Detained on the Fourth of July
It’s not clear how, or if, the nation’s birthday will be observed Wednesday in federal immigration detention facilities. But we do know how tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans – most of them citizens, almost half of them children – marked their first Fourth of July in captivity during World War II.
They celebrated the occasion with a rush of patriotism. They sang, paraded and acted out skits. They recited the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. They pledged allegiance to the flag. If they didn’t have a flag, they drew one on a wall.
They swallowed their fear and anger. “It was our Independence Day celebration,” interned Sachi Kajiwara would recall, “though we were behind barbed wire, military police all around us, and
we could see the big sign of ‘South San Francisco’ on the hill outside.”
Which suggests that sometimes those who most love or desire America are those it treats most harshly.
Last week the Supreme Court, in the process of allowing President Donald Trump’s travel ban, finally declared unconstitutional the 1944 decision that upheld the wartime internment.
Left unsettled is whether, in its treatment of migrants near the Southern border, the nation has again lost its moral compass.
There are many differences between the prisoners of 1942 and 2018.
The former were Americans; the latter merely want to be. But some people, including former first lady Laura Bush and former “Star Trek” helmsman George Takei, have noted a visceral similarity between then and now.
The holiday tension was palpable in 1942 at Manzanar, in the high desert of eastern California, where many Japanese-Americans were interned. For people who’d been “herded into camps and guarded by the bayoneted sentries of their own country,” editorialized the inmates’ newspaper, the Manzanar Free Press, “it will be a doubly strange and bewildering day.”
It had been a strange and bewildering year. Five months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt allowed the relocation and detention of anyone with Japanese ancestry in much of the coastal West. Eventually, more than 110,000 were interned – the greatest single violation of civil rights in U.S. history.
Two years later, in Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the order.
July 4, 1942, found Japanese-Americans scattered across the West in a network composed of main camps in remote locations, like Manzanar and Tule Lake, California, and of makeshift “assembly centers” in or near big cities.
Most had fences with barbed wire, guard towers with armed sentries, and few comforts. In Portland, Oregon, school buses took more than 3,500 Japanese-Americans to the livestock yards, with its black flies and smell of manure. Families were housed in 14-by-19 foot spaces and slept on Army cots with haystuffed canvas bags for mattresses.
The new residents of this archipelago strove to celebrate Independence Day in good cheer.
Manzanar planned dances, “allstar” baseball games and a Miss Manzanar pageant with 29 contestants. At Tanforan Assembly Center south of San Francisco, girls took yards and yards of newspaper, colored them red, white and blue, and made paper chain decorations to transform the camp rec hall (Building 6) into “The S.S. 6” for the holiday dance.
Beneath the gaiety, there was frustration.
“I get so tired of the flag-waving,” Charles Kikuchi wrote in a diary archived by Densho.org, which documents internment history. “It is difficult to reconcile some things that have happened with true Democracy. Negroes are sent out to fight for Democracy; at home they don’t get a full share of it. Nisei (U.S. Japanese) boys serve faithfully in the army; their parents are sent to Tanforan,” where he was held.
Reactions to the story of Manzanar, and its relation to contemporary federal installations such as the tent city for immigrant children at Tornillo, Texas, can be gauged from the visitors log book there. The entries do not constitute a scientific gauge of public opinion. But they have a theme: History is repeating itself.
“Our country is still imprisoning immigrants (i.e., illegals), separating parents from their children. We must educate ourselves and work against this. We are not powerless.” — Susan Scott.