Brazen images depicting World War II Japanese-American internment camps from more than 70 years ago flashed before a large crowd last week in Concord as Masumi "Margie" Yamamoto shared the story behind her family’s enduring evacuation, along with 120,000 others, shortly after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
It was President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1942 Executive Order, fueled by widespread racial prejudices, to remove Japanese-Americans, regardless of loyalty or citizenship, from America's West Coast, that resonates with people today under President Donald Trump’s executive order banning the entry of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, said Yamamoto.
A sizeable group, of mostly retirement community residents, inside Concord’s Newbury Court fell silent March 2 as the former Lincoln resident and former WGBH employee of 18 years, recounted her family’s hardships as resilient first-generation Americans, who survived and thrived despite being removed from their homes and stripped of civil liberties.
"When my family was incarcerated during World War II, I was just an infant and I don’t remember any of it. But I’ve learned a great deal about it through family stories, told mostly by my mother,” said Yamamoto.
Yamamoto’s mother, Kinuko, was born in Hilo, Hawaii in 1904. Kinuko’s father came to Hawaii from Japan in 1884 and her mother followed as a picture bride in 1887. Kinuko worked in her family’s bakery, but she wanted to travel, so she moved to Japan where she eventually connected with Sohei Yamamoto, who moved to California from a small fishing village in Japan. After exchanging photos, Kinuko eventually visited Sohei in Los Angeles where he managed a grocery store. On Nov. 5, 1931, the two married and two years later began their own family on Terminal Island, between San Pedro and Long Beach – a place known for work and opportunity for Japanese people.
In December 1941, within hours of the Pearl Harbor attack, FBI descended on Terminal Island since it was close to a major naval station that was being built. Most first-generation Japanese-American men were subsequently and unjustly suspected as having helped the enemy and were taken into custody, said Yamamoto. Racially charged war propaganda took front pages of national publications, vilifying the Japanese, she said.
Terminal Island was the first area in the U.S. affected by Roosevelt’s Feb. 25, 1942 executive order, giving military jurisdiction over the western military zone. More than 3,000 residents were given 48 hours to evacuate their homes, businesses and the island. Yamamoto moved his growing family and overnight the island became a ghost town. On March 11, 1942 Yamamoto was born. On March 24, the family was forced to leave their rented home – the first of a series of swift mass evacuations. By June 1942, all 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, of which two-thirds were American citizens, were removed from the West Coast, said Yamamoto.
“They were taken from their homes and instructed to bring only what they could carry with them. They were taken from orphanages and hospitals. They were taken even if they were found to have a 1/16th of Japanese blood. They were taken regardless of age, from oldest to youngest,” said Yamamoto.
Yamamoto and her family were sent to the Turlock Assembly Center in central California and were housed in poorly erected temporary barracks while permanent camps were being built across the country. On July 28, 1942, the family was transported via train to a camp in Gila River, Arizona, 47 miles southeast of Phoenix. With peak occupancy of 13,348 people and surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers in the hot desert, the camp and its 20-feet wide by 100-feet long barracks were said to be the family’s home for the duration.
“These hastily constructed military-style barracks were made with green lumber that shrank in the hot Arizona sun. The sand invaded the barracks through gaps between lumber and my mother had to put layers of wet cheesecloth over my crib to protect me,” said Yamamoto. “Some of the more enterprising tried to make their quarters homelike with bedspreads and curtains… Families with men who knew carpentry made furniture out of scrap lumber, while others just couldn’t be bothered.”
Long lines, lack of privacy and insufficient paid labor inspired the successful agriculture operation to supply an abundance of fresh crop to the camp. By 1943, Gila River was deemed a “model camp” and attracted visits from government officials, said Yamamoto, pointing to a smiling first lady Eleanor Roosevelt waving to a grinning crowd of Japanese-Americans occupying the notable internment camp.
In 1944 the government began allowing families to leave if they stayed outside the western military zone, so Yamamoto’s family was given a one-way bus ticket to Denver and $25 per person to join their uncle. From there, Yamamoto’s father brought his family to further family-run entrepreneurial endeavors in Chicago and then back again to California.
“In all those years after the war, my parents never spoke of their camp experience. [My father] had spent more than 33 years feeling the guilt and shame of our imprisonment and never saw anything that told him what happened to him was unjust,” said Yamamoto.
After the passing of Yamamoto’s father, the U.S. government passed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988, granting reparation to Japanese who had been incarcerated during World War II.
“Mom was 85 years old when she received her check. Although my parents are no longer with us, their story continues. For you see, when a strong-willed young woman who wanted to see the world meets an adventurous entrepreneurial young man, together they can overcome obstacles,” said Yamamoto, noting her parents left behind a large multi-racial, multi-cultural family with four children, 13 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren.
“Our story is just one of many thousands to result from World War II incarceration. What happened more than 70 years ago is the past, but its message to us is as fresh as today’s headlines,” said Yamamoto. “As the statesman Edmund Burke so wisely warned us: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
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