Anniversary prompts bleak memories

Wednesday, February 19, 1997

HISTORY:

Panel sheds light on the internment of Japanese Americans during
World War IIBy Hannah Miller

Daily Bruin Contributor

One of Eddy Kurushima’s paintings depicts 1940s-era teenagers in
bobby sox and saddle shoes, Levis and letter jackets. They’re
flirting and smiling and making eyes at each other, but there is
barbed wire crossing the edge of the painting and a machine gun
tower looming in the background.

Kurushima, one of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans
interned by the U.S. government during World War II, spoke on a
panel Tuesday to mark the anniversary of the internment. The
disrupted reality of the internees, as reflected in Kurushima’s
art, was echoed by the three other speakers.

As Miho Murai, student welfare commissioner of the Undergraduate
Students Association Council, explained at the discussion’s
opening, Feb. 19, is the date that Franklin Roosevelt signed
Executive Order 9066, which called for the immediate evacuation of
all "alien and non-alien" Japanese.

Two of the speakers ­ Kurushima and Reiko Nimura ­
were Japanese Americans who were interned at ages 17 and 13,
respectively.

And there is another, often overshadowed story: that of the
2,200 Japanese Peruvians who were kidnapped by the U.S. government
to trade for white prisoners of war. The two other panelists,
Carmen Mochizuki and Alicia Nishimoto, told this little-known part
of history.

The discussion started with Kurushima telling about the history
of Japanese immigration to the United States starting in 1882.
Although "two-thirds of the internees were citizens," Kurushima
said, "we looked like the enemy."

"To my dying day, I will never forget the words of Gen. Dewitt,
who directed the evacuation," said Kurushima. "He said, ‘Once a
Jap, always a Jap.’"

Reiko Nimura was the next to speak. In 1941, the FBI arrested
her father without any charges, padlocked his business and froze
their family bank accounts. After the evacuation order was signed
in February, Nimura, her mother and three brothers were sent to a
race track converted to an internment camp.

"Many families were forced to live in stables," she remembered.
Her family, still not reunited with her father, was then sent in
freight trains with the other internees to a concentration camp in
Colorado.

Nimura’s father made repeated appeals to the government to allow
that their family be reunited. "My father felt he would die if he
didn’t see us," she commented, and the Nimuras were forced to take
one choice offered to them by the government: They could be
together, but only if they went to Japan.

Nimura did not know that they were being used to "trade" for
American POWs, and the family was forced to break up again after
the war ended when Nimura and her brothers returned to the United
States.

At 18, Nimura worked as a domestic in Caucasian homes for room
and board. It took until 1955 for the family to be reunited, when
her parents (who were second-generation themselves) were finally
able to return.

Alicia Nishimoto spoke next, in Spanish-accented English, of her
entirely different experience during the war. "What happened to
Japanese Peruvians is very little known," she explained to the
audience.

In 1943, she and her family were abducted from their home in
Peru and shipped to the Crystal City internment camp in Texas.

"It was like a regular prison camp. There were guards with
guns," she recalled. "We had no communication with the outside
world, and everything we owned had been taken away from us."

Nishimoto and her family had been kidnapped by the U.S.
government to exchange for American POWs. By the end of the war,
they hadn’t been "used" for this purpose (a purpose that went
unexplained for the last 50 years) and no longer had a home in
Peru.

"So we went to Hiroshima, where we had relatives. It was worse
off than all the other cities," she remembers. "I can’t even
understand how we made it. There was no food, and practically
everything was destroyed."

Carmen Mochizuki, another Japanese Peruvian, became friends with
Nishimoto in the camp. Like Nishimoto, she had come from a
prominent family in Peru that was singled out by the U.S. for
arrest and abduction.

After the camp experiences, Mochizuki said, "we had no choice
but to go to Japan," where they settled in Okinawa. "It was totally
devastated by war."

"I was little, so I asked my mother why we had to stay in such a
wasted and desolate place," she recalled. "It makes me so sad when
I think of my mother not being able to explain to her kids. I only
hope no one ever has to go though this again."

Although the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 has provided for
redress to Japanese Americans interned during the war, no such
reparations have been made for the Japanese Peruvians.

There is a campaign underway to obtain redress for the Japanese
Peruvians, but as Nishimoto told the audience, "We’re running out
of time."

The Civil Liberties Act expires next year, and each year sees
the death of more internees. "I want to see redress for the sake of
my parents, who lost their dignity," said Nishimoto. A lawsuit has
been filed by the National Coalition for Redress and
Reparations.

AARON TOUT

Eddy Kurushima describes his experience as a Japanese American
during World War II at a panel discussion on Tuesday.