San Jose, CA: Japanese American Museum

Today was unique and precious, because we got a history lesson from a woman intimately connected to the Japanese community in Silicon Valley. I had wanted to visit the Japanese American Museum in San Jose, CA for awhile and had never quite fit it in. Today we fit it in, and to our delight a docent appeared out of nowhere to walk us around. Carolyn is a third generation Japanese American who had relatives interned in U.S. camps during WWII, and, as we were to learn, a father, who, despite fierce discrimination, earned a Congressional Gold Medal for his service in the South Pacific

Leading up to Pearl Harbor, San Jose's Japanese community, despite being segregated into their own Japantown, were thriving as farmers, with their own hospital (now the Issei Memorial Building, pictured here), schools, churches, and temples. Six weeks after Pearl Harbor, FDR signed the infamous Executive Order 9066, which required anyone living on the West Coast of the U.S. of Japanese extraction (1/16 Japanese or more, similar to the race rule used for African American slaves) must be relocated to camps. Approximately 125,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, were sent to ten camps in the U.S. in the middle of nowhere.

Most from San Jose were sent to Heart Mountain in Wyoming to live in barracks so hastily and poorly built, they were only covered with tar paper. Six families could be in a single barrack. The same spartan design was used for all ten camps.

A family was given a single room with some beds and a bare bulb. All other furniture had to be built by hand or bought. The walls separating each family didn't reach to the roof, so a barrack could get noisy. It could also get extremely cold and extremely hot in a barrack, which lacked any kind of insulation or sealant in the floors and wall boards. Knot holes in the floor were patched with the lids from tin cans and scrap linoleum. Temps in Wyoming could be below zero or above 100. In short, there were few days when accomodations were not extremely uncomfortable. The museum has built a replica with creaky, leaky floors and walls and handmade furniture, and home sewn curtains for privacy. The discomfort is palpable. The internees could find jobs, but for pay no higher than the lowest solder in the U.S. Army - about $19 a month. It was hard to make improvements on your shack on a salary like that. Why was there so little resistance to this internment? Because, by far, most wanted to show they were good Americans, ready to follow the laws of the U.S.A. A formal apology for this egregious treatment of U.S. citizens didn't come for another 40 plus years, when President Reagan offered an apology and $20K to every individual in the camps. (Carolyn told us one recipient was so incensed at this reparation that was too little, too late, that he refused to cash the check. No money could compensate for what had been done, he said.)

To add insult to injury, after having stripped Japanese Americans of their citizenship, their young men were asked to enlist in the U.S. Army. Understandably, a few hundred refused and were thrown into prison at the Tule Lake Camp, where the "troublesome" Japanese Americans were housed. But most enlisted, including Carolyn's father, Charlie Hideyoshi Hamasaki. He had grown up in California and actually enlisted in the U.S. Army in April 1941, months before Pearl Harbor. Initially enrolled in the Army's dental school, after Pearl Harbor he was quickly reassigned to the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), a service so secretive, he could not talk about what he did for decades. His role was translation, intrepretration and interrogation of Japanese prisoners, as he was bilingual in English and Japanese. He spent the duration of the war in the South Pacific. His daughter Carolyn, our docent, showed us his bronze medal for his service. His commanding officer hated anyone of Japanese ancestry and Charlie had a difficult tour of duty and criticism for his interrogation tactics. But he told his daughter that no Japanese soldier would reveal military secrets, and he found by talking about their families that he could still glean valuable intelligence. He died in 2001, eight years before President Obama awarded all soldiers in his regiment the Congressional Gold Medal.