On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 9066, which sent people of Japanese descent — many of them U.S. citizens — from their homes to “relocation centers,” resulting in the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Every two years, people come from all over the country to Klamath Falls to remember the Tule Lake internment camp, just south of the Oregon border. Today, we listen back to a conversation we recorded at the Tule Lake Pilgrimage in 2016. We talked to Satsuki Ina, one of the organizers of the pilgrimage and a former resident of Tule Lake. We also spoke to former resident Jimi Yamaichi and Akemi Yamane, whose parents were incarcerated there.
Also today, we listen back to a conversation with Oregon author Mitzi Asai Loftus, who was born in Hood River on a fruit orchard and spent years of her childhood in several different internment camps. After leaving the camps, her family returned to Hood River. Asai Loftus spent much of her adult life in Eugene and Coos Bay and now lives in Ashland. She wrote a book about her experiences called “From Thorns to Blossoms: A Japanese American Family in War and Peace.”
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066 eighty-three years ago this week. It authorized the forced removal of more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. They had no choice but to leave their homes and live in internment camps. There were 10 different camps on the West Coast. Tule Lake, which is just across the Oregon border in Northern California, became the site of the largest camp with 18,000 people. It was also the most notorious. It’s where the government sent Japanese Americans who were suspected of being disloyal to the U.S.
Firsthand memories of this time and place are quickly disappearing. That is the idea behind the Tule Lake Pilgrimage that happens every two years. It’s a chance for former inmates and their families to share stories and to make sure this period of American history is never forgotten. We visited the pilgrimage in the summer of 2016. It was held at the Oregon Tech campus in Klamath Falls – that’s just north of Tule Lake. 450 people were there.
Jimi Yamaichi was one of them. He was 20 years old when he came to Tule Lake. He was 93 when we met him. He told us what the food was like.
Jimi Yamaichi: The majority of the cooks, there was no professional cooks because back in the ‘30s there was no Japanese restaurant. Like today, there’s one around the corner, all over the place. I dunno where you come from, but in San Jose, Japantown, two blocks, there’s 10 Japanese restaurants. But back then there was only one restaurant. So as far as professional cooks, you didn’t find too many of them.
The cooks were not great cooks, and then you’re cooking with coal. There’s no heat control. Once that thing gets hot, how are you gonna turn it down? Like cooking rice … we have to eat the burnt rice too, so everybody have to have their share of the burnt rice.
Miller: That’s Jimi Yamaichi. We also sat down with Satsuki Ina, who was on her fourth pilgrimage. She’s a retired family therapist. She met with us right before dinner started in the cafeteria on the first night. I asked her why she keeps coming back.
Satsuki Ina: I was born in Tule Lake. My parents answered, “no-no,” to the Loyalty Questionnaire, and eventually they actually renounced their American citizenship. So, out of despair about what their future held for the children – my older brother was born in the Topaz concentration camp, and then I was born here – they felt that the only hope for their children was to go back to Japan, and the only way they might be able to do that was to renounce their American citizenship.
So then they were segregated here, which … Tule Lake is the segregation camp for people who were considered disloyal, but essentially people who were protesting the treatment that they got.
Miller: For people who aren’t aware of the Loyalty Questionnaire, can you explain what it was and what was asked? Especially on questions 27 and 28, they’re numbers that you can see as you walk around here. People have them on t-shirts with a red circle with a slash going through it. They’re pretty infamous numbers here, but not necessarily known widely by a lot of other Americans right now.
Ina: It’s euphemistically called the “Loyalty Questionnaire.” When 110,000 people were forcefully removed from their homes, it was a blanket removal of anybody that had one-sixteenth Japanese blood. So when they were preparing to draft young men from the camps to go fight in Europe, there was pressure to determine now who was loyal and who wasn’t loyal.
Miller: After internment had already begun, they’ve been essentially, specifically imprisoned by their country for some number of months or years, and then the government said, “Now tell us that you’re loyal.”
