We knew we weren't the enemy

Being an "American with a Japanese face" in 1942 was probably emotionally a lot like what people with an "Arab face" feel in America today. All told, I was incarcerated for 10 months and, after release, not allowed to return to the West for two years.

Our family's journey started humbly 100 years ago when my father, a scared 15-year-old Japanese peasant, staggered off a creaky ship at a West Coast port after a month at sea. He'd left home naively hoping to make his fortune as a contract laborer on a railroad construction crew in the western desert. Of course, he never made his stake and didn't return to Japan. Like many other young immigrants, he worked a few menial jobs, liked America, and sent for a picture bride. They settled in Seattle, where their two sons were born.

My role in the placid generational journey took a devastating jolt with Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The brew of suspicion and fear started soon after as West Coast Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to camps. By May, my family - along with 6,000 other bewildered, apprehensive Japanese-Americans from Seattle - was interned at the Puyallup, Wash. fairgrounds.

When the government had announced the mass evacuation some weeks earlier, we were immediately placed on curfew and limited in our movement. We had tried to picture the incarceration - dreading it, despising it, denying it, and finally resignedly awaiting it. We knew we weren't the enemy, and the vast majority of us who did not resist told ourselves that if our government decreed that we be interned, then we must comply as our contribution to the war effort.

The reality of internment was even worse than feared. We all take freedom for granted. There was a frightening desperation that pierced my innards as we were loaded on buses for the 90-minute ride to Puyallup.

My bride, Yoshi, and I held hands tightly as the caravan headed south. She'd dropped out of college so we could be together in whatever our internment would bring.

How would it be behind barbed-wire walls, under watchtowers, living in one bare room per family? Not easy. One June evening, Yoshi and I walked up the steep steps of the fairgrounds grandstand. From the top section we could see the green fields and the wooded hills beyond, soft and lush in the sweet summer dusk. We gazed silently at the countryside - so close and yet out of reach. But as tears ran down our cheeks, we could look no longer. We retreated to our sparse quarters near the livestock pavilion.

The summer was long, but we adjusted as best we could. I was on the recreation staff and planned the limited activities we were allowed. Yoshi worked as a librarian. And in August, the Seattle-area residents were transferred to a camp in a barren reclamation area near Jerome, Idaho. Elementary and high school classes were started. Residents staffed a camp hospital. We even published a mimeographed camp newsletter called the Irrigator. We were coping.

A few months later, word came that those who could pass security and find employment away from the West Coast would be released. And the government reopened military service for nisei volunteers. Americans would learn of heroic young Japanese-Americans who fought in Europe and the Pacific after having volunteered from behind barbed wire. Their wartime service to prove their devotion to the US is a glorious chapter that aided immensely in postwar integration of Americans with Japanese faces.

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