Infamy (18 page)

Finally, on November 2, the army allowed his release. He had been inside for 184 days. Driving back to New York, he stopped in Wisconsin to see his friend the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. From there he wrote to his half sister Ailes, “Please let my various friends know that I am on my way. I feel like Rip Van Winkle.”

*   *   *

The heat. The heat. The dust. Fathers dug foxholes under their barracks so that their children could lie in them for hours in the middle of the day. Spaces underground were sanctuaries in most of the camps. A professional photographer named George Hirahara actually built and equipped a secret darkroom under his “apartment”—ordering equipment from Sears Roebuck catalogs—at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. He took and developed more than two thousand photos.

The cold. Even in summer, the nights could be cold in the desert camps. The winters were terrifying. Charles Hamasaki, who was sent from Los Angeles to the Minidoka camp in Idaho, wrote, “Twenty-five degrees below zero man. I’m from Southern California. I had my moccasins—moccasins, not shoes—with me and just a tee-shirt and overcoat. When we got off the train there was a snowdrift ten feet high … and they have to line us up in the freezing weather to count the heads so nobody would escape.”

Frank Emi, the twenty-nine-year-old grocer who had liquidated his family’s little supermarket in Los Angeles, said this about the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp in Wyoming:

It was in the middle of a dusty prairie. You could hardly see 10 or 25 feet ahead of you.… Course, it turned out dust storms were the least of our worries because the winter was the coldest in Wyoming history; it was 30 below zero. If you went to the restroom, which was located outside, and wet your hands or took a shower your head would be in icicles and if your hand was still wet it froze to the metal doorknobs.… We didn’t even have topcoats when we arrived. We were California boys.

At the beginning of November, Tetsuzo (Ted) Hirasaki, writing from Poston to Miss Breed in San Diego, talked about the weather as well, describing the dramatic desert temperature swings: “Brrr to have to get up in the morning. It is about 38 degrees in the morning and in the middle part of the afternoon, it is about 80+. The mornings don’t warm up until noontime.”

Hirasaki had a tubercular lesion in his biceps, but he wrote in his letter to Miss Breed that his arm was all right—though not much helped by the camp medical facilities. “The medical situation here is pitiful,” he reported. “The main and only hospital is at Camp I, 15 miles from here. Here in Camp III there is one young doctor with not too much equipment and one student doctor working in an emergency clinic. They are supposed to take care of 5,000 people!”

He scoffed, “And they (the Big Shots) wonder why we squawk.… If they don’t watch out there’s going to be trouble.” He said that one of his close friends had “got to thinking—and he went crazy. He tried to commit suicide by slashing his wrists. His roommates found him bleeding and immediately gave him first aid. He is still alive but his face is like that of a wild ape caged for the first time.” He went on, complaining again that the machine guns in the camp towers were pointing inside. “The Army had the gall to tell us that the purpose of the towers was to keep the white folk from coming to mob the Japs.… Ha, ha, ha. I’m laughing yet.… Enough of this before I go out and murder a white man by killing myself. God forgive us for the thoughts that are beginning to run amok in our brains.”

Then he added: “I am sending you a few things in appreciation of all the things you have done, as well as my sister and all the rest. The lapel pins are for you.… Have a nice Thanksgiving dinner.”

Ever cheerful, Louise Ogawa wrote back to San Diego that Thanksgiving dinner at Poston was wonderful. A couple of weeks later, as camp life became calmer at Poston, Louise wrote to Helen McNary, “After six weeks of school life in camp, everything has become similar to the life in San Diego.”

Perhaps not quite. She described their work:

I went cotton picking with my fellow school-mates to raise funds so the school will be able to have a school paper. We left home at 8:30 A.M. on a cattle truck. We were going bumpity-bump down the narrow dirt road when all of a sudden we came to a halt. We were surrounded by cotton plants. We flung the bag over our left shoulder and began picking the cotton. I often crawled on the ground to pick the fallen cotton. It certainly was a good thing that I wore slacks and a long sleeve blouse because you get scratched all over.… It certainly is a boring work. It is no wonder that the Negroes have developed such a talent in singing. I only picked 14 lbs. but I tried!… I see men with packs on their backs walking toward the east to the plateau for petrified wood or toward the west to the Colorado River to fish. This seems to be the main activity for the older folks.

