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This essays discusses how exactly WWII affected the Seattle area and Washington State as a whole. The war transformed the industries present in the area, like Boeing, and also attracted more people to move their because of the economic. In addition to providing the historical context of Seattle for the setting of this novel, it also touches on the treatment of Japanese Americans at this timing, stating that these people had a "special burden" in being forced to move out and into internment camps.

Warren, James R. "World War II Homefront on Puget Sound." Historylink, 13 Sep. 1999. http://www.historylink.org/File/1664. Accessed 27 Oct. 2018.

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Fearing a second world war, the United States began to build up its armed forces in the late 1930s, helping to revitalize the Depression-becalmed economy of the Puget Sound region. The area's aircraft and ship builders shifted into high gear after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Every sector of business and domestic life was affected by the war effort. The society underwent dramatic change as women took the place of men on production lines, thousands of Japanese Americans were interned, and equal numbers of African Americans migrated to the Northwest in search of defense jobs. Historian James R. Warren (1925-2012) surveys the scale and legacies of our area's mobilization during World War II in this essay, adapted with permission from the Puget Sound Business Journal.
The Beginnings of War
As the 1930s ended, German troops were marching across Europe, and Japan controlled much of China and threatened all of Asia. An isolationist Congress finally, grudgingly, acceded to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's urgent appeals for national defense funding.

In the Puget Sound area, war contracts were soon revitalizing moribund industries with a swelling flow of urgent orders for war materials, equipment, and supplies. Labor shortages replaced unemployment lines and a great migration developed as Americans moved from poorer areas, particularly in the South, to areas with major war industries. Census takers in 1940 counted slightly more than 1.7 million Washington residents. The war effort quickly added a quarter-million more -- including thousands of African Americans.
Mobilization
In September 1940, the United States implemented its first peacetime draft, requiring that all male citizens and resident aliens between 21 and 36 register for compulsory military service. Fifteen months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States declared war on the Axis Powers (chiefly Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan). Americans quickly mobilized in support of a total war effort.

Washington, a comparatively small and undeveloped state, played a disproportionately important role in the country's efforts to gear up for war. In January 1943, Washington Secretary of State Belle Reeves issued a report titled War Production in Washington. A year and a month after Pearl Harbor, she wrote:

"No state has been more profoundly affected economically by the expansion of war industries than Washington. By the middle of 1941, migration of war workers was already at full tide and the relation of prime military contracts in the Puget Sound area to the value of manufacturing products in 1939 was relatively five times greater than for the country for a whole. The relationship of war work to normal activity has been about twice as great as for Los Angeles and four times greater than for San Francisco."

Seattle ranked as one of the top three cities in the nation in war contracts per capita, and Washington state ranked as one of the top two in the nation for war contracts per capita. Airplane and ship contracts in 1943-1944 were valued at three times the total of all manufacturing in the state in 1939.
Flying Fortresses
The National War Production Board in August 1942 revealed that up to July 1, 1942, more than $1 billion in contracts had been awarded Seattle's aircraft industry and $709 million had been awarded shipyards in Seattle.

Secretary of State Reeves added that by 1944, "floor space of Seattle airplane plants increased from 800,000 square feet to 2.4 million square feet by early 1942 and has since been increased another 1.7 million square feet. The Boeing Aircraft Co. employed about 7,500 persons in 1940. The Seattle plant now has over 22,000 workers and the new Renton plant about 10,000."

Boeing's Seattle and Renton plants produced 8,200 planes, including 6,981 B-17s and more than 1,000 giant B-29s. Civilian use of Boeing Field was greatly curtailed to accommodate the production of thousands of Boeing bombers. The military also annexed Tacoma's McChord Field, prompting that city to plead with the Port to develop Seattle-Tacoma International Airport at Bow Lake -- midway between the Sound's two major cities. Work began in 1942. The new airport was completed in 1944.
Floating an Armada
Puget Sound-area shipyards constructed an unbelievable number of war vessels. At the combined Todd Shipyards/Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding operation, 33,000 men and women worked in Tacoma to build five freighters, two transports, 37 escort carriers, five gasoline tankers, and three destroyer tenders. At the Seattle yards, 22,000 employees built 46 destroyers and three tenders for the U.S. Navy, plus other vessels.

Puget Sound Bridge and Drydock/Associated Shipbuilders turned out 38 minesweepers, three seaplane tenders, 10 floating drydock workshops, 15 covered wooden lighters, three wooden tugboats, and other vessels. The Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton commissioned 19 major ships, including eight destroyers, eight destroyer escorts, five escort aircraft carriers, and other vessels. They also repaired many battle-damaged ships.

The Lake Washington Shipyard at Houghton, now annexed to Kirkland, employed 6,000 workers to repair dozens of merchant vessels and ferries during the war and to turn out ships for the Navy. The shipyard site is now the location of Carillon Point, a residential-commercial development. Fifteen smaller shipyards in Seattle and others in Tacoma, Aberdeen, Hoquiam, Gig Harbor, Bellingham, Friday Harbor, Anacortes, Olympia, and Winslow (now Bainbridge Island) also produced vessels for the war effort.
Plywood and Powdered Eggs
Lumber, one of the state's basic industries, was also in great demand. Many billions of board-feet were needed to build everything from barracks to minesweepers. Specialized lumber products were developed as substitutes for critically scarce metals. For example, water-resistant plywood was produced to use in construction of training planes and barges.

Washington continued as a leading agricultural state. In 1941, Washington farm products increased in value to $250 million. Improved preservation processes, such as dehydration of fruits, vegetables, milk, and eggs permitted such foods to be shipped to distant war fronts. In 1943, with millions of Americans serving in the armed forces, the annual need for powdered eggs reached 400 million pounds, compared with 250 million pounds the year before.

The state fishing industry continued as one of the most productive in the country. Salmon and halibut were the major products, but various other seafoods were also harvested. During the war years, the Army and Navy purchased virtually all of the salmon canned in Washington and Alaska.
The Suburbs Do Their Part
Renton gained a huge Boeing airplane factory early in the war that turned out hundreds of B-29 Superfortresses. The Pacific Car and Foundry plant there produced 926 Sherman tanks during the war, and company engineers designed a tank recovery vehicle to haul tanks damaged on battlefields to repair facilities. The firm produced more than 1,300 of these rescue vehicles.

In Bellevue, which didn't incorporate as a city until 1953, the Coast Guard appropriated the whaling dock on Meydenbauer Bay and converted the whaling vessels to be used as part of the government fleet. Because war workers in need of housing were renting summer cabins and other available shelters on the Eastside, Overlake Transit scheduled 26 bus trips a day to carry commuters across the recently opened Mercer Island Floating Bridge.

During the war, the first few buildings were built in what became Bellevue Shopping Square. Though building materials were reserved for wartime needs, the government allowed construction of a motion picture theater there in an effort to keep entertainment-hungry Eastside residents from moving to crowded Seattle.
Life on the Home Front
Every city, county, and region in the state was involved in the war effort. Every individual, company, and agency felt the effects of the war in dozens of ways. The war was constantly on every mind and war news each day motivated citizens to work long and often unusual hours. Many companies scheduled three eight-hour shifts each day, seven days a week.

Japanese Americans bore a special burden when thousands were uprooted in April 1942 and interned in camps away from the Pacific Coast. Seattle's Japan Town, once the second largest in the nation, was emptied in a few days (and never recovered). Local grocers and the Pike Place Market lost the bounty of hundreds of Japanese American truck farms, including the 55 families who had produced Bellevue's famed strawberries. Although most of their neighbors acquiesced to the internment of Japanese Americans, a few community leaders questioned its validity or necessity. Tacoma Mayor Harry P. Cain said, "America has always been interested in selection, and I feel it would be preferable to make careful selection of those who are evacuated then just to say, 'Let's get rid of our problem by the easiest, most obvious way, by moving everybody out' " (Smith).

The Puget Sound region was site of dozens of military bases during the war, including Paine Field, the Whidbey Naval Air Station, Sand Point Naval Air Station, Fort Lawton, the Keyport Torpedo Station, and Bangor Naval Ammunition Depot, among many others. The Navy also took control of Piers 90-91 and other Port of Seattle facilities.

