In “The Little Exile,” Jeanette Arakawa revisits what her family endured as Japanese internees in WWII.
Jeanette Arakawa remembers her 10th birthday well. It was October 6, 1942 — the day she, her brother and their parents arrived at the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas, where they and thousands of other Japanese-Americans would be interned for the next three years.
Disembarking after a wearying five-day train ride from California, Arakawa says they couldn’t believe their eyes.
Bleak and overcrowded, the camp sat on a particularly barren piece of the Bottom Lands, five miles from the Arkansas-Mississippi border. Housed in barracks, Arakawa’s family was assigned to a tiny space in Block 8 — an area she describes as being “in the farthest corner of the camp, at the edge of the wilderness.”
In her new book, “The Little Exile” (Stone Bridge Press, $14.95, 240 pages), Arakawa revisits the fear, confusion and injustice her family experienced during World War II. It’s a shameful chapter in American history: Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, sending 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent into camps throughout the West.
Arakawa’s book tells the story through the eyes of San Francisco native Marie Mitsui, a young girl living in the city when the war begins. Marie describes years of displacement and privation as she comes to understand the meaning of discrimination in the land of the free.
Marie is a stand-in for Arakawa: “The Little Exile” is a novel, but it’s the author’s own story. In a recent conversation over tea in Berkeley, Arakawa, who lives in Los Altos with her husband, said she changed the names to protect the privacy of others. Aside from that, she said, the narrative is drawn from memory.
Like Marie, Arakawa and her family lived in San Francisco’s Sunset District; her parents owned and operated a dry cleaning business, and the family lived in the back of the shop. Once Executive Order 9066 went into effect, they were given a short time to sell the property. Suddenly, they were both homeless and without a livelihood.
After a brief stay in Stockton, they were ushered onto the train. “We didn’t know where we were going,” said Arakawa. “There was so much fear.”
Once in Arkansas, she recalls her mother saying they were there “for the duration.” Ten year-old Arakawa didn’t know what that meant. “I thought we were going to be there forever,” she says.
They were there until 1945. Conditions in the camps were difficult; there was little privacy, and Arakawa says she watched family life as she’d known it erode. Her father had an especially hard time, chafing at his Rohwer assignments as bus boy and pot washer. “He was a proud man,” she says. “He didn’t like authority figures.”
When they were finally released, coming out was hard in a new way. The family temporarily settled in Denver, but Arakawa felt isolated. “I wondered: How do I make friends? What is it I’m supposed to do?” says the author, who admits that, as a teenager, she considered suicide.
Things improved when the family returned to San Francisco in 1946. Arakawa attended Lowell High School and UC Berkeley, where she met her husband, Kiyoto. He was originally from California’s Central Valley, but, like Arakawa, had been interned in Arkansas, at Jerome. They settled in Los Altos; he became a dentist, and she worked as a medical technician. They raised two sons.
Arakawa and her husband are retired now, but she stays active in the Japanese-American community groups: “When we meet somebody now, we say ‘What camp were you in?’”
At 84, she continues to work for civil rights, particularly in education. She has shared her experiences in classrooms and testified before government committees. The work, she says, gives her “courage to express my views about not being recognized as an American because of my origins.”
The idea for writing “The Little Exile” grew out of an experience a number of years ago, when Arakawa saw a car with a bumper sticker that read “Pearl Harbor survivor.” She was suddenly filled with fear. “I wanted to hide,” she says. “It was still just below the surface.”
Instead, she wrote a short story describing the incident. A teacher in a writing class she took at Stanford University urged her to expand it into a book.
Published 75 years after Executive Order 9066, Arakawa’s book arrives as Americans are experiencing a new wave of fear around immigration, deportations and the criminalization of “others.” Does she think the events described in the book could happen again?
“Hopefully, we’re past that,” she says. “But prejudice comes from ignorance, and it starts early.”