His early memories were formed behind barbed wire fences.
He remembers the soldiers with their rifles. The tower guards with their searchlights. The tarpaper barrack he lived in with his uncles, mother and siblings. The rough, unfinished wood floors.
He pictures childhood friends and games played in the dust. Empty thread spools fashioned into makeshift toy cars, and tiddlywinks made from milk cartons. And the camp rule he learned quickly and early on: Never venture beyond the barbed wire.
He is my grandfather. Sam Matsumoto spent four years in a remote desert internment camp on the Oregon-California border during World War II, part of a West Coast roundup that sent more than 100,000 people – two-thirds of them American citizens – to confinement because of their Japanese heritage.
His family – and the family of his future wife, my grandmother Harriet Matsumoto – were forced from their Sacramento-area homes to the Tule Lake camp, which at its peak held more than 18,000 people. With wartime fear racing through the nation, the Japanese were told they were enemies of the country. They were charged with no crime and given no due process.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, set the roundups into motion. It authorized regional Army commanders to remove anyone from “military areas” – ultimately the entire West Coast — as they saw fit. Within six months of the executive order, all people of Japanese ancestry were evacuated from their homes and taken to one of 10 remote camps.
The camps today are commonly known as internment camps, though my grandparents don’t use the term because it refers to a wartime process applied to nationals from enemy countries, not U.S. citizens.
With the 75th anniversary of the executive order approaching Sunday, I interviewed my grandparents to tell their story.
Many who were sent to the camps, my family included, lost nearly everything. They left behind their homes, their property and their lives.
For generations, they did not speak of it.
***
My great-grandfather was a farmer.
Kaneshige Matsumoto was a Japanese immigrant and thus prohibited by California law from owning land. Instead, he worked on farms in Lodi, California, where he lived with his wife, Shizuko Matsumoto, and their three sons. Money was tight, but he set aside what he could. Before the war, he had finally started to amass some savings.
The executive order changed everything, my grandfather said.
“When they signed the executive order, that’s when everything started happening — boom, boom, boom,” my grandfather told me from his Lodi home, as we talked recently about the camps.
Shizuko burned everything that could connect the family to Japan – papers, books, magazines.
It didn’t do them any good, he said. Shortly after the executive order was signed, the FBI agents came.
My grandfather was 6 years old. Despite being young, he remembers the night vividly: The family was eating dinner. His father told him to go into the living room and draw the blinds. As he went to the window, two black cars drove up. Four men emerged and came to the door.
They identified themselves and began to search the house, room by room. They watched Kaneshige, never letting him out of their sight. Then, they told him to pack his bags.
The family learned that prominent figures in the Japanese American community were being arrested. Church leaders and Japanese society officials, like Kaneshige, were detained and questioned in San Francisco.
“It’s not that my dad did anything wrong,” said my grandfather, who is now 81. “It was just that he happened to be one of the officials of a club that had something to do with Japan.”
Kaneshige was sent to a camp in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In the meantime, though, Shizuko could not care for her three children alone. She moved the family to Gridley, California, where they lived with her brothers.
But within a few months, they could live there no more. Ordered to leave their homes, the family boarded a train to Tule Lake, taking only what they could carry.
Sam, my grandfather, didn’t see his dad for 21/2 years, when Kaneshige was eventually relocated to Tule Lake.
***
The twins died without a name.
My grandmother, Harriet, a toddler when her family was sent to the camp, was too young to remember them. Harriet’s mom, Hatsuko Nishizaki, gave birth to the boys in Tule Lake. Harriet said she doesn’t know why they died. It could have been a stillbirth, she said, or maybe it was the camp’s poor conditions.
“It was just a hardship in the whole undertaking,” said my grandmother, who is now 75. “She really never said anything about it.”
The twins were buried at the camp’s cemetery. For their gravestones, the boys were named posthumously: Harry and David.
Families were given one room in the barracks. In my grandfather’s barrack, Shizuko sectioned off the room with blankets to create some sense of privacy.
The families often went without, my grandmother said. Her father, Henry Iwao Nishizaki, worked in the camp kitchen and brought home scraps so they never went hungry. Clothing was difficult to come by.
Harriet, the youngest daughter, remembers a lot of hand-me-downs.
“There’s a picture of me, and I look like a little orphan,” she said.
Despite it all, my grandparents said, they didn’t think life was unusual.
“Everybody was in the same situation,” my grandfather said. “So you didn’t really feel deprived because we were all like that.”
“Of course,” my grandmother added, “we really didn’t know any better.”
Sam doesn’t remember being scared. He spent his days playing with the other children. The barbed wire fences were a fact of life.
“All I knew was the barbed wire fence was there, and you couldn’t go anywhere,” he said. “We knew we couldn’t go anywhere, like a prisoner. But as a kid, that didn’t bother us because that’s the way it was.”
***
The church president said he was sorry.
Nearly 75 years after the camp opened, I travel to Tulelake. The president of the town’s First Baptist Church, Jimmy Alexander, studies me curiously. He’s never met a relative of one of the camp residents before me, he says.
“I’m sorry about that,” he says of the camp.
He thinks the camps were wrong, but he understands why it was done, he says. It was wartime. Things should have been done differently, he says, but that’s how they are when the country is at war.