Huge numbers of servicemen assigned to the area, some with their families, brought a rush of business to cities near Army and Navy bases, even before the U.S. entered the war. This was especially true in Tacoma, Olympia, Bremerton, Seattle, and the smaller, nearby towns. In 1937, Fort Lewis hosted the nation's largest military exercise to date, involving 7,500 soldiers and officers of the Third Division. Several of the officers later made headlines, among them Gen. George C. Marshall, Maj. Mark Clark, and Maj. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

During the two years prior to Pearl Harbor, the number of men at Fort Lewis and McChord rapidly increased from 7,000 to more than 26,000. After Pearl Harbor, more than 50,000 soldiers at a time trained at Fort Lewis.
The Atomic Age
After Victory in Europe (V-E) Day on May 8, 1945, all efforts turned to defeating Japan. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans had been shipped to the Pacific ready for the sure-to-be-bloody invasion of the Japanese home islands. They and the entire world could hardly believe the news when, on August 6, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress dropped an atomic bomb, the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, on Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

Washington residents finally learned what had been going on at Hanford in Eastern Washington. Radioactive ingredients, including plutonium, had been prepared there for use in the bomb. We learned that workers in our state had both designed the plane and refined the fissionable materials that ushered in the Atomic Age.

On August 14 and 15, 1945, Puget Sound residents celebrated the end of the long and bloody conflict. Within a week of V-J Day, hundreds of men began quitting their jobs to pursue suspended civilian careers, and many women defense workers -- celebrated collectively as "Rosie the Riveter" -- laid down their tools and picked up aprons and frying pans (not always happily).

Dreams of returning to "normalcy" would prove elusive. The war had changed the region's economy, population, and social structure in profound and permanent ways.

Sources:

James R. Warren, "A Century of Business," Puget Sound Business Journal, September 17, 1999; Page Smith, Democracy on Trial: The Japanese American Evacuation and Relocation in World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 121.
Adapted with permission. Original copyright 1999, Puget Sound Business Journal.

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Fearing a second world war, the United States began to build up its armed forces in the late 1930s, helping to revitalize the Depression-becalmed economy of the Puget Sound region. The area's aircraft and ship builders shifted into high gear after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

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This essay talks about how after internment, the Japanese Americans that resettled back in Seattle were met with great opposition. Though there was still rampant racism before the war, the internment gave rise to Anti-Japanese groups that tried to prevent the resettlement. This gave rise to an opposing force that supported the returning Japanese-Americans. These two forces then battled it out with editorials in local newspapers. This connects to our reading because it further highlights the general hatred for the Japanese, whether they served or not, in the post-war Pacific Northwest.

Speidel, Jennifer. "After Internment: Seattle's Debate Over Japanese Americans' Right to Return Home." The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, University of Washington, 2005. http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/after_internment.htm, Accessed 27 Oct. 2018.

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After Internment Japanese American's Right to Return

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After Internment: Seattle's Debate Over Japanese Americans' Right to Return Home

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This article discusses the current reflection on the internment of Japanese Americans from Seattle during WWII. It discusses how drastic the relocation was for most people and that it made these residents and citizens feel as if they were enemies. Today, there are many people memorializing this atrocity through poetry, documentaries,  and memorials at Bainbridge Island. The purpose of these pieces to remember this event is not to seek apology, but to make sure that people learn from this history and "make sure nothing like it happens again". Like the novel, these works are not there to simply condemn Executive Order 9066 but show its profound impact of these people's lives during and after the war.

Kinoshita, Lisa. "Seattle Remembers Japanese Internment." Seattle Magazine, Feb. 2012. https://www.seattlemag.com/article/seattle-remembers-japanese-internment, Accessed 27 Oct. 2018.

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A wrenching chapter in our region's history was written 70 years ago this month: the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans. In 1942, in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, amidst war hysteria, racism and fears of sabotage, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing the evacuation of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry (two-thirds of them U.S. citizens) to "war relocation camps"-detention centers-primarily located in California and Arizona. Swept up in the relocation were hundreds of Bainbridge Island residents; they were given a mere six days to liquidate or secure arrangements for their homes, farms and businesses.

"It was my first train trip, first time out of state," says Fumiko Hayashida of her forced evacuation. The 100-year-old Beacon Hill resident shares vivid memories over a pot of hojicha in the tearoom at the historic Panama Hotel in Seattle's International District. Hayashida recalls dressing in her finest one cold March day, because the government only allowed them to take the clothes on their backs and one suitcase per family. She and her husband, Saburo, had two small children and a third on the way when they abandoned their 50-acre Bainbridge Island strawberry farm and boarded the train to the high desert of California.

An iconic 1942 Seattle Post-Intelligencer photo (shown at left and on display both at Seattle's Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience and the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum), shows Hayashida, then 31, clutching her sleeping baby. She is stylishly dressed and wearing a veiled hat; her expression is unreadable. Identification tags dangle from the coat of both mother and child, uneasily suggesting a human cargo. In fact, she and more than 250 others who make up Bainbridge Island's Nikkei (Japanese immigrants and their descendants) community were about to be loaded onto a Seattle-bound ferry, then shipped by train to the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California's Mojave Desert.

A poignant memorial of the time-photographs by landscape photographer Ansel Adams-is now on display at the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum. Adams recorded daily life in California's main detention center in Ansel Adams: A Portrait of Manzanar, an invaluable record, since prisoners were not allowed to take pictures. Also at the BIHM is For the Sake of the Children: Kodomo No Tame Ni, a fascinating permanent exhibit telling the story of Japanese settlers to the island since 1883.

Before World War II, immigrants from Scandinavia and other parts of Europe labored amicably alongside those from Japan, China, Hawaii and the Philippines to make their fortunes on Bainbridge. During the internment, many Bainbridge Islanders cared for their evacuated neighbors' property while they were away. Hayashida's family eventually regained possession of their Bainbridge Island strawberry farm; the island was one of the rare communities that welcomed Japanese Americans back home after the war, and The Bainbridge Review was the only newspaper on the West Coast to defend the rights of local Japanese after the executive order was announced.

The three years of the internment forever changed the lives of hundreds of Northwesterners. By 1940, Seattle's Japantown-then located south of Yesler on Main and Jackson and between Fifth and 23rd avenues-was almost a half-century old, a bustling community with Japanese-operated hotels and restaurants; small businesses such as grocers, barbershops, variety stores and laundries; and a professional class that included doctors, lawyers, architects and real estate agents. The Wing Luke Museum exhibit, Vintage Japantown: Through the Lens of the Takano Studio illuminates the nihonmachi (Japanese community) through period photographs.

But with Executive Order 9066, 10,000 Nikkei living in King County became "enemy aliens" overnight. Seattle Mayor Earl Millikin declared that a handful of traitors would likely "burn this town down and let the Japanese planes come in and bring on something that would dwarf Pearl Harbor." Denied due process, most of the county's Japanese Americans were shipped to the Minidoka center near Hunt, Idaho, after transitional detention (in barracks cobbled from racehorse stables) at the Puyallup Fairgrounds.

The majority of Nikkei in rural Western Washington were incarcerated in the Tule Lake, California internment camp-back then, called a "concentration camp," until that term was co-opted by the Nazis. None of the prisoners was ever charged with a crime.

The repercussions of that experience will be illuminated at the Wing Luke Museum on a day of documentary film screenings (February 18). Conscience and the Constitution, With Honors Denied and Transcending: The Wat Misaka Story all tell personal stories of Japanese Americans overcoming mistreatment by their own government.

With the anniversary in mind, local internment survivors are sharing their stories of loss and upheaval. Writer Larry Matsuda, 66, taps into the enormity of the Nikkei experience through the medium of poetry. During a 27-year career with the Seattle school district, Matsuda taught literature at Sharples Junior High School (now Aki Kurose Middle School) in Rainier Valley, where he introduced the first Asian-American history course in a Washington public school. Matsuda's family was incarcerated in Minidoka-he was born there; they lost their family home and First Hill grocery; his mother suffered a miscarriage in the camp. Friends and neighbors succumbed to suicide.

