1999-Upper Level
First Place
VOICES FROM THE HOMEFRONT:
AMERICA'S SHAME
By Diane Coppage
This paper is part of a larger study I am doing about women during World War II. I would like to begin with the words of Marion Nakashima, one of 13 women I have interviewed thus far.
At first, you disbelieve it because you're taught about equality.
Then you realize you're being outsted because of race.
You can't believe this would happen in America.
Marion Nakashima
The bombing of Pearl Harbor in December, 1941 made Americans deeply suspicious of the 127,500 Japanese and Japanese-Americans who lived in the United States at the time. That seven out of ten of them were Americans, born in the United States, did little to keep them from being considered potential enemies. This suspicion was reinforced by rumors that Japan's next attack on the United States would be on the West Coast mainland. To quell the rising paranoia that America's Japanese and Japanese-American populations were aiding and abetting the enemy (indeed, many people believed they were the enemy), West Coast Commander Lieutenant Gen. John L. DeWitt suggested that all Japanese and Americans of Japanese heritage who lived on the West Coast be moved inland. Despite Attorney General Francis Biddle's argument that DeWitt's idea violated the basic human rights of American citizens, President Roosevelt agreed in early 1942 to sign the Civilian Exclusion Order. The Order, signed without the approval of Congress or the Justice Department, mandated the forced removal of more than 112,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans to nine relocation camps in Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho (Chadakoff, 289).
The camps were built by the War Relocation Authority and were known as the "Nisei" (pronounced Nee-say), a Japanese term referring to second generation Japanese born in the United States. Raised in a culture that respects the unity of the family and the privacy of the individual, the first generation "Issei," their American children, the second generation "Nisei," and their grandchildren, third generation "Sansei," were herded together in the camps without regard for individual differences or family needs.
In late April, 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt toured the 7,000 acre Gila River camp outside Phoenix, Arizona, at the request of President Roosevelt. She described the living conditions of its 12,000 inhabitants in her daily newspaper column on April 26:
The contractors who built . . . the fourth largest city in Arizona simply scraped everything away . . . . When the wind blows everything is covered with sand.
The sun beats down on . . . rows of barrack buildings, which are divided into spaces about 25 by 20 feet, and in these spaces families have begun their lives a new. Many of them have made screens out of anything they could find available, and these are used to create privacy . . .
Everything is spotlessly clean. It is quite evident that the community washing centers are frequently used.
The messhalls have . . . been decorated with paper streamers, paper flowers, and paintings . . .
Sometimes there are little Japanese gardens, sometimes vegetables or flowers bloom . . . Makeshift porches and shades have been impro- vised . . . out of gunny sacks and bits of wood . . . . (qtd. in Chadakoff 289)
Eleanor Roosevelt was a tireless human rights activist, and a shrewd, smart woman. She was instrumental in convincing Congress to pass the Anti-Lynching Bill in 1937 (54); she resigned her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution when the group decreed that black soprano Marian Anderson would never sing in Constitution Hall in Washington (113); and she fought for better living conditions for women, blacks, and Native Americans. Moreover, she was dead set against the original order to evacuate the Japanese and Japanese-Americans, a position she made perfectly clear to her husband. Yet, in writing about the war she tried to put a good face on even the most heinous violations of human rights. Perhaps she struggled with personal feelings of what she believed was right and what she saw as her political responsibility not to inflame public opinion in an already delicate situation. Whatever the reason, her description of the conditions at Gila is an example of her tendency to mask the United States' bold violation of the rights of its own citizens.
