World War II and Japanese Internment

Chizu Liyama
Interview Transcript

Before the War & Pearl Harbor

Were you aware of the war that was going on in the United States before you were interned?

I wasn’t aware of a lot of things. I did know, for example, we went swimming. I guess it was with school. I’m trying to remember. Maybe I was in a group, I don’t know. But we went swimming. We would go swimming to the pools, and then I could remember that I and some of the Japanese kids all sat outside. We had to sit on benches and watch the other kids go swimming because we weren’t allowed to go swimming. Places like Sutro Baths. I could remember we all used to envy people who could go swimming there because we couldn’t, but it never occurred to us to challenge it in any way. We just said, “Well, that’s the way it is.” But I did not encounter discrimination per se because we were in a sense prized. The teachers really loved us because we worked so hard. And we were so good. So when we were so good in American school, we let loose in the Japanese school. I felt so sorry for the teacher in Japanese school because everybody was so rambunctious. We would go to school till three o’clock or something, and then about from four to six was Japanese school. And we were terrible. I think if you ask most Japanese my age who went to Japanese school, they will say they did not learn Japanese. We socialized with each other, and the poor teachers were really distraught. When I was in high school, I used to cut Japanese school all the time. And the Japanese school teacher never told my parents because, you know, we were tuition. My father used to pay to have us go to Japanese school, but if we didn’t appear then my father would not pay. So they didn’t tell them, and we used to cut all of the time.

Pearl Harbor Day

How had your life change right up until you were interned after the war started?
We went to high school, and when I was in high school that was when I began to feel the difference, the difference between being a white American and an American of a minority group like the Japanese. And I had a black friend, but at Galileo there weren’t many black kids. But the Japanese got together, the Chinese got together—we didn’t do it together—but we had all kinds of social activities even though we were not part of the school activities per se. I could remember, for example, going to a prom and dancing all night just with my escort who came, whereas the other white kids were dancing with other white kids. And I think that’s when we realized we’ve got to go in a group so that we would at least be able to exchange partners. So we had our own dances, our own socials, our own parties, very separate. We lived a separate life from the white life that we had with the high school that we went to. Although people in high school were okay, but they didn’t have social ties. I used to help people with their homework because I always did my homework and gave it out if people wanted to copy some of the stuff. They were very happy to get that, but when they had a party in their house or whatever we were never invited. So we felt that distinction between the whites and between us as minority people.
When I went to Cal, we had again wonderful social groups of Japanese Americans, and to this day I see them. We have a group that meets—my college friends—but they are all Japanese Americans. I did not have any real good Caucasian friends. I was in my senior year. I was in the Fair Labor Standard Club—or something like that—to make sure that everybody got wages that were I think at that time forty cents an hour, and I remember working for forty cents an hour. We made sure that at least that was the minimum standard that they had. I knew people along that line, but never became close with them. My closest friends then and now are Japanese Americans. I regret that because I wish that I knew some people. I wish that I had been more forward in trying to make friends with them, but, you know, it was one of those things.
December 7th, are you leading up to December 7th? December 7th, we were in church, and we came out of church and we heard. At that time we had boys running up and down with extras. And they’re saying, “Extra! Extra! The Japs Bomb Pearl Harbor.” We looked at each other and said, “Where is Pearl Harbor?” We didn’t know where it was. We came running home to my father. We said to my father, “Look at that, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor is in Hawaii. Why did they do that?” And my father who was very nationalistic said, “Oh, Japan wouldn’t do that. That is British propaganda,” he says. We said, “British propaganda? Is that what it is?”