Matsuda mines these events in his poem, "The Noble Thing," from his 2010 collection of poetry, A Cold Wind from Idaho (Black Lawrence Press):

Depression took Mom away
like invisible armed guards. She was
a stranger-a stick-like figure with arms
and legs poking out of a white smock,
pacing the sidewalk next to the Western
State Hospital turn-around.
Dad never talked about it, none of it.
I never heard him say the word Minidoka...
Gaman, 'endure the unbearable
with dignity.'

The overarching theme of his work is "never let it happen again"; he also explores the pain of being betrayed by an entity that was supposed to protect.

The internment shook lives in many local communities. Seattle author Keith Egawa's grandparents lived in Woodinville at the time. His grandfather Fred Egawa was Japanese-American; his grandmother Grace Egawa was pure Lummi Indian. "Because my grandma was Indian, she and the children didn't have to go to the camp," Egawa says. "But they missed my grandpa so much that they volunteered to be interned with him [in Minidoka]. I was told by my aunt that it was very difficult-the insult of being imprisoned and losing their home-but that the camaraderie among those interned was very strong."

The violation of Japanese Americans' constitutional rights was finally acknowledged in 1988-43 years after the internment ended in 1945-when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, in which the U.S. government made a formal apology and paid restitution of $20,000 to each internment survivor.

Honoring the victims and learning from the mistakes of the past are the focus now, according to Clarence Moriwaki, chairman of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Memorial Committee. He spearheaded the creation of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial, dedicated in 2011 on the site of the former Eagledale ferry dock, where 227 Japanese Americans boarded the ferry to Seattle. The serpentine red-cedar wall, designed by architect Johnpaul Jones, is called "Nidoto Nai Yoni" ("Let it not happen again"). "What's the takeaway? To learn from this moment of history," says Moriwaki. "Five [U.S.] presidents have apologized [for the internment]. ....It's not about guilt or shame. We wanted to send a different message."

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Seattle Remembers the Japanese Internment

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A wrenching chapter in our region's history was written 70 years ago this month: the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans. In 1942, in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, amidst war hysteria, racism and fears of sabotage, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing the evacuation of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry (two-thirds of them U.S.

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This is a copy of the executive order that FDR issued to enforce Japanese internment. Though this novel takes place after the fact of this order, it is important to see and understand as it is the act that caused the internment and forced the Japanese people into a lesser status of citizenship.

"Executive Order 9066: The President Authorizes Japanese Relocation." History Matters, George Mason University. 19 Feb. 1942. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5154, Accessed 27 Oct. 2018.

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Executive Order 9066: The President Authorizes Japanese Relocation

In an atmosphere of World War II hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, dated February 19, 1942, gave the military broad powers to ban any citizen from a fifty- to sixty-mile-wide coastal area stretching from Washington state to California and extending inland into southern Arizona. The order also authorized transporting these citizens to assembly centers hastily set up and governed by the military in California, Arizona, Washington state, and Oregon. Although it is not well known, the same executive order (and other war-time orders and restrictions) were also applied to smaller numbers of residents of the United States who were of Italian or German descent. For example, 3,200 resident aliens of Italian background were arrested and more than 300 of them were interned. About 11,000 German residents-including some naturalized citizens-were arrested and more than 5000 were interned. Yet while these individuals (and others from those groups) suffered grievous violations of their civil liberties, the war-time measures applied to Japanese Americans were worse and more sweeping, uprooting entire communities and targeting citizens as well as resident aliens.

Executive Order No. 9066
The President
Executive Order

Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military Areas

Whereas the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities as defined in Section 4, Act of April 20, 1918, 40 Stat. 533, as amended by the Act of November 30, 1940, 54 Stat. 1220, and the Act of August 21, 1941, 55 Stat. 655 (U.S.C., Title 50, Sec. 104);

Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary, in the judgment of the Secretary of War or the said Military Commander, and until other arrangements are made, to accomplish the purpose of this order. The designation of military areas in any region or locality shall supersede designations of prohibited and restricted areas by the Attorney General under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, and shall supersede the responsibility and authority of the Attorney General under the said Proclamations in respect of such prohibited and restricted areas.

I hereby further authorize and direct the Secretary of War and the said Military Commanders to take such other steps as he or the appropriate Military Commander may deem advisable to enforce compliance with the restrictions applicable to each Military area hereinabove authorized to be designated, including the use of Federal troops and other Federal Agencies, with authority to accept assistance of state and local agencies.

I hereby further authorize and direct all Executive Departments, independent establishments and other Federal Agencies, to assist the Secretary of War or the said Military Commanders in carrying out this Executive Order, including the furnishing of medical aid, hospitalization, food, clothing, transportation, use of land, shelter, and other supplies, equipment, utilities, facilities, and services.

This order shall not be construed as modifying or limiting in any way the authority heretofore granted under Executive Order No. 8972, dated December 12, 1941, nor shall it be construed as limiting or modifying the duty and responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with respect to the investigation of alleged acts of sabotage or the duty and responsibility of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, prescribing regulations for the conduct and control of alien enemies, except as such duty and responsibility is superseded by the designation of military areas hereunder.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The White House,

February 19, 1942.

[F.R. Doc. 42-1563; Filed, February 21, 1942; 12:51 p.m.]

Source: Executive Order No. 9066, February 19, 1942.

See Also:Korematsu v. United States: The U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Internment
"Evacuation Was a Mistake": Anger at Being Interned
Milton Eisenhower Justifies the Internment of Japanese Americans

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Executive Order 9066: The President Authorizes Japanese Relocation

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In an atmosphere of World War II hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan.

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75 Years Ago, the US Forced Japanese into Internment Camps

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75 Years Ago, the US Forced Japanese into Internment Camps

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This article talks about the stories of those who experienced the war and the relocation as Japanese Americans. This article primarily focuses on Spokane and the Inland Northwest, but also discusses the other areas of the West Cost that had more cases of relocation. Many of the people that originally from Seattle or California chose to come to Spokane rather than their former home because it wasn't home anymore. This reflects the sentiment in the novel that though these characters have all returned to their homes in Seattle, it is changed in a ways that makes some characters want to leave to other places to start anew.

"75 Years Ago, the United States Forced Japanese into Internment Camps. After World War II, Many Settled in Spokane. These are their Stories." The Spokesman Review, 19 June 2017. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/jun/11/75-years-ago-the-united-states-forced-japanese-int/, Accessed 28 Oct. 2018.

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"Seventy-five years ago, I lived in a horse stable."

That's how 90-year-old Kaz Yamamoto describes the summer of 1942.

Yamamoto, a longtime Spokane resident, lived in the Yakima Valley with her Japanese immigrant parents when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Feb. 19, 1942, executive order evacuating Japanese-Americans from the West Coast.

Her family was sent to a hastily built "assembly center" in Portland, where they lived for three months, making due with sheets for walls to separate families, no ceiling, blazing heat and the constant smell of horse manure.

For Jeanne Tanaka, now 93, internment started earlier. Police came for her father one January day while he was working in the pea fields on their farm in Auburn, Washington. They took him away with no explanation.

Tanaka came home and found her mother, who didn't speak English, sobbing on the floor.

"She said, 'They're probably going to line all of us up and take us and shoot us,' and I told her, 'No, America doesn't do things like that.' "

Her father would remain incarcerated in a special Department of Justice facility for the rest of World War II, separated from Jeanne, her mother and her brothers. The rest of the family was ordered to Puyallup, Washington, and eventually to Tule Lake, a camp in Northern California reserved for "disloyal" Japanese and Japanese-American people.

The pain on Tanaka's face is still palpable as she described her family's forced relocation: sent by train in the middle of the night, told to pack only a suitcase, with no idea where they were heading or whether they would be killed or imprisoned when they arrived. She teared up more than once during an interview and said this will be the last time she talks publicly about internment. Even now, it's just too difficult.

"It's hard to believe, isn't it? Our country doing something like that. But they did it to us," she said.

Changing the face of Spokane

Japanese internment occupies a strange place in American history. It's the only act of large-scale violence or discrimination for which the U.S. government has formally apologized and paid reparations: $20,000 to each surviving internee, as mandated by a 1988 law signed by President Ronald Reagan.

Still, it's often a footnote in World War II history. Many internees describe the places to which they were sent as concentration camps, and point out the hypocrisy of the United States freeing Jews from death camps in Europe while keeping their own citizens imprisoned here.