*   *   *

On December 8, 1942, a year after the army first rejected him, Ben Kuroki was finally overseas. The kid from Nebraska had been scheduled to be left behind, peeling more potatoes or cleaning more latrines, when the Ninety-Third Bomb Group left the United States. He went to the squadron’s adjutant, Lieutenant Charles Brannan, and pleaded his case, tears rolling down his cheeks, begging again to fight. Finally, Brannan called in his secretary and said, “I’m going and Kuroki’s going, too.”

Now the Ninety-Third and its forty B-24 bombers were in Huntington, sixty miles from London. Kuroki was in Communications as a ground-bound clerk, pleading with officers to let him fly. Lieutenant Erik Larson, the armaments officer, listened as Kuroki told his story one more time, ending, “I want to prove my loyalty, sir. I can’t do it on the ground.”

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” asked Larson. He told Kuroki the average life span for members of B-24 crews was ten missions. Kuroki was sure. He was sent to gunnery school near London: five days of lectures about spotting enemy planes and firing just ten rounds of a .50 caliber machine gun on the ground. He was a gunner. Now he had to find a crew who would take him.

There were many openings; gunners died in crashes, gunners froze at their positions as German fighter planes buzzed around them like deadly bees, gunners got “flak-happy,” breaking down with combat fatigue. Kuroki went back to Larson, who called in Lieutenant Jake Epting, a Mississippian commanding a B-24 nicknamed “Red Ass”—its symbol was a mule kicking Hitler. He called his crew together and said, “If there is anyone here who objects to flying with Kuroki, let me know now.” No one did. The next day the Red Ass was ordered to fly to North Africa on temporary duty, with Kuroki manning a machine gun.

*   *   *

As the first Christmas of the internment approached, Louise Ogawa sent Clara Breed in San Diego a handmade card with happy drawings and the words: “With our Friends, the Rattlesnakes, / Coyotes, and Scorpions / We send you / SEASON’S GREETINGS / from Poston / The Oasis of Arizona.”

Fusa Tsumagari sent a more sobering report from one of the three Poston camps at the same time.

I guess you have been hearing over the radio about the riot in Camp 1. The version I heard over the radio was quite unlike anything that I have heard in camp.… I’ll tell you our version. The first outbreak occurred about two weeks ago on a Saturday night. A band of people were so sick and tired of “Stool-pigeons” going around and listening to private conversations and getting people into trouble that they went to the homes of the “Stools” and brutally attacked them. Then, two men were picked up on charges of “Attacking with Intent to Murder.” They were going to be taken to Phoenix by the FBI for a hearing. The people in Camp 1 heard this and balked. They did not want these men to be taken to Phoenix and tried for two reasons: first, they did not believe these men were guilty of the charges against them; second, if taken to Phoenix they probably would not get a fair trial. The people built large bonfires near the police station and parked all night to be on guard so that the men would not be taken out when everyone was asleep.

A week later, Tetsuzo Hirasaki sent Miss Breed a letter describing the end of the incident at Poston: “Because a Jap wouldn’t have a Chinaman’s chance in an Arizona court, the people of Camp I did not want the prisoner to be taken out, therefore the strike. After 5 days a compromise was reached and the man is to be tried here in Poston II with a Jap judge & jury.” He went on to report, “Most of the trouble was caused by misunderstandings between the people and the Chief of Police, who is anti-Jap, a big blustery fellow who likes to push a small fellow around.”

The Japanese American Citizens League was at the center of many of the troubles at the camps. Many internees scorned the league as a tool of the government and camp administrators, openly accusing JACL leaders and members of being spies and informants.

Still, the JACL continued to try to boost morale for those living in the primitive camps. Bent nails wrapped in old paper were given as gifts, valuable because the residents were building their own furniture with scrap wood left over from the hasty construction of barracks. In the autumn of 1942, the league sent out appeals to people and organizations to send more cheerful presents to the children in the camps. Thousands and thousands of Americans responded, especially through their churches. But there was a backlash, too. Newspapers around the country were bombarded with hate mail.