It is clear by her description of the camp as a "city" that Mrs. Roosevelt is trying to convince her readers that the Japanese-Americans were simply being asked to live together in one place, that their living conditions weren't terribly harsh, and that, as a result of their ingenuity, the internees had turned their desert barracks into temporary homes. Because she focuses her description on the structure of the camp, Mrs. Roosevelt creates an abstract population. By not including people in her report, she de-humanizes the camp. Further, although she concedes the hot, dusty conditions, she idealizes the camp's harsh environment by describing in almost patronizing tones how internees tried to transform their prison barracks into family living spaces. She writes of the families beginning "their lives a new" (289) in a tone that suggests the internees were embarking on a camping adventure. Their ability to "make screens out of anything" to create a bit of privacy dismisses the humiliation the internees no doubt felt upon being forced to expose their bodies and their private family lives to public scrutiny. Her description of how the internees sought to re-create a bit of their home by the sea in the hot, dusty desert in which they found themselves, is rendered in language that is racially insulting. The phrase "little Japanese gardens" demeans the internees by suggesting the cuteness and diminution of children. Implicit in her description of the gardens is a racial slur against the size of the gardeners. All the evidence we have of Eleanor Roosevelt's kind heart and generous spirit makes us want to believe that her feelings about what she saw at Gila ran much deeper than what she reported in her column. She knew that no amount of blooming flowers or vegetable gardens, no makeshift porches or shades, could have turned those hot, cramped barracks into cozy family cottages or justly described a place in which more than 12,000 innocent people were imprisoned and denied their liberty. (It defies reason that the children in the camps were made to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day (Kearns-Goodwin 429) ).
A more realistic look at life in the internment camps can be found in the accounts of two women who lived in them. Marion Nakashima, one of the women interviewed for this project, is an 87-year-old Nisei who spent more than a year in the American camps. Novelist Joy Kogawa was interned with her family in a Canadian relocation camp and reflects her experiences through the journey of a fictional family as it is forced from its home on Vancouver Island inland to Alberta.
Marion was born in Seattle and educated at UCLA. In 1942, she and her husband George, also American born and educated, and their infant daughter, Mira, were forced from their home in Seattle by the US government and sent to a "processing center" in Portland, Oregon. Permitted only one suitcase each, Marion packed as much as she could for her baby, even managing to take along a sterilizer for the baby's bottles. Her description of "begin[ning] their lives a new" (Chadakoff 289) presents a strikingly different account from Eleanor Roosevelt's report:
We were tagged with numbers . . . taking only what we could carry. The assembly center was a former livestock center. Space was allotted to each family, separated only by plywood full of knots and holes. More than 4,000 people were put under one roof with bright lights overhead and concrete floors . . . Showers, toilets, and laundry facilities were communal. Meals were served at the messhall. The center was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and watchtowers were manned by armed soldiers. I think somebody went out and got shot. The teenagers wore wooden clogs and the noise was terrific . . . it was very hard for me to get the baby to sleep. (personal interview: Feb. 24, 1999)
For several months, Marion, George, and Mira lived in an unheated horse stall. What Mrs. Roosevelt described in her column as "spotlessly clean . . . community washing centers" (Chadakoff 289) were, in fact, crowded facilities where bathing or attending to personal hygiene must have been a humiliating experience for people whose culture teaches that "in all public places, even a glance can be indiscreet" (Kogawa 58). Mrs. Roosevelt's description of "messhalls . . . decorated with paper streamers, paper flowers and paintings" (289) allowed little opportunity for family meals and customs. Table manners were abandoned, and quiet family dinner conversation was impossible (Kearns-Goodwin 429). For the first-generation Issei, whose lives were ordered by the patterns of respected and cherished traditions, eating with forks instead of chop sticks and foregoing the family's ancient tea ceremony was especially difficult.
Occurring parallel in time with the Nakashima's experience in America is the story of the Nakane/Kato family of Joy Kogawa's novel, Obasan (the Japanese word for "aunt"). In the novel, which Kogawa dedicates to her mother and father, and "to those amazing people, the Issei," Kogawa traces the journey of young Naomi Nakane and her Obasan (Aunt Ayako) as their family is relocated from their home in Vancouver off the Pacific coast of Canada inland to Alberta.
In early 1942, men, women, and children from a one-hundred-mile strip along the coast are herded into a prison at the Hastings Park exhibition grounds in Vancouver. Here they are "kept . . . like animals" (93) in the "Livestock Building . . . pending removal (105) to concentration camps in the interior of the province. Emily Kato's diary entry of on March 22, 1942 would be eerily familiar to Marion Nakashima:
Vancouver, this paradise, is filled up and overflowing with hatred now. . . . The crowding, the noise, the confusion is chaos. Mothers are prostrate in nervous exhaustion-the babies crying endlessly-the fathers torn from them without farewell-everyone crammed into two buildings like so many pigs . . . forbidden to step outside the barbed-wire gates and fence. . . Babies and motherless children totally stranded . . . . the pure hell that results is kept 'hush-hush' from the public . . . . (Kogawa 108)
Before the "relocations" end, the whole coast will be cleared, and everyone of the Japanese race in Vancouver will be sent away to one of the Canadian government's "Interior Government Housing Projects" (Kogawa 41). As they leave their home in British Columbia behind, six-year old Naomi Nakane speaks for her family and her people: "We are the Issei and the Nisei and the Sansei . . . . We disappear in the future undemanding as dew" (132). The innocence of Naomi's childhood is shattered with the understanding that she and her family are being forced to "disappear" simply because they are Japanese.
