Reparations Awaken Painful Recollections Among Japanese

Sumi Seo Seki remembers entering the expansive grandstands of Santa Anita in Arcadia, with their magnificent view of the San Gabriel Mountains. On that Easter Sunday in 1942, the roses were in bloom at the track, one of the country’s most sumptuous arcades of wagering and horse racing, where legends like Seabiscuit and Whirlaway had once run.

But Seki, 17, felt as if she were going into a dungeon, into a deep, dark hole. Her depression worsened that night as she and her family slept on a mattress of straw in a former stable. She carried her possessions in a duffel bag and suitcase that she had just unloaded after a long ride from San Pedro in a pickup truck.

Seki and her brother, sister, mother and father were among the hundreds upon hundreds of Japanese-Americans from throughout California who arrived in Arcadia as part of the nation’s largest forced evacuation, ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Barbed-Wire Fences

The track, its season forestalled by America’s entrance into World War II, was playing a major role in that evacuation.

By the summer of 1942, six months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, nearly 20,000 of the approximately 93,000 Japanese-Americans who lived in California would be led--without the due process of legal hearings--behind the barbed-wire fences of Santa Anita.

Another 5,500 would go to the Pomona fairgrounds near Los Angeles County’s eastern border. Among the 12 makeshift assembly centers in the state, the race track and fairgrounds were the county’s only such facilities where Japanese-Americans were processed, staying as long as six months, before being sent to internment camps.

Eventually, 120,000 Japanese-American men, women and children, most of them passing through these temporary compounds at fairgrounds, race tracks and labor camps, were taken farther inland--away from the coast, which was considered vulnerable to Japanese attack as well as sabotage.

Tar-Paper Barracks

By the fall, all but one of the temporary assembly centers had been shut down. (The one at Manzanar in the Owens Valley was converted into an internment camp.) The Japanese-Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens and who were all from California, Oregon and Washington, were sent to sprawling camps with row upon row of tar-paper barracks in the deserts, mountains and swamps of the West and South.

Now, more than four decades later, assembly center and camp internees like Sumi Seo Seki of Long Beach are telling their stories of life in the centers in Santa Anita and Pomona and of the internment camps in California, Arkansas, Wyoming and Arizona.

Those stories may be easier to tell now. President Reagan signed a bill Aug. 10 providing for an apology and tax-free payments of $20,000 to each of the living internees of the World War II camps.

“It was an experience, and I hope nobody else has to go through the same thing,” said Seki, now 63. “It’s just a sad thing that happened . . . The hurt is still there, still hurting down deep, and the curing process is still going on.”

The Japanese-Americans tried to make the best of things by replicating the community life they had left behind. With nearly 20,000 residents at its peak, Santa Anita had its own police and fire departments and its own hospital, run by Japanese-American physicians. There were 81 baseball clubs, 23 World War veterans, Scout troops, religious groups, a newspaper, PTA groups, literary societies, volleyball courts, canteens that sold items from aspirin to shoes, and a 15-piece orchestra.

Other Restrictions

And those who were U.S. citizens made camouflage netting for the Army in the grandstands.

But there were other painful restrictions. All Japanese books and publications were forbidden, even to those who did not speak English.

U.S. Rep. Norman Mineta (D-San Jose), one of the sponsors of the reparations bill, was one of those who was confined at Santa Anita. In an interview last year, Mineta told The Times of the 345-mile train ride from his home in San Jose to Santa Anita and of his boyhood experiences there.

“We were fortunate because . . . we were not in the horse stables,” Mineta said. “We were in barracks . . . that had been built. I remember going to visit friends . . . in the horse stables during the hot months of the summer. They might have swept out the horse stables, but the stench was still there. How, frankly, they lived in those, I’ll never understand.”

Staunchly Defended

The confinements, lasting as long as three years, were at the time staunchly defended by the nation’s leaders who said the unusual measures protected the Japanese-Americans who might be subject to harassment from Americans.

News accounts of the day presented conflicting reports of life in the assembly centers.

Journalist Carey McWilliams, in a September, 1942, Harper’s magazine report of his tours of Santa Anita and Pomona, attempted to reassure those who sympathized with the internees by saying:

“I came away from a visit to these centers . . . with a bewildering variety of impressions, both good and bad, and profoundly moved by what I had seen and heard.

“No one is starving. . . . It would certainly not be accurate to characterize Santa Anita as a concentration camp.”

Conflicting Reports

And The Times, in its report on opening day at the Santa Anita facility, said: “Most of the new arrivals took to the place at first glance, expressing open admiration of the beauty of the surroundings, their faces wreathed in smiles.”

Yet, writing about that same day and the track’s conversion into “Little Tokio,” the Arcadia Tribune reported: “We discerned sad-faced women and tiny tots seated upon . . . belongings, tied up in sheets and pillowcases. . . . “

The stable quarters were particularly noisy, according to Paul N. Yokota, then fresh out of the University of Southern California with an undergraduate degree in education. He became news editor of the facility’s biweekly Santa Anita Pacemaker.

