Fear of people who spoke an unrecognizable language.
Fear of people whose traditional dress was different.
Fear of people who had different religious practices.
Fear of people taking their jobs.
Fear that someone else’s success threatened their own.
Fear of people not being “American” enough.
Fear, the most powerful motivator of human behavior. Now imagine this set of fears as a pile of sticks arranged in a campfire ring. Pour on the gasoline of international animosity between the United States and the country of Japan. And now light the match of the Pearl Harbor attack. With a WHOOOOSH, the flames of hate popped skyward, the intensity of the heat burning the skin, hot ash coating the lungs.
Law-abiding Japanese immigrants woke up to find “JAP” painted on their doors. Dr. Seuss drew political cartoons depicting Japanese people holding bars of TNT, waiting for a signal from the homeland to light them on fire and blow up the United States. Soldiers were taught “how to spot a Jap” via manuals printed by the United States Army. The manuals described how Japanese people shuffle, have buck teeth, and have a wide space in between their first and second toes.[21]
Life magazine printed an article on how to distinguish between a Japanese and Chinese person. The magazine said the Japanese have “blob” noses and wear the expressions of “ruthless mystics.” The Japanese were depicted in nationwide propaganda as literal snakes wearing Japanese flags or as frightening killers with pointy teeth, wielding knives in the dead of night behind the backs of white women.[22] I wish I were kidding.
In February 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, having been relentlessly pressured by western state lobbyists, economic groups, military generals, and some members of Congress, signed Executive Order 9066. The order created military zones on the West Coast and authorized the military to exclude any people who were deemed to be a national security threat from those military zones.[23]
It started with curfews for people of Japanese ancestry. Soon, it blossomed into exclusion and removal orders. Those living in Military Zone One, which meant people within seventy-five miles of the Pacific coast, would be rounded up and forced from their homes.
They wanted people to go as quietly as possible, so first they came for the leaders within the Japanese American community. The pastors and civic group presidents, the successful businessmen and the revered elders. With no one to lead them, they thought, the community wouldn’t be able to organize an uprising.
The federal government began to hastily construct incarceration camps, where they would send men, women, and children who had been accused of no crime. Maybe you’ve heard them called internment camps, but FDR initially called them concentration camps, because that’s what they were doing—concentrating people into one confined place.[24] But as word of the German concentration camps spread, the U.S. government stopped using the term publicly. They changed the term to internment, but today, members of the Japanese American community largely resist this name.
“Internment” is what happens to citizens of the enemy you are fighting. But the majority of people who were sent to the camps were citizens of the United States by birth. They, by definition, could not be interned. They were imprisoned. Incarcerated without due process. While you may still hear people call them internment camps, every person I have interviewed prefers incarceration or concentration camp, because the term more accurately describes what was happening.
The camps, situated on desolate scraps of land far from the Pacific, were placed in Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, Arkansas, and inland California. Tar-paper barracks sat in forlorn rows, surrounded by barbed wire, guarded by men with machine guns pointed at the inmates.
Nineteen
The MinetasCalifornia, 1942
While Daniel was manning the first-aid station on Oahu in 1942, Norman Mineta was only ten years old. He loved baseball and the Boy Scouts, and his parents were deeply involved in their Methodist church.
Norm’s father, Kunisaku, immigrated to the United States at age fourteen, alone. He was meant to disembark his ship in San Francisco, but he got off the boat nine hundred miles from his destination, in Seattle. Working in lumber camps and slowly making his way south, it took more than a year for him to reach the home of his uncle, where he’d meant to end up all along. When his uncle saw that he couldn’t speak English, he did something wildly humiliating: enrolled him in first grade. The boy of (now) sixteen was learning with six-year-olds.[1]
Ten years after his arrival, Kunisaku, who went by Kay in the United States, was twenty-four, had regular employment, and decided it was time to get married. He wrote to a friend in Japan inquiring about a wife, and his friend sent back several pictures for his consideration. As an afterthought, his friend also sent a picture of his younger sister that they used to tease mercilessly, who was now all grown up.
“I’d be honored to marry her,” Kay said, and in short order, twenty-year-old Kane embarked on her own voyage across the Pacific.[2] Teddy Roosevelt was president at the time, and he had signed a gentleman’s agreement with the leader of Japan: we will only let people into the United States who are joining family members, and you will help us enforce this by refusing to issue them passports. As a result, tens of thousands of Japanese women immigrated alone as “picture brides” during this period, engaged to be married to the laborers who had previously made their way to America’s shores.
Japanese immigrants categorized themselves into generations. The Issei were the first generation, and their children were Nisei, or second generation. The Nisei generation, to which Norm belonged, were born American citizens. Kay and Kane worked hard to integrate into American society: they bought a house in San Jose, California. Kay opened an insurance agency.
After the shock and devastation of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kay sat his children down and said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to your mother and me. But just remember: All of you are U.S. citizens and this is your home. There is nothing anyone can do to take this away from you.” A few weeks later, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, and six weeks after that, men with guns were at the door of Norm’s home, rifling through the luggage they’d been forced to pack to make sure there were no contraband items: Flashlights. Radios. Cameras.
Posters rustled on every telephone pole and street corner, reading: “Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry… Pursuant to the provisions of the Civilian Exclusion Order…all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien…will be evacuated by 12:00 noon on May 7, 1942.” Anyone whose face looked Japanese would be forced to leave their home and report to a civil control station for “evacuation.”[3]
Evacuation has an air of “you must leave for your own good, a hurricane is coming,” doesn’t it? It feels like “a wildfire threatens your home, get out now so you will be saved.” In that sense, this wasn’t an evacuation, then. It wasn’t removing people for their own safety, it was imprisoning them so that white people would be less afraid.
