Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
American Roots: During World War II, landscaper and Willow Glen Elementary School science teacher Toshimi 'Bill' Kumagai, 66, spent three years in an internment camp in Heart Mountain, Wyo., with his parents and four siblings.
WG teacher reflects on his years spent in a U.S. internment camp
Kumagai is afraid of a repeat of WWII-era racial discrimination
By Moryt Milo
Willow Glen Elementary School science teacher Toshimi (Bill) Kumagai reads about the United States' war against the Taliban and wonders if history will repeat itself.
He is concerned that mass hysteria and racial profiling will once again take hold and dictate behavior the way they did 60 years ago after the bombing of Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941.
Kumagai, 66, was a victim of racial profiling. He lived for three years in a Japanese Internment Camp in Heart Mountain, Wyo., with his mother, father, two brothers, two sisters and 10,000 other Japanese-Americans from the West Coast.
At the time, he was only 7 and too young to fully understand what was happening, but he says, "I remember the barbed wire, search lights and guard towers," Kumagai says. "We used to stick our heads through the barbed-wire fence."
He pauses when asked if that was permitted.
"Well, no one in our camp was shot. But it did happen in other camps," Kumagai says.
Now Kumagai, who lives in East San Jose, sees a new war and a new group of people singled out because they look different.
"People are being picked on because they have long beards and turbans," Kumagai says. "Are these people going to be uprooted like the Japanese-Americans? How do we know the U.S. government is not planning something on the side like we experienced?"
The internment of Japanese-Americans from 1942 to 1946 was a dark period in American history, Kumagai says. More than 100,000 Japanese-Americans were forced from their homes in California, Oregon and Arizona.
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
American Roots: During World War II, landscaper and Willow Glen Elementary School science teacher Toshimi 'Bill' Kumgai, 66, spent three years in an internment camp in Heart Mountain, Wyo., with his parents and four siblings.
The United States government, under an executive order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1942, required all individuals of Japanese extraction on the West Coast to give up their homes, their land, their personal possessions and even their pets to live inside a barbed-wire community.
To accommodate this need, the government created a separate agency to handle the relocation and detention of Japanese-Americans. The department was called the War Relocation Authority, and it was the WRA's job to relocate, uproot and confine any Japanese-American individuals and transfer them to one of 10 internment camps located in California, Arizona, Idaho, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming.
"The government said it was for our benefit," Kumagai says. "They told us they were protecting us."
But the government's motives were founded in fear. The West Coast was frightened that local Japanese-Americans were spies, although no incidents were ever reported, and overall suspicion prevailed against anyone who looked Japanese.
Ironically, most of those interned were American citizens, extremely patriotic and fiercely loyal to the United States. Men who were interned were also drafted to serve in the war. Some units were highly decorated and recognized for their bravery.
Yet when the government ordered the Japanese-Americans to leave their homes, it never saw Japanese-Americans as anything but a potential threat to the country, Kumagai says.
"The West Coast was out of bounds for the Japanese," he says. "I have friends who moved to the East Coast and were never affected by internment."
In fact, internment camps were a Western United States phenomenon. Many Japanese-Americans west of the Mississippi had no idea what had happened to their East Coast brethren. Kumagai thought relocation was happening to all Japanese-Americans and says, "I didn't know until later that their lives [those living on the East Coast] remained unchanged."
Photograph courtesy of Bill Kumagai
Life Goes On: The Kumagai family, top, Shirley and Mitsu, and bottom, Barbara, Bill, parents May and Jack, and Ed, lived in Campbell for several years after the end of World War II.
For the Kumagai family, change happened swiftly and hardships began even before moving to the internment camp, as they were forced to spend six months in an assembly center in San Jose.
"I remember we slept on mattresses stuffed with straw," Kumagai says. "We had to wait there until the camps were built."
Leaving their home also meant taking only the bare essentials.
"We stored a lot of things, but they were either vandalized or stolen," Kumagai says. "We had a truck, and I remember my mother had some valuable Japanese chinaware, which my parents buried in the soil thinking they could retrieve it later. But nothing was left. It was all gone."
The United States Department of the Interior estimates, with inflation, the loss of Japanese-American property at between $4 billion and $5 billion.
Kumagai's family became known as number 3222 and began a life in the camp with all the makings of a real community--schools, a hospital, post office, court house, city council, newspaper and police station. But nothing could hide the nine guard towers and chicken-wire walls that confined their lives.