Ina: Right. Question 27 said, “Will you forswear loyalty to the Japanese emperor?” And 28 was, “Are you willing to bear arms against the enemy?” This posed a huge crisis for many people, because the elders, the parents, who would have been like my grandparents, were Issei: First generation immigrants here who are not allowed to own land or to become citizens. They weren’t allowed to become naturalized citizens.
They were afraid that they were going to be deported, and they didn’t want to split up the family because their children were born in America, and they were American citizens. Many of those folks answered “no-no” and asked their Nisei children, their second-generation children, to answer “no-no,” so they could all go back to Japan. So it created a lot of conflict. Some of these were young adults by then, who are saying, “We don’t want to go to Japan, we don’t speak Japanese, we’ve never been there.”
Miller: In other words, just so I understand, they thought that if they answered “yes” on this questionnaire, on one or either of these two questions, either their parents would have to leave – and they didn’t want to be split up – or perhaps they would have to go, and they’d be split up from their kids. So, to prevent that, some Japanese Americans felt like they had no choice but to answer “no” and “no” on this questionnaire?
Ina: Right. And, if you answered “yes-no,” that was by the government considered, “no-no.” If you refused to answer, that was also considered, “no-no,” and anybody who answered “no-no,” was then designated as disloyal to the U.S.
Miller: How did Tule Lake become the camp, the prison that was the special place for people who the government considered to be disloyal?
Ina: Well, if you think about it, since they removed, arrested all of us without cause, no due process, now that they had had people sign this questionnaire, they had to do something with people who are now considered disloyal. So they created a segregation camp.
Tule Lake became the maximum security segregation camp because 80% of the people in Tule Lake signed “no-no” for different geographical reasons. But then people who signed “yes, yes” and who were in Tule Lake – because before that it was one of the 10 WRA [War Relocation Authority] camps – were then removed from Tule Lake and spread throughout the other nine camps.
Miller: How much did you hear about this when you were growing up?
Ina: Nothing. Never learned about it in school. My parents never spoke about it. It wasn’t until redress in 1988, where reparations were made after the president made a presidential apology, and legislation was passed that acknowledged that the incarceration of the Japanese Americans was based on racism, wartime hysteria and the failure of political leadership.
As a result of that … Well, I’ll tell you what happened. I went to see my mother. I was in Sacramento. She lived in San Francisco, and I went to go see her, because she said her check arrived. So I said, “Oh well, let me see your $20,000 check.” She said, “It’s over there on the desk, somewhere, in a pile of stuff,” but what I saw was the apology from President Reagan was already framed and on the wall. I said, “Wow, you hung this up?” And she said, “Yes, I feel like I finally got my face back.”
There was a lot of shame associated with being incarcerated for no cause. After redress, people started talking more about what happened. And in that process, I began to learn more. I’m a psychotherapist, so I had my own experiences, getting pieces from my mother about what happened. Remembering that when I was a student at Berkeley during the ‘60s, my parents would call me every day frantically, making sure that I wasn’t protesting, that I wasn’t speaking out. And I couldn’t understand why because up until then, they were very supportive of me.
So when I went home, I said, “Well, what’s going on?” And she said, “We need to talk to you.” She said, “We never told you this, but we renounced our American citizenship when we were in camp, and we never got our citizenship back until 1957.” Of course, I was a young kid at Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement. I was there with my tie-dyed shirt and braid across my forehead. I’m thinking, “OK, she’s protesting,” but she said “No, I don’t want you to protest because bad things will happen.”
Because they really suffered after being here at Tule Lake, and even people in our own community looked down on the people who said, “no-no” because the emphasis after the war was, we have to assimilate back into mainstream America. We can’t cause any problems. We have to show everybody that we deserve to be here. Anybody that was associated with Tule Lake was viewed as somebody who could make the whole community look bad.
Miller: Within the Japanese community, people who had been in Tule Lake were shunned. How did that manifest itself?
