A Day of Remembrance at Iowa State

Memories of internment - Wednesday, February 18, 2009 By Allison Suesse — Iowa State Daily Staff Writer In 1942, when Grace Amemiya was 21 years old, she was forced into a Japanese internment camp. She was attending college for nursing when she had to “disrupt” her life and education to comply with an executive order from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, requiring people of Japanese ancestry to be moved into internment camps in California. Now Amemiya is 88 years old. She said her life in the Japanese internment camp was “unbelievable … that it actually did happen.” Amemiya has a stack of photographs, tangible reminders of that time in her life, but she is not bitter. The delicate black-and-white photographs show the smiling, appreciative faces of those she’s known throughout her life. Some she met as a young woman in the Japanese internment camp, while others she has not known as long. All the photographs show that this event in history did happen, but they also remind her that it will never happen again. Amemiya was the youngest of six children. “I grew up being a tomboy,” Amemiya laughed. “I grew up trying to compete with my older brothers. I was very much interested in sports.” Her father died when she was 10 years old. She grew up in California with her mother and siblings. Her parents were Japanese immigrants, but were integrated into the community. However, her parents were denied American citizenship. This made finding work difficult for them. “We lived a modest life, living in a farming community,” she said. Amemeiya spent her childhood farming fruit such as cherries, pears and plums. Amemiya and her siblings worked all summer on the farm to save enough money to attend college. Amemiya was always interested in going to school to become a nurse. However, this was no easy feat for a Japanese citizen in the 1940s. “Many of the schools we wrote to wouldn’t accept us,” she said. “They would say ‘we’d love to have you’ but the community isn’t ready to accept us,” Amemiya said. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, while Amemiya was attending the San Francisco School of Nursing, an executive order for Japanese-American citizens to move to camps was signed. Before the order was sent out, Japanese-American citizens still experienced discrimination, were forced to obey a curfew and were not allowed more than five miles away from their homes. The notice was sent out in February of 1942 and stated that all Japanese-American citizens, even those who had as little as “one-sixteenth Asian blood would have to be put into camp,” Amemiya said. If Japanese-American citizens did not comply with the order, they were imprisoned. “I had to disrupt my education,” Amemiya said of being forced into an internment camp. The executive order was widely supported by citizens of the West Coast, said Charles Dobbs, professor of history and department chairman. However, Dobbs said there was actually no risk of a Japanese invasion after the bombing and that the internment camps were not necessary. “After the battle of Midway of June 3 or 4, 1942, the Japanese lost four fleet carriers. Any risk of Japanese invasion is over, period,” Dobbs said. Amemiya and her family were initially sent to an assembly center in California, as the internment camp they were assigned to move to wasn’t ready yet. The assembly center consisted of extremely modest living areas, which were actually horse stables converted into living quarters. Her family was sent to the Gila River Camp in Arizona. Amemiya described the living quarters as “barracks set up into six units.” She said she shared a 20-by-20-foot room with four of her family members because one of her older brothers was in the military and was not required to move into the camp. “We were told that the only way we could prove our loyalty was to go to camp, so most of us went quietly,” Amemiya said. The living quarters were “very bare” and had no running water. The internees had to create their own furniture from scrap lumber. The situation was frustrating for 21-year-old Amemiya. “We never considered ourselves different as far as our citizenship was concerned,” Amemiya said. “So it was a shock to all of us that the government put us into the camp situation.” There were about 10,000 internees living within Gila River. Amemiya described the camp as being similar to a small community because the internees themselves ran the camp. Since Amemiya was studying to be a nurse, she had a job working at the camp hospital. “We were paid eight, 12, 16 dollars a month depending on the level of the job,” Amemiya said. Because she had a job at the camp hospital, she received the “intermediate” level of income within the camp. After she was released from Gila River Camp, she went on to become a nurse who volunteered to work with soldiers from the army. There were churches, schools and community centers located in the camp. There were social activities for the internees. “We did have a social life … yes,” she laughed. “We made wonderful friends.” Amemiya still keeps in contact with the people she met at Gila River. However, life in the camp was nothing like the life Japanese Americans had while not detained. Their main concern was to continue along with life as best they could. Work saturated most of their days in camp and families were torn apart, she said. “The thing that was noticeable was that the family units were broken because it got to where the father was not the breadwinner,” Amemiya said. “We ate in the areas we worked in … so the family units were sort of broken.” When Amemiya was released from the Japanese-American internment camp one year later, she finished nursing school at St. Mary’s in Rochester, Minn. She never went back to California. Amemiya was married in Ohio and moved to Ames in the 1960s. She has been giving presentations about her experience in the Japanese internment camps since the 1980s. “We … felt no bitterness or anger,” she said of her experience. “It was something we had no control over. We forgive the government for what they did to us and carry on with a more positive attitude with the fact that this will never happen again.” When: 1:30 p.m. Thursday Where: Sun Room of the Memorial Union What: An event to commemorate the signing of Executive Order 9066 that forced the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, The lecture will include two speakers. Grace Amemiya will discuss her experiences as a former internee. Phil Tajitsu Nash is a professor of Asian American studies at the University of Maryland who worked on the reparations movement. Additional facts about the Japanese internment camps: There were approximately 120,000 Japanese-American citizens placed into these camps. In 1988, Congress issued a formal apology to the Japanese-American internees and gave the surviving internees a $20,000 payment. The American army unit that won the most medals in World War II was the unit made up of Japanese-American citizens. It also had the most casualties. — Information from Charles Dobbs and Grace Amemiya