COURTESY OF BRIAN NIIYA Shoichi Asami, third from left, was among family and friends at this New Year's party in 1940. Asami was among some 110,000 Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II under a U.S. executive order.

Event recalls American internment camps

Japanese Americans will mark
60 years since the forced moves

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By Rosemarie Bernardo
rbernardo@starbulletin.com

On the night of Dec. 7, 1941, Shoichi Asami's life was turned upside down as a series of events took the father of five from his recently built home in Kaimuki.

Authorities took the managing editor of the Nippu Jiji newspaper to a camp on Sand Island before he was shipped to an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas. Asami's wife and their five children later joined him at the camp, where they lived for six months.

The family and other internees were then sent to Singapore for a year. Asami decided to move his family to Japan because Singapore was in the line of attack. But he never made it back to his homeland.

On March 31, 1945, while aboard the Awa Maru en route to Japan, Asami and his 10-year-old son, Harold, were killed after a torpedo from an American submarine mistakenly struck the vessel. His wife and four other children were aboard another ship.

COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES / 1942 In 1942, hundreds of Japanese Americans, allowed to keep only the belongings they could carry, were forced onto trains bound for relocation centers.

Asami's ordeal is recalled by his grandson, Brian Niiya, who is among those who will never forget the events triggered by the presidential order that forced more than 110,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II.

On Monday the Japanese American Citizens League will hold the "2002 Day of Remembrance Commemoration" from 2 to 4 p.m. at the William S. Richardson School of Law on the University of Hawaii-Manoa campus. The event will acknowledge the 60th anniversary of Executive Order No. 9066, which authorized the mass removal and internment of Japanese Americans.

Former CNN reporter Dalton Tanonaka, who is running for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor, will emcee the event. Mitchell Maki, one of the authors of a study on the Japanese-American redress, "Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress," will give the keynote address.

The Taiko Center of the Pacific is expected to perform at the free public event, and there will be poetry readings by J. Martin Romualdez and the Rev. Yoshiaki Fujitani.

Maki, associate dean of the College of Health and Human Services at California State University, will speak on civil rights issues and his book.

Nearly 50 years later, former internees and evacuees were compensated for their mistreatment with a written apology from the president and $20,000 each.

Some Japanese Americans say they see similar mistreatment of Arab and Muslim Americans following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The same kind of guilt by association is happening, said Niiya, historian of the Honolulu chapter of the Japanese-American Citizens League.

There is more vigilance now in protecting civil rights than in the early 1940s, Maki said.

Former Kalihi resident Lillian Nakano, 73, of Gardena, Calif., now involved in the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations for Japanese-Americans, said: "It's so very real. What we are seeing in front of our very own eyes is a similar pattern continuing. ... It's not right.

"We have to keep raising the issue of civil rights," she said.

Nakano was 13 years old when she was shipped to internment camps in San Francisco and Arkansas. Her father, Saburo Sugita, ran a Palama business called Holly Bakery before he was forced to leave his home.

Before the war, Niiya said, military and federal officials conducted surveillance on those who were deemed most influential among the Japanese-American community in Hawaii, Niiya said.

Soon after the Pearl Harbor attack, Japanese Americans on the West Coast were forced into internment camps after the military felt they would assist with the Japanese invasion. Only Japanese-American educators, Buddhist priests and community leaders in Hawaii were shipped to internment camps because Japanese Americans made up 37 percent of Hawaii's population and were needed to maintain the economy.