I went to Cal, and Cal is a wonderful, wonderful place, I think. It really expanded my world in many ways. The world of literature, the world of history, the world of science, all of that was expanded. I was a liberal arts major for a long time, a psychology major. Let me tell you, when I went to Cal, I had an advisor and the advisor said, “Well, Miss Kitano, what would you like to do? What would you like to be?” I said, “I would like to be a teacher. I really want to be a teacher or a librarian.” I said, “Teacher.” And he said, “Well, I hate to tell you this,” he said, “but there are no jobs for Japanese teachers,” that Japanese Americans can not become teachers. And you know instead of challenging it, at that time I said, “Well, then what else could I be?,” and he thought social worker, and my sister said, “Oh, be a social worker.” So then I took psychology as my major and enjoyed that very much, wonderful teachers. But I could remember while I was in there that remnants of feelings of what was going on in the world began to seep into us even though we were a very closed Japanese American group. I remember going to a lecture just in September, and this guy—I don’t know who he is, I can’t remember who he was—but he came in to speak to the Japanese American group, our club. He said, “Things are not good between Japan and the United States. You know, there might possibly be a war.” We all laughed. We said, “How could there possibly be a war between Japan and the United States?,” because we didn’t know enough to be able to see what was going on.
I could remember that we were really closed in on our own activities. One of the things that I tell, when I go to the University of California to speak, I tell them that we used to have things like treasure hunts on the campus, and we would be out at twelve o’clock at night looking for all of the clues, etc., etc. A bunch of girls going out there. Nobody ever thought that you would get hurt. Today, when I go to Cal at night, coming home my husband always calls and says, “Are you okay?” I have to check with him going back. But, it was so different, the times were so different. Everybody was poor. At Cal, we could immediately see the class distinctions of people who were able to live in some of the nice—we saw the sorority kids and how different they were from us. But, it didn’t really bother us in any way because we had our own things we could be involved with.
December 7th comes, and we get this thing. We go home. Then I went to the library because it was during the period of finals at Cal. So we went to the library and there some of the girls were really upset. They began to cry. And I said, “Why are you crying?” And they said, “Because something is going to happen to us, something is going to happen to us because we’re Japanese.” We all kept saying, “But we’re citizens, we’re citizens.” But it didn’t seem to make any difference. At the beginning, things were pretty quiet. About a month later, the newspapers came out with a lot of stories about Pearl Harbor and how the Japanese in Hawaii sabotaged the war effort and things of that kind. We didn’t know. We knew that we had friends in Hawaii. The first thing we worried about was, “Are they safe? Did the Japanese bombs hit them?” Evidently, some of them did. But we didn’t know about that. So it was a terrible period. I could remember when getting into the war effort and being stranded in a Berkeley streetcar for about two hours one time, because the “Clear” didn’t go through and we had to stay where we were. We were sitting in the streetcar like sitting ducks if they ever had a bomb. We were so totally unprepared—there were no places you could go to for shelter, or whatever. It was a period where really we felt odd because we’re Japanese Americans. We have faces of the enemy. In January, the whole thing began to come apart. All these people began talking about the Japanese and how they were living close to the, I guess, vital parts of America—like the oil things—that they were close to the coast and they were flashing all kinds of messages, none of which were true, but they were all in the newspapers.

