Shame of Camps Won’t Die
Kaz Mayeda recalls the moment he realized the severity of being imprisoned in a camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.
Some of the prisoners rushing the main gate of the camp with sticks and stones were turned back by armed guards firing into the crowd.
“I was sitting in the mess hall afterward,” Mayeda said, “and this man who had been treating some of the rioters came in. He had blood all over his hands.
“That was when it really hit me. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, my God.’”
Today is the 50th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066, which empowered the government to temporarily relocate any group, anywhere, any time.
Mayeda, 64, a genetics professor at Wayne State University, was one of the nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned shortly after Pearl Harbor as a result of wartime paranoia.
“People like William Randolph Hearst and Earl Warren went around whipping up anti-Japanese feelings,” Mayeda said. “They said that the sheer fact that Japanese Americans had not done anything wrong up to that point was an indication that they were simply awaiting orders from Tokyo.”
Detroit City Council President Maryann Mahaffey volunteered to teach at a Poston, Colo., camp in 1945.
“To have a group of people imprisoned -- put behind barbed wire -- was inconceivable,” she said. “Yet it happened.”
With irony in his voice, Mayeda explained why the Japanese Americans went to the camps peacefully.
“Japanese Americans in leadership roles said, ‘Go quietly so we can help the U.S. win this war.’ The best thing for us would be to express our patriotism that way. So to help the U.S., we went.
“If something like this were to happen again, I would take up arms. But then, I was only a 13- year-old kid.”
Mayeda went to a camp with his three brothers and their mother (his father had died 12 years before) at Manzanar, Calif. There were about 10,000 people in each of the 10 camps.
“All we could take was whatever we could carry in our own two hands in two duffel bags,” he said.
Awaiting them in the barracks that would be home for the next three years were Army cots, blankets and bags that could be stuffed with hay for use as mattresses.
There were communal showers and open-door latrine stalls, and only a thin partition separating the 12-by-12-foot rooms that families shared, sometimes with strangers.
Mahaffey said government efforts to make the camp conditions humane failed.
“The language then was that they were evacuated to relocation areas,” she said. “But I think everyone there understood that they were concentration camps.”
Mahaffey and several other volunteers were driven into the camp in the middle of the night.
“The first thing I saw was the search lights on top of the guard towers and the barbed wire,” she said. “I was in Auschwitz in 1988, and the guard posts there looked like those at Poston. It was horrible.”
Mayeda and the other Manzanar residents left the camp in May 1945. After getting his doctorate from the University of Utah, he moved to Detroit to teach.
Unable to leave the experience behind, Mayeda and other Japanese Americans spearheaded a campaign for reparations for surviving camp residents.
In 1988, the U.S. government admitted wrongdoing and paid $20,000 each to all surviving camp residents.
“That $20,000 is just pity,” he said. “It’s meaningless. But when you look at the total $1.5 billion, that’s big. If you want the government to remember something, hit them in the pocketbook. The government will remember that.”
This is probably Mayeda’s last term of WSU. He will carry his memories into retirement in Las Vegas.
“It was a shameful experience, and I am traumatized when I think about this,” he said. “It was a crushing experience. But if we don’t recognize the mistake we made in 1941, we will make the same mistake with some other minority group.
“And we can’t allow that.”
The Detroit News