70 years ago today the U.S. prepared to "intern" all Japanese Americans; 120,000 were eventually imprisoned

by Jack Brummet, Green River Valley Editor

On June 4 and 5, 1942, more than 1,000 Issei (first generation Japanese immigrants) and Nisei (second generation Japanese Americans) were rounded up in the Yakima Valley and sent to a camp in Wyoming, far from the west coast, where they would be presumably unable to assist Japanese invaders or terrorists.  Other Japanese-named citizens and immigrants were shortly rounded up in other areas of the state, including Seattle.  Many more Japanese Americans were rounded up in other states and areas--120,000 people all together were imprisoned.  Three-fifths of those people were U.S. citizens.

Dust storm at an internment camp a/k/a relocation center

The Japanese-Americans were sent to hastily, and flimsily, constructed camps called "War Relocation Centers" (which we now generally call internment camps)  in remote parts of the nation's interior. . .far away from where they might have, say, used a flashlight to guide a fleet of Japanese bombers toward the Boeing warplane plant.

I focus here on Kent, Washington (now a suburb of Seattle), because that's where I grew up, and know first hand about some of the aftermath of the camps.  The first wave of immigrants to Kent, Washington happened shortly before 1900. The immigrants were mostly European. There were, even as I was growing up, several Italian families still farming the valley. The 1900 census count shows just 13 Japanese-named  families in and around Kent.

The number of Japanese immigrants rose steeply over the next few years until 1907, when the US Government put the brakes on the number allowed to immigrate. Eventually, in the 1920's, Japanese immigration was banned altogether. The Anti-Alien Land Law in 1923 barred these immigrants from owning land, or even becoming citizens. Those with a child born in America could put land in the child's name. Some of the Japanese worked for established farmers and some cleared land and began their own farms in Kent, Auburn, and the tiny nearby villages O'Brien, Orillia, and Thomas.

Many Japanese farmers owned dairy farms until the price of milk plummeted after the World War I. Those farmers jumped into vegetable and berry farming, and their truck farms were profitable. They sold produce in Seattle, at the public market and farm stands, and shipped lettuce and cabbage to the east coast.

By 1930 there were around 200 Japanese families farming the White/Green River valley. In 1942, months after Pearl Harbor, all people of Japanese descent in the White/Green River Valley were evacuated and detained at an internment camp at Tule Lake, California. They lost their businesses, farms and personal belongings. They lost everything in the war hysteria.

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered them jailed under Executive Order 9066, a law designating certain "military areas" as zones from which "any or all persons may be excluded." In one of our more shameful national acts of jingoistic racism, all people of Japanese ancestry were removed from the entire Pacific coast--all of California, Oregon and Washington. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this law, saying it is "permissible to curtail the civil rights of a racial group when there is a "pressing public necessity."

My mother, Betty Brummet, remembers Japanese American kids being marched from Ballard High School one day. Some of the students lined up and booed.

The phrase "shikata ga nai" (loosely translated as "it cannot be helped") summarized the interned families' resignation to their helplessness. This was even noticed by the children, as mentioned in Farewell to Manzanar. They tended not to make waves, and complied with the government to prove themselves loyal citizens.

Dust storm at an internment camp

In our war hysteria, we didn't want any Japanese Americans near the west coast. They would form cells and assist soldiers and pilots from the motherland in attacking The Pacific Coast. The number of Germans and Italians placed in the camps is only a fraction of their total population compared with the Japanese, virtually all of whom were locked up.

After the war only about thirty families (out of the original 200) returned to the valley area. I knew the Miyoshis, Yamadas, Nakaharas, Koyamatsus, Hiranakas, and Okimotos. Some of them got back into farming (not on their old farms, which had been confiscated and sold). I worked on the Yamada's farm a couple of springs, cutting and boxing rhubarb, and I worked for a couple of weeks on Kart Funai's farm one summer, bunching radishes and scallions.

Photo of a shop owner in my hometown of Kent, Washington, in 1942

In 1988, the U.S. Congress passed legislation awarding formal payments of $20,000 each to the surviving internees—60,000 in all. This same year, formal apologies were also issued by the government of Canada to Japanese Canadian survivors, who were each repaid the sum of $21,000 Canadian dollars. President Ronald Reagan even apologized on behalf of the United States. $21,000 would buy a fraction of the hundreds of acres of stolen land.  It's better than the reparations paid to the families of slaves (zero, to date), but a pittance compared to losing everything you owned, and the farms you nurtured. If they held on until now, they'd all be rich.

Through the 1950's the Green River continued to flood the valley floor in late spring. This is what made the valley floor some of the richest soil in the world. . .but, alas, flooding prevented big business from locating there. In 1963 the Army Corps of Engineers built the Howard Hansen Dam (an earthen dam, still protecting the valley from floods) to regulate the river waters. The danger of uncontrolled flooding ended. The flat, treeless land on the valley floor now was an attractive area for business. And build they did.

Boeing built an aerospace lab, and the floodgates were opened. Farming was over, and dwindled rapidly, although there are a few pockets left. One of my old high school mates, Danny Carpinito has in fact become a wealthy vegetable farmer. Of the Japanese kids I knew in school, virtually none remained in Kent after high school. Of course, neither did I nor most of my friends, although some of our families still live there.

Sources:

The Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

The History of Kent, Washington: http://www.kent.k12.wa.us/curriculum/vtours/kent/

Japanese Relocation Centers: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/internment1.html

The Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American
Previous articles, and photos on the Green River Valley and Japanese-Americans from All This Is That (http://jackbrummet.blogspot.com/)

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