Remembering Executive Order 9066 Through the Generations

by Julia Park, photos by Alex Garland

The forced removal of Japanese Americans into incarceration camps after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 affected thousands of families including both Issei — Japanese-born immigrants — and their Nisei children born in the United States.

Now, as the oldest generation of Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII is largely gone, their descendants are carrying the memory of the camps forward. More than 80 years later, the struggle is how to preserve the integrity of the story when each generation's memory of the camps is different.

The term Issei refers to Japanese immigrants who came to the U.S. before Executive Order 9066. These were mostly middle-aged or older during WWII, according to Densho. Their American-born children are Nisei or second-generation Japanese Americans, many of whom were children or young adults during WWII. The children of Nisei are Sansei, most of whom were born after the war. The children of Sansei are Yonsei, or fourth-generation Japanese Americans, followed by Gosei and Rokusei.

Parents faced the overwhelming decisions of what to do with their property in the brief time before they had to leave for the incarceration camps, but their children weren't forced to shoulder the same level of responsibility. "If you had gotten the older generation, who were the Isseis, they'd probably tell you a whole different stor[y] than I'm telling you," said Victor Ikeda, a Nisei who was in high school when he was incarcerated at Minidoka.

Several Japanese Americans from college to retirement age reflected on the Day of Remembrance this month, and on what it means to pass down the memory of the camps to future generations.

The Story Begins

About 48 people gathered in a light-filled room at The Lakeshore, a retirement community at the southern tip of Lake Washington on Feb. 16. Life Enrichment Director Krista Trapp walked around closing the blinds on the windows as residents trickled in and filled the rows of chairs facing the front, where a screen indicated that the oral history presentation was about to begin.

Among them were Victor and Mary Ikeda, Nisei survivors of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans. They weren't the focus of this presentation, which featured video recordings of interviews with Japanese American Lakeshore residents, but their son and Densho founder, Tom Ikeda, kicked off the series by featuring his parents' stories.

Victor is now 97 and Mary is 96. When they were incarcerated, they were in their mid-teens.

Victor's family had been leasing an apartment in Seattle when they were forced to leave for the Puyallup detention facility along with thousands of other Japanese American residents from Washington State and Alaska. They sold all their furniture for $500 because they only had two weeks to prepare to leave their home, Victor said.

"Whatever offer you got, you took and walked away," he said.

Their families stayed in the detention facility, then called the Puyallup Assembly Center or "Camp Harmony," for four to five months. The Ikedas both recounted what life was like in the camp.

"One evening what happened was for an easy dinner, they had Vienna sausage that everybody got sick on, so in the middle of the night, everybody was rushing to the bathrooms," Victor said. "The guards thought there was a riot."

"I remember the first day we went to camp, they gave us bags," Mary said. "They ran out of mattresses, so we had to stuff the bags with hay for our mattress and some people … stuffed it so much that when they [lay] down on it they just rolled off."

Mary also said she remembered a dead cow near the edge of camp. "He must have got close to the wires, and they thought it was us escaping, and they shot him," Mary said.

After their time in the Puyallup detention facility, Victor and Mary's families moved to the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho. There, the Ikedas were among those who helped harvest the potato crop after the young men who would normally be working on the farms were drafted into the Army, and Japanese Americans were recruited to pick the potatoes in their place. As teens, the Ikedas knew each other and have warm memories of the local youth "gangs" that formed rivalries and played sports together.

But those experiences are only a part of the story. As teenagers, they could take things in stride, but the older people who had lost homes, businesses, and belongings suffered more, Victor said. While he and Mary may be able to share positive memories, that's not what Day of Remembrance means to them.

"The Day of Remembrance is you young people … telling the rest of the world that you should remember what we went through … When President Roosevelt signed that [Executive Order 9066] and put us into the camps and stuff, they had to apologize to us because it was wrong," he said.

The Ikedas were married in 1951. More records of their families' time at Minidoka can be found in the Mary and Victor Ikeda Collection available through the Densho Digital Repository. Densho also contains separate full oral history interviews with Victor and Mary.

