ON OUR TELEVISION SCREEN IN THE LIVING ROOM flashed a short clip of Japanese American families being herded into trains with armed guards watching, another short clip of rows of barracks in the desert. A newscaster's voice announced that it was twenty years since the residents of Japanese ancestry in the Los Angeles area had been put into camps in 1942, soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor. My husband Yosh said to the children, "Your mother was in one of those camps."
My oldest, Jeni, who was about eleven years old then,looked at me with tears welling up in her eyes and said, "Mom, how come you never told us?"
The newscast went on to other momentous matters of the day. Jeni's younger siblings were noisily romping about in the living room, but not noticing that I was on the verge of tears myself, she persisted with her questioning. It was her accussatory tone -"How come you never told us?" -and the look in her eyes that had me scurrying through my mind to find a reasonable answer.
"I don't know why," was all I could manage.
I was thinking: It isn't as if I were keeping it a secret. It just didn't seem important enough. The subject never came up. Nobody ever asked me. An immediate facile answer might have been that I was always too goal oriented to indulge in reflection, too busy with more "important" things to do during those years, such as attending classes, studying, working for my tuition, getting my degrees, getting married, and taking care of a husband and four children.
When I was growing up, my parents never brought up subjects that they felt would "burden" their children. As a result, my brothers and I never thought that our parents had financial or any other kind of problems. Even as the talk of the worsening relationship between the governments of Japan and the United States dominated the news media in the 1930s - and the subject must have been the topic of conversation among the Issei - they never expressed their concerns to us around the dinner table. It seemed to us that their only concern was that we go to school and study hard.
It occurred to me when Jeni asked, "How come you never told us?" that my silence was a legacy handed down to me by my Issei father. I remember angrily directing the same question at my absent father during those panic years after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. I was shocked beyond words when the utilities companies called, warning us that the telephone, gas, and electric services would be shut off unless we paid our bills. How come he never told us that the utilities bills had to be paid every month? My father had been arrested by the FBI the afternoon of December 7, 1941, along with many other leaders of the Japanese community on the West Coast, and was held on suspicion of espionage during most of the war years. After his arrest, we were too preoccupied with daily money matters to pay attention to the mail that was piling up on his desk. The one person in the family who silently took care of all our needs was no longer with us. Our not knowing about monthly utilities bills was only a temporary inconvenience at that time, but it represented a terrifying question that I did not deal with until decades later: What else was he keeping from us? The unspoken question led me to send for my father's FBI file in 1980 under the Freedom of Information Act, years after his death. (The FBI's suspicions about my father, as about all the other Japanese immigrants to this country, proved unfounded.) The more immediate lesson I learned from my father was the parents' role of protecting their children from the unpleasant realities of life. As they were often heard to say, Kodomo no tame ni: for the sake of the children. The newscast report of the forcible removal of the Japanese from the West Coast and actual film footage of the camps brought forth images in my head that had been long buried, but they did not encourage me at that moment to disclose fully my feelings about my internment experiences to my older daughter.
Jeni, now a mother of three growing sons, and I, a grandmother five times over, are both actively involved in community affairs that have been shaped by out past, the most prominent part of which was the internment experiences of the Issei and Nisei in the family. Much has been written about the collective silence surrounding these experiences for many decades. Jeni has been determined to break that silence among members of our immediate family - her siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins. In contemplating the "why" ofJeni's original question, I have learned that there was a combination of factors that contributed to my own silence.
Many of us who had kept silent all those years about our own war experiences should reflect on why we did so. Did we feel, as our parents did, that we did not have the right to speak out? Our parents,like all Asians, were ineligible to become United States citizens through naturalization until the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. They must have felt that they were denied the right to full citizenship through some fault of their own. Our parents, who were born and raised in Japan, may have accepted the "forever foreign" status to which they were relegated in this country. I, on the other hand, who, unlike my three brothers, was born in Japan but lived in the United States from the age of three and a half, never felt comfortable being treated like an outsider. As a teenager growing up in Seattle, Washington, in the prewar days, I often complained to my father about certain slights I experienced in school, and his cautionary words were always, "If you ever want to become an American citizen, keep your nose clean. Don't do anything that might seem un-American." I carried this warning with me throughout the war years as I traveled about the country. It acted like an internal barometer that made me check my tongue, even when I felt misunderstood by those around me.
I remember only too well that day in 1955 when I became an American citizen after having been a resident of the United States for twenty-eight years. What should have been a celebratory event became an occasion for me to feel more unwelcome in the country than I had ever felt before. In the interviewing room at Brooklyn College where I was about to be sworn in, the immigration officer asked, "Are you willing to bear arms in defense of this country?" There was that question again, I was thinking, the question to which we had to answer yes in order to receive permission to leave the internment camp. Then I thought about the rumors I had heard during my graduate school days only a few years before, that HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Comminee) was ordering the University of Chicago to fire the professors who had refused to sign the loyalty oath. Suddenly I was aware that the officer was barking at me, "Whatsa maner? Why do you hesitate? You don't wanna defend your country?" I answered lamely, "Well, since I'm a woman, would I be asked to do that?" He mellowed a little, and said, "If you was a man, would you?" I felt like saying, "Not really," but I knew that this was not the time to argue about pacifism....
What I found most painful about the her story was the realization that in a flash we can return to the "square one" about which Jeni writes in her essay. I was weeping over the incident because I knew that it was not an isolated one but a form of nonviolent hate crime to which our children are subjected all too frequently. I knew that such actions could not be legally prosecuted. Still, they do damage not only to the recipients of such attacks but to our society as a whole.
We need to ask questions beyond "What was it like?" The assumption behind such questions is that as long as we are treated decently, we have nothing to complain about. If we continue to think in these terms, we will come to conclusions such as the one that was handed down by a judge in Gordon Hirabayashi's case in 1981, when Hirabayashi was demanding that his wrongful conviction during World War II be vacated by the courts forty years later.' Initially his appeal was turned down, because Hirabayashi, by that time a respected professor at the University of Alberta, had not, it was said, been "grieved enough" as a result of his incarceration. Fortunately for us, and of course for Hirabayashi, Judge Mary Murphy Schroeder, a circuit judge for the United States Court of Appeals, reviewed the case and in 1987 made the stunning ruling that when any American's civil rights are violated, that person is lastingly grieved. No matter how many years have passed, a wrong is still a wrong.
We have for too long thought in terms of relative justice, comparing the weight of the suffering (who suffered more than whom?), and along with the rest of the country, we have indulged in voluntary amnesia about the internment camps. In too many ways we have been complicit in the silence that has been forced on us. And so the silence has left our children to sort things out for themselves and to wonder, "What else are they keeping from us?" I would change our parents' saying, kodomo no tame ni (for the sake of the children) to mogo no tami ni (for the sake of the grandchildren). I learn from my daughters' examples in their more open ways with their children. The greatest lesson we can teach our children is awareness of the world around them. Jason's words (quoted by Jeni in her essay) give me hope that the legacy of silence is gradually being broken.
