A Strange and Bewildering Fourth of July

In February, 1942, after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor two months earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 to relocate all people of Japanese ancestry who were living in Washington, Oregon, and much of California to one of ten “relocation centers” outside of the Pacific military zone.  Roosevelt felt it was the best thing to do to alleviate rampant fear for our national security.

This order affected 117,000+ Japanese people, including 78,000, who were native-born American citizens.  Once they were notified, they had forty-eight hours to sell their belongings and pack.  Each person was allowed to bring one suitcase.  Their businesses were abandoned.

Many Japanese from Southern California were sent to Poston, AZ, a relocation center in the desert near the Colorado River.  The camp opened in May of 1942 and closed  in November of 1945.  The temperatures in Poston often reached more than 100 degrees in the summer.  Winters were extremely cold.

For the main meal of the day, the internees were frequently served hot dogs with sauerkraut.  To replenish salt in their bodies from excessive perspiration, they were given salt pills everyday.

The jobs they were given in and around the center focused on agriculture (clearing land, planting and tending gardens) for up to $12 a month.  Since they were not allowed to own a camera, they often bought watercolor paints with their salary so they could paint scenes of their daily life.

Although the 18,000 Japanese in Poston felt like prisoners because of barbed wire fencing around the area, many of the Japanese took on the attitude of shikata ga nai (It can’t be helped.  Life must go on.)  Even so, the internees had nicknames for the three areas of the Poston camp where they lived – nicknames that told what they thought of the place:  Roaston, Toaston, and Duston.

One unknown fact is that most of the soldiers in World War II’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team were Japanese Americans with many having been recruited from the Poston internment camp.  After serving in the U.S. military in Italy, France, and Germany, they became the most decorated infantry regiment in military history.  The irony is that while they were fighting for our country abroad, their relatives were stuck in internment camps back in the States.  During the war, twenty-five Japanese Amercans from Poston lost their lives.

So what was July 4, 1942 like for the internees?  The Manzanar Free Press, the inmates’ newspaper for the internment camp in Manzanar, California, said that July 4th was “a doubly strange and bewildering day.” While the newspaper said that the people in the internment camp in Manzanar would celebrate with baseball games and a Miss Manzanar pageant, Poston would be receiving more internees, mostly from Central California.  The Register-Pajaronian in Watsonville, CA reported that 1,500 Japanese were transported on a special train from Salinas, CA, on July 4, 1942, to their new relocation center in Poston, AZ.

Tom and I visited Poston on our last trip and saw how hot and isolated it was.  We did not see any of the old buildings when we were there, but from videos I’ve watched this past  week, the buildings are mostly rubble.

There is a beautiful memorial, though, at the site of the Poston camp.  There are plaques on each side of the memorial.  Near the bottom of one side, there are many paper cranes, symbols of hope and healing.

President Ronald Reagan issued an apology in 1988 to the Japanese Americans for having been interned because of race and without due process of law.  Each internee was awarded $20,000.  Unfortunately, many of the older internees had already died.  The monetary award in those cases went to their survivors.

The plaque on one side of the memorial at Poston summarizes it best:

“This memorial is dedicated to all those men, women and children who suffered countless hardships and indignities at the hands of a nation misguided by wartime hysteria, racial prejudice and fear.  May it serve as a constant reminder of our past so that Americans in the future will never again be denied their constitutional rights and may the remembrance of that experience serve to advance the evolution of the human spirit.”