Ina: Well, that’s a great question, because people would say, “Oh, you were in Tule Lake.” They said, “You were part of the bad boys, you were the ‘no-no’ boys. You were the draft dodgers.” They had names for the people who were “no-no’s,” so the people at Tule Lake who were dissidents dropped their profile. They didn’t speak about their experience. Many of the children of the people who signed “no-no” didn’t know that their parents had said “no-no,” on the questionnaire …
Miller: Including you?
Ina: Yes, that’s right.
Miller: Did you ever get to talk to your dad about this?
Ina: No, I didn’t ever get to talk to him about it. My mother shared more. But after my father passed away, my mother and I were cleaning out his desk. She pulled out the drawer and there was a stack of letters tied with some brown string. She said, “Oh look, daddy saved the letters I sent to him in camp.” Because he was protesting. They took him from us in Tule Lake and put him in Bismarck, North Dakota, Department of Justice camp, because now he was a “no-no,” and he had renounced his citizenship, so that made him an enemy alien.
So they could take him and put him in an all men’s prison in Bismarck, North Dakota. He was arrested and you’ll see, if you’re here, the jail where they held him. We’re trying to preserve that. And then he was shipped to Bismarck, North Dakota. He kept a haiku poetry journal, and I had that translated over time. That’s how I learned how he felt about what had happened to him.
Miller: What did you learn in that haiku journal?
Ina: That there was constant anxiety about what was the best decision to make, what’s going to happen to us, what will happen to our children living in a country like this. Then at one point, when the atomic bomb was dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they knew that Japan was a defeated country. Could they still go back there? Would the family be able to support and take care of them? It was a constant poetry of pain, lots of fear about what would be the best thing to do as a father.
Miller: What do you wish you could have asked him about his experiences here?
Ina: Many questions. I don’t know if I’d ask him, but I would want to tell him how grateful I am for being so loving and concerned about the welfare of the children. I’d want him to know that I respected the decision he made and that I don’t feel any shame about his choices. I would want him to know that how it turned out was perfect in many ways and that I’m really grateful for what he was willing to endure on our behalf.
Miller: As a psychotherapist, have you encountered the after-effects of the trauma from this place?
Ina: I’ll tell you a story. I had been living in Europe in 1987, came back when redress happened. There was an exhibit at the Smithsonian, telling the story about the incarceration and the redress that happened. When I walked into the exhibit hall, there was a very large picture of my father standing in front of the jail here in Tule Lake. You’ll see that photograph if you go to the jail with us tomorrow.
Miller: Did you have any idea you would see a photo of your father in Washington, D.C.?
Ina: Absolutely not. I’d never seen that photo before. So, that was the start. I realized that I had some idea, but I didn’t know all the details. Then I started this whole research project and that led to making the film about their experience. When I got the mug shot, when I went to the National Archives and I got the mug shot, I saw he was wearing the same shirt, but he had cuts and bruises on his face. His lip was split. So we knew that they were beaten in those jails.
So when people say, “It wasn’t so bad, we were fed every day” … Then, especially now, the survivors were teenagers there, and many teenagers that I interview and talk to now will say, “Oh no, it wasn’t traumatic because I got to go to dances. I met my boyfriend there.” But their parents suffered a great deal. And I tell them, “You have good memories because of your parents. Your parents protected you from the trauma of that experience.”
But as a therapist … People know that I’m a therapist. They understand my specialty has been trauma, so I have many Japanese American clients, second, third and now fourth generation, who will come in and want to talk about, “This is what’s going on for me. Do you think this is related to my camp experience?” So we know that trauma can be passed on intergenerationally. We know that the Jewish Holocaust survivors carry a high level of anxiety. It’s very true for us, too. The way it gets manifested, though, doesn’t bring a lot of attention.
The way it gets manifested for us is, we have to constantly prove that we’re worthy of being here, of even participating in this process. So many of us have way more degrees than we need. We sweep our streets regularly, we vote, we make sure that our kids are clean and don’t use bad words. There’s this pressure. The young people tell me that there’s so much intense pressure that they go to the best schools, get the best grades, and continually feel like they can’t ever really fully express who they are because they’re afraid of making a mistake.
