Chapter 5
In Spokane, Fred Shiosaki and his family lived in fear that at any moment FBI agents might come and take Fred’s father, Kisaburo, away. One by one the other Issei men in the town had been arrested, and their families had not heard from them since.
When the FBI did show up, they ordered Fred’s parents to report to their office. Fred and his sister, Blanche, drove their parents downtown and waited outside in the car. Hours ticked by, and the siblings worried that their father would vanish, as other fathers had vanished. Finally their parents emerged from the building. Kisaburo and Tori got into the car and announced quietly that they were now something called “enemy aliens.”
Barely a week after Pearl Harbor, Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi strode onto the floor of the House of Representatives and declared, “I’m for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps.”[17] Some in the Roosevelt administration pushed back, citing a lack of evidence and concerns over what the law allowed.
The War Department and military commanders also pushed for mass incarcerations. The Department of Justice argued against, saying that this would be a massive violation of civil rights. Throughout late January and early February, the two sides debated the issue in a series of contentious meetings.
All the while, pressure mounted on President Franklin D. Roosevelt, from military officials, West Coast journalists, and both Democratic and Republican politicians. They wanted those people removed. Now. Increasingly, Roosevelt seemed inclined to agree with them.
Eleanor Roosevelt did not. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the first lady had made a point of posing for photographs with a group of Nisei, and she made a radio address on January 11 in which she pointed out that the Issei were long-term residents who had always been denied the right to apply for citizenship.
Back at the White House, she tried to gain the president’s ear, but to no avail. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the secretary of war, or his military commanders, to designate areas of the country from which “any and all persons may be excluded.”
The order made no mention of Japanese Americans, nor of any other ethnic group. It made no distinction between citizens and noncitizens. It did not specify what was to become of whoever was excluded, where they were to be sent, or what was to be done with them. All that was left to the military authorities.
But everyone knew at whom the order was aimed: anyone and everyone with a Japanese surname living near the West Coast of the United States. The western sections of Washington State, Oregon, and California and parts of Arizona were designated an “exclusion zone” from which both Japanese Americans and their Issei parents were to move or be removed. The majority of America’s Issei and Nisei lived within these boundaries.
The only other large concentration of Japanese Americans—and it was very large—was in Hawaiʻi. The government realized it would be impossible to lock up so many people without devastating the sugar and pineapple industries. That could not be allowed to happen.
In Hawaiʻi, only those the FBI considered overly friendly to Japan would be incarcerated. They would be kept in federal detention sites, mostly on the mainland, far away from their families. And so, on the morning of March 17, Katsuichi Miho and 165 other Issei men were marched into the hold of an old steamship and taken to the mainland.
They were brought first to San Francisco, then to Fort Sill in Oklahoma, just north of the Texas border. The place was nearly treeless—a windy, flat landscape unlike anything they had ever seen. Accommodation was in four-man canvas tents, and the camp was surrounded by two fences, the outer one topped with rolls of barbed wire. Overlooking the stockade stood a guard tower with searchlights and a machine gun.
A day or two after their arrival, each of the Issei men was called in turn into a makeshift clinic and told to strip. Expecting to be vaccinated, Katsuichi waited patiently for a doctor. Instead, someone who was not a doctor came into the room and slowly and deliberately wrote a number across his bare chest with a red pen. This number was now his identity as far as the government was concerned.
At night, Katsuichi lay on his cot in the dark, staring at the canvas above his head as the searchlight played over the tents. Listening to the wind whistle and his tentmates snore, he tried to conjure up the Miho Hotel: the pink and white orchids Ayano grew in the courtyard, the smell of ginger and shoyu drifting from the kitchen, the soothing warm water of his wood-heated ofuro, the laughter of his children.
But try as he might, he couldn’t hold on to the images. They seemed far out of reach, rapidly disappearing into the past.
A new government agency, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), was established by President Roosevelt on March 18. Its purpose was to incarcerate people who had been removed from California and parts of Washington State, Oregon, and Arizona.
A week later, on March 24, the army issued the first of a series of area-specific civilian “evacuation” orders. This first order applied to 271 people of Japanese ancestry living on Bainbridge Island in Washington State. It gave them six days to prepare to be taken away to camps the government called “assembly centers,” and they were allowed to take only what they could carry.
A family being forcibly removed from Bainbridge Island.
To be sure, there were families who stepped forward to help their Japanese American friends, neighbors, and business associates. But others couldn’t wait to see them go. They wanted to take over the leases on their homes and farmland, buy out their businesses for a fraction of their worth, loot their possessions, and vandalize their orchards and greenhouses.
