Survivor recalls life in internment camp for Japanese-Americans

MANZANAR, United States: At age 15, Rosie Maruki Kakuuchi became a prisoner in the blink of an eye, in her own country.

Now 88, she recalls the three miserable years she and her family endured in one of the concentration camps the United States set up for JapaneseAmericans after Tokyo attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec 7, 1941.

“We were treated like enemies,” Kakuuchi told AFP from her home in Las Vegas, speaking ahead of the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bomb drop in Japan on Aug 6, 1945.

Here was a government taking extreme measures that reflected fears that such Americans — some 112,500 were interned in the camps — could not be trusted as the country waged war in the Pacific.

The executive order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt — No. 9066 — in February 1942 created military exclusion zones along the West Coast and elsewhere, allowing for JapaneseAmericans to be rounded up and held in camps run by the military.

“The successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage,” said the order signed by Roosevelt.

Camps were set up in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming.

Kakuuchi remembers initially trusting the very government that had imprisoned her.

“This is my country, so I thought they knew what was best for us,” she said.

Kakuuchi and her relatives ended up in a camp called Manzanar, in the Sierra Nevada mountains of eastern and central California. The name is deceivingly bucolic — it is Spanish for apple orchard.

But life at Manzanar was far from pleasant.The camp held up to 10,000 people, who turned it into a virtual city. Conditions were harsh.

“We lost our freedom and got used to horrible conditions,” Kakuuchi said.

It was not until 1988, when Ronald Reagan was president, that the government paid reparations to the camp survivors. Each got US$20,000.

“This is one of the most shameful chapters in US history,” said Alysa Lynch, curator of a museum set up at what used to be the Manzanar camp.

It also has three replicas of the barracks.

When the gates of Manzanar finally opened in 1945, Kakuuchi said the government gave her a bit of money and a ticket, supposedly to go home.

“They gave us US$20 and a ticket to go somewhere. We had nowhere to go,” she said. — AFP

Buddhist nuns and monks pray for victims of the 1945 atomic bombing at Nipponzan Myohjii temple in Nagasaki, western Japan, on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. — Reuters photo