Haverford
man describes life in World War II internment camp at Villanova talk
By Cheryl Allison
April 24, 2012
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| A. Hiro Nishikawa, PhD |
It will be 70 years this July since
A. Hiro Nishikawa, PhD, (Poston 18-2-A) and his family were put on a train and sent from the San Francisco
area, where he was born, to a makeshift barracks city in the southwestern
Arizona desert.
The years since then have dimmed
memories. Fewer Americans today recall or are aware that places that could be
described as concentration camps once existed on their country’s soil –
especially among the generation of the Villanova University students who heard
the Main Line resident speak last week.
For Nishikawa, whose early childhood
years were spent at Poston War Relocation Center, though, those memories are as
sharp as the sting of the sandstorms that occasionally roared across that
barren “no man’s land.”
A nearly 30-year resident of the
Haverford Township section of Haverford, Nishikawa is retired after a career as
a biochemist in the pharmaceutical industry. He is also a member of the
Japanese-American Citizens League in Philadelphia, who has been active in
recent years on civil rights issues.
Nishikawa was 4 when he, two brothers, and
his mother and father were sent to Poston 18-2-A in the summer after Japan’s attack on
Pearl Harbor. His youngest brother would be born there, and Nishikawa would
finish first grade at the camp school before the facility was closed in late
1945, when he was 7.
Poston, which housed 17,000 at its
peak, was second largest of 10 internment camps that were set up, mostly in
western states, to hold some 110,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry living in
the United States. Nearly 70% of them were American citizens.
With photographs from government
archives and one or two family images – since cameras were confiscated, there
are very few personal photographs from the period, he explained – Nishikawa
described conditions at the camp.
It consisted of blocks of tarpapered
wooden barracks, without running water, arranged around men’s and women’s
latrines, a mess hall, a laundry building, and a recreation building. When it
was hastily raised in a landscape that had been nothing but “sagebrush,
tumbleweed and lots of sand and dust,” it instantly became Arizona’s third
largest municipality, after Phoenix and Tucson, Nishikawa noted.
In the summer, temperatures reached
116 degrees. One of his vivid memories is of playing under the raised barracks,
one of the few places to find shade. The problem was, “nature’s creatures” –
gila monsters, rattlesnakes, scorpions and tarantulas – also quickly found
refuge there. “As a 4- to 5- year-old, you had to learn to make sure you didn’t
run into these animals,” Nishikawa said.
At the camp, his father, who had
worked as a professional chef in San Francisco, found work as one of the camp
cooks for $19 a month. Like other families, they lived in one room of one of
the barracks.
While there was school for the
children with teachers who “came in from outside” and other activities – one
photograph shows boys playing baseball on a field “like any sandlot in America,
the only difference being the barracks in the background” – there is no
question, Nishikawa said: The camp was a prison. The barbed wire around the
perimeter, the watchtowers, and the armed sentries patrolling inside told the
residents that.
Inside the camp, he said one
“unanticipated consequence” of the new social order was that “family and parental
authority began to fall apart,” the traditional “respect and interaction with
parents” upset.
There was despair, also. He
recalled, at age 5, hearing a new word: suicide. The rate was high among single
men, middle-aged and older. “They had been ripped from their professions. In
the case of non-citizens, their assets had been taken. They didn’t know what
they would have [after the war]. They didn’t want to be a burden on their
families.”
There was resistance to internment
by some. Made to fill out “loyalty” questionnaires, some resented or felt
insulted by items questioning their patriotism. Some even chose to renounce
their American citizenship to be repatriated to a Japan at war, where they
faced deprivation and were looked on as “foreigners.”
A Supreme Court decision in late 1944
finally set the stage for the closing of the camps, some months before the war
ended. The result was “this diaspora after the camps,” Nishikawa said. Many of
the internees moved east, to New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania. Some, aided by
Quaker groups, came to Philadelphia.
Nishikawa’s family was given “some
money and train fare” to San Jose, Calif., where his father eventually bought a
Chinese restaurant in nearby Gilroy. He worked as head cook, Nishikawa’s mother
was head waitress, and Nishikawa himself, when he was old enough, cleared
tables and washed dishes.
That is “what happened” during and
immediately after the war years. But Nishikawa also wanted to explain “how and
why” internment happened. A hundred and fifty years of laws and policies that
tightly restricted immigration and naturalization, especially of persons of
color, including people from Asia, helped set the stage, he explained.
“Given these conditions of law that prevailed, the environment on the eve of Dec.
7, 1941, made it very easy for the government to say, ‘This is what we’re going
to do,’ and nobody objected.”
Finally, Nishikawa talked about the
connections he sees between the history he lived through and events since Sept.
11, 2001.
There has been gradual recognition
of “the degree of injustice” to Japanese-American citizens in the years since
World War II, he said. And it was notable, he added, that after 9/11,
then-President George W. Bush made a point of attending a Muslim service and
imploring other Americans “not to react arbitrarily against individuals seen to
be the enemy.”
When there were hundreds of
incidents of violence and hate in the following months, Nishikawa said, the
Japanese-American Citizens League, with other organizations like the Jewish
Defense League, “got involved in trying to connect with the public and point
out what was wrong with this kind of thinking.”
But there are indications, such as a
clause in a military funding bill last year that would allow the military to
indefinitely hold prisoners regardless of citizenship without charge that tell
him, “We’re not home free.”
And, Nishikawa said he understands
why some Americans today find it hard to listen to and accept this chapter in
the country’s history.
A question one student asked him
illustrated the difficulty. When she told an acquaintance about the talk, the
response was, “Those were not concentration camps;” Japanese-Americans “had
their families there. They were not being killed.” How would he respond to that
view?
There is a historical definition of
the term that applies, Nishikawa said, but added, “I understand the
sensitivity.”
“There are euphemisms all over the
place. . . . We don’t want to talk about things that are ugly,” he reflected.
The irony, he said, is that in his mind, “concentration camp,” in the context
of the Holocaust, is itself a euphemism.
Those, he said, “were death camps.”
Source:
http://www.mainlinemedianews.com/articles/2012/04/24/main_line_times/life/doc4f96e0ac1c83c340853360.txt?viewmode=fullstory
