By Colleen Sleven
11/21/12
DENVER -- Some letters arriving from Japanese-American
internment camps during World War II were very specific, asking for a certain
brand of bath powder, cold cream or cough drops – but only the red ones. Others
were just desperate for anything from the outside world.
"Please don't send back my check. Send me
anything," one letter said from a California camp on April 19, 1943.
The letters, discovered recently during renovations at a
former Denver pharmacy owned by Japanese-Americans, provide a glimpse into life
in some of the 10 camps where 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including
U.S. citizens, from the West Coast were forced to live during the war.
They were written in English and in Japanese, expressing the
kinds of mundane needs and wants of everyday life, such as medicine as well as
condoms, cosmetics and candy.
About 250 letters and postcards, along with war-time
advertisements and catalogs, came tumbling out of the wall at a historic brick
building on the outskirts of downtown. The reason they were in the wall and how
they got there are a mystery, particularly because other documents were out in
the open.
The letters haven't been reviewed by experts, though the
couple that found them has contacted the Japanese American National Museum in
Los Angeles to gauge interest in the missives.
It wasn't unusual for internees to order items from mail
order catalogs or from the many companies that placed ads in camp newspapers,
selling everything from T-shirts to soy sauce, said Alisa Lynch, chief of
interpretation at the Manzanar National Historic Site, which was the location
of a camp south of Independence, Calif.
They earned up to $19 a month doing jobs at camps and some
were able to bring money with them before they were interned, Lynch said.
The building where the documents were discovered had been
vacant for seven years when Alissa and Mitch Williams bought it in 2010.
The T.K. Pharmacy was originally owned by Thomas Kobayashi,
a native Coloradan of Japanese descent, but during the war it was run by his
brother-in-law, Yutaka "Tak" Terasaki, who died in 2004, according to
his younger brother, Sam Terasaki of Denver.
Sam Terasaki was in the service then and doesn't remember
his brother talking about taking orders from internment camps. He said his
brother may have gotten involved because of his longtime participation in the
Japanese American Citizens' League, a national group dedicated to protecting
Japanese-Americans' civil rights. He said his brother's wife worked as a
secretary to Gov. Ralph Carr, who took the politically unpopular stand of
welcoming Japanese-Americans to the state.
Some writers noted seeing ads for the pharmacy. One letter
from a man who said he arrived at the Poston,
Ariz., camp "half dead" addressed his letter directly to
"Tak" and asked for chocolate. "I had to wait twenty hours in
the middle of the desert at (illegible) Junction, no place to go, just
wait," he wrote.
The other camps the letters came from included Heart
Mountain in Wyoming, Gila River in Arizona, and others in McGehee, Ark., Topaz,
Utah and Granada in southern Colorado.
Japanese-Americans who lived in Colorado and elsewhere in
the interior West weren't interned.
The relatively small but stable Japanese-American community
that began taking hold in Colorado in the 1880s provided a support network for
those forcibly moved from California to the state camp, state historian Bill
Convery said.
Internees at that camp were able to leave with permission
and could visit Denver as well as a fish market near the camp opened by two men
of Japanese ancestry. It was relocated to Denver after the war.
Convery said the pharmacy could have been one of the few
Japanese-American owned pharmacies in the West, since business owners on the
coast were interned. It could offer products favored by internees – who had one
week to pack up two suitcases and sell any assets – and they might have felt
more comfortable dealing with a Japanese-American-owned company, given tensions
during the war.
Internees couldn't bring much to camp and they didn't know
where they were headed or how long they'd be gone. "So as much as anything
could soften the blow of that unimaginable situation, those businesses did what
they could," Convery said.
Alissa Williams has been poring over the letters and
wondering about the stories behind the polite orders, including one for
diabetes medicine. Her grandmother, aunt and uncle suffer from the disease and
she wondered what they would do without medicine. The mother of a 2-year-old,
she also thought about how she would cope in such a camp.
"I can put myself in their place, they're having kids,
they're sick and they can't get what they need," she said. "... But
no one is complaining."
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/21/internment-camp-letters-f_0_n_2172502.html
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