JAPANESE AMERICAN TRAUMA REMAINS TOO MUCH TO BEAR
To understand loss, we often attempt to quantify the cost in current-day U.S. dollars. But for the 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese descent unjustly incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II, the losses are more than just financial.
On the surface, the Japanese American community indeed lost countless homes, businesses and possessions, many of them sold at a fraction of their value. California farmland stretching from La Jolla through what is now Silicon Valley and beyond was taken from their hands. One would calculate the losses today in the multiple if not tens of billions of dollars.
On top of this, those incarcerated lost their freedom and were forced to live in horse stalls at temporary incarceration sites and in hastily built prison camps across the most desolate and inhospitable areas of the country. Though twothirds of those incarcerated were American citizens, they were denied due process and equal protection under the law. Simply put, they were denied their basic constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In addition to this fundamental violation of an entire community’s civil rights and civil liberties over the course of 40 months, relationships became strained. Families were sometimes separated across different sites, and many families lost their patriarchs when nearly 1,300 community and religious leaders were rounded up by the FBI on the evening of Dec. 7, 1941. Wives and mothers were left behind to make difficult decisions on their own, often for the first time.
For many, the psychological trauma was too much to bear. The emotional scars were longterm and lasted across generations. The government placed entire families into overcrowded barracks, where they lived in a single room with dust and biting winds coming in through cracks in the floorboards and walls. Communal toilets with no stalls, shared mess halls, inadequate medical care and dehumanizing confinement all contributed to feelings of fear, guilt, shame, hopelessness and helplessness behind barbed wire.
Though many complied with government orders, others rose to defy them. Within the onceunified social structure, two opposing factions emerged. This disruption in the cultural fabric of the Japanese American community pitted family member against family member, a fracture vividly captured in the Broadway musical “Allegiance,” which premiered in our very own Old Globe Theatre in 2012 and starred icons Lea Salonga and George Takei.
Lost education and career opportunities had a long-lasting intergenerational impact. College students were removed from campuses along the West Coast. Young men and women with aspirations to become doctors and lawyers were “forcibly removed” from their ambitions. For young adults, the prime of their lives was stolen. Others lost their entire savings and had to start their lives from scratch after the war.
Recently I met and had breakfast with a 93year-old Japanese American veteran who lives near me in Carlsbad. He shared a personal story, telling me, “I had a sister who was disabled and in very frail health. The U.S. Army denied my mother’s request for special accommodations, so my sister had to ride on the bus with us all the way to Poston, Arizona. When we finally arrived, her health had deteriorated. An ambulance took her to the infirmary, but she passed away within 48 hours.”
I listened incredulously, as the story, though horrifying, was not unique.
In Sacramento, the U.S. Army there forbade a young man named Toyoki from accompanying his family. He was blind, cognitively impaired and in a wheelchair. He spoke only Japanese, ate only Japanese food and depended solely on his mother to survive. He was forced into a local institution while the rest of his family was moved to a temporary incarceration site in Fresno.
There, my family heard the news that Toyoki Kurima — my father’s cousin — had lasted only one week.
When reflecting on the Japanese American war experience, we often try to simplify the costs to freedom and property. In 1983, a federal commission determined that the mass incarceration was not based on military necessity, but on “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”
Though Congress and then-President Ronald Reagan provided an official apology and redress in 1988 via the Civil Liberties Act, no words nor actions will ever fully compensate for the true losses our community unjustly suffered.
Kurima is a management consultant and business owner, and president of the board of the San Diego Japanese American Citizens League, a social justice nonprofit. He is a member of The San Diego Union-Tribune Community Advisory Board and lives in Carlsbad.