Miller: They have to be perfect American citizens and show their loyalty by being good.
Ina: Right, not causing any problems.
Miller: Which is related to what your parents told you when they didn’t want you to get in trouble, when your classmates were protesting the Vietnam War. Did you internalize that as well?
Ina: Yes. Absolutely. You know, I have way more degrees than I really need.
Miller: How many do you have?
Ina: Well, I have the bachelor’s, the master’s and the PhD …
Miller: It seems like you’ve put them to good use.
Ina: I have, and it’s been wonderful. But the feeling is, “Am I the best professor at the university? Am I writing the best paper? Is there any question of my credibility?” Really hits hard for me, yeah.
Miller: Why did you end up focusing on trauma as your specialty?
Ina: I think there was this unconscious process going on for me, because when I was starting in junior high school, after school I used to go to the main library by bus in San Francisco and scan the library for books about the Holocaust. I was driven, trying to understand what happened to the Jewish people. At that time, I had no idea about what happened to my own family.
Miller: Just so I understand … zero idea? I mean, when you said your family didn’t talk about it, did you know that Japanese Americans were interned in their own country during World War II? Did you know that, at least?
Ina: We knew … so here’s what would happen: My parents would meet somebody on the street in Japantown and start talking. They’d say, “Oh, what camp were you in?” And they say, “Oh,” and then it was something that people alluded to but never talked about. That was it. Some people will tell you they thought that they had gone camping. That’s how elusive that information was …
Miller: Nevertheless, for you, when you were in junior high, you would take it upon yourself to get on a bus, go to the library and read about the Holocaust.
Ina: Right. And I would carry as many books as I could hold on my lap on the bus, then go home and pour through these books, trying to understand what happened. So when I think back on it, trying to understand what happened to the people …
When I was a student at Berkeley and then my master’s degree, I knew more, but there was no ethnic studies at that time. They still weren’t teaching the subject matter, so there was a very limited amount of information. Even while I was protesting at Berkeley, I was protesting for the African Americans who had struggled against slavery. We weren’t talking about our own experience, but it was there. It was totally there.
Miller [in studio]: I asked Dr. Ina how her parents eventually got their American citizenship back.
Ina: It’s a very moving story, because there was a man that we all love and revere. His name is Wayne Collins. He was an attorney, initially for the ACLU. Word got out that some of the men at Tule Lake were being put into the prison inside of the prison, with no due process. So the ACLU sent Wayne Collins to Tule Lake and he visited the jail. And the photographer for Tule Lake, Robert Ross, had taken photographs of the beatings that had happened, and we think smuggled it to Wayne Collins.
Then people came to talk to Collins because they heard somebody from the ACLU was there. The families who were cut off from the men who were put into the jail talked about what had happened. So he got involved in what was happening at Tule Lake and eventually learned that people were being under duress, forced to renounce their citizenship – because that was the government’s plan, to rid the U.S. of dissidents, of people who had been protesting, so now that they are no longer citizens, they could be easily deported.
Wayne Collins fought and eventually left the ACLU because they didn’t want to continue supporting his efforts. So, on his own, for 20 years, he worked to regain citizenship for every single person who had renounced their citizenship. There were like 1,600 people. Yeah, we love him … we’ve had his son come and speak at the symposium here, and with deep gratitude, because he didn’t get paid much money. But he was on a mission to get social justice.
Miller: After what your mom and your dad went through, why did they want to regain their citizenship?
Ina: They really didn’t have any choice because they’re both American citizens who had been partially educated in Japan. And I think they thought that if they could go back to Japan, and maybe Japan was going to win the war, they would survive. But once it was clear that Japan had been defeated, the family actually wrote to them and said, “Don’t come back here because we can’t feed you.” They had to stay here.
But at their deepest part of their heart, they were American citizens. They had lost their faith in America, but they knew that this was their home. My parents created a great life for us kids here, worked hard, blue collar work, and really proud of us as good American citizens contributing to society.