Many families were forced to sell all their possessions for a pittance, never knowing when they might be back. “I’ll give you five dollars for your refrigerator,” unscrupulous gawkers offered. “You can’t take your car with you, I’ll buy it for two hundred dollars.” Scholars like Lorraine Bannai say that because traditional Japanese society is collective and group identity is important, standing out was not valued.[4] To be singled out for exclusion was experienced as shame. Saddled with that weight, many families accepted prices for their belongings that were far lower than what they were worth.
The evacuation instructions said that families could only bring a few changes of clothes, some bed linens, and eating utensils. Their businesses, homes, cars, and household goods were sold for pennies on the dollar or forcibly abandoned. Kay’s insurance license was suspended for no reason other than he was of Japanese ancestry. Families who had money in Japanese banks had their accounts all but frozen, leaving them unable to withdraw funds to pay for essentials.[5]
Norm’s family was lucky in one respect: a white attorney named J. B. Peckham was incensed by California’s long-standing policy of not allowing people of Asian descent to own land, so he created a workaround. He would purchase property in his own name, allowing the Asian family to pay him for the mortgage, and when a family’s oldest child, a U.S. citizen by birth, turned twenty-one, he would legally transfer the property to them. On paper, Peckham appeared to be one of the wealthiest men in Santa Clara County, California. In reality, he owned the properties in name only. He gave the dream of home ownership to hundreds of families for whom it would have been otherwise out of reach.[6]
No pets were allowed where Norm’s family was going, and he had to give his dog, Skippy, away, which haunted him. Would he be able to get Skippy back when they returned? How long would they even be gone? He hugged his beloved friend goodbye, told him to be a good boy, and turned over his leash to the family who was taking him. He never saw Skippy again.[7]
At the appointed hour, his parents dressed in their nicest clothes—his father in a suit, his mother in heels—and they headed to the train station. “On the day that we left,” Norm later recalled, “I was wearing my Cub Scout uniform, baseball glove, and had a baseball bat. As we got on the train, the MPs took my bat. I went running to my father, crying.”[8] His bat, they told him, could be used as a weapon, and wasn’t allowed.
His family boarded the train to leave behind the life they had worked for. They remained calm and cooperative to demonstrate their loyalty to America—they were willing to sacrifice, if that’s what it took. Norm sat opposite his mom and dad, the window shades pulled down so that people outside watching the train roll by wouldn’t be afraid when it was full of Asian faces. Tears streamed down his father’s face. What had he done but raise good children and run his own business? The train journey to Southern California took more than sixteen hours, and it was full of the quiet suffering of people who knew in their hearts their only crime was having been born of the wrong womb.
When the train finally stopped, Norm realized where they were: at a famous horse track, Santa Anita, the one where Seabiscuit had raced.[9] They soon saw that the grounds of the racetrack had been transformed into a facility to imprison Japanese Americans. Barracks had been erected, latrine facilities slapped together, the horse barns transformed into housing.
The MP barked at them to head to the mattress-stuffing station, where Norm got his Cub Scout uniform covered in dirt from the straw. He winced as his mother, still wearing her best high heels, demonstrated how to stuff straw into a rough cotton sack.
“You’re going to have to sleep on this,” his father said, coaxing the lumps from the rudimentary mattress.[10] They arrived, mattresses in tow, at their assigned barrack, which was nothing but a small room for the entire family, with a single light bulb. Cots lined the walls. There was no other furniture—no table, no chairs. This is where they were to live now; for how long was anyone’s guess.
The one saving grace was that the weather was nice, which made sitting outside comfortable. Old men sat in the bleachers of the race rack, gazing at the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance. They were only a handful of miles from the mission where Maria de Lopez lived. Perhaps, if the wind was right, they could hear the bells tolling on a Sunday morning. Women worried together, collectively watching their children make up games without toys.
When night fell, Norm laid down on his crunchy, dank mattress and pulled the covers over his head. Even still, he couldn’t shut out the constant sweep of the searchlight. If they were being forced to stay here for their own protection, as they were told, why were the guns pointed at them?
So many people were living at a racetrack that was designed to house no one that it took hours to do anything. Each mealtime, Norm’s family waited for more than an hour in line to receive a plate of unfamiliar canned food. Green beans. Spam. Perhaps a scoop of potatoes. It was all flavorless and gluey.
After months living at Santa Anita racetrack, Norm’s family got new orders, and they once again boarded the train for a long journey. When they arrived at the new incarceration camp, they found 740 acres of land ringed by barbed wire, their living quarters finished with tar paper. Heart Mountain housed more than fourteen thousand people in barracks, which made it larger than the nearby town of Cody, Wyoming. Signs erected in the windows of Cody businesses read, “No Japs allowed. You sons of bitches killed my son at Iwo Jima.”[11]
The Heart Mountain camp operated like a small city that people of Japanese ancestry were not permitted to leave. Able-bodied adults were assigned jobs like farming, teaching, or providing medical care. Incarcerated Japanese doctors were paid $19 per month, while white nurses from the outside were paid $150 per month.[12]
Mothers gave birth to more than five hundred babies while imprisoned at Heart Mountain. Life was somber, the unknown stretching endlessly before them, waves of grief swallowed silently as children ran up and down the lanes between the barracks, stopping short of the barbed wire.