“Certainly the best present we give the Japs for Christmas would be a kick in the pants. Especially if they were near a large body of water.… Mae E. Collins”

“I could never look another serviceman in the face if I were to extend Christmas greetings to a Jap.… A Sailor’s Mother.”

“As to sending 40,000 Christmas presents to Japs, I feel that anyone who has the desire to do that should be living with the slimy devils.… A Mother”

Still there were thousands of Americans who obviously felt differently because packages were arriving every day. Before they were passed out, guards stripped paper, wrappings, and ribbons from the boxes; they looked and shook, searching for secret messages or contraband. Chocolates and other candies had to be scooped up with men’s caps. As for cards, like all mail in and out of the camps, they were routed through a post office box in New York City, where more than a hundred censors opened and read every letter and card. The censors used scissors, so letters looked like Swiss cheese or paper dolls—one more humiliation.

Even without wrapping paper or ribbons, residents were cheered by the gifts. “Yesterday night I got a X’mas present from someone I don’t even know,” wrote a seventeen-year-old internee at Heart Mountain, Stanley Hayami, in a new diary. “I got it from a lady named Mrs. C.W. Evans who lives way over in Minominee, Michigan. I got the present via the Sunday School.” All the presents sent to the camp, Hayami reported, were sent by the Presbyterian Union Church. “I really think it was a fine gesture,” he wrote. “I’m going to write to the lady as soon as I can.”

A few days later he wrote:

Far away in New Mexico in an isolated spot, there are a few very poor Mexicans who attended a certain Mission. There, poor people were told by the priest that the kids in Heart Mountain wouldn’t have a very good Christmas, because they didn’t have an income, and because they were uprooted from their homes and put into camp. Well these people were poor themselves but they wanted to help us anyway. They went to their priest and said that they didn’t have much money and the nearest store was about fifty miles away, what could they do? The priest answered by going to that store and buying some gifts and bringing them back. He exchanged these gifts for chickens, vegetables and such that they could spare and took these back to the store in exchange for the gifts. I think that I’ll remember this forever.

Hayami had begun his diary on November 29, 1942. Just a year before, he had been a sixteen-year-old junior at Alhambra High School in the San Gabriel Valley, ten miles east of downtown Los Angeles, before evacuation to the Pomona Assembly Center and then to Wyoming with his mother, father, two brothers, and a sister.

“It is no special day, but I have to start someplace,” he wrote on the first page of the diary. He described his family, which included his thirteen-year-old brother, Walt, and his nineteen-year-old sister, Grace, nicknamed “Sach.” He reported that Sach was trying to convince their parents to let her leave camp to study dress design. “Well I’ll be darned they’ve finally decided to let Sach go to college; it’s to be Washington U. in St. Louis, Missouri.” He mentioned his twenty-two-year-old brother, Frank, an engineering student at Berkeley. Then Stanley Hayami closed out the brief diary entry, saying, “Well that’s about all for now I guess. Gotta get up early tomorrow & get braced for the great bad news—report cards.”

He was obsessed with his grades, not unusual for Japanese American students. He had been a straight A student back home, but now was getting some Bs. The competition was tougher at Heart Mountain; there were just too many smart kids in the camps. The report card he was waiting for had three As and two Bs.

Two weeks later, he wrote of hearing news of the troubles at Manzanar.

Last Monday, December 7. The
Isseis
and
Kibeis
rioted at Manzanar. They were celebrating the Japanese victory at Pearl Harbor and some loyal American
Nisei
tried to stop them and they (rioters) killed one and injured several others. Among those that were injured and had to be taken away for his safety was Tad Uyeno. Tad lived across the street from us at San Gabriel and was our competitor. The internal police could do nothing so the Military Police were summoned into camp. The rioters charged the MPs with rocks so they threw tear bombs. When this didn’t work they shot the rioters and wounded a few. Now Manzanar is under martial law. During the riot in which there was a mob of about 4,000, one group tried to haul down the “Stars and Stripes” but failed as fourteen boy scouts stood guard with rocks and repulsed the attackers.