Miller: What does it mean to you to see all of these people coming here every two years to remember what happened here?
Ina: I keep coming back because it’s a healing journey and from this kind of meta perspective, as a therapist, I can see we had community trauma, historical trauma and collective trauma. People can share their experience with others here in ways that they can’t when they’re back home.
Every night while we’re here I run a group called the Reflections Group. It’s an opportunity for people to come and just talk about the feelings that come up as they gather bits and pieces of the stories that had been missing in their own narrative. I always cry while I’m here, many of us do, and I encourage it. I feel like we’re shedding the grief and the losses. For some people, they lost their farms, they lost beloved pets, they lost friendship, they lost their opportunities for education. My father was a brilliant poet, but he had to do hard physical labor until he died because he had lost so much.
Miller: Just briefly, what are your reflections on the 2016 presidential election?
Ina: Well, It’s frightening, the rhetoric. And it’s familiar. We’ve been talking about it, on the bus and amongst ourselves, that the ranting and fearmongering about a specific targeted group is exactly what was happening. Even before Pearl Harbor was bombed, there was a lot of anti-Asian, anti-immigrant fearmongering that was done by newspapers and people who were going to gain a lot of economic benefit by getting rid of the Japanese.
I think we’ve been politicized by this experience. Many of us are active in the election process, getting people out to vote, writing articles and getting people to understand what happens if you don’t participate in the process. Part of my own personal healing has been to speak out for other groups when something like this is happening.
Miller: You mean … in other words, to not agree to what your parents didn’t want you to do back in the 1960s.
Ina: Exactly. I’m very proud of my community because after 9/11, we mobilized quickly, went to the mosques, contacted people that we knew to provide support and some education. I’ve been very involved with the Central American women and children who are being brutally treated in Texas and put in private prisons for seeking asylum.
I encourage people, as part of their healing process, to speak out and to recognize when that racism, fear, Islamophobia, anti-gay, any of those things that target vulnerable groups, we have to be a voice in that.
Miller: Satsuki Ina, thank you.
Ina: You’re welcome, It’s my pleasure. Thanks very much.
Miller [in studio]: That was Dr. Satsuki Ina, one of the organizers of the Tule Lake Pilgrimage.
During the opening night dinner, we noticed one multi-generational family whose members were all wearing the same specially printed t-shirt. It had an old black and white picture of a couple holding young children. And it said, in English and in Japanese, “Pride, Yes. Shame, No.”
Akemi Yamane is a family matriarch. She is 72 years old. I asked her why she’d come to the Pilgrimage.
Akemi Yamane: I was born in Camp, in Topaz. My parents had said “no-no” to the questionnaire and were sent here to Tule Lake, where my brother was born. They never talked about it, so I grew up not knowing anything.
In the 7th grade I found a recipe for chocolate pudding, and I thought, because my father was a cook, I said, “That’s really cool. It’s from scratch.” Then I read it, and it said like 12 gallons of milk and so many pounds of sugar. I said, “Daddy, what kind of recipe is this?” He goes, “It’s from camp.” And I thought, “Wow, that was a big old camping trip.” And that’s all I knew about camp.
Then later on, I found out that they lost everything. This is all summation because when I actually got into it, they were dead. Their stories died with them. So I come every year to hear the stories of the people that are left, because this is the only place that you’re gonna hear it.
And I want to understand, I want to realize … I mean, I’ve learned so much now – how much they suffered, that they could only bring in what they could carry. They lost everything they had. Their homes, their jobs, everything. Treated like prisoners. There was so much racial discrimination, even before the war, and they’re placed in these horrible places.
My mother had had a child – me – she said, naturally, because they didn’t have medication. It was horrible for her. She was a very strong person, so it was just really awful. But I never knew. So, I want to learn as much as I can. I didn’t realize that they had given them like $25 and a ticket, and [said], “Go home.” They didn’t have a home. They had nowhere to go. And they never complained. They never said anything. We lived at the Buddhist church with a bunch of families because nobody had homes. Then my father disappeared. I don’t know how long, because I was just a kid, I was like 2 or 3. Then he came back, and he just took us all.