In late 1942, the Nakashimas are moved from their stall in Portland to the Minidoka Relocation Center in Hunt, Idaho. Marion recalls their arrival:
We arrived in a dust storm . . . . Each barracks was divided into sections. Because we were a small family, we had the small end. The furnishings were cots, mattresses, and a coal stove. Teens resorted to gangs, and young mothers were frightened for their children. No one was permitted in or out of the barracks. You had people outside watching you and watch towers. (personal interview: Feb. 24, 1999)
A few years after the Nakashima family is transported to Idaho, Kogawa's fictional family is moved to Granton, Alberta to work as slave laborers on a sugar beet farm. Naomi Nakane describes her family's new home:
Our hut is at the edge of a field that stretches as far as I can see and is filled with an army of spartan plants fighting in the wind . . . The door slams open and soot and dust leap to the walls. A round stove stands in the middle of the room . . . a broom and some rags . . . . by the door. One room, one door, two windows . . . we are alone in this wind-battered place . . . (230)
These two accounts-one from the heart of an old woman with real-life memories; one through the eyes of a fictional little girl-link the Nakashima and Nakane families in a way that Mrs. Roosevelt's newspaper column fails to do. Marion Nakashima's anxiety for her child mirrors the fear of young Naomi, and their descriptions of the bare living areas covered in dust, the spare furnishings, and the single coal stove convey the sense of abandonment and deprivation of both families. Mrs. Roosevelt's "little Japanese gardens" (Chadakoff 289) do not grow in Minidoka or Granton.
Kogawa's creation of the fictional internment experience of the Nakanes is closer to the truth of Marion Nakashima's real-life experience that Mrs. Roosevelt's eye-witness account. Obasan Nakane and Marion Nakashima merge in the shadows between fact and fiction as "the women who are burdened with all the responsibility of keeping what's left of the family together" (Kogawa 120). Mrs. Roosevelt sugarcoats the experience of the internees to make it more acceptable to her readers. She sensed that Americans would approve the notion of rounding up people who posed an internal security threat, even if they were Americans, if they could be convinced that the internees were being well-treated. Her idealized view of life at Gila River creates a false historical record and leaves behind a deceptive picture of conditions as they actually existed in the camps and as they were experienced by the internees who lived in them.
Notwithstanding the view of the Gila River camp that Eleanor presented to her readers, and we might assume to the President, she realized how deeply wrong it was to deny American citizens their freedom based solely on racial heritage. She worked to persuade the government to relax the exclusion order and allow the Japanese to return to their homes, "to start independent and productive lives again" (Kearns-Goodwin 430). Eventually, the President agreed to step up the issuance of exit permits to individual Japanese who had jobs and a place to live away from the West Coast. George Nakashima wrote to a friend in Pennsylvania who offered him a job caring for the chickens on his farm. A work permit was granted, and the family was released in April, 1943.
In January, 1943 the War Department began allowing American-born Nisei to enlist in a special unit in the army. By the end of 1943, between those who had joined the army and those who left to take jobs, nearly one-third of the interned Japanese and Japanese-Americans had left the camps (430).
In April, 1946 the Co-operative Committee on Japanese-Canadians issued a six-point memorandum to the House and the Senate of Canada. The memorandum begins:
It is urgently submitted that the Orders-in-Council [for the deportation of Canadians of Japanese racial origin] are wrong and indefensible and constitute a grave threat to the rights and liberties of Canadian citizens, and that
Parliament . . . should assert its powers and require the Governor-in-Council to withdraw the Orders. (Kogawa 297)
The Nakanes do not leave the sugar-beet farm until 1951. They never re-gain their possessions or return to their home in Vancouver. Naomi Nakane becomes a teacher in Alberta, haunted by the persecution she and her family endured during the war. Marion and her daughter still live in Pennsylvania. Mira received degrees in architecture from Harvard University and Waseda University in Tokyo and today manages the Nakashima Studio, the business her father built after the war as an internationally known architect and furniture designer. Before his death in 1990, George Nakashima founded the Nakashima Foundation for Peace, the manifestation of which is a "Peace Altar/Table," designed by Nakashima to "create a tangible focus of prayer and meditation one for each of the continents of the world" (Nakashima). There are Peace Altar/Tables currently on display in Russia and India as part of an international program to bring the voice of peace to the world.
