April 24, 2012
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| Saburo Masada |
Like other Americans, Saburo Masada vividly remembers Dec. 7, 1941. He and his family were working on a newly purchased farm in California. While taking a break, they turned on the radio to listen to a program. That program was interrupted by a news flash: Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor.
“I still remember saying, ‘What a stupid thing Japan is doing. Who do
they think they are bombing our country?’” Masada said.
But within a short time, rumors circulated that Japanese Americans had
something to do with the bombing — that they were loyal to Japan.
Soon, Masada would never forget another date: March 16, 1942. That day,
a U.S. Army truck drove into the front yard of the Masadas’ farm. All nine
family members were loaded into it and taken to the Fresno fairgrounds. Once a
fun place, the fairgrounds now was surrounded with barbed wire fences and guard
towers with soldiers manning guns pointed at Saburo and other Japanese
Americans.
It was only the beginning.
During World War II, some 120,000 Japanese Americans and loyal permanent
residents of Japanese ancestry were forcibly removed from their homes on the
West Coast and taken to camps where they were imprisoned for up to four years.
On Monday, Masada and his wife, Marion, shared their experiences in the
camps with students at Wahoo High School. Students from other schools
throughout the state watched via a live video feed.
The Masadas, born in California, served 43 years in the Presbyterian pastorate
before retiring 17 years ago. They have spoken to clubs, churches and at
schools.
They were eager to speak to students
in Wahoo.
“I want them to be aware of an important part of American history which
has been left out of the history books,” Saburo told the Tribune. “Most people
don’t know how it could have happened or what did happen.”
Anti-Japanese sentiment actually emerged decades before the war. Saburo
cited a May 1905 gathering of organizations in San Francisco to form the Asian
Exclusion League to promote the anti-Japanese movement. In 1924, Congress
passed the Asian Exclusion Act which prevented any further immigration from
Japan to America.
Saburo attributes the forced incarceration to various factors, which
included economic competition because Japanese Americans dominated the
vegetable and fruit market in California. He also said there were bigots who
only wanted Caucasian people in the United States.
These were but a few voices, but Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor
provided them an opportune time to exploit fear.
“The government said it was for national security reasons. We were a
danger to the national security because we were Japanese — the face of our
enemy, but it was all based on lies, rumors and propaganda and the newspapers
just didn’t print what the intelligence agencies were saying — that there was
no truth to the rumors.”
Saburo said the public was duped and politicians — wanting to be elected
or re-elected — backed the mass incarceration.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which
authorized the incarceration, on Feb. 19, 1942.
“The government tried to say in the propaganda that it was to protect
us, but the towers and the guns were pointed at us,” he said. “And you don’t
protect innocent people by imprisoning them.”
Raised to obey authority, Saburo said people didn’t try to escape. He
cited an instance when a hearing impaired man was shot to death. The man, who
had befriended a stray dog, was trying to retrieve the animal which had gotten
past the fence. A boy trying to get a ball that had rolled away and went to the
fence was shot to death as well.
While he said the camps in which Japanese Americans were held were
nothing like the German ones — those were death camps — he still calls them
concentration camps.
To Masada and other children, the incarceration was traumatic.
Two-thirds of the prisoners were children under age 15.
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| Marion Masada |
Marion (Nakamura) was just 9 when she and her family were uprooted from
their home and business. Her parents were successful truck farmers in Salinas.
Marion had five siblings. They and other Japanese Americans were kept on a
rodeo grounds for five months, before being transported in old, rickety trains
to an Arizona camp (Poston 211-1-B). They got to take two duffel bags of
belongings per person. They were given tags with numbers.
“My mother drummed it into us that we were to remember our number
because ‘they will not know you by your name from now on. You are a number.’ It
was a way of dehumanizing us,” she said.
She remembered the thick dust storms in Arizona. The family of eight
lived in one room with no partitions. Beds were side by side. There was a
community bathroom with showers for women and for men. There was one mess hall;
her father was a cook and her mother a dietitian. Marion washed all the
family’s clothes by hand and did the ironing. She had little time to play.
One day, a friend invited Marion and her sister to stay overnight in her
barracks. In the night, that girl’s father molested Marion, who kept the
incident to herself for many years.
“My whole experience in camp was a traumatic one I was made to feel that
I started the war. I felt being Japanese was bad. … I felt a hurt I couldn’t
explain. I didn’t know how to fight back, I would be so angry I would take it
out on others,” she said.
After the war, the family discovered
that their valuables, left with a landlord, had been looted.
“Even our car was an empty shell,” she said.
The family had difficult time finding housing. No one wanted to rent to
them. She did make friends with a girl in high school, who invited her home on
weekends. Marion fought tears as she told how she was loved like a member of
that family.
After their talks, the Masadas answered questions from the audience,
which gave them a standing ovation.
Source:
http://fremonttribune.com/news/local/couple-shares-story-of-living-in-japanese-internment-camps/article_f917df1e-8e20-11e1-bbc4-001a4bcf887a.html#ixzz20dVsaopr
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