The only jobs available to the Japanese at that time were gardeners, because the rich people would hire Japanese gardeners, domestics – pretty much those two. So my father was a domestic. He was a cook in camp, so he was a cook for this rich lady, Miss Perrett in San Mateo. My mother was a maid.
Miller: When you come here, do you feel like you’re closer to your parents?
Yamane: Yes, because I was so ignorant. I had no idea. If they’d even complained or said something, I would have thought, “Oh, God, they really suffered.” But I didn’t. They just pretended like everything was fine. They lived for their children pretty much. That was it.
They wanted their children to go to school, do well. It was like, “be good, don’t be bad, don’t bring attention to yourself,” and that kind of stuff. It was really weird. But my mother would always say, “Be quiet, be quiet, they can hear you, don’t bother anybody.” And it’s from the camps because they had no privacy. So, all these things come out after. I hear stories and it just brings tears because I didn’t know how awful it was. I cry. Yeah, I come here for the stories, pretty much.
Miller: Now you’re here with your children and their children. Why did you want your family to come here?
Yamane: Unlike some of my Nisei friends, I never talked about it.
Miller: And just as a reminder, Nisei is second generation.
Yamane: Yes. I have friends who, their parents did talk about it. So the way I felt, but they were disloyal. And there was nothing to be proud of to be disloyal, so I couldn’t tell my kids anything. I did tell them they went to camp and the horrors of it, but I couldn’t say whether they were loyal Japanese. I just felt like I wasn’t in that class with them.
They were technically disloyal. And it was only after UCLA had a program going for the renunciants, the “no-no’s” and all that, to let people know that they were not the disloyals, they were not the bad guys. They stood for their rights and it was the government that was bad. But when I heard that, I went “hmmm …” I felt different, you know. I felt like, oh, I could be proud of them. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of them, but I just didn’t know how to feel about the whole thing.
Miller: And that seems like that was relatively late in your life. You already had kids when that happened.
Yamane: Yeah. I mean, I’m 73 and I just found out last year.
Miller: Your shirt says, “2016 Yamane Family Pilgrimage” and then on the right it says, “Pride, Yes. Shame, No.” What does it mean?
Yamane: You know, the Japanese are very proud, but they came out ashamed. They didn’t do anything wrong, but they were treated like they did, so they came out ashamed. A lot of people committed suicide. A lot of people died, carrying shame with them. They shouldn’t have because there was nothing to be ashamed of. They did what any human being would do.
I mean, I talk to my kids and they go, “Of course!” And I’m going, “Of course?” I mean, it surprises me. The younger generation knows that it was wrong. Me, I didn’t, for years. As old as I am, it took me this long to realize that they did what I would have done.
Miller: Can I ask you, have you fully … Your shirt says, “Pride, Yes. Shame, No.” Do you fully feel that in your bones right now?
Yamane: Actually, yes. After last year, after that UCLA program, when it really dawned on me that they really had nothing to be ashamed of. Prior to that? Being disloyal? That’s a horrible thing.
Miller: You carried that for 70 years?
Yamane: Absolutely, and my parents died that way. So yeah, it was a big thing for me. It was like my eyes opened up and I could hold my head up. A year ago, at 72, I found out and I feel really good about it. I really do.
Miller: Thank you.
Yamane: You’re welcome.
Miller: That was Akemi Yamane talking to us from the 2016 Tule Lake Pilgrimage.
Mitsuko “Mitzi” Asai Loftus was born on a fruit orchard in Hood River in 1932. She was 9 years old when President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 sent people of Japanese descent from their homes to so-called relocation centers. 120,000 people, many of them U.S. citizens, were incarcerated during World War II. Mitzi spent most of the war behind barbed wire fences, while two of her older brothers served in the U.S. Army. After leaving the camps, her family returned to Hood River. She spent much of her adult life in Eugene and Coos Bay. She now lives in Ashland. She wrote a memoir, primarily for her family, in 1990. An expanded and revised version was recently published by Oregon State University Press. It’s called “From Thorns to Blossoms: A Japanese American Family in War and Peace.” Mitzi Asai Loftus joins me now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Mitzi Asai Loftus: Thank you.
