May 1990

              Page 16
Redress Monitor
May 1990
Victory ontinued from previous page
country and my dad came here from
Japan as a young child. We were
Americans. I couldn't understand
why we were being sent away."
He didn't know it at the
time, but Kometani would 	
never return to his hometown
of Auburn. Stripped of all
money and belongings, his
family spent the next 2 1/2
years behind the barbed wire
and guard towers of the
Japanese internment camps ——
created during World War JJ.
Located in desolate mountain and
desert regions of the West and South,
these camps were created in February
1942, when President Franklin D.
Roosevelt signed Executive Order
9066, which enabled the government
to legally remove anyone of Japanese
descent from their communities.
About 120,000 Japanese-Americans — 77,000 American citizens
and 43,000 resident aliens living in
California, Oregon, Washington and
Hawaii — were forced from their
homes in the months after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor and sent to
10 internment camps.
The government contended that
these people were a threat to
national security, were ___
disloyal and were possibly
working as spies for Japan,
according to Kometani.
"At the time there was a
tremendous amount of anti-
Japanese sentiment," Kometani said. "Congress and the
press openly expressed racial      	
hatred for the Japanese. Even
if the Japanese community had been
better organized and stronger politically it wouldn't have mattered. The
nation wanted us put away. It was
almost by popular demand."
Life in the internment camps was
harsh. Because they were in desolate
regions, internees suffered from
extreme heat in the summer and subzero temperatures in the winter. The
wooden barracks, covered with tar
paper, provided little protection from
the weather. Each barrack typically
housed three families, and each
u
We were Americans.
I couldn't understand why
we were being sent away.
family was assigned only one room.
There were communal mess halls,
toilets and laundries and makeshift
schools were set up for the children.
Kometani's family spent the first
year of imprisonment at the Tule
Lake internment camp in the California desert. The camp held about
12,000 people.
"My family of six slept in one
room, and there was little privacy
between compartments. You could
always hear what was going on in the
next room," Kometani said. "Because
the camps were so far away from the
nearest towns, we rarely had teachers
or doctors who came from the
outside. We had to rely on the people
it
All the guns were pointed
inside at us. No one was
trying to get in, and we
weren't allowed to go out.
in the camp for everything."
But the most pervasive memory of
many of the internees were the two
barbed wire fences that surrounded
each camp and the soldiers with fixed
bayonets who patrolled between the
fences. Each camp also had guard
towers along the perimeter, each
equipped with a machine gun and a
searchlight.
"They called them relocation
centers, assembly centers, concentration camps, but they were prisons. If
you didn't believe that, all you had to
___    do was look outside. All the
guns were pointed inside at
us. No one was trying to get
in, and we weren't allowed to
go out," Kometani said.
There were few cases of
outright brutality at the
^^    camps, which was probably
because that most of the
internees just accepted the situation
and did not attempt to retaliate,
according to Kometani.
"I know of only a few instances
where people were hurt. Once an old
man chased a dog too close to the
fence and the guards shot and killed
him. This didn't happen often but it
reminded you that you were a
prisoner, and if you tried to escape
you would be shot," Kometani said.
"We didn't retaliate. It's part of
the Japanese culture that we as Nisei
(second-generation Japanese-Americans) inherited. You sort of accept
things and do the best with what
you've got. We tried to make a life of
it despite the severe circumstances."
In 1943, Kometani's
~~    parents, along with the other
adult internees, were given
the opportunity to fill out a
loyalty questionnaire. Among
other questions, they were
asked if they would be
willing to serve in the United
___    States army.
"As you can imagine, it
was hard for most people to swear
loyalty to a government that was
keeping them prisoner, but most
people answered yes to these questions," Kometani said.
Ultimately, more than 33,000
Japanese-American men and women
volunteered or were drafted into the