JAPANESE INTERNMENT AUTHORIZED 80 YEARS AGO

Eighty years ago, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, giving the military sweeping authority to evacuate “any or all persons” deemed a security threat from the West Coast.

San Diego’s Japanese-americans were shipped out of Santa Fe Station in April 1942 and incarcerated in remote internment camps for the duration of the war.

From The San Diego Union, Sunday, Feb. 20, 1983:

Japanese-americans Recall War Humiliation

Until the civil rights movement of recent years, few accounts were printed on the deprivation and humiliation suffered by Japanese-americans in U.S. internment camps during World War II.

First came word from a few men and now Japanese-american women are being heard.

The women were timid,” Elsie Hashimoto explained.

She was interned in a compound at Amache, Colo. Yesterday she was taking part in a “Day of Remembrance” meeting here. The date, Feb. 19, is a kind of unofficial Japanese-american day of mourning. It was 41 years ago yesterday that a presidential order leading to these U.S. residents’ imprisonment was signed. Their allegiance was suspect, according to the military.

In 1942, Elsie was the young wife of Harry Hashimoto, a Christian minister. Both were in their 20s when they were hustled off to a foul-smelling relocation barn in Merced before being taken to the permanent, highdesert Colorado imprisonment area.

In the miserable time spent in the rough wooden compound, with snow blowing through the cracks during winter and sand in the summer, everything eventually came down to a single obsession late in her stay: “I became pregnant there, and I didn’t want my child to be born behind barbed wire.”

As it turned out, the infant — now Sharon Asakawa of San Diego, with children of her own — did not enter the world as an internee of Amache. Prevailed upon by the prospective parents, the FBI cleared them to leave camp for Chicago, where Harry Hashimoto might obtain work and his wife could give birth in freedom to her first and only child.

Mrs. Hashimoto said yesterday many children were born inside the compounds. She believes the mothers and other women who survived behind barbed wire, for anywhere up to three years, kept quiet about everything over the years because of the trauma and the embarrassment.

“Some residents there picked up lumber lying around outside and built crude furniture. But my husband, being a minister, considered that to be dishonest. So he waited until some old outhouses were torn down because they were no longer useful. He built our furniture from them.”

She recalled Pearl Harbor.

“My next-door neighbor was in the navy and on a ship in the harbor when it was bombed. After hearing the news that day, we prayed together that he was safe. She did not hear anything from him until about five weeks later.

“Then one day she knocked on my window and said he was safe. We were so grateful. We sat down and cried.”

Mrs. Hashimoto and her husband drove past there old home 40 years later. “It looked about the same,” she said yesterday, “and the pepper trees were still there.”

And the old neighbors?

The Clairemont resident, a San Diegan with her pastor husband for the last 25 years, responded slowly. “Gone,” she said. She had never seen either neighborhood friend after being taken away to the internment camp on four days’ notice.

Elsie Hashimoto said yesterday that one of her greatest disappointments was that the Christian churches in the United States did not stand behind the Japanese-americans who were in their congregations when internment appeared imminent. There were a few exceptions, she recalled. “The Congregationalists stood fast,” she said. “And they sent a trainload of toys to the camp for Christmas. I believe every boy and girl there received a toy. My husband played Santa Claus.”

This turn of conversation led Mrs. Hashimoto to produce a color photograph from her purse. “My two grandchildren,” she said. “They get straight As in school.” She might have added that they had no chance of ever seeing their great grandfather, her father. He was one of the first—if not the first Japanese-american—to die in a World War II U.S. internment camp.

Another early death, said a spokesman for the San Diego Redress/reparations Committee and the Japanese-american citizens League, cosponsoring yesterday’s “Day of Remembrance” here, was a 70-year-old, hard-of-hearing man who was shot by an internment camp guard for stepping beyond a compound boundary line.

“The camp site was 16 miles across desert land to habitation,” the spokesman said.