The isolation of Heart Mountain, Wyo., also thrust a population accustomed to the mild West Coast weather into extremely cold winters, with temperatures reaching 28 degrees below zero.
Having the right clothes to brave the cold meant shopping in catalogs like Sears or Montgomery Ward, Kumagai says. Those who had no savings or money received clothes, most of which was government surplus, through the welfare department.
At Heart Mountain, the adults were given $3.75 a month in clothing allowance and also had jobs inside the camp. Kumagai's father, Jack, who had owned a gardening business before being interned, was now a hospital cook. Many others applied their skills in an area they knew best--farming.
The internees turned the empty, dry, rattlesnake-infested land around the camp into productive farmland, because the WRA needed to find ways to supplement the internees' food supply.
With ingenuity and knowledge, the farmers developed cattle-grazing land into farmland, but it was within a guarded environment.
Photograph courtesy of Bill Kumagai
Moving Back Home: The Kumagais, including four of their children shown here, resettled with an Italian family on McKee Road in San Jose after they were released from the Wyoming internment camp in 1945.
Even the daily life at the camps, which included children's activities, such as Girl and Boy Scouts and raising the American flag while saying the Pledge of Allegiance, seemed out of context.
But Kumagai thought it was all quite normal.
"My parents never talked about what happened to us until the 1980s," Kumagai says. "They just pushed it aside. They simply let it go and let us go back into the mainstream of American life."
But re-entering the mainstream wasn't that easy. Kumagai remembers a lot of discrimination, verbal abuse and hurt.
"When I first went back to school in San Jose, the kids said to me, 'Are you a Jap?' I replied, 'No, I'm an American,'" Kumagai says.
The Kumagais, like most other internees who left the camps in 1945, had nowhere to go. His family returned to San Jose and stayed at a church hostel until the church placed him and many of his relatives with a family living on McKee Road.
Later his family moved to Campbell where John C. Ainsley's son-in-law William Ninde Lloyd hired Jack Kumagai to take care of the grounds on Lloyd's private residence.
"My mother used to do domestic work at the Ainsley House and Mr. Lloyd's office, which is still there on 43 Harrison Ave.," he says. "For three years I picked walnuts, cherries and prunes on the Lloyd property."
Kumagai has fond memories of his years in Campbell after leaving the camps. He recalls the people in town as kind and friendly and his years going to elementary school and high school in Campbell as happy ones.
He says Lloyd's son-in-law gave him his first plane ride and introduced him to the love of flying. Later in life Kumagai got his pilot's license.
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Just a Four-Digit Number: The Kumagais had to wear a number tag, like this re-creation, during their internment in Wyoming.
Oddly his resentment of what happened to his family took 40 years to surface, when third- and fourth-generation Japanese-Americans began digging and accumulating information about what happened to their families during World War ll.
"If they didn't start pulling the information out of people [like my parents], they would have died with this secret and nothing would have been documented," Kumagai says.
It took more than a decade to gather the information necessary to present the case to the U.S. government and demand an apology and financial compensation.
"Until we were going through redress, I never knew there was a petition signed by the neighbors to prevent my parents from buying their home in East San Jose," he says. "But when my parents started talking about it, I couldn't believe someone would do that to us."
Under former President George Bush, the government finally acknowledged that such atrocities occurred, and each Japanese-American internee received a formal apology from the government and $20,000.
"There were 750 of us who testified before Congress in San Francisco, and I was one of them," Kumagai says. "When I testified during the Washington hearings, I said, 'A certain amount of money needs to be set aside to educate the public so it never happens again.'"
Kumagai says this is starting to happen.
With only 60,000 Japanese-American internees left, documenting the events is critical so that people remember what can happen when public opinion gets out of hand.
Kumagai talks about it whenever he can and to whomever will listen, including his students at Willow Glen Elementary.
"I've led a good life up until now," he says. "But I still harbor resentment. I ask myself, 'How could they do that? Someone didn't speak up for us. We didn't have enough vocal power. We are just a small invisible minority.' People need to be more tolerant and understanding of people's differences."
Those interested in learning more about the Japanese-American internment camps can visit the Japanese-American Resource Center Museum at 535 N. Fifth St., call 408.294.3138 or visit its website, www.jarc-m.org. The hours are Tuesday-Friday 11a.m.-3 p.m. and Sunday 11a.m.-2 p.m. Admission is free.
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