But especially outside the American West, in communities without Japanese populations or camps nearby, internment is often barely mentioned in school.

Roosevelt's 1942 order, 75 years ago now, applied to people of Japanese descent living in coastal areas of the U.S. In Washington, the line was drawn at the Columbia River. Anyone west of it, including the Yakima Valley, had to leave or be sent to camp, while Spokane's Japanese people were generally allowed to remain. But internment left a wide mark across the Inland Northwest.

Sumi Okamoto, 97, was 21 and getting married on the morning Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor. FBI agents interrupted her Dec. 7 wedding reception at the Desert Hotel and detained everyone of Japanese descent for several hours. Two men, first-generation immigrants who were prominent in the local community, were arrested and taken to Department of Justice camps, where they would remain for the rest of the war. The rest were free to go, but told not to leave town.

The raid interrupted Okamoto's planned honeymoon.

"He was going to take us to California, but they told us we'd better not go anywhere," Okamoto said, speaking of her husband.

Internment pushed Japanese people from across the Pacific Northwest to Spokane. A handful moved after Roosevelt's executive order, hoping to avoid forced relocation. They came because they had family here, or because they thought it would be safer, said Rose Krause, who wrote a master's thesis at Eastern Washington University about the local impact of internment.

Many, like Tanaka and Yamamoto, settled in Spokane after the war because they had nothing to go back to. Krause estimated 2,500 people of Japanese descent moved into the Spokane region from 1943 to 1945.

Those not sent to camp still faced restrictive laws governing their movements and whom they could do business with. People of Japanese descent had an 8 p.m. curfew. Older Spokane residents who lived here during the war said they didn't know what happened to those who broke curfew: It wasn't something they ever considered.

"My sister discouraged us from speaking Japanese. It drew attention to us," said Alice Tanaka, 81.

For decades after the war ended, internment wasn't mentioned at all in schools. Elaine Okamoto, Sumi's daughter, said she never learned about it.

"It wasn't in the history books," she said. She learned about it from relatives in Seattle who were sent to camps.

"It reminded me of Hitler and concentration camps. It was scary," she said.

The 'disloyal'

Tanaka was 17 and months away from high school graduation when the relocation order came.

In Auburn, where she'd grown up, the Japanese community mixed with German-American neighbors and American families. Her first job was picking weeds in the neighboring Snyder family's corn patch, and she remembers hearing the mother yodeling during the day.

After school, the Japanese-American children of first-generation immigrants went to a special Japanese school. There, they learned the language so they could communicate with their parents. There were no English classes for the immigrants to take.

Tanaka hated the extra schooling and said she felt distant from her parents. English was her first language, and her communication with parents was restricted to mundane topics like work and getting ready for school. They never talked about politics, religion or anything "deep," she said.

"I vowed that when I raised my family, we're going to speak only English," she said.

She found out about the attack on Pearl Harbor on the radio, and immediately thought she'd be treated differently at school.

"They kind of shied away talking to me after Pearl Harbor," she said. "In a way, I can't blame them." No one, including young Japanese-Americans, knew what to think of the attack.

After her father was taken, the family spent several days in shock. Eventually, they learned he was being held in an immigration office in Seattle and went to visit him. He was behind steel bars.

"We were not even allowed to get close to that cage," she said. "It was hard to see him behind bars for doing nothing."

Later, they would learn he'd been reported as a possible Japanese spy, an absurd claim, Tanaka said. No evidence was ever presented and her father was never told what the allegations against him were. He wasn't even involved in the local Japanese immigrant community, she said.

Japanese, Italian and German community leaders and noncitizens who were suspected of being influences were detained in Department of Justice camps during World War II. Officially, they were supposed to have hearings, after which they could be released to the general internment camps run by the War Relocation Authority, but in practice, many were held without evidence and without legal representation.

The rest of the family had to leave in the spring, she said. They could pack 60 pounds of personal belongings. Her mother brought one pot so she'd be able to cook rice wherever she went. Many neighbors and people who had been friendly with the family stayed away, but Tanaka's art teacher, Mrs. Drake, came to say goodbye.

"I appreciated so much that she had the courage to come," she said.

The family was sent to the Puyallup fairgrounds as a temporary assembly place, then to Fresno, California. It was so hot people regularly fainted, and internees had to make their own mattresses from straw.

Tanaka said her family was moved to the Tule Lake camp in California in fall 1942. Once again, the internees weren't told where they were going - they were simply ordered to get on a train. The camp housed about 18,000 people on 26,000 acres. Newspapers were banned, and armed guards said anyone who left without authorization would be shot.

Because she had finished high school, Tanaka was put to work as a nurse's aide, where she changed beds, cleaned bedpans and helped with minor procedures. They had wards A through H, which included people with infectious diseases, children, maternity and more.

In 1943, the War Relocation Authority made people of Japanese descent fill out a "loyalty questionnaire." Two questions, numbers 27 and 28, would shape the rest of the war for many families.

Question 27 asked if the respondent would be willing to serve in the U.S. military. Many Japanese-Americans did, even while their families were locked in camps, but Tanaka said no, she didn't want to serve unless she was released.

"Why should they go to war if their parents were in a concentration camp?" she remembered thinking.

Question 28 asked if the respondent would forswear loyalty to the Japanese emperor and swear allegiance only to the United States. Tanaka reasoned that she'd been born an American citizen and had never sworn allegiance to the emperor or Japan in the first place, so she had nothing to forswear.

Her answers put her in a group called the "no-nos," people of Japanese descent who were branded disloyal.

"They can call me whatever they want to. I don't think I'm any more disloyal than anybody else," Tanaka said.

Those from other camps were relocated to Tule Lake, sometimes separated from families. People who led strikes or protests in other camps also ended up there. "Loyal" Japanese from Tule Lake were supposed to be moved elsewhere, but many declined to transfer.

"The people that came to Tule Lake were people who were loud about the injustice that was done to us," she said.

Surviving

at Heart Mountain

Yamamoto's family spent three years at Heart Mountain, a camp about 60 miles east of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.

They were farmers before the relocation order came down and had to get rid of any possessions related to Japan: dishes with the Japanese flag on them, photos from her parents' home.

"We had to either burn it or break it," she said.

The family tried to sell their farm implements, but left some things sitting where they were, including a brand-new Dodge pickup.

Most Western states, including Washington, had laws barring immigrants from Japan and other countries from owning land or becoming citizens. The Supreme Court would rule those laws unconstitutional in 1952.

Both Tanaka's and Yamamoto's families were farming on rented land. When they left, they lost everything: the houses they had built, the improvements they'd made.

At camp, Yamamoto's family was assigned to barracks and given an identification number: 37004. One barrack would house six families, with the two at either end reserved for families with more than five. Her family had one of the middle rooms, she said. Inside, they had straw mattresses and a coal-burning stove.

It was better than horse stables, she said, but not by much: "blazing hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter," she said. The food was served in a mess hall and was often weak stew. Toilets were communal. Privacy was scarce.

No one knew how long the war would last, but Yamamoto assumed her family would be there until it ended. She remembered the Army coming through to try to recruit young men.

"I never heard of such a thing, putting people in camps and telling them to serve," she said.

At camp, she went to school and still has the 1944 and 1945 yearbooks. They had a student government and sports. It was as normal as a school can be when its students live surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

No home

to return to

When the war ended, many internees were unsure what to do next.

"A lot of people in camp didn't go back home because there was nothing to go back to," Yamamoto said. Her family settled in Spokane, where her father had a friend. She'd wanted to go to college, but after internment, the family had no savings, so she did housework and eventually went to beauty school.

The U.S. government offered internees a free one-way ticket to Japan after the war. Many first-generation immigrants wanted to go home, including Tanaka's mother. So the family left for Japan, where she lived for several years. One of her four brothers had been studying there during the war. They stayed with family, and Tanaka got a job with a shipping company.

In 1952, she moved to Seattle for school, leaving her family behind. There, she met and got engaged to John Tanaka, an aspiring doctor, and followed him to St. Louis for medical school, then to Spokane around 1967 when he got a job at Deaconess Hospital.

