70 years
ago, U.S. rounded up 2,000 local Japanese Americans
February 19, 2012
by Garth Warth
Takeo Sugimoto (Poston 43-2-A) didn't know where he was headed when he and his family
arrived at the train station in Oceanside 70 years ago. But he wasn't alone.
About 1,000 other Japanese-Americans from North County also
were gathered at the station that day, many holding two suitcases filled with
as many belongings as they could fit inside.
"I was confused a little bit, but not scared,"
said the 85-year-old Encinitas resident. "I was with my family. But it was
kind of surreal. Why is this happening? Where are we going?"
He and other Japanese-Americans from California, along with
others from the western parts of Oregon and Washington and the southern border
of Arizona, were told to take only what they could carry in two hands to a
local train station, where they would be transported to an undisclosed
location.
In San Diego County, which had a population of 2,076
Japanese-Americans in 1940, families were sent to Poston, 12 miles south of
Parker, Arizona. Poston was one of 10 internment camps created during World War
II after an executive order authorized the Secretary of War to designate
specific areas as military zones and excluded certain people from living in
them. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on
Feb. 19, 1942.
In San Diego County and other Pacific coast communities, the
reverberating terror of the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese in 1941 fueled
fear of conspiracies, treason and espionage from within.
Historian Gerald Schlenker researched and wrote about the
period in his article, "The Internment of the Japanese of San Diego County
During the Second World War," published in 1972 in the Journal of San
Diego History. In his article, it was clear the county was swift to call for
action against the perceived threat.
Just one month after the Pearl Harbor attack, the San Diego
Union published an editorial calling for the removal of Japanese from the
coast, federal officials closed the Japanese-language school in downtown San
Diego and the San Diego City Council adopted a resolution calling for the
removal of the "known" subversive element in the area, according to
Schlenker's research.
The county Board of Supervisors also passed a resolution
urging internment of Japanese residents.
San Diego City College history teacher Susan Hasegawa, who
has researched the internment era, said she doesn't know of any North County
municipality that adopted a resolution endorsing internment in 1942.
Schlenker, however, reported that the Fallbrook Grange No.
614 sent a resolution to the Board of Supervisors asking for immediate removal
of all Japanese people from the county.
Hasegawa said granges, agricultural organizations that
started in the late 1800s, competed with Japanese-American farmers and thus
were largely supportive of internment.
Among those deported were the parents of Elaine Armstrong, a
graphic artist at Palomar College.
"I've talked to people of that generation who said,
'Oh, it was essential because it was to protect them,'" she said.
"And I say, 'Why were the guns pointed into the camp?'"
Sugimoto, who said he has mostly pleasant memories of
spending his teenage years at the camp, was alarmed at the sight of armed
guards at the camp.
"It was disconcerting for me to see a closed gate,
barbed wires and soldiers at sentry boxes," he said. "It was the same
with the train ride from Oceanside to Poston. We had armed soldiers at every
car."
Armstrong said her mother, Hannah Sonoda, was sent to a camp
in Arkansas, where she graduated from high school and worked in the post
office. Her father, Howell Sonoda, (226-4-AB) was sent to Poston.
Her parents met and married after leaving the camps, and
Armstrong said they were never bitter about the experience.
"They weren't angry about it," she said.
"They were just farmers. They were practical people. I think growing up,
my parents made sure we were super-patriotic."
Matthew Estes, a teacher at Palomar College who has
researched and written about the internment period, said that his interviews
with former internees revealed a stoicism among many of the people who
experienced the camps.
"The Japanese have this term, Shikata ga nai,"
he said. "It literally means, 'some things can't be helped.' It's not
fatalism, but just recognition that some things you can't do anything
about."
Estes also said many Japanese-Americans did not talk about
the experience because they had a sense of shame about being incarcerated.
"They were ashamed to talk about this with their
children, even though they had not done anything wrong," he said.
"There's a stigma with being locked up."
Estes' father was American, but his mother was Japanese and
had family members who went sent to internment camps. One of his cousins is
buried at Manzanar, a former camp in California.
Estes said many Japanese-Americans lost most of their
possessions after leaving for the camps. In downtown San Diego, the exodus
wiped out what once was Little Japan between Island and Fourth avenues, which
had a thriving strip of businesses including Japanese restaurants, a barber
shop, a grocery store and photo studio, he said.
Some San Diego residents took their possessions to a
Japanese Buddhist temple in San Diego, but those were lost when the building
was burglarized and firebombed, Estes said.
Japanese-Americans in North County were more fortunate.
Sugimoto said poinsettia grower Paul Ecke, founder of the Paul Ecke Ranch in
Encinitas, opened his warehouses on his agriculture fields for displaced
Japanese-Americans to store their belongings.
Estes said people sent to the camps were free to leave for
other cities away from the Pacific coast, but only if they had a sponsor and
could prove they had a job lined up.
With rumors that lynchings and deportation awaited
Japanese-Americans outside the camps, however, many people decided they did not
want to leave, Estes said.
Sugimoto left Poston after about a year and a half to attend
school in Chicago, but returned to be with his mother after his brother was
drafted, leaving her and his sister alone. While in the camp, Sugimoto said he earned $7 a month as a
courier, delivering papers for administrators.
About 17,800 people lived in Poston, the second-largest of
the camps, after Tule Lake in California. Poston was divided into three
sections that each had farms, schools, a mess hall and jobs for internees
ranging from trash collector to physician, Sugimoto said. He and his mother, sister and brother shared a single room
in a barracks that held four families.
"For me, it was fun," he said about his time in
the camp, where he made many friends. "You've got to realize I was brought
up in a farm environment, working on the fields, feeding horses, doing a lot of
chores. I got into camp, and all we had to do was attend classes and play
ball."
The internees were forbidden from moving immediately back to
California after leaving the camp, but Sugimoto may have been the first to
return to the state in 1945 when he moved in with a San Dieguito High School
teacher who sponsored him.
His family retrieved their truck from Ecke's warehouse and
used it in a gardening business in Los Angeles before returning to Encinitas.
Sugimoto said he knows people from the camp who are bitter
about the experience, but he is not.
"My mom would not allow us to think negatively about
it," he said. "She instilled in me and my brothers that it was
something that happened and we had no control over it. Being bitter was not
going to help. It'd just make it tougher on our own lives."
In all, 120,000 Japanese-Americans were interned in the
camps.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation
apologizing for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. More than $1.6
million in reparations to surviving interned Americans and their heirs was
later disbursed.
Source:
http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/sdcounty/region-years-ago-u-s-rounded-up-local-japanese-americans/article_6923c316-e632-5350-a73f-a675da9b7840.html
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