Internment scar pains families
The Santa Clara Valley Medical Center looks like any large hospital complex, but because my family’s farm once thrived on that land, it holds special significance for me.
Seventy-five years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942. Three months later my uncles James Higuchi, a U.S. Army medical doctor, and Kiyoshi Higuchi, a San Jose State College student, sold the 14.25-acre farm for pennies on the dollar to their neighbors, Joe and Millie Curci.
The order forced my grandparents, Iyekichi and Chiye Higuchi, three of their five children, and 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry from their homes to 10 prison camps.
It also spurred the arranged marriage between James, the Army doctor, and Amy Iwagaki — a young nursing student — so that she would not have to go to camp with the rest of her family. They began their married life at Camp Chaffee in Arkansas.
The forced removal also affected my mother’s family, the Saitos, in San Francisco. When my grandfather, Yoshio Saito, lost his retail business, he and my grandmother, along with my mother, Setsuko, and uncles were sent to the hastily constructed prison camp at Heart Mountain, Wyo., where my aunt Kathy was born.
The Higuchis were also sent to Heart Mountain, where my father, William, and my mother met as children. Without my parents’ incarceration, I would not be here to share this story. However, this silver lining doesn’t mitigate the anger and sadness I feel 75 years later.
This unnecessary order violated human decency and American values. Officials knew Japanese Americans and their families posed no threat to national security, but they never told Roosevelt.
The order followed other racist laws, like the 1913 and 1920 Alien Land Laws that prohibited my grandparents, first-generation immigrants, from owning the farm themselves.
My grandparents never got rich growing fruits and vegetables for local markets, but they made the farm work. Their part of the American Dream was taken from them without legal due process.
The Higuchis returned after the war to California, where my grandparents struggled to rebuild their lives. My grandfather worked as a gardener and my grandmother did housework. By the time they purchased another farm in San Jose, my grandfather was 60; his most productive years were behind him.
Meanwhile, their children prospered. James built a successful medical practice in San Jose. Kiyoshi was a scientist in the Army Biological Laboratories. Takeru became an eminent pharmaceutical chemist. My father retired as chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Utah in 2007 and is working on his third startup pharmaceutical company he founded in Salt Lake City. Emily graduated from Berkeley and worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
When I visited San Jose last November with Emily, who is now 80, my 85-year-old-father, and my 94-year-old aunt Amy, we recognized how much the city has grown and how Silicon Valley has flourished. We stood in the rain staring at where the farm once stood and wondered how much it would be worth today.
I can only share these stories of wartime imprisonment because my parents met at Heart Mountain. But when President Trump talks about immigration restrictions for Muslims, I think about the error of Executive Order 9066 that stripped Americans of their businesses, homes, and rights. I think of how Americans need to overcome such fears.
I also think of that farm, where a great hospital now stands, and a very different future that could have been.