Men in trucks drove around Bainbridge Island, looking to take advantage. “Hey, you Japs! I’ll give you ten bucks for that refrigerator . . . I’ll give you two bucks and fifty cents for that washing machine.”[18]
In Salinas, Rudy’s father was at a loss. Headlines in newspapers, posters plastered on telephone poles, and stern bulletins on the radio were all telling him that by April 30 he and his family would be required to “evacuate”—to walk away from the land, leaving his crops to wither and die in the ground. It seemed more than a man his age should have to bear.
In the forty-two years since Jisuke Tokiwa left Japan, he had been a houseboy, a student, a laborer, an American soldier, and a farmer. After a life of hard work, he had allowed himself to believe that he and his wife, Fusa, would be reasonably comfortable in their old age, that they could begin to enjoy life a little and let their sons carry more of the weight of running the farm.
Now those dreams lay shattered.
The Tokiwas did not own the land they farmed—Japanese immigrants were banned from owning land by anti-Asian laws reaching back to the arrival of Chinese laborers during the gold rush of 1849. Nor were they allowed to become American citizens. Now they faced forced removal from their homes, loss of their livelihoods, and mass incarceration.
The Tokiwas’ neighbors, Ed and Henry Pozzi, were immigrants themselves, from an Italian Swiss family. Years before, when the Pozzi boys were orphaned, Jisuke had advised them to switch from dairy production to crops, with enormous success, and he had mentored them on everything from tractor maintenance to seed selection.
Now that the Tokiwas were in a difficult situation, the brothers were eager to help.
“You store everything in our place,” Ed and Henry said.[19]
“Are you sure you want to do that? You might get in trouble.”
“No, no, you people are like family to us.” They even agreed to take care of Fumi’s dog.
On April 30, 1942, Rudy’s father turned the key in his front door, and the Pozzi brothers drove the family downtown, where they joined hundreds of people milling around on the sidewalk.
Many had come dressed in their Sunday best—men in three-piece suits, ties, and fedoras; women wearing white gloves, pumps, and church hats; little girls in plaid skirts and black patent-leather shoes. They came carrying bags and suitcases, dragging steamer trunks, and cradling babies and jewelry boxes.
Families with personal possessions stacked in front of the Salinas Armory.
A young girl in Oakland, California, tagged and ready to be sent to an “assembly center.”
The Tokiwas piled their possessions on the growing mountain of luggage, where men in military uniforms attached paper tags to the bundles. Then they attached matching tags to Rudy, his parents, and his siblings.
More uniformed men directed them into a crowded auditorium, where they sat on folding chairs waiting to register. Eventually their names were called. They filled out some forms, then trooped back outside and climbed reluctantly onto a Greyhound bus. A grim silence settled over the passengers as the reality of what was happening sank in.
It was a short ride, just across town, to the Salinas Rodeo Grounds. When he got off the bus, Rudy was shocked. He tried to imagine it in advance, to prepare himself for it, but the sight of the barbed-wire fencing and the rows of barracks made of tar paper and pine planks drove home the reality of his future and deepened his outrage at the injustice.
The Tokiwas found their belongings and dragged them through the dust, past a row of tall eucalyptus trees and a barbed-wire gate, into what was now called the Salinas Assembly Center. It was a concentration camp.
They found their assigned barracks and peered into the single room they were all to occupy. There was no furniture apart from some metal cots, a couple of light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and a kerosene stove in the middle of the room. A plywood partition between their room and the next did not even reach the ceiling, and they could hear every word spoken by the family next door.
Over the next few days, Rudy explored the camp. It was basic and poorly equipped. The men’s toilets were nothing more than planks with holes in them placed over pits in the ground. There was a long line to use them, and they stank. There was no privacy. In the men’s bathhouses, shower faucets had been placed seven feet up on the walls—too high for many boys and some adults to reach.
When he went to the mess hall to find something to eat, Rudy discovered that it, too, required standing in line—sometimes for forty-five minutes. The food was sparse at best. With a food budget of just thirty-three cents per day for each person in the camp, there was usually rice or potatoes but seldom any meat—a bit of tongue or liver at most.
Barracks at Camp Harmony at the Puyallup Fairgrounds.
The worst of it, for Rudy as for most people, was the barbed wire around the camp and the watchtowers guarded by uniformed men armed with guns.
Conditions were much the same at the fourteen other hastily built assembly centers—what newspapers around the country had taken to calling “Jap Camps”[20]—in Washington State, Oregon, California, and Arizona.
At the Puyallup Fairgrounds, south of Seattle, where the assembly center was almost insultingly called Camp Harmony, rain turned the ground into soupy mud, and people sank to their ankles every time they stepped outside. At the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, California, dozens of families were housed in horse stalls that reeked of manure and urine. For young Americans like Rudy, who had grown up free and proudly American, and for their entire families, it was all deeply humiliating and starkly dehumanizing.