Tanaka has few photos from camp: cameras were banned at Tule Lake, though a few people managed to sneak them in. She said she'd like to forget what was done to her, but doesn't think she'll ever be able to. The contrast between her father's personality - kind, soft-spoken, eager to try her cooking - and the way the U.S. government treated him is an especially bitter memory. No apology, even if it came with a check, will ever make that right, she said.

"I don't think we really received justice for what they did to us because we lost everything," she said.

For her, internment was an act of racism, plain and simple. If there's any good that can come out of it, she hopes it will serve as a cautionary tale against the knee-jerk fear and assumption that all people of Japanese ancestry were the same that led Roosevelt to sign the order.

"The United States is a pretty young country and we've got a lot to learn yet," Tanaka said.
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Kaz Yamamoto's name.

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75 years ago, the United States forced Japanese into internment camps. After World War II, many settled in Spokane. These are their stories.

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"Seventy-five years ago, I lived in a horse stable." That's how 90-year-old Kaz Yamamoto describes the summer of 1942. Yamamoto, a longtime Spokane resident, lived in the Yakima Valley with her Japanese immigrant parents when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Feb. 19, 1942, executive order evacuating Japanese-Americans from the West Coast.

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This piece by NPR discusses the exhibit formerly in the Smithsonian called The Art of Gaman. It is an exhibit composed of art pieces created by Japanese Americans while they were in internment camps or after the fact. Some of the art are artifacts from those camps, like the painting below, and some pieces that were created after people had returned, like the one made of bird pins. No matter the time in which these pieces were made, they were created out of a need to cope with the harsh reality of being put into camps. It was not only the conditions of these camps that made it hard to cope, but also the identity crisis internment caused. Many people were confused as to why they were labelled as enemy, yet forced to fight. This is the same conflict in the novel for many of the young men. They have been interned, yet are forced to decide if they will join the army, putting themselves at odds within.

Stamberg, Susan. "The Creative Art of Coping in Japanese Internment." NPR, 12 May 2010. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126557553, Accessed 28 Oct. 2018.

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When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government took action at home. People of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast were forcibly removed from their homes and taken to desolate inland areas of the U.S. Some 120,000 men, women and children were placed in internment camps for the duration of World War II.

In Washington, D.C, the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery is exhibiting art and other objects created in those camps -- a grim yet handsome reminder of a dark chapter of American history.
'We Had No Furniture'
Norman Mineta grew up in San Jose, Calif., the son of Japanese immigrants. He went on to serve in Congress and eventually became commerce secretary under Bill Clinton, and transportation secretary under George W. Bush.

Mineta still has vivid childhood memories of his internment at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. He was 11 years old when his family was relocated to hastily built, bare barracks.

"We had no furniture," Mineta recalls. "All you get is four blank walls and one light bulb in the middle of the room and a black potbellied stove over in the corner ... and cots. That was it."

And so, in all 10 of the internment camps, people began making what they needed with whatever materials they could find. Scrap lumber became chairs, tables, dressers. Found metal became knives (they weren't allowed to bring sharp objects into the camps). And for fun, scrap wood was carved into small, painted birds.

Delphine Hirasuna, a third-generation Japanese-American, was organizing family belongings after her mother's death and found a bird pin that belonged to her mother, stashed away in an old wooden box in the garage. Lacquered, with shades of brown and yellow -- it was this pin that inspired the exhibit at the Renwick.

Hirasuna found many other trinkets from her family's time in internment, and began asking around for other camp-made objects. She began going house to house in California farm country.

"When I asked them if they had anything, they would go into their sheds ... and they would haul out this dusty box," Hirasuna says. "And the items in the box would still be wrapped in newspaper from 1945. So it was pretty obvious to me that they never looked at it when they brought it back from camp."
Looking Like The Enemy
A painted wooden carving of the Heart Mountain barracks, a model ship crafted of wood, wire and string, a carved and polished Buddhist shrine are all on display at The Art of Gaman exhibit at the Renwick gallery.

From the Amache internment camp in Colorado came a silk vest a mother made for her son who was going off to war. (Eventually, some of the internees were drafted or even volunteered for a special combat unit of U.S.-born Japanese-Americans.) The cream-colored vest is decorated with 1,000 red, French-tied knots.

"One person made each knot," explains Robyn Kennedy, chief of the Renwick. "This was passed around in the camp, and this was in order to provide strength and good luck for the person it was given to."

On the back of the vest a ferocious tiger is painted in orange and black ink. His hunched shoulders and sharp teeth show his strength.

"No one is going to go through that tiger to get this person's back," Kennedy says.

It's ironic that people of Japanese ancestry could fight and die for America, but in those post-Pearl Harbor days, they were also seen as a potential threat. They looked like the enemy. Families were told they were relocated for their own protection, but even at age 11, that made Norman Mineta wonder.

"You have guard towers every [200], 300 feet all around the camp with barbed wire, holding us in," he says. "You look up and you wonder: If we're in here for our protection, why are those machine guns pointing at us?"
'With Patience And Dignity'
The Art of Gaman exhibit provides striking visual evidence of how internees coped -- fashioning, by hand, arts and crafts that enhanced their difficult days.

" Gaman means to bear the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity," Hirasuna explains.

She began work on her picture and history book -- also called The Art of Gaman -- not long after Sept. 11, 2001. She says she is inspired by the way internees discovered their creative talent.

"It makes me wonder what we, all of us, have in ourselves," Hirasuna says. "Could we create things of beauty like that in adversity in such a situation?"

There were a few professional artists in the camps -- some of the internees had been illustrators for Disney. But most of the people in the camps had not created art or crafts before their internment -- and never did again. They went back to being doctors, dentists, farmers, shop owners.

To Hirasuna, their acts of creativity are also acts of courage -- "the quiet courage of people who are put in the worst circumstances, and they find it in themselves to rise above it and make things that are truly beautiful."

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The Creative Art Of Coping In Japanese Internment

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After the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, the U.S. government relocated 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes on the West Coast to desolate inland areas of the U.S. The Art of Gaman is a new exhibit that showcases works of art created by internees during this dark chapter of U.S.

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75 Years Later, Art Exhibit Considers Lessons from Japanese-American Internment

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75 Years Later, Art Exhibit Considers Lessons from Japanese-American Internment

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This piece talks about an art exhibit in The Japanese American National Museum in L.A. called "Instructions to All-Persons: reflections on Executive Order 9066." In their exhibit, one artist created a painting of the famous war hero Sen. Daniel Inouye with a background of pages from a Bible. It is meant to reflect "what it meant to be Japanese American," though that meaning is complicated for most. It also features the original document of Executive Order 9066. This exhibit not only reflects the turmoil from 75 years ago, but is also meant to address the current treatment of minorities, like Muslims, that are villainized because of war abroad. This contributes to our discussion of No-No Boy because it also tackles with idea of a Japanese American identity. Different from No-No Boy, this exhibit clearly praises those that served regardless, where No-No Boy complicates the importance of being a veteran in characters that are trying to be more American than Japanese.

Young, Robin. "75 Years Later, Art Exhibit Considers Lessons from Japanese-American Internment." Here and Now,  10 March 2017. http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/03/10/art-exhibit-japanese-american-internment, Accessed 28 Oct. 2018.

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75 Years Later, Art Exhibit Considers Lessons From Japanese-American Internment

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Clement Hanami of the Japanese American National Museum talks with Here & Now's Robin Young about "Instructions to All Persons: Reflections on Executive Order 9066."

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Soldier, Mike Saijo, 1993. Wax, shellac, acrylic, toner on pages of the New Testament Bible on wood panel

Mori, Darryl. "Mike Saijo: Remaking the Rules Through Art." Discover Nikkei, Japanese American National Museum, 2017. http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2017/3/23/mike-saijo/, Accessed 28 Oct. 2018.

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Daniel Inouye: A Japanese American Soldier's Valor in WWII

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Daniel Inouye: A Japanese American Soldier's Valor in WWII

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Sen. Daniel Inouye is a Japanese American world hero that was awarded the Medal of Honor for his efforts in WWII. He also is one of the longest serving senators in US History. Inouye is from Hawaii and enlisted in the army following  Pearl Harbor and the lifted ban of Japanese Americans from enlisting. Inouye was never interned, but he served in the segregated 442nd unit among Japanese Americans that had been interned and thereby forced to serve. Inouye's heroism and lauded career serves as a foil to Ichiro in No-No Boy, as Inouye is exactly what he wishes to be, or what he wishes that he had done when faced with the questionaire.

