On December 7, 1941, siblings Michael, Toshio, Mitsuye, and Joe Yasutake were in church when they heard the shocking news about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. That afternoon five FBI agents came and searched their home. When their father Jack did not come home they were frightened and confused. They soon learned he was being detained in the very place where he had worked for twenty-five years--the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) station in Seattle.
From there he was transferred to a series of Department of Justice (DOJ) internment camps: Fort Missoula, Montana; Fort Lincoln, North Dakota; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Like other prominent issei men arrested immediately after Pearl Harbor, he was detained separately from his family. They heard only rumors about where Jack was until they received a letter sent by him from the U.S. Army internment camp at Lordsburg, New Mexico. Because the parents' assets were frozen, the older children had to drop out of school and take jobs to pay the bills.
In the weeks following the signing of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, the U.S. Army issued exclusion orders requiring "all persons of Japanese ancestry" to vacate their communities. They had only days to prepare to leave their homes. The Yasutake family rented their house and stored their belongings with neighbors.
Along with hundreds of other Seattle families, they boarded buses for Puyallup, Washington. The state fairgrounds had been converted to an "assembly center" surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed soldiers. The four children lived with their mother, Hide, in a bare room of a barrack with walls that did not reach the ceiling. Twenty-year-old Tosh worked in the poorly outfitted hospital; Mitsuye, nineteen, volunteered in the nursery school; and Joe, only nine at the time, played with friends. At Puyallup, INS colleagues of their father visited the family and encouraged them not to worry about their father Jack.
After spending months in the "assembly center" at Puyallup, the incarcerees were bused to an incarceration camp at Minidoka, Idaho, near Twin Falls. The terrain was high desert, alternately muddy or dusty. Sagebrush and rattlesnakes were commonplace. Five miles of barbed wire and eight guard towers marked the perimeter of the camp.
The children fought boredom by staying busy. Tosh again worked at the camp hospital, and was later granted temporary leave to work on a sugar beet farm. Mitsuye also worked in the hospital as a nurses' aide and was paid $8 per month. Joe recalls meeting friends at the canal built by the camp residents to irrigate vegetables. Like other War Relocation Authority (WRA) incarceration camps, Minidoka used the labor of the incarcerees to run the facility.
In early 1943 President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the formation of a segregated Japanese American combat unit, and the call went out for volunteers. Tosh was glad for the opportunity to serve, but he didn't like the notion of being in a segregated infantry under white (hakujin) officers.
Finally Tosh did enlist, thinking that it might help his father to be released from the U.S. Army internment camp and be reunited with his mother Hide. At about the same time Mitsuye and her brother Michael applied for leave to attend college in Cincinnati, Ohio--it quickly became clear that the family would be split up and the mother stranded in camp with ten-year-old Joe.
Before Tosh reported for military duty, he and his sister Mitsuye were granted the unusual privilege of visiting their father in the U.S. Army internment camp at Lordsburg, New Mexico. They were escorted by a white minister and his wife. Fearing violence, they urged Tosh and Mitsuye to crouch down in the back seat of the car so that they would not be seen by the locals.
To get through the emotional visit, Tosh, Mitsuye, and their father Jack pretended everything was normal, though they had not seen their father for two years and the children were about to leave for uncertain futures. They did not speak of Tosh's decision to enlist for combat duty.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) internment camp at Crystal City, Texas, was unique in that families could join the interned fathers. The camp also held German and Italian nationals, as well as thousands of Japanese Peruvians and other Latin Americans of Japanese descent. The U.S. and Latin American governments had arranged to deport and detain residents of Japanese descent with the intention of exchanging them for U.S. prisoners of war.
After Mitsuye was released to go to college in Cincinnati, she successfully pleaded with the INS in 1944 to reunite her parents and brother Joe at Crystal City, Texas. The family did not know that at this time Tosh was recuperating in an Italian hospital. He had been wounded while serving as a medic with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in northern France. Joe remembers the contrast between the Minidoka WRA incarceration camp and the higher security Crystal City DOJ internment camp.
When the camps closed, the detainees had to reenter an inhospitable outside world. Upon their release from Crystal City in 1945, Jack moved his wife and Joe to Cincinnati, where Mitsuye and Michael had been attending college. The only employment he and his wife could find, however, was domestic work. Two years later, they moved to Chicago where Jack had been recruited to be the Executive Secretary of the Chicago Resettlers' Committee, a social service organization that helped former camp inmates find work and housing.
Most young adult Japanese Americans tried to put the incarceration behind them as they completed school, pursued careers, and started their own families. Many never spoke of the painful episode. For instance, Mitsuye's twelve-year-old daughter, Jeni, learned about her mother's wartime incarceration from watching a television program with her parents. Sixty years later, many Japanese Americans are finally sharing their personal experiences with their families, educating sons, daughters, and grandchildren about that historic time. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the tension between civil liberties and national security has resurrected memories of the Japanese American imprisonment, a reminder that these wartime lessons are as relevant now as ever.