“Camp life had everything,” he said, in a recent interview “from death to birth to everything in between.” By the time he was moved from Santa Anita to Jerome, Ark., Yokota had married a fellow internee.

Yokota said that although he had many enriching experiences with those in confinement, the fact remains that he was forced to leave a job supervising student publications at USC, and his family was forced to leave behind the poultry farm they owned in Downey.

And, he asks, “If the confinement was for our protection, then why were the machine guns at the camps pointed inward instead of outward?”

New Friends

Still, Phil Shigekuni of Sepulveda says: “It’s not like we were beaten with rubber hoses.” For children like himself, 8 years old when he was at Santa Anita, the experience was like an oddly extended camping trip with lots of relatives and new friends to get to know.

“My anger has come about after leaving the camps,” he said, “and my understanding that this (confinement) came about because California farmers wanted to take land away from Japanese-Americans and that this was the end result of years of racism.”

For Shigekuni the strongest memory of Santa Anita is not a pleasant one. It is a sound that awoke him night after night: the sound of people urinating in pails.

This perplexed him then, because he knew there were restrooms. Eventually, however, he learned that people were embarrassed at having to walk to the latrines in public and that they were afraid of being exposed to the glare of searchlights which swept across the camp from the armed sentry towers.

On Easter Sunday in 1942, Seki was pained when, leaving her family’s vegetable farm, she watched her father, in tears, say goodby to his workhorse and tell the animal: “I hope the next person takes good care of you.”

Then she and her family gathered with the group that was assembling on San Pedro’s Front Street, where the Pacific Electric’s Red Car trolleys were filled with Japanese-Americans headed for Arcadia.

Hurt by Stares

An American citizen born and raised in San Pedro, she was hurt by the hard stares of bystanders who viewed the 11th-grader as a threat to her country’s security.

By the fall, when she eventually left Santa Anita and headed by train with her family for more permanent internment in Arkansas, she hoped to never again see the race track.

“We just lived day by day,” said Frank Emi, a San Gabriel resident who at the time went from his home in East Hollywood to the Pomona assembly center. “There is a Japanese term: Shikataganai. (It means) ‘It can’t be helped’ or ‘Go with the tide.’ ”

But by the time he and his wife and baby, his parents, two sisters and brother were sent from Pomona to the camp at Heart Mountain, Wyo., Emi began to protest. He refused to sign a loyalty oath that was distributed to all men, women and children and was a precursor to the drafting of Japanese-American men.

Upset that the federal government had denied the Japanese-Americans their rights but was asking the young men to fight for democracy, Emi joined with dozens more in forming a group known as the Fair Play Committee. He was indicted and convicted of conspiring to violate the Selective Service Act and of encouraging young internees not to register for the draft.

Conviction Overturned

After serving an 18-month prison sentence, Emi was released when a federal appeals court overturned the conviction of him and seven others.

At Santa Anita, dissent was minimal. But Tom Shiroishi of South San Gabriel does recall that he and Sumi Seo Seki’s brother, Masanobu Seo, along with two others, jumped the fence. Soon caught by guards not far from the center, the four teen-agers were put in a chicken-wire jail where they were held before being transported eastward. The young men found themselves in Poston, Ariz., along the Colorado River, where an internment camp later grew to a population of 18,000.

There were those who tried to escape internment by using disguises. This did not work, however, for one young Japanese man. His once-coal black hair was still dyed bright red as he returned, under guard, to Santa Anita, according to former residents.

There was also an honest-to-goodness redhead, “an irate . . . Irishman,” who was a resident there, according to reports from journalist McWilliams.

The Irish internee had met and married a Japanese woman on a visit to Japan before the war and did not want to be separated from his wife. “There are, in fact,” McWilliams wrote, “many cases of mixed marriages, involving Koreans, Chinese, white Americans, Mexicans and even Negroes.”

No Exceptions

The strangest case McWilliams found was at the Pomona fairgrounds, where 21 members of a family named Hayward were confined. “The Haywards do not speak, write or read Japanese; they never have been to Japan; they do not resemble the Japanese; and they have never associated with Japanese.

“But it seems that the father of this tribe, whose name was originally Hayoishi, was one-fourth Japanese . . . This strange situation results from the Army’s policy of admitting no exceptions: if there is any Japanese blood the individual falls within the evacuation order.”

Sumi Seo Seki last January returned to Santa Anita race track, now next to the Santa Anita Fashion Park shopping mall that was--oddly enough--financed by the Bank of Tokyo.

Request Denied

With three others, Seki had come to ask that the track commemorate Feb. 19, the day President Roosevelt signed his evacuation order, as a special day for Japanese-Americans. Track officials declined the request.

“We’re not proud of the fact that this was an assembly center,” Santa Anita publicity director Jane Goldstein said in an interview. “We’d like to disown that. But it was simply a case of the government taking over the property.”

Indeed, after the last of the Japanese-Americans left in October, 1942, the track became a weapons training post.

Seki says she understood why the race track would not want to commemorate Feb. 19, but it was important for her to return once more and ask.