"Daniel Inouye: A Japanese American Soldier's Valor in WWII." National Park Service, 9 Nov. 2017. https://www.nps.gov/articles/inouyeww2.htm, Accessed 28 Oct. 2018.

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Senator Daniel K. Inouye at the USS Arizona Memorial in 2003
US Navy

Daniel Inouye was one of the most influential politicians of the late 20 th Century. He had an unparalleled 50 year career in the United States Senate representing his home state of Hawaii ending in 2012. He served as President pro tempore of the Senate in his final years which made him the highest-ranking Asian American politician in U.S history. Much like his fellow senator and friend Senator Bob Dole, Inouye was a decorated World War II veteran. Like Dole he brought a level of character and decorum that perpetuated the respectability and trust seen by all with the United States Senate. His contributions to perpetuating National Park sites in Hawaii including securing funding for Kalaupapa National Historic Park as well as the continued preservation of the USS Arizona Memorial were immeasurable.

Dan was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. His parents had emigrated from Japan to settle in Hawaii's Bingham Tract which was a Chinese-American enclave in Honolulu. Coming of age as tension grew with Imperial Japan was hard enough, but graduating from high school in Hawaii as a Japanese American immediately following the surprise attack of Pearl Harbor leading to the death of over 1,000 Americans prove especially difficult for Inouye. Curfews were enforced for Japanese Americans in Hawaii. There was an attempt to ship them to internment camps but the local economy for the islands relied heavily on Japanese American businesses. He attempted to enlist in the military but was turned away. He spent a year enduring insults and being questioned about his patriotism. In 1943, when the U.S. Army dropped its enlistment ban on Japanese Americans, Inouye curtailed his premedical studies at the University of Hawaii and enlisted in the Army.
"My father just looked straight ahead, and I looked straight ahead, and then he cleared his throat and said, 'America has been good to us. It has given me two jobs. It has given you and your sisters and brothers education. We all love this country. Whatever you do, do not dishonor your country. Remember - never dishonor your family. And if you must give your life, do so with honor.' I knew exactly what he ment. I said, 'Yes, sir. Good-bye."

Sergeant Inouye in the Vosges Mountains region of France
US Army

He volunteered to be part of the segregated all- Nisei-442 nd Regimental Combat Team . The 442nd Regimental Combat Team was activated on February 1, 1943 at Camp Shelby Mississippi. The Team was composed of Japanese American volunteers from the internment camps, Hawaii, states outside of the west coast exclusion zone, and Japanese American soldiers who were already serving in the U.S. Army when the war broke out. Inouye was promoted to sergeant within his first year, and he was assigned as a platoon sergeant. He served in Italy in 1944 during the Rome-Arno before his regiment was transferred to the Vosges Mountains region of France.

Two Japanese-American color guard and color bearers of the 442nd RCT stand at attention during their citation for rescuing the Lost Battalion. France. November 12, 1944.
US Army

Inouye and the 442 nd proved their unbridled valor in the Vosges Mountains when they were ordered to find and rescue a lost battalion of 400 U.S. infantry cut off and surrounded by German forces. In five days of battle in the fall of 1944, the 442nd broke through German defenses and rescued 211 men. The 442nd suffered over 800 casualties. I Company went in with 185 men; eight walked out unhurt. K Company began with 186 men; 17 walked out. As a result of his courage Sergeant Inouye with given a battlefield commission to second lieutenant. At one point while he was leading an attack, a German round struck him in the chest directly above his heart, but the bullet was stopped by the two silver dollars he happened to have stacked in his shirt pocket. He continued to carry the coins throughout the war in his shirt pocket as good luck charms. Three members of the 442nd, Barney Hajiro, James Okubo, and George Sakato were awarded the Medal of Honor for their participation on the rescue, although due to discrimination at the time, they did not receive their medals until 2000.

Lieutenant Inouye Infantry Platoon Leader
US Army

In early 1945 Lieutenant Inouye and the 442 nd redeployed to the Gothic Line. For nine months in 1944 German Field Marshal Kesselring directed the construction of the Gothic Line along the top of the Apennines in the mountains joining Italy and France. This included the Todt Organization known for its fortifications at Monte Cassino. It was impossible terrain and the worst possible scenario for the American forces attacking uphill against well-fortified and dug in German infantry and artillery.

On April 21, 1945 Lieutenant Inouye was leading a flanking attack on a heavily-defended ridge near San Terenzo in Tuscany, Italy. The American platoon was in turn flanked in a surprise ambush by three MG-43 machine guns at relatively close range. Inouye's platoon of 30 men was being cut to pieces. He stood up to look for the best avenue for cover when he was shot in the stomach.

Ignoring his wound, he proceeded to attack and destroy the first machine gun nest with hand grenades and his Thompson submachine gun. When informed of the severity of his wound, he refused treatment and rallied his men for an attack on the second machine gun position, which he successfully destroyed before collapsing from blood loss. As his squad distracted the third machine gunner, Inouye crawled toward the final bunker, coming within 10 yards. As he raised himself up and cocked his arm to throw his last grenade, a German soldier inside the bunker fired a rifle grenade, which struck his right elbow, nearly severing most of his arm and leaving his primed grenade reflexively "clenched in a fist that suddenly didn't belong to me anymore". Inouye's horrified soldiers moved to his aid, but he shouted for them to keep back out of fear his severed fist would involuntarily relax and drop the grenade. While the German inside the bunker reloaded his rifle, Inouye pried the live grenade from his useless right hand and transferred it to his left. As the enemy soldier aimed his rifle at him, Inouye tossed the grenade into the bunker and destroyed it. He stumbled to his feet and continued forward, silencing the last German resistance with a one-handed burst from his Thompson before being wounded in the leg and tumbling unconscious to the bottom of the ridge. He awoke to see the worried men of his platoon hovering over him. His only comment before being carried away was to order them back to their positions, saying "nobody called off the war!"

The remainder of Inouye's mutilated right arm was later amputated at a field hospital and without proper anesthesia, as he had been given too much morphine at an aid station and it was feared any more would lower his blood pressure enough to kill him. He had to endure his arm being sawn off without anesthesia. He ceased carrying around his lucky silver dollars in his breast pocket.

Amputee Daniel Inouye with Bob Dole at Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan
Robert Dole Library

Although Inouye had lost his right arm, he remained in the military until 1947 and was honorably discharged with the rank of captain. At the time of his leaving the Army, he was a recipient of the Bronze Star medal and Purple Heart. Inouye was initially awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his bravery in this action, with the award later being upgraded to the Medal of Honor by President Bill Clinton (alongside 19 other Nisei servicemen who served in the 442 nd). While recovering at Percy Jones Army Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan; he met and became friends with another recovering severely wounded young officer - Bob Dole. The two became friends that lasted through their terms in the United States Senate and up to Inouye's death in 2012. The Percy Jones complex of federal buildings, no longer a hospital, is now named Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center in honor of three patients who became United States Senators.

The 442nd Regiment of Japanese-Americans would go on to be one the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of American warfare. The 4,000 men who initially made up the unit in April 1943 had to be replaced nearly 2.5 times. In total, about 14,000 men served, earning 9,486 Purple Hearts.. The unit was awarded eight Presidential Unit Citations (5 earned in one month). ¹ Twenty-one of its members were awarded Medals of Honor. Its motto was "Go for Broke". They proved their loyalty to the United States of American in its greatest time of need like no other.

"Americanism is not and has never been a matter of race or color.
Americanism is a matter of mind and heart."

- FDR

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Daniel Inouye: A Japanese American Soldier's Valor in World War II (U.S. National Park Service)

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Daniel Inouye was one of the most influential politicians of the late 20 th Century. He had an unparalleled 50 year career in the United States Senate representing his home state of Hawaii ending in 2012. He served as President pro tempore of the Senate in his final years which made him the highest-ranking Asian American politician in U.S history.