Leaving for Internment

Did the government ever tell you why you were being interned?

No, they never told us. It was something—we were so naive, which you would never do today, but we were so naive that we just accepted what the government said. We said, “This is unfair, it’s not right,” but nobody thought about any organized kind of resistance or anything. And let me add, places like the ACLU did not protest it either. There was nobody that protested it except for the American Friends Service Committee, a few church groups, but that was it. When we look through the commission hearings—they had hearings before we left—they knew that they were going to leave us, but they had put together a commission to hear—and this was way back in 1941/’42—and they had a commission that looked as to whether they should send us in or not and it was just a loaded committee. People who already had started in motion the things that they were doing already to get us into the camps. When we read that now, it’s very interesting, commission hearings in 1942 that put us in; the government never told us why. They just made us go.

Can you talk about your experiences when you first saw your father?

It was a Department of Justice camp my father went to, they had individual hearings. We never had individual hearings.  There was never an opportunity for us to protest about our innocence, or whatever.  My father had that opportunity in that Department of Justice camp, and they came to the conclusion (I got a copy of the report that they had, a lot of which was blacked out but still I could see the copy) that my father was no threat to the United States.  So he was released and he came to us in the camp.  He stayed with us in the camps until 1945.

Was he forced to remain in the camp with you?

Yes.  He could not go back to California.  As far as our property was concerned —the lease for the hotel—my father had bought a property in Japantown under my sister’s name, so that my sister could be the owner because she was a citizen, and he could not be an owner.  He bought it under her name, so he had that.  He had two pieces of property. And the first one, a very wonderful guy, Mr. Pearson, who was black, was one of our residents in our hotel.  We said, “Oh, he’ll take over,” and he took over for us, collected the rent, etc., and we told him “just keep it.  Keep the-whatever it is- and all.” He kept everything, it was there and everything was still in order when my father went back, and then my father gave up the lease and decided to live in the other apartment building that he owned in Japantown which later, was re-developed out.  My father was an entrepreneur.  He bought some property, which helped him.

How did you prepare to go to the camp?

That was really a difficult thing.  We had five days in which to prepare.  I don’t know how it is with you, but for us to go on a trip, it takes us about that time to figure out what we’re going to take, and how we’re going to get there, etc.  We didn’t know where we were going, we didn’t know how long we were going to stay, we didn’t know what was going to happen to us.  So what do you take, you know? We went, most of us, very unprepared.  My mother was so cute, though.  We were so poor, she says, “well, don’t bring your good clothes?”  We said, “If we don’t bring good clothes, what are we going to wear?”  She said, “Well, wear the things you’re going to throw out.” We were so poor; we didn’t have very much, so we were going to take whatever was serviceable.  But again, one little suitcase—what could you put into it?  So we wore the same thing over and over again, and while we were in camp we were allowed to get things from Sears Roebuck, or Montgomery Wards. So sometimes you go out to a dance and about five people have the same dresses on because we all get it from Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Wards.
It was, again, a very difficult time, because of my sisters: one was in Berkeley, the other in Japantown, and they were with their families, they had little babies and all.  It was, again, that separation.  The night before we left we all got together and we cried.  We just cried, because we didn’t know when we were going to see each other again. Because we were young—we were only—we were young, life was looked on very differently from my parents who were—and now that I’m 84, my parents were young at that time. My father was in his 50’s, my mother was in her 40’s, but we thought they were so ancient and so old. It was hard for us to imagine what it must have been for them at that time because they thought—my mother said, “They’re going to kill us.” I said, “Oh, Mama, we live in America. They’re not going to kill us.” She says, “Well, they are going to put us in slave labor.” And I said, “Look Momma, I don’t think they’ll do that either.” I said, “We have President Roosevelt.” I thought at that time President Roosevelt was considered really a liberal person. I think the fact that he was liberal, and yet put us into the camp- it was the politics of the whole thing. There was just a lot of political maneuvering.

Were there people who were not of Japanese descent helping you?

Yeah.  There were.  In fact, there’s a good book out now that my friend wrote about people who stuck their necks out to help us, who really got vilified by other people because they said they would help, and they were helpful. She wrote a book about all these people who also suffered because they came out and said, “This is wrong.  You shouldn’t put people like that into the camps.” They really suffered economically.  I think there was a publisher in Seattle who wrote all kinds of editorials, kept in touch with the Japanese, and was in the camps throughout.  People like that were threatened, their lives were threatened.  Their newspaper lost a lot of ads, and things like that. We could see the good in people, and we could see the negative parts of people.

How did you feel about being interned once you were there?

Once we were there, we were so doggone busy because, again, as I said, I knew so little and here I was in charge of recreation and education.  Fortunately, some people came in and took the education part for me, but I was in charge of recreation for 18,000 people, and what do you do with that?  We were just really busy organizing all kinds of things, but I learned a lot.  It really was a learning experience for me.  I learned how to push and how to pull, and the guy I worked for, Spike England, was a football player, or something like that.  He was a very kind, very nice guy.  I’d never been to Los Angeles, so he took me to Los Angeles when he went on one of his buying sprees.  We had dinner out there.  I mean, having dinner in a restaurant was like pie in the sky because we were in camp; we had this cruddy food and everything else!

Were you allowed to leave camp?

Because I was going with him, we got special permission.  He (Spike England) had this secretary, a beautiful Japanese-American woman, who was being groomed to be a movie star at the time.  She just lost everything!  But she was his secretary.

Camp Community

Tell us more about being able to leave. What was the law behind that?