The Ikedas said all of their friends who were with them in the camps are gone now.

"People don't like to talk about it. If you were in camp, you don't want to talk about it," Jan Kumasaka, another resident at The Lakeshore who was only 3 or 4 when she went to the Puyallup detention facility, said. "But those people [who were in the camps] are really dying off now."

The Story Is Told

Outside the Northwest Detention Center, a group of over 100 people shake cans, blow whistles, and hold signs with messages like "Japanese Americans Say Never Again" and "Stop Repeating History." Tents shield people from the rain, as well as the taiko drums and sound equipment.

Stanley Shikuma steps up to the front to offer a few words before the protest gets fully underway. A taiko drummer and social justice activist, Shikuma is both simultaneously on this day.

In the Japanese American incarceration camps, "the food was terrible, sanitation was bad, medical care was almost nonexistent," Shikuma said. "And when we talk to folks who have been inside or are still inside the Northwest Detention Center, we hear the same exact things."

Shikuma's parents were Nisei, making Shikuma Sansei. Even before he was born, the incarceration shaped Shikuma's life.

Shikuma's father's side of the family was from Watsonville, California, and after being forcibly moved to Poston, Arizona, during the war, they moved to Brogan, Oregon.

Shikuma's mother's family was from Shelton, Washington, and were imprisoned in the Tule Lake concentration camp. Her brother, who was a minister near Brogan at the time, brought Shikuma's mother down from Shelton to meet Shikuma's father, whom she later married. If not for the camps, they would never have met.

The post-war resettlement impacted Shikuma's life more directly. Shikuma's grandfather had started a farm under his uncle's name due to alien land laws, and the farm was starting to become successful when the war began. The family didn't lose the farm because an Italian immigrant looked after it for them, but they still struggled to make ends meet as they restarted their lives.

Shikuma said he recalls eating scrambled eggs for dinner and only later realizing that it was because the family couldn't afford meat. He also learned that the farm had almost gone bankrupt in the '50s.

By the time he got to high school in the mid- to late-60s, the family had become more financially stable and could afford to send him to college. His sister was taking Asian American studies courses in college and telling him about what she was learning. Shikuma read books about the incarceration, such as Michi Nishiura Weglyn's book Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps.

He began to ask his parents about what they had experienced in the camps. "But they would always say, 'Oh, I don't remember that much' or 'Oh, it wasn't that bad,' or 'Who wants to remember those things, we'd rather forget,'" Shikuma said.

In 1982 or 1984, Shikuma took his mother on the Tule Lake Pilgrimage. On the bus ride over, he asked her if anything looked familiar.

"And then she just gave me this odd look and said, 'Well, how would I know, because I never saw the camp from outside,'" Shikuma said. "Because when they brought them in on the train, all the shades were drawn so they couldn't see out the windows."

He also remembers asking her how long she was there, expecting her to give a rough estimate. Instead, she said one year, one month, and one day.

"She knew that she left at 10 p.m. at night, she knew that she got there before lunch," Shikuma said. "Forty years later, she could tell me within about a two-hour window exactly how long she was behind the barbed wire."

That signaled to him that the camps had a deeper impact on his parents than they would admit aloud.

The impact of the camps further rippled out into tensions within the family and community. Shikuma said he remembers the parents of his non-Japanese friends blowing off the crazy things their teens would do, but most of the Japanese parents were different.

"Toe the line, don't do anything that gets you in trouble … because if you stick out you might get taken away," Shikuma said. "To them, it wasn't this abstract [idea of] you got to be good or you'll be arrested, or they'll send you to jail. It was really fear. It could happen, because it happened to us."

That attitude started to shift as the movement for redress gained momentum in the 1970s. Japanese Americans began organized efforts to demand financial reparations and an apology from the U.S. government for the incarceration.

The Commission on the Wartime Internment and Relocation of Civilians (CWRIC), authorized in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter, heard from over 500 former detainees about their experiences. There were three days of hearings in Seattle, and Shikuma spent all three days at the side of the stage taking photographs. It was a very emotional time, he remembers.

