They Called Us Enemy

Each family was assigned a horse stall still pungent with the stink of manure. As a kid, I couldn’t grasp the injustice of the situation.

But for my parents, it was a devastating blow. They had worked so hard to buy a two-bedroom house and raise a family in Los Angeles... now we were crammed into a single, smelly horse stall. It was a degrading, humiliating, painful experience.

As a teenager, I had many after-dinner discussions with my father... discussing everything from the government’s forced incarcerations of Japanese Americans... to politics.

He taught me the power of American democracy—the people’s democracy.

“People can do great things, George. They can come up with noble, shining ideals.

“But people are also fallible human beings, and we know they made a terrible mistake.”

Memory is a wily keeper of the past... usually dependable, but at times, deceptive.

Childhood memories are especially slippery.

Sweet and so full of joy, they can often be a misrendering of the truth.

For a child, that sweetness... out of context and intensely subjective... remains forever real.

I know that I will always be haunted by the larger, vaguely remembered reality of the circumstances surrounding my childhood.

There were fishermen and farmers, shopkeepers and professionals. We were so diverse, all so different. And yet, we were the same. We were all Japanese Americans and we were all in Block 6 at Camp Rohwer. That was our common denominator. Daddy felt keenly that we needed to forge a community together.

Childhood memories come rich with sensations...

... Fragrances, sounds, colors, and especially temperatures. That golden afternoon when Daddy took the family on that wonderful jeep ride...

... Is a fond memory that glows radiantly with warmth.

It was there I discovered the power of movies. I remember Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame most vividly.

I empathized with this love-starved character whom people scorned.

That movie was a transporting experience. Old Paris was fascinating.

Other nights the movies were Japanese, and often missing the audio track.

Daddy explained to me how a benshi provided the soundtrack for the film.

I was mesmerized by the benshi—how he could be so many voices from one.

In the days of silent movies, Daddy said, benshi were considered artists, similar to actors.

During out after-dinner discussions, Daddy would reveal more details about that time in our lives... filling in some of the gaps that escaped me.

“It was a demonstration in protest of the arrest of a man accused of being a radical.”

“Was he?”

“No! But regardless of whether he was or not... it was important to exercise our right to assemble. Send a message that we were united as a group and opposed to their actions.”

It dawned on me in that moment... I had been participating in democracy as far back as I can remember. That is the strength of our system. Good people organized, speaking loudly and clearly. Engaged in the democratic process.

I had to learn about the internment from my father, during out after-dinner conversations. That remains part of the problem—that we don’t know the unpleasant aspects of American history...and therefore we don’t learn the lesson those chapters have to teach us. So we repeat them over and over again.

It was not until 1991 that I received a letter of apology...with a check for $20,000 signed by George H.W. Bush. As my father would say, “the wheels of democracy turn slowly.”

That makes an amazing statement about this country.

It took a while, but it did apologize. That apology came too late for my father. He passed in 1979, never to know that this government would admit wrongdoing.