In agreeing that what was done to Japanese-Americans during the war remains to this day a national disgrace, Mrs. Nakashima echoes the thoughts of Emily Kato: "What this country did to us, it did to itself . . . " (40).
The policies adopted by the United States and Canada during the 1940s almost destroyed the Japanese populations in the two countries. But the spirit for life that is part of the Japanese culture is reflected in a language of hope. In their darkest hour, Naomi's uncle gives thanks for bringing them through their ordeal alive, "As long as we have life and breath" (Kogawa 144), he intones at the family prayer ritual. His prayer of thanks becomes his family's rallying cry and reinforces Emily Kato's belief that "nothing in heaven or on earth can stop the labor of the heart . . . (307). Today in Pennsylvania, more than 50 years after their release from Minidoka, the Nakashima family keeps the Nakane sense of indestructibility alive. The name given to the Nakashima Foundation for Peace around the world is "Keisho," continuation.
* * * *
As I write about Marion Nakashima, Obasan Nakane, and their little girls, Mira and Naomi, the world is caught up in what is being called by the mass media and western governments a "refugee crisis." In Yugoslavia, NATO is undertaking a "military action" to stop the "ethnic cleansing" policies of Slobodan Milosevic that are creating the crisis. Milosevic is demanding the "forced exile" of all ethnic Albanians from the province of Kosovo in Yugoslavia. Today, April 4, their number is reported to exceed a half-million displaced persons. Television news footage bears witness to the mass of humanity that walks, crawls, or is carried over the border of Kosovo to neighboring countries willing to give a very temporary and very tenuous safe shelter. The images transmitted from the quickly set-up tent camps defy our sense of sight, seeing is no longer believing. In a line that stretches as far as the camera lens can capture it come the dispossessed: women carrying babies on their backs and in their arms, some nursing as they walk; men pushing old women in wheelbarrows; ancient old people with the suffering of civilization in their eyes struggling with rag-covered feet through the mud and snow; toddlers, without shoes, walking over the frigid ground, clinging to their parents; a very young mother sitting on the ground in the rain, silent tears streaming down her face as she nurses her baby, her hand over its face providing cover against the rain. Forced to sit out the nights in the freezing rain and snow without food, water, or warm clothes-without sanitation or medical treatment, the very old and the very young are beginning to die.
I struggle to make sense, some sense, any sense of it all. Do not speak to me of the wonders of the "information highway" when a highway of human misery is passing before me. Do not dare to praise our "scientific breakthroughs" of cloning and multiple births when mothers are giving birth on the cold wet ground, without privacy or medical attention. Do not hail our "just in time" delivery systems when food and medicine is two weeks in coming. Do not attempt to show me our progress, while I watch our decline. The events of the past weeks make me understand in the most awful way the philosophy behind the treatment of US and Canadian Japanese populations during World War II. Marion Nakashima's words of what happened to her fifty years ago, "you realize you're being outsted because of race" still ring all too true.
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Works Cited
Chadakoff, Rochelle, ed. Eleanor Roosevelt's My Day. Vol. I, Her Acclaimed Columns, 1936- 1945. New York: Pharos Books, 1989.
Kearns-Goodwin, Doris. No Ordinary Time. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. New York: Doubleday, 1981.
Marion Nakashima. Personal Interview. February, 1999.
(Diane Coppage is an English major. She came to AASU to complete her BA degree after a 15 year business career in corporate communications. Her essay is part of a larger research project about women during World War II that she is working on with Dr. Winterhalter. Diane has been a tutor in the Writing Center and a guest lecturer in the Business and Technical Communications class. As the Secretary for AASU's chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, she is active in the chapter's community outreach programs. She also represents AASU as moderator on the Union Camp (International Paper as of today) Community Advisory Council. Diane is currently the interim director of the Coastal Georgia Writing Project at AASU.)