You could leave. When we were in Santa Anita, I had an opportunity to leave, to go on to college—for graduate work at Smith College, because they offered a scholarship. My mother cried because she didn’t want me to go, because she wanted the family to be together. To her it was very important that the family was together. She also was afraid for me because she said “You’re going out all by yourself, you don’t know anybody, you’re going to be in some east coast city—Smith college is in Massachusetts (I think)— so she refused to let me go. Anybody below 21 had to have a signature from their parents. My mother refused to sign. I wished I had been able to go because it was a real opportunity. They took care of my room and board, they took care of everything for me to go. My friend Ishka Uchida, who became a writer—and her books are now all over—she wrote about her experiences in camp. She and I were recipients of this scholarship. Because I couldn’t go somebody else went, I could remember that.

If the camps were so bad, and you had the opportunity to leave and do what you wanted, why did you return?

We couldn’t leave. I had a scholarship, that would have a student leave, then you could leave. The way the student leave came about is interesting. People at the University of California and the people who were with the YWCA of the University, they put together a fair play committee. They were the people who pushed to get the Japanese-American students, who were at Cal, to go to some of the other graduate schools. They were behind this push, to develop what they called student relocation committee. They were the people who gave scholarships for people, opening up universities and colleges. Most of the colleges that opened up were colleges that were Christian. Christian Colleges opened up much better than the others. The state colleges did not open up for a long time because, the state, again, is so much a part of the political scene, because its a public university. Maybe about 3000 people eventually left camp to go onto colleges because of student relocation.
Student relocation is still on today, and the reason is because the Japanese American students who were recipients of the aid got together—my friend Nobuko put some of the people together, and they developed the Nissei Student Relocation Committee. We all gave money every year, to make sure that other Asian students—people coming in from Laos, North or South Vietnam—to make sure that they had the opportunities we were offered when we were in camp. This has been going on now for a long time. So every year we give money to this group to make sure that the Student Relocation Committee goes on.

Were students the only people who were able to leave the camps? (4-6)

Well, after a while we went to Topaz after Santa Anita. In Topaz, life was totally different. In Santa Anita there was like impermanence. It wasn’t going to be permanent. You could still smell the orange blossoms, and you could still see some greenery because we were in Santa Anita. You could see the trees and everything else. Well we went to camp in Topaz, and it’s in the desert, the real heart of the desert. They took all the greasewood and everything out because they were putting the buildings up, so that every time the wind blew you had a sandstorm, all over the place, so much so that you couldn’t see. By that time they had the places built, really ugly looking buildings. We were all put into different blocks, and you could hardly see the next one because the sand was around. The thing about Topaz, which I thought was most beautiful, was the nighttime; you could see the stars. The stars were so big, and they were glowing, almost felt like you reached them.
I guess the high school students said that their favorite song was “Don’t Fence Me In”—They’d sing it all the time, “Don’t Fence Me in”. Some of my friends, who were high school students, were there all the way through! They have their high school reunions. What’s interesting is the town of Delta. We were twelve miles away from Delta—this was in Topaz—I was heading social service committee. We had social workers in each block, and I was part of the group working together with the different social workers. We took care of problems in the block. We also had Issei, (the first generation people who spoke Japanese) as Block Managers. We used to call them “Blockheads” of our camp. My father was a Block Manager.
Again, it was this time that I really became serious, because now we were getting families that were disintegrating because of the situation. I asked them, how would you like to live in one room with your father and mother, your sisters and brothers all around, your aunts in the next room or whatever; All knowing exactly what you do every minute of the time. It was really a difficult period: Gossip, false gossip, consuming the camp. These were people who had time on their hands, and didn’t know what else to do. They would gossip a lot. I could remember when I was in Santa Anita, and I was holding hands with a boyfriend. We were walking around, and when I came home, back to my cabin—back to the horse stall—my mother said, “Where have you been and what have you been doing?” I said, “I was just walking”. She got very upset, because the whole camp—everyone in that area—said, “You know, something is going on with your daughter!” You had to be so careful.

How did you feel about everyone knowing what you were doing?

