Deep-seated racism and economic competition, not national security, was the real reason he and so many others were forced out of the valley, he told his granddaughter before her assignment. BY MATT O’BRIEN | CONTRA COSTA TIMES ADVERTISING WALNUT CREEK,
BY MATT O’BRIEN | CONTRA COSTA TIMES
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. — Her history teacher gave Alex Iwagaki an uncomfortable assignment last year: in a classroom debate, she had to justify the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
She wanted an A, and got one, by defending America’s wartime roundup of more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry.
But almost 70 years after Japanese American internment, the teenager learned a hard lesson about the resonance of an extraordinary period in her country’s history. As the number of Japanese Americans who experienced the prison camps dwindles, the memory of that era will need nurturing to keep it alive.
The Cupertino High School student found she knew far more than her classmates about the internment. She grew up hearing her grandparents’ stories of the camp.
She thought the class would see through her flimsy, halfhearted arguments about national security and the unknown dangers posed by ethnic Japanese, most of them American-born.
Many students didn’t.
“I was taken aback. Some people in my class actually believed that putting Japanese Americans in internment camps was justified,” the 17-year-old said. “I don’t think they understand that a huge part of someone’s life was taken away.”
Sunday marks 70 years since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order, No. 9066, allowing the U.S. military to imprison every Japanese American on the West Coast for the duration of the war.
The order swiftly transformed the San Francisco Bay Area in the late winter and spring of 1942, forcing more than 20,000 residents out of their homes, farms, classrooms and businesses and into converted horse stalls and rickety desert barracks.
“I just can’t imagine what they went through,” Alex Iwagaki said.
Today, memories have faded. The pioneer Japanese immigrants, the Issei, are long gone, and their surviving children, the Nisei, are in their waning years.
So elder Japanese turn to the third generation — the Sansei — and Alex Iwagaki’s fourth generation — the Yonsei — to keep alive the dark lessons.
Ken Iwagaki, 84, is glad that his granddaughter cares but wonders about everyone else.
“We all hope that the word about what happened to us has gotten out,” he said.
He was a student just a few years younger than his granddaughter and living not far away, when the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
A farmer’s son, basketball and football player, student government leader and trombone player in the marching band at Campbell High School, Ken Iwagaki thought himself an all-American sophomore at his school in then-rural Santa Clara Valley.
But he felt abandoned in his last days at the school before what was known as the “evacuation.” “Not one teacher, not one student came up to me and said, ‘I’m sorry that you guys are going,’ ” he said.
“I felt pretty betrayed by the U.S. government to be taken from our homes and put in a camp.” He lived behind barbed wire in Wyoming’s Heart Mountain camp until he joined the Military Intelligence Service. When he returned home and resumed his education, he would run into high school classmates at San Jose State University. He would nod at them, but they never talked.
“There was a lot of competition between the white farmers and we Japanese, or Asian, farmers,” Ken Iwagaki said. “They wanted us out. They always wanted us out.”
Deep-seated racism and economic competition, not national security, was the real reason he and so many others were forced out of the valley, he told his granddaughter before her assignment.
