[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 136 (Tuesday, September 5, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S12632]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       ``LOST YEAR, LOST PEACE''

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, one of the gravest injustices 
perpetrated by the American government in our more than two centuries 
of history was in February 1942, when we told 120,000 people who lived 
in the States of California, Oregon, and Washington that they had 1 to 
3 days to sell all their property and put everything they own into one 
suitcase and they would be taken to camps.
  Almost all of these 120,000 people were Japanese-Americans. A few 
were actually citizens of Japan.
  Gary Matsumoto, a national correspondent for NBC, had an op-ed piece 
in the New York Times about his family's experiences.
  Our colleague in the House, Congressman Norman Mineta, was moved from 
California to a detention camp.
  Not one person, among all those 120,000, had been charged with any 
crime.
  My reason for paying special attention to this is that I grew up in 
the State of Oregon. My father was a Lutheran minister there. When this 
occurred my father made a statement on a local radio station, KORE, 
that it was wrong to treat American citizens in this way. My mother 
also recalls that he wrote a letter or two to the editor of the local 
newspaper, though I have no recollection of that.
  What I do know is that we received some phone calls and experienced 
some minor unpopularity. I was 13 years old at the time, and I would 
love to relate to my colleagues in the Senate that I stood up and 
defended what my father did, but I did not. I remember him explaining 
it to my brother and me, why it was wrong. But I was embarrassed by 
what my father did and wished he had not done it, perhaps a typical 
reaction for a 13-year-old. But now, as I look back on my father's 
life, it is one of the things I am proudest of him for. He was active 
in what we then called race relations and was always responsive to the 
needs of people. Up until the last few weeks before he died, he was a 
volunteer every Thursday morning at a facility for the mentally 
retarded. But perhaps nothing my father did makes me prouder of him 
than standing up for Japanese-Americans when it was not popular to do 
so.
  I ask that the Gary Matsumoto op-ed piece be printed in the Record, 
and I urge my colleagues to read it.
  The material follows:

                         Lost Years, Lost Peace

                          (By Gary Matsumoto)

       For millions of Americans, this week's anniversary of V-J 
     Day conjured up memories, celebrations and passionate 
     embraces. My parents were reminded of barbed wire and dust.
       They shared the fate of 110,000 Japanese-Americans living 
     in California, Oregon and Washington after the bombing of 
     Pearl Harbor. Amid anti-Japanese hysteria and irrational 
     fears of treason, all were expelled from their homes and 
     exiled to concentration camps.They were told it was for their 
     own safety. The Constitution was forgotten.
       My father, Kimitsu Matsumoto, was 15 years old and lived in 
     Santa Maria, Calif. In the fall of 1942, he, his older 
     sister, Imiko, and my grandmother were put aboard a dimly lit 
     railroad car and whisked out of Los Angeles. For nearly 400 
     miles, they sat despondently, wondering if they would ever 
     see home again.
       The Government sent them to the Gila River Relocation 
     Center, a desolate tract on the Pima Indian reservation in 
     Arizona.
       My father, being young, could adjust to the situation. He 
     and friends made the best of it. They marked out baseball 
     diamonds in the desert. Cactuses became football goal posts.
       They sang around campfires, danced on weekends and 
     participated in talent shows.
       My Aunt Imiko, who was 22 in 1942, has darker memories. She 
     answered the door when F.B.I. agents arrived before dawn to 
     arrest my grandfather. Later, she delivered a shaving kit to 
     him, standing her ground when a young G.I. lowered his rifle 
     and threatened to run her through with his bayonet if she 
     come any closer to the prison gate.
       My grandfather spent the spring and summer of 1942 in a 
     detention camp in Bismark, N.D., before being reunited with 
     his wife and children in the Arizona desert. They lived in 
     crude barracks with cinder block floors. Guard towers were 
     equipped with machine guns and searchlights.
       In the summer, the temperature reached 125 degrees, and the 
     place would stink of roof tar. When the wind blew, clouds of 
     suffocating dust would blanket the camp. For these fastidious 
     people, the dust was a ceaseless affliction that symbolized 
     their ruin.
       My grandparents missed the small cafe the family had run. 
     My father missed the tortillas stuffed with beans he had 
     bought from Mexican friends at school. My aunt missed her 
     boyfriend, who had been drafted into the Army before the war 
     broke out. (She eventually married him.)
       My grandmother and grandfather had come to America in the 
     late 19th century seeking opportunities that they could never 
     know in Japan's stultifying, feudal society. They reared 
     their children, born in California, to love Fords, meat loaf 
     and the New York Yankees. After Pearl Harbor, they not only 
     lost their homes, they lost the sense that they belonged.
       My mother's family, who lived in Loomis, Calif., lost much 
     more. They were sent to a camp, called Amache, in 
     southeastern Colorado near the Kansas border. Before my 
     grandmother left California, doctors warned that she could 
     die in Colorado's altitudes: Amache was very high. Her blood 
     pressure was high, and the air was thin. After several 
     strokes, she was bedridden. For three years, my grandfather 
     nursed her, first in the barracks, later in the camp 
     hospital, where he would sleep on the floor beneath her bed. 
     She died in the camp five days after the war ended, leaving 
     seven children.
       On V-J Day, Aug. 14, 1945, most interned Japanese-Americans 
     thought their ordeal would soon be over. But for them the war 
     did not end so tidily. The last relocation camp did not close 
     until March 20, 1946.
       Some people, especially the elderly, were afraid to leave. 
     With their livelihoods destroyed and their children 
     scattered, they reluctantly gave up the security of life 
     behind barbed wire. When a family from the Amache camp 
     returned to California, their shed was dynamited and shots 
     were fired into their home.
       What people forgot was that a Japanese-American regiment 
     that fought in Europe was among the most decorated military 
     units in the war. Japanese-Americans also served in the 
     Pacific.
       After the war, both sides of my family found shelter in 
     Chicago from the virulent racism festering at that time on 
     the West Coast. But they have never lost the fear that 
     another cataclysm would provoke the Government to come for 
     them again.
       A generation removed from the war, I have never fully 
     shared that concern. Then I look at my baby daughter--part 
     Swiss, part German and Irish, but with a decidely Asian cast 
     to her eyes--and I wonder.
       This year, a memorial was erected at the Gila River camp. 
     Except for the concrete slabs where the barracks once stood, 
     all that remains is the dust. But for my family and 
     successive generations of Japanese-Americans, Gila River is a 
     place in the heart, a wound that never quite heals.

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