Internees recall arrests, camps of 60 years ago
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
For Maui teacher Tokiji Takei, it was "the sound of the shoes" in the rainy night as he waited to be arrested for being of Japanese heritage.
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For Hawai'i Times publisher Keiho Soga, it was holding his wife's hand for the first time after six months in an internment camp on Sand Island.
Lily Arasato of Mo'ili'ili shows a photo of herself taken at an internment camp in Tule Lake, Calif., with her father, Muin Ozaki.
For teacher Muin Ozaki of Hilo, it was having the number 111 painted in red on his naked chest at a camp at Fort Sill.
The prisoner-poets' words were read yesterday on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the presidential order that led to their arrest after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
While most Japanese-Americans in Hawai'i were not arrested in the sweeps that pulled in 110,000 citizens on the West Coast, teachers and other community leaders were immediately rounded up by the FBI.
Their stories brought dozens of aging survivors of the camps and their children to tears during the Honolulu "day of remembrance."
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The anniversary is a time to guard against new assaults on civil liberties and to celebrate Americans' redress of those wrongs, said speakers at the gathering at the University of Hawai'i's law school.
A historical photo shows children at Manzanar internment camp near Independence, Calif.
Clem Bautista, president of the Honolulu chapter of the Japanese Americans Citizens League, which sponsored the event, said Arab and Muslim Americans have fallen "under a cloud of national suspicion" since Sept. 11, much like AJAs during World War II.
Keynote speaker Mitchell T. Maki, a California educator and author, said all Americans should celebrate the 1988 decision by Congress to pay a token $20,000 in redress to those interned in the camps.
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The payment was not sought or offered as compensation for victims, he said, but as an act required by Americans' sense of justice under the U. S. Constitution.
Japanese Americans, mostly from the West Coast, were sent to the Manzanar camp and others after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Retired Mo'ili'ili minister Masayoshi Wakai, 85, recounted how he was snatched out of the Pacific School of Religion at Berkeley and sent to a temporary camp at in San Bruno, Calif.
The redress payment so many years later was "a good idea," he said. He and his wife pooled theirs to pay off the mortgage on their Kailua home.
But redress did not compare to being released from the camps, where he was ordained as a Christian minister behind barbed wire, Wakai said. "The world opened up, and I could become a citizen."
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State Rep. Barbara Marumoto, who had hazy memories as a child in that same camp for about 100 days, said the distress did not end with the war. Marumoto, R-17th (Kahala, Wai'alae Iki), said many Japanese felt shame even though they had done nothing wrong.
Taiko Center of the Pacific drummers entertained at "Day of Remembrance" events yesterday at the Richardson School of Law.
"My father tried to join the San Francisco Board of Realtors later, and they wouldn't admit him because he was Japanese," she said.
Years later, her brother became the president of that board. "And the first thing he did was to make my father an honorary member."
Reach Walter Wright at wwright@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8054.