That’s right, what you were doing, and I said why would you go on a date? I mean there’s everybody knowing exactly what’s going on. One of these days I should write a book called “Sex in Camp.” My brother in law said “didn’t you ever hear about the ambulances?” and I said no, I never heard about the ambulances—we had some ambulances in Topaz—and he said, “guess what they were used for?” They were used when guys would make propositions to the girls and they would go over to the hospital. They would use the ambulances. I said, well, nobody ever asked me! It was really funny. My husband and I didn’t get married in camp because you could hear every noise that people made. When we were in camp they just had the tops of the building, but there was nothing under that. So, if you had a fight with your mother or father, everybody in camp knew about it, because people heard. They’d say, “Did you know what was going on in this thing? So and so was having a fight.” Fortunately, we didn’t fight in our family, we didn’t fight like that, but we knew who did!
They would tell us when people were getting babies. Japanese are not supposed to cry. You aren’t supposed to yell. That thing is so strong, I didn’t cry and I didn’t yell, because I could remember my mother saying “Don’t cry and don’t yell when you’re getting a baby!” But there were some women who cried. Then the whole camp, “Did you know that Masako cried when she was getting a baby?” It was just terrible like that, because everyone knew everybody else’s business because there were no secrets in camp. So what happened of course, my husband and I said, “We’re not going to get married in camp”. There was- they called it a “honeymoon cottage” at the very end of camp—they didn’t have one side. That was the “honeymoon cottage” and people would say you know “Did you hear all the noise last night?” So we didn’t want that. It was really a strange situation, and the boys used to complain. They couldn’t hold hands.
My friend Kiku tells me this funny story. She said she was in high school, and it was the last dance. So for the last dance, they turned the lights out. Totally dark, they were supposed to be dancing in the dark. One night they were doing that, along came this Issei, being this Japanese guy, first generation. He came in and said, “Oh no, what are you doing?” He puts the light on, and everybody just looks so embarressed. You look around, there are boys with lipstick marks on their cheeks! He looked around and began to yell at them, telling them they all had to go home. She said the next morning, all over camp they said “These Nissei kids are going crazy! It’s wrong what they’re doing.” Japanese have very strong things about relationships between boys and girls. They still have some but not as bad. She said it was so embarrassing, because everyone knew about what had happened. From then on they didn’t make it totally dark.
Were the young men looked down upon if they requested her services?
Yes, when I’m talking about young men, there were a lot of Issei men. They couldn’t get married. Most of them, especially the farm workers—your immigrant group—didn’t get married. It was very difficult; I think there was a ruling in 1920 that picture brides stopped. So it was from 1910 to 1920 that the picture brides came, but after that it was stopped. Women could not come to get married to the men in the United States. You had a lot of bachelors; we had an uncle who was a bachelor. They lived a very sad life, a very lonely life. Because they were men they don’t know how to bunch up like women do—women always find some kind of a social group. I think of Hisashi and his life was difficult for him. So you had these men, she was servicing these men, who were older. Not so much the Nissei men, because they were still eighteen, nineteen, twenty—they were still in the stage of what we call puppy love. There were a lot of marriages that did go on in camp. I said, “How was it?” They said “difficult”. You know, very difficult.
Most people got married just as they were leaving to go out of camp—people didn’t want to get married in camp—but they did. I really often wonder how many illegitimate children—I don’t know of any single mother, when I was in camp. I did a lot of social work, and I worked with people. They were single only if their husband died young. There was very little divorce in the Japanese family at that time. They were very stable families, but they began to break away. And the reason they began to break away was that in camp, you could eat with your family, but when you’re a teenager, would you eat with your mother and father or would you rather eat with your friends? The family began to disintegrate, especially the teenage kids. At least when your children are young, as a parent you still have control over them and they all ate together, but the young people began to eat out. In the end, my mother would just as soon eat with her friends than eat with the rest of us. It was piecemealing the family.
What was interesting was when it was time to leave the camps, the families got together, they made decisions together. Some of us who were at other places, reported back about what it was like in the other places. Whether this would be a good place to relocate. Everybody wanted to go back to California. They loved their homes. The people who were in farming, I think most people did not go back to the farm. The work was too hard, they lost their visas, they lost their farms, so they went into the city. I worked in Chicago, I got out. I could not get out on the student leave thing because of that, so I got out generally, again, because I had a college education, and prospects of jobs were okay for me. You had to have a prospect of a job to go out. They had early releases for a short time. They were like braceros, they were like part-time workers, who went out to work and then had to come back to the camp. They made more money by going out to work, because they got the wages—minimum wages—outside. At camp they got something like sixteen, eighteen dollars a month. When you went out of camp you made something like forty dollars. So people began to go out.