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Only What We Could Carry is an anthology of experiences of the Japanese American internees. It came about as a project by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program. It is edited by Lawson Fusao Inada, Patricia Wakida, and William Hohri. This anthology gives further insight into the confused identity of Japanese Americans during internment.

"Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience." Heyday into California. https://heydaybooks.com/book/only-what-we-could-carry-the-j/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2018.

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An Important Classic in Heyday's California

In the wake of wartime panic that followed the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans residing along the West Coast of the United States were uprooted from their homes and their communities and banished to internment camps throughout the country.

Through personal documents, art, and propaganda, Only What We Could Carry expresses through words, art, and haunting recollections, the fear, confusion and anger of the camp experience. The only anthology of its kind, Only What We Could Carry is an emotional and intellectual testament to the dignity, spirit and strength of the Japanese American internees.

A project of the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program

Reviews

"The presence of such a volume inspires historical and moral reflection on both the delicate construction of individual liberty and the ambiguities of national identity"

- Doubletake

"It conveys the deep anguish felt by Japanese who defined themselves as citizens of the United States and yet lost their rights as citizens during a time of national fear."

- School Library Journal

" Only What We Could Carry gathers together the voices of interment-private, personal stories that could have been lost, but will now be heard and felt. It's as if we have a seat at a family dinner, listening to stories passed down from one generation to another, feeling the pain and the spirit of hope."

-David Mas Masumoto, author of Harvest Son: Planting Roots in American Soil

About the Editors
William Hohri
William Hohri is a Nisei born in San Francisco in 1927. He was interned at the Manzanar camp during his high school years and graduated from the University of Chicago after the war. He is the author of Repairing America: An Account of the Movement for Japanese-American Redress (1988) and a columnist for the Rafu Shimpo newspaper.
Patricia Wakida
Patricia Wakida's published books, essays, stories, and poetry include: Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience, Generations Experience; A Japanese American Community Portrait, Letters of Intent, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Nikkei Heritage, Kyoto Journal, Santa Barbara Review, and the International Quarterly.
Lawson Fusao Inada
Lawson Fusao Inada is regarded by many as the poet laureate of Japanese America.He is co-editor of Aiiieeeee! (1983) and The Big Aiiieeeee! (1991) and author of Legends from Camp (1992) and Drawing the Line (1997). Inada is a multiple recipient of NEA Poetry Fellowships and has read his works at the White House. He has been Professor of English at Southern Oregon State College since 1966.

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Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience

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An Important Classic in Heyday's California In the wake of wartime panic that followed the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans residing along the West Coast of the United States were uprooted from their homes and their communities and banished to internment camps throughout the country.

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From Right to Wrong: A U.S. Apology for Japanese Internment

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From Right to Wrong: A U.S. Apology for Japanese Internment

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In honor of the 25th anniversary of Reagan's Civil Liberties Act. In honor of this apology, the act was put on display next to Executive Order 9066 in the National Archives. This piece also interviews John Tateishi, one of the leaders of the Japanese American Citizens League, and his successful quest for redress. This act from 1988 and the remembrance of it serves to show how criminal and unconstitutional the internment was. In No-No Boy, though it takes place after internment, there is no official apology for internment. However, there are several white characters that recognize how terrible it is and try to apologize on the majority's behalf. The redress continues the conversation of if an apology is good enough to make up for what happened.

Qureshi, Bilal. "From Wrong to Right: A U.S. Apology for Japanese Internment." NPR, 9 Aug. 2013. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/09/210138278/japanese-internment-redress. Accessed 28 Oct. 2018.

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This month marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream for a more equal America. But there's another anniversary looming: 25 years ago this week, the Japanese-American community celebrated a landmark victory in its own struggle for civil rights.

In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act to compensate more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. The legislation offered a formal apology and paid out $20,000 in compensation to each surviving victim. The law won congressional approval only after a decade-long campaign by the Japanese-American community.

To mark the 25th anniversary of its passage, the Civil Liberties Act was put on display at the National Archives alongside the original Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment. For senior curator Bruce Bustard, it was a powerful juxtaposition of the journey from a wrong to a right.

When she saw the Executive Order in a glass case, Marielle Tsukamoto, who grew up in an internment camp, said she had "shivers up and down [her] back" because she realized the order ruined lives.

To some, it might seem like a bureaucratic government document, but according to Bustard, that's precisely what makes this exhibition such a potent reminder of what federal documents really mean. "They are filled with legalese, and again that to me reinforces the idea that from these sorts of legal decisions that our government makes, these kinds of consequences can happen."

The Japanese-American internment camps were often nothing more than makeshift barracks, with families and children cramped together behind barbed wires. Most of the internees were U.S. citizens from the West Coast who were forced to abandon or liquidate their businesses when war relocation authorities escorted them to the camps.

John Tateishi says the experience was both humiliating and disorienting. "We came out of these camps with a sense of shame and guilt, of having been considered betrayers of our country." He says that after the war most families never spoke about it. "There were no complaints, no big rallies or demands for justice because it was not the Japanese way."

But decades later and inspired by the civil rights movement, the Japanese American Citizens League launched a contentious campaign for redress. It divided the community along generational lines. Tateishi became a leader of the movement.

"You have to sometimes bring your community dragging and screaming behind you, but you better have strong convictions that what you're doing is right," he says.

In 1980, Congress responded by establishing a commission to investigate the legacy of the camps. After extensive interviews and personal testimonies from victims, the commission issued its final report, calling the incarceration a "grave injustice" motivated by "racial prejudice, war hysteria and the failure of political leadership."

Japanese-Americans then serving in Congress, including Robert Matsui and Norm Mineta, helped turn that report into legislative language, providing for tax-free compensation and a formal apology. Mineta has served in two presidential Cabinets, but he says that bipartisan effort remains one of his proudest achievements.

"Today I just feel that Congress is so polarized that I'm not sure a grassroots movement like this would have the kind of impact that we see resulting in the signing of the bill by President Reagan in 1988," he says.

Tateishi says the redress campaign was less about the compensation for those who had already suffered and more about the next generation of Americans.

"There is a saying in Japanese culture, 'kodomo no tame ni,' which means, 'for the sake of the children.' And for us running this campaign, that had much to do with it," he saysi. "It's the legacy we're handing down to them and to the nation to say that, 'You can make this mistake, but you also have to correct it - and by correcting it, hopefully not repeat it again.' "

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From Wrong To Right: A U.S. Apology For Japanese Internment

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More than 100,000 people of Japanese descent were put in camps during World War II. Decades later and inspired by the civil rights movement, Japanese-Americans launched a campaign for redress that culminated in an official apology. The community marks the 25th anniversary of that victory this week.

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This piece explores the divide of Japanese Americans following WWII with dissenters, or better known as "no-no boys." The piece follows the retellings of the treatment of no-no boys, a label given to the author's grandfather. Resentment reached great highs to the point where service men refused to walk on the same side of the street as dissenters. No-no boys were not only social outcasts, but were fully discriminated. Families would be discriminated against if someone was arrested as a dissenter. This provides greater insight into Ichiro's feelings as an outcast in the novel. While we get scenes of him being called out and even spit on, this further shows how pervasive this discrimination was.

Kurata, Elizabeth. "The No-No Boys and Me." The Daily Californian, 25 Sep. 2015. http://www.dailycal.org/2015/09/25/the-no-no-boys-and-me/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2018.

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Culture
The no-no boys and me

I've always known that, in regards to my Japanese cultural heritage, I basically grew up under a rock.

Well not quite a rock - more like a collection of larger rocks. I grew up at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Colorado Springs is known for many things; it's home to numerous conservative Christian groups; a large Army base, Fort Carson; and both the worst-dressed and fittest individuals in the United States. But it's not known for cultural diversity or for being a hotbed of Japanese American culture. My mixed-race family was somewhat of an outlier. When my dad moved our family because of a job outside his previous tech bubble of San Jose, he inevitably had to cut ties with a familiar Japanese American community, leading to a sort of cultural isolation in Colorado Springs.

My brother and I were very young when we moved, so for us, being Japanese American
primarily meant correcting people on the spelling of our Japanese last name - "That's Kurata with a K. K-U-R ..." To be half-Japanese, or hapa, was to admit that the blond woman trailing us in public was, in fact, our mother and that, no, we were not adopted. My personal Japanese American history is primarily my dad's love of Japanese food - particularly udon noodles, like the ones his mom made him - and my white mom, with a distaste for sushi, attempting unsuccessfully to find a Japanese teacher for my brother and me.