"I've never seen so many Nisei men cry when they were giving testimony," he said.

Before, talking about the camps was a taboo subject, except for talking about the positive memories, he added. But the hearings helped make it possible for people to talk about the whole experience, not just the sliver that they thought might be acceptable to the public. Getting the stories out helped mobilize the Japanese American community to pursue redress because it became a necessity, no longer just a wild dream.

The Japanese American campaign for redress, which engaged leaders from the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) as well as other activist groups, pursued and won the passage of the Civil Liberties Act in 1988, which offered formerly incarcerated Japanese Americans an official apology and $20,000 each in reparations, according to Densho.

Shikuma currently serves as the co-president of the Seattle Chapter of JACL, which continues to work to defend civil rights for Japanese Americans and other groups whose rights are put in jeopardy.

The Story Moves Forward

(Left to right) Keila Uchimura and Hannah Chiu smile for a photo in between classes on Feb. 22 at the University of Washington in Seattle. Uchimura is the president and Chiu is the treasurer of the Nikkei Student Union at UW this year. (Photo: Alex Garland)

The line grew as students and community members gathered at the entrance of one of the auditoriums on the University of Washington campus. Members of the Nikkei Student Union (NSU) at UW sat at a table by the door, welcoming attendees. The lights dimmed as the first speaker came to the podium.

Keila Uchimura's parents were in the audience, watching proudly as their daughter and her fellow NSU officer Hannah Chiu welcomed each guest to the stage.

"This is a much larger audience than we were expecting, and we were thinking they would all be students," Puyallup JACL President Eileen Yamada Lamphere joked before beginning her presentation on the history of the incarceration.

Around 130 attendees came to the program, which included speeches from community activists, writers, and JACL leaders as well as a live performance from the UW's Taiko Kai.

Chiu and Uchimura are both half Japanese and half Taiwanese. They said they found their community with NSU at UW. "I do think that the Japanese American community is pretty distinct from the Japanese community," Chiu said.

"Especially since some of us are like Yonsei, Gosei, Rokusei," Uchimura added. "It feels like a very different identity."

Uchimura, a Yonsei, has family on her father's side who were incarcerated, but she didn't know much about the incarceration until a few years ago when she joined NSU. "I think the family that did go through that, [who were] alive while I was there to hear the story, didn't necessarily want to pass that knowledge down," she said. "They didn't really talk about it."

Chiu is a sixth-generation Japanese American, or Rokusei. Her family is from Hawaii, where mass incarceration was not carried out in the same way as it was on the mainland. While none of her family members were incarcerated, her great-grandmother remembered when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

While her great-grandmother was alive, Chiu said her grandmother and mother didn't ask much about the war. "I would love to ask, but she's just not here anymore," Chiu said.

Uchimura said her great-aunt was her last living family member who experienced incarceration. She passed away last year, leaving behind a written record of her story, which may include some of her experiences in the camps. Uchimura is looking forward to reading it.

Even while relatives are alive, asking them to share can be difficult. "It's like an uncomfortable conversation to have a lot of the time, especially if those older relatives aren't as open to sharing everything about it," Uchimura said. "And I guess I do kind of regret not … learning more about what happened. I would encourage other people to push through that discomfort before it's too late."

For Chiu and Uchimura, the Day of Remembrance is about sharing the stories of those who were incarcerated and applying the lessons learned to the current injustices still happening in Washington and the nation as a whole — even as they're still learning about it themselves.

"It's important to pass on the story that will otherwise be lost if we ourselves, our generation, doesn't take initiative to retain that and pass it on, so that future generations can not only remember it but make sure that it never happens again," Uchimura said.

This article is published under a Seattle Human Services Department grant, "Resilience Amidst Hate," in response to anti-Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander violence.

📸 Featured Image: Victor Ikeda adds a comment during the audience share-out portion of the oral history presentation on Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 16 at The Lakeshore. Susumu Nakanishi, one of the Japanese Americans featured in the presentation, is sitting to his left. (Photo: Alex Garland)