Miller: What are your memories of December 7, 1941?
Asai Loftus: It was a Sunday, and we were all home, and my father was downtown at the Japanese community hall. They were getting it all cleaned up and gussied up for a talent show they were gonna have, and we heard on the radio of the Pearl Harbor bombing, and my father came home all excited. He didn’t know what was going on, because the sheriff and the police sent them all home. And of course, he didn’t know anything about it. I suppose the police thought they were cleaning up the hall to have a big celebration that night, and how ridiculous. We explained to them they were joining with the LDS church folks to put on a talent show, and they were gonna make money so they could build an indoor toilet. That story wouldn’t go over too convincingly.
Miller: How long was it before your family was forced out of your home?
Asai Loftus: We were sent away on May 13, 1942, almost five months after Pearl Harbor.
Miller: Can you describe the Pinedale Assembly Center? This was near Fresno, California. That was the first place that you were taken to.
Asai Loftus: Yes, we were in tarpaper barracks, the black tarpaper with laths nailed on them. There were no walls. There were just bare two-by-fours and the roof, you could see right up to the top. There were concrete floors, and it was 10 degrees. It was just … the heat. We were not used to that kind of heat. So we sat, sometimes with a block of ice right on the concrete floor, sitting around fanning ourselves to keep cool. And I got self-contagious impetigo and I was sent to the camp infirmary, where I had to sleep in a long barrack with about 15 people, beds side by side – chicken pox [on] one side and whooping cough on the other. And me with impetigo in the middle.
Miller: You have a dramatic description of lying in bed at night there. And even with your eyes closed, you say that you could see, through your eyelids, the search light that was just roving its brightness through the camp. And that even when you went to the next stop – this is the Tule Lake, which we’ll get to in a second – lying in bed at night, you would still, in a sense, see that searchlight. It was burned into your memory.
Asai Loftus: Yes. When I was in the Fresno Pinedale Assembly Center, I used to count silently – one, two, three, four, five – slowly. And each time that light would hit my face, like number six or seven, that went on. And then in Tule Lake, where we were sent later, there was no search light, but I still had that ingrained into my brain. So I would be counting one, two ... and around six or seven, that light would flash across my face. The light that wasn’t there.
Miller: You’ve written that you were a happy child at Heart Mountain. That before incarceration, in fourth grade, you lived on a farm. Your closest neighbor was a quarter of a mile away and you were socially isolated. And then in camp, even though there was barbed wire at the outskirts keeping you there, there were kids everywhere, and you were young enough that you could just play and have fun. I mean, it was very different for your older siblings and very different for the adults. What was life like for your parents or older siblings at that time?
Asai Loftus: My sister was 9 years older. She had just graduated from high school when the war started. So for her, the future was bleak. She had no future of getting a job, going to college, any of those things you usually think about when you finished high school. So her life, her view, is entirely different.
I was just happy to have all these kids to play with. And all this time, as I look back, I’m thinking about my parents worrying about, are our sons going to get killed in the war? And they both – the two who went overseas – went to fight in the Pacific Theater, which a lot of people don’t understand when they think about Japanese American soldiers. They always talk about the well-decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, who made a name for themselves in the European Theater. And so they were thinking and worrying about those things while I was having a great, fun time with my friends. But I had something further to experience I wasn’t expecting.
Miller: Well, let’s turn to that. In December of 1944, President Roosevelt declared that Japanese Americans could begin returning home the following month. You note that a little before that, in January of 1943, a newspaper poll found that 84% of Hood River County residents, who were questioned, said that they did not want people of Japanese descent to return to the valley after the war. You were the first Japanese American student to re-enter an elementary school in Hood River, and the only one throughout your 7th and 8th grade years. What were those years in school like for you?