I can't remember the first time I learned about the mass Japanese American incarceration. It's possible that my grandparents' story was always present in my mind, just as I always knew my last name. My grandparents were both born in the United States, although my grandfather was considered a keibei, a person of Japanese ancestry born in the United States but educated in Japan. He returned to the States about the same time World War II was starting. He was sent early on to build the incarceration camps, while my grandmother and her family were sent to live in the cramped, dirty horse stalls of the Santa Anita race tracks. Their paths crossed at Manzanar, and they married quickly after meeting; together they were sent to a camp called Tule Lake for Japanese Americans considered disloyal. While in camp, they had my dad's oldest siblings, Aunt Nach and Uncle Yo. Other family lore says my machinist grandfather built a sake distillery in camp and helped construct the camera for the famous incarcerated photographer Miyatake. I've always known that my grandparents left the camp after the war ended and moved to Los Angeles, where my dad was eventually born. It was always a fact that my dad and his siblings never learned Japanese and never knew many stories of the camps, because it was not something on which the elders reminisced.

Their story was always just that - a story. I never met my grandparents. Their story was connected to me, but it seemed distant, and their history never seemed much of mine.

Their story was always just that - a story. I never met my grandparents. Their story was connected to me, but it seemed distant, and their history never seemed much of mine.

Since I left Colorado Springs, I have tried to learn more about my family's story, to gain context. This summer, while interning at a Japanese American cultural center in Oregon, I heard for the first time a name for my men like my grandfather - "no-no boys." These were men who were sent to Tule Lake and given this nickname because of how they answered the loyalty questionnaire or, more specifically, questions 27 and 28. These questions were, in short, "Will you serve the United States in combat?" and "Will you swear allegiance to the United States, forswearing allegiance to Japan?" These men answered "no" and "no," respectively. My grandfather told the person interviewing him, "It doesn't matter what I say - you won't believe me anyways." And so, he and his new bride, my grandmother, were sent to Tule Lake. The nickname was meant to defend the men's choice to refuse to serve in the Army. But the fact that these men needed defending was intriguing to me. I had never thought of it as a divisive issue. I had seen pictures of the Japanese American 442nd infantry unit but figured that those men chose to serve in the war and that some men, such as my grandfather, simply chose not to.

In order to learn more, I spoke with Lisa Hirai-Tsuchitani, a lecturer in UC Berkeley's ethnic studies department who is currently teaching a class on Japanese American historical and contemporary issues. As we got to talking, I asked her about her family's story. She quickly asked me right back, "Well, does your family talk about the camps?" I told her that I had never met my grandparents, that I had heard most people of their generation tried to move on and not discuss it. In fact, because of the vacuum I grew up in, I didn't even know the appropriate tact to take when talking about the camps.

She was, thankfully, incredibly kind and understanding of my ignorance. I told her about my confusion around the rhetoric of the no-no boys. She was very diplomatic and too kind to make big assertions, but she did tell me that growing up in Japantown, San Jose, she would see men refuse to walk on the same side of the street if one was a "draft resister" and the other served in the Army. Up to this point, I had no idea that my family - or families that lived alongside my grandparents - might have been looked down upon for choosing not to serve.

Further research gave me more background: Almost immediately after Pearl Harbor, most leaders in the Japanese American community were imprisoned. Three months later, president Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, sending all American citizens of Japanese ancestry to prison. Many people in the community wanted to protest the forced internment. But those who might have led the movement were the ones imprisoned, leaving only leaders of one organization, called the Japanese American Citizens League, or JACL. The JACL encouraged Japanese Americans to enter the camps without a fuss, to do their wartime part and prove their innocence. The JACL went so far as to formally condemn the no-no boys. The JACL hoped that if Japanese Americans fought in the war and succeeded, they would be welcomed back with open arms. Even after the war, as I learned from Dr. Hirai-Tsuchitani, the tension between the JACL and the no-no boys remained.

I asked more of my family members to see if they knew of the divide in the community between those who were labeled "patriots" and those labeled "dissenters." Thankfully, in its Japanese American community in Los Angeles, my family never faced any animosity due to my grandfather's decision. My dad's eldest sister, whom we call Aunt Nachan (a nickname literally meaning "oldest sister"), said the family never questioned her father's decision. She explained that my grandfather had no idea what was going to happen at the end of the war, so to take a survey and have to try to decide which country to be "loyal" to was difficult. There were many questions. After the war, would the families be sent to Japan, which was not even their home country? Would they be allowed to stay in the United States, a country that had imprisoned them? I imagine it would be challenging to feel loyal to a country that had done this to them. No matter who won the war, there was the undeniable fact that they were American just as much as anyone else, but their phenotypes certainly made them look like the enemy, and they had been imprisoned for that.

Aunt Nach told me that her family didn't know anyone who served in the war. I suspect that might be, in part, why my family didn't experience the discrimination Dr. Harai-Tschitani witnessed. But as I began to read more and more about it, I learned that my family was lucky for not receiving discrimination. I read that many people would not admit they were sent to Tule Lake or had family members in Tule Lake because of the shame they felt for not serving "their country."

Maybe it's a good thing I didn't know this. Maybe it's a positive thing that I saw the community as united. Growing up as I did allowed me to make a blanket of Japanese American history - one I crafted out of my family's history and all the things I had liked. I am a proud member of the JACL, which identifies now as a civil rights league and has been an ally in many civil rights injustices, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia. And now that I know that at one point, the JACL denounced no-no boys, I don't think this erases the good it has done in recent years. From my vantage point in history, the fact that any citizens or people were forcibly incarcerated without due cause is crazy, and to think that people who shared this atrocity were pitted against one another because of questions 27 and 28 is even more crazy. But learning of my grandfather's decision to say "no-no" makes me proud, and I find his decision just as important as that of the men who felt called to fight in the war.

Perhaps the fact that I had no idea of these tensions bodes well for the legacy of the Japanese American community. Maybe it means that because of the luxury of temporal distance, the newer legacy of a postwar united community is right.

Maybe the fact that this history is complicated - that it does have texture, even if I have learned of it late - makes it more real to me. As I sort through these facts, it becomes less a distant story and more a part of my history.

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The no-no boys and me | The Daily Californian

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I've always known that, in regards to my Japanese cultural heritage, I basically grew up under a rock. Well not quite a rock - more like a collection of larger rocks. I grew up at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Colorado Springs is known forRead More...

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In this curation, I wanted to talk about the context of WWII internment and what happened right after. I also wanted to talk about how internment is viewed today by not only Japanese Americans, but by Americans and America in general. I used journalistic pieces and historical essays to talk about the past and present. I also used art and literature created during internment or in reflection of it to supplement the history. I included more information about the issue of internment and dissenters. I narrowed the issue to the Seattle area to talk about the specific setting in the novel. I also included the piece about Inouye to show what the figure Ichiro wanted to be like. Inouye is not just a Japanese American war-hero, he is just simply a war hero. I also made sure to include the order that called for internment to further contextualize the discrimination Japanese Americans were facing.
I looked at how internment is viewed today. Following Reagan's Civil Liberties Act in 1988, it is easy to condemn the internment. But the wounds still run very deep. There are still clear memories of what those camps were like and what their legacies are today. I looked both at the impact in Seattle, the setting of the novel, but also the legacy in Spokane. It shows that the internment itself was not the issue, but also what happened after.
The inclusion of art and literature made at or after the fact was added to show the emotional wounds still present today. Though most of the pieces I found were made in the camps, their emotional need to cope still resounds today with people trying to deal with the aftermath of these tragedies.
Japanese American internment is an easy thing to condemn today, but is harder to understand the deep trauma it caused for people. American citizens were having their loyalty and their identity questioned for the first time and in a way that was entirely raced based. Though most people today were not alive during this time. its legacy has lived on. Understanding the emotional turmoil it has caused, as seen in No-No Boy, is key on learning from this mistake.
With issues of Muslims being stereotyped as terrorists and discriminated against, especially in the wake of 9/11, we must be aware to not make this mistake again.