Clourise Fleming, sitting at a church table with Alexander, speaks up. She thinks the Japanese were held in the camps for their own protection.
That’s something I hear multiple times. A man in the nearby town of Malin tells me the same thing. The Japanese weren’t persecuted, he says. They were held there for safety. They could have been shot in the streets by angry, fearful people otherwise, he says.
Others don’t talk about the camps much at all. Arleen Glover says people recognize the name of her town when she travels. They ask her about the camp.
She doesn’t know much about it, she says. Here, no one ever asks.
***
My grandpa’s uncles didn’t take things quietly.
Much is made now of the stoic acceptance of the Japanese Americans during World War II, but history, it turns out, is more complicated. Tule Lake, which at its peak population was the largest of the federal camps, was the site of several protests and strikes.
In February 1943, a questionnaire was distributed to all the camps. Two questions were designed to determine whether the Japanese Americans were loyal to the U.S.
The questions were number 27 and 28 on the questionnaire. Number 27 asked, “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?” Number 28: “Will you swear unqualified allegiances to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor or other foreign government, power or organization?”
People were given a fixed deadline to answer and no explanation of what their answers would mean. Some wondered whether answering “yes” to 27 meant they were volunteering for the military. Others wonder if 28 was a trick question and answering it was to admit they were loyal to Japan before.
My grandpa’s uncles, Mori and Jim Tanimoto, were offended by the questions, my grandparents said. They were American-born citizens. Before the executive order, they had registered for the draft. Just like any other American, they were willing to serve their country.
Instead, they were classified as enemies and ordered to Tule Lake.
“They were very, very upset about how they were treated,” my grandfather said. “They were asked to go into service, but yet the whole family would be behind barbed wires.”
In protest, Mori and Jim refused to answer. The government considered that a “no.”
My great-uncles were among several young men in Tule Lake, known as “no-no boys,” who did not answer the questions or answered “no” to both.
The men were taken to Alturas and Klamath County jails. Since no criminal charges could be brought against them, they were later moved to a separate camp. The old Civilian Conservation Corps site, Camp Tulelake, separate from the general population Tule Lake camp, held more than 100 protesters for two months.
The main Tule Lake camp became the destination for the “disloyal” from the other nine camps. It was the last to close after the war in March 1946.
***
When the camp closed, the town used the barracks.
The residents of Tulelake feared that the Japanese would stay in town after the camp closed, townspeople told historian Sherry Turner in 1973 interviews Japanese American Project of Oral History at California State University, Fullerton. But when they didn’t, the barracks were given away.
They went to homesteaders who settled the farmland around Tulelake after the war. And they were repurposed into homes and churches, legion halls and granges.
Fleming, the woman at the First Baptist Church, got married in a legion hall built from old barracks.
First Baptist itself is built from three barracks, cut up and put together and painted over with pastel creams and yellows.
The town has few other reminders of the camp. A back corner of the county museum is devoted to camp artifacts. Outside the museum, you can look at a guard tower and peer into the windows of a barrack.
Off the main drag, a town square of sorts commemorates the area’s history. Flags wave for each branch of the military, alongside a U.S. flag, a California state flag and a Gadsden flag with its snake hissing, “Don’t tread on me.” One black flag hangs limply from its pole. I glimpse barbed wire and a guard tower on it.
Then the wind unfurls it, revealing its message: “POW, MIA,” it reads. “You are not forgotten.”
***
Going home was not easy.
Before they left, Sam’s family put everything they could not sell into a storage unit.
When they returned, it was all gone, except a Model T truck.
Harriet’s family didn’t own any land either and had little to lose, she said. But her father lost all his savings from before the war.
My grandparents grew up, met each other, and got married.
Sam and Harriet raised their family and played with their grandkids in Lodi. My great-grandparents died. Sam went back to farming and produce. Harriet worked in offices.
Neither of their families spoke much of Tule Lake, they told me. For years, no one did.
But in time, the silence began to break.
My grandparents have returned to what is left of Tule Lake. They’ve swapped stories with their siblings, aunts and uncles.
To them, now, it’s history. It’s just water under the bridge, they said.
More than anything, my grandparents said they want to tell the stories so the country does not make the same mistakes again. To categorize any one group of people as dangerous is always wrong, my grandfather said.
My grandmother sees some similarities with what is happening now with American Muslims and immigrants. She worries that people are being discriminated against because of their ethnicity and religion, she said.
“I think we need to be real careful about what we say and do,” she said.
Tule Lake changed his life, my grandfather said. But it wasn’t all bad.
He has good memories of playing with other children. At Tule Lake, many of his uncles got to know the women they would later marry. What happened was wrong, he said, but they made the best of bad circumstances.
My grandmother relays what her father used to say: “This happened. The government did this to us, but we have to go forth. If we are going to survive, we have to persevere.”
Today, little is left of the camp. The acres of tarpaper barracks are gone, replaced with mobile home parks, maintenance yards and miles of nothingness.
The only building left is an old jail, surrounded by a chain-link and barbed-wire fence off the highway.
When they were held in camp, people wrote on the walls inside the jail. The writing is faded, but still visible. Someone wrote the lyrics to a popular American song:
“Show me the way to go home.”
— Samantha Matsumoto
smatsumoto@oregonian.com
503-294-4001; @SMatsumoto55
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