Asai Loftus: I should say my brother was above me in high school. He was the first and only one to go to high school. And the principal said, “I hope you don’t turn out for athletics.” And my brother said, “Why not?” He said, “Because it might be embarrassing for you.” And he knew very well what he was talking about. He said, “I wouldn’t be embarrassed.” Well, he said, “When visiting teams come, it might be embarrassing for our team, or whatever…” My brother says, “Well, don’t worry, I’ll just do intramurals.” And he was very athletic, so that was sad for him.
For me, I was going back to the elementary school I’d gone to in the first through fourth grades. And when I got home, I found my so-called classmates and friends didn’t talk to me, didn’t play with me at recess, didn’t walk with me on my walk to and from school. And so I was socially isolated for a good two years. I got to the place where I could go as a group someplace, but I had no dates. I couldn’t go to the school dances. So all I did was sell hot dogs at the football games and usher at the various programs.
Miller: It wasn’t just classmates who shunned you. Adults were vicious and cruel. One woman would sic her dog on you as you walked by her house. But you note that you did not tell your parents about experiences like that, or what you were experiencing in school. Why not?
Asai Loftus: I felt that my parents had enough things to worry about.
My parents went to town once or twice. And it was so unpleasant, they never went downtown after that. So my brother was 16 and just got his driver’s license, and I, at 13, did all the family business that had to be done in town.
Miller: How did you navigate that? I mean, that there were plenty of stores that had signs using a racial epithet, that you weren’t allowed there?
Asai Loftus: Fortunately, a soldier was discharged early. And he came home, he was the head of the Safeway stores. At that time, I think Standard Oil owned Safeway. And when he came home, he was shocked at what was happening. He said, “Anybody with the American dollar is welcome here.” So I still have a kind of a personal loyalty to Safeway, although it’s not owned by Standard Oil anymore, because without Safeway, there was not a good place we could buy groceries without worry. And the same is true … the gas companies that would deliver gas to our underground tanks on our farms. The government representatives in Portland had to come to help us to get through all of that and negotiate with businesspeople.
Miller: Were there white allies, neighbors or friends, who stayed with you?
Asai Loftus: There certainly were. And I can tell you their names. I can count them on the fingers of my hands. Hood River is just not that large a place. So most of the people signed the petitions that the American Legion Post put out in the newspaper saying, “We don’t want you coming here, we will make life miserable for you.” And they were true to their word.
But I can name the Carl Smith’s, the Max Moore’s, the Mr. McIsaac’s – those people who suffered along with us. They were even refused service in businesses where they had “No Jap” trade signs, they couldn’t even buy there.
Miller: It does seem that a number of white people who maybe were friendly to you in private, were not going to at all be public about that, for fear of being tainted, being seen as traitors. So, I’m curious what that taught you at the time, and what lesson has stayed with you, in terms of human nature, or the desire to “go along to get along,” in the face of injustice?
Asai Loftus: I’ve given talks for more than 50 years about this whole thing. When people ask me what advice do you have or what thoughts do you have that you want to leave with us, I always say, “You know, too many people have noodles for backbones. They need to grow some calcium for their backbones.” I know that there were people who wanted to be friendly to us, but they didn’t have the courage to speak up, or to stand up when something happened, or was said that shouldn’t have been. So those folks, some of those people would speak to us in private, but the next day, if you saw them in town, in public, they didn’t know you.
Miller: Where do you think courage comes from?
Asai Loftus: I think it comes from will. A person just has to decide for himself what they’re going to do or not do. Most people don’t say or do things when they know what is right, and just don’t have the courage to stand up for it and be counted.
Miller: Mitzi Asai Loftus, thank you very much and happy almost-92nd birthday.
Asai Loftus: Thank you.
Miller: Mitzi Asai Loftus is the author of the memoir, “From Thorns to Blossoms: A Japanese American Family in War and Peace.”
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