one?"
He or she would answer: "Amache, Gila, Heart Mountain, Jerome, Manzanar, Minidoka, Poston, Rohwer, Topaz, or Tule Lake."
After a pause one of us might say, "That was a long time ago, wasn't it?" We would both nod and then fall silent. We understood each other. This might seem strange to people who had not shared this experience, but for those of us who did, we knew what the experience was like. At the time, it seemed as if there was no need for words.
In the decades following the internment I managed to suppress feelings and memories of this painful period. I thought the only way I could achieve normalcy was to forget about the evacuation, and work diligently to get on with my life. To speak or even think of those times meant to revisit what had happened, and that was too painful to consider.
The penalty I paid for being silent for years--even to myself--seems perplexing even now. I complied and endured, albeit begrudgingly, but never had the nerve to fully break out of those self-imposed "barbed wire fences" built around my experiences in the camps. For most of my life I was afraid to deal with those years of repressed shame and anger and the unknown depth of those feelings.
As I reflect on all that happened, I am reminded of a book, The Trial, by Franz Kafka. In this story a man is accused of some crime about which he is unclear. The elements of the trial are fearful and unpredictable, and it is difficult to foresee the conclusion of the ordeal. I, too, had a sense of guilt for a crime I had supposedly committed, but I never understood what that crime was.
My three children had to discover for themselves what the Japanese-American internment was about. I kept a few relics from that era such as the three, one-gallon jars of shells I gathered from the grounds of Tule Lake Camp. These would stimulate occasional conversations, but I matter-of-factly told the same safe anecdotes over and over again. As a parent, I did not want to show my children how vulnerable I felt at that time, nor did I want to get into the emotional part of my experience that could lead me to tears.
In 1967 when my oldest child, Martha, tried to write a research paper on the internment, she could not find a single book that mentioned it. But a few years later, books and films such as A Farewell to Manzanar finally broke the silence. This is how my children and the rest of the public began to learn about this regrettable chapter in American history. More recently the best-seller Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson, and the subsequent film showed the evacuation of the first group of Japanese from a fictional island in Washington state. As I watched the part of the movie when the FBI searched the home of a Japanese-American family who were later forced to evacuate under armed U.S. soldier escorts, I broke down and wept. Vivid memories of my own experience swept over me
When I was 74 years old I was invited to participate in a writing class and began writing about those war years. The dam broke loose when emotions and tears I had repressed for decades burst through, at times seemingly uncontrollable. At last, I was telling my story--a Nisei no longer willing to be silent.
Now as I near my 80th birthday and the completion of my book in 2005, my tears come more easily and with understanding and acceptance. I weep for all Japanese-Americans who could not acknowledge that it was all right to be angry and confused about our identity in the face of the mass rejection by American society. At the same time, I am profoundly grateful for the open-minded, compassionate, and humane fellow citizens who helped Japanese-Americans make the difficult transition back to normal life.
I yearn for the day when the general American public will read, listen, and understand the implications of what the United States did to Japanese-Americans--and what we must do differently and far better in today's world torn by terrorism and war.