By Jonathan G. Lee
On February 19, 1942, in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans to be rounded up into camps dotting the West Coast and the Midwest. A young boy named George Takei was one of the 120,000 people uprooted from their homes under the suspicion that they were secret collaborators with the Japanese government. Takei’s family was interred in Tule Lake War Relocation Center in California.
Takei, who years later would play Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek: The Original Series, has spoken often about his time in Tule Lake, and his most graphic memory was looking up at the sentry towers as he crossed the common area. The machine gunners above tracked his every move.
He was six years old.
Takei’s internment story is powerful because Executive 9066 is glossed over in many American classrooms. I wanted to find more stories from other Japanese Americans who were incarcerated by EO 9066, and my search led me to Tessaku.
Tessaku, which means “iron fence” in Japanese, is an online archive of oral testimonies from Japanese American internees, maintained by Diana Emiko Tsuchida, an independent writer. She named the archive after the Japanese-only magazine published by the prisoners of Tule Lake. Tsuchida’s own father, Mitsuki Tsuchida, was interred in Tule Lake with George Takei.
Mitsuki is nisei, or second-generation Japanese American, meaning he was a U.S. citizen by right of being born in America. His family was first sent to Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah, then eventually moved to Tule Lake.
Though I didn’t get to speak with Mitsuki, I read his testimony on Tessaku and it was fascinating. Mitsuki’s father, Tamotsu, vehemently protested the internment. In fact, Tamotsu was targeted by the FBI for being too vocal. He was moved to Tule Lake because of his activities. The testimony illuminated something that now seems obvious: there was a lot of in-fighting within the camps.
According to Mitsuki, there were two factions within Tule Lake. First were the Kibei, American-born Japanese Americans who had traveled to the old country for school, then returned home to America after finishing their studies. Then there were the Nisei, the rest of the second-generation Japanese Americans. In general, the Kibei were outraged by the camps and demanded an immediate end while the Nisei wanted to ride it out.
Mitsuki criticized soft, bureaucratic words used to describe the internment like “relocate” because his experience was anything but soft. Tule Lake, he said, was filled with violence and fighting.
At the time, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), which was originally formed in 1929 to lobby for greater civil rights legislation for Japanese Americans, was pushing male camp members of the right age to enlist. The JACL believed that by volunteering for service, they would show Washington that Japanese Americans were trustworthy.
Some prisoners in the camp didn’t like this suggestion or the JACL. Mitsuki recalled that one of his classmates, Diane Tsukamoto, had a father who volunteered for service. The radical prisoners were planning on assaulting him, but the administrator allowed him to leave the camp.
In the end, only half a dozen men from Tule Lake volunteered to join the 442nd, the infantry regiment made up entirely of Japanese-American volunteers who were given suicide missions deemed too dangerous for white soldiers. One such mission took place on October 1944, when the 442nd were sent in to rescue 1st Battalion in the Vosges Mountains. The 442nd suffered 800 casualties to recover 217 men according to Go For Broke, a foundation dedicated to preserving the legacy of Japanese-American soldiers who served in World War II. A young soldier named Daniel Inouye, who would eventually become president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, was among those rescuers.
The low level of enlistment at Tule Lake debunked another of my preconceptions I had. The one time I learned about the 442nd was in sixth grade, and my history teacher claimed that the men in these camps enthusiastically volunteered in droves out of love for a country that hated them.
But they didn’t. While it’s true that Tule Lake was the camp reserved for prisoners that the U.S. government considered particularly suspicious, draft records from the time show a big disparity in enlistment between Japanese Americans in Hawaii and Japanese Americans from the mainland. Ten thousand men from Hawaii volunteered, compared to the 1,256 from the mainland.
I was taught a history that ignored Asian American resistance, and I can’t help but think it was distorted to fit the Model Minority myth — the pervasive stereotype that Asian Americans are all wealthy, well-educated and obedient without fail.
I was also alarmed to learn that people were murdered in the camps. Mitsuki shared one story about a white soldier killing James Okamoto, a truck driver interred in the camp. The soldier shot him and was acquitted of murder during his court martial. Instead, he was fined one dollar for the bullet he fired, because it was an “unauthorized use of government property.” Mitsuki said there were a few other murders, but committed by other camp members.
“It was a known fact, it was dangerous to walk at night around Tule Lake because you’d get beat up or jumped on,” he said.
There is a Japanese phrase, shikata ga nai, which has used to characterize the Japanese American internment. It translates into “it cannot be helped,” and American historians have used it to explain the mindset that they say allowed Japanese Americans to weather the injustice of the internment with quiet dignity. Mitsuki’s testimony disrupts this narrative.
Speaking with Diana Tsuchida and reading and listening to the oral histories recorded in Tessaku made me realize how much of Asian American history has been told through the words of white writers, and it was a framing that I bought into myself until I listened to the first-hand testimonies of the people who were actually imprisoned.
When I contacted Tsuchida, she was preparing for an event about the Japanese American internment at the California Historical Society.
I wrote to her: “Are we silent because of our culture? Or are we silent because we’re ignored?”