Internment Camps

Fifty years ago, the dust storm was the only visitor here that was free to go where it pleased without a permit. It came howling at 70 m.p.h. or more from the Riverside Mountains, stirring clouds of dust in its path. It sprayed hot sand against the barracks, hurling filth through inch-wide cracks in the dried pine walls, and sometimes blew the roofs right off. Inside the flimsy barracks, residents covered their mouths with towels to keep from choking.

On an uninviting swatch of arid desert, marked by sagebrush and mesquite trees just east of the California border, the winds of war blew together the fates of two beleaguered peoples. In a now familiar tale, 120,000 Japanese Americans were removed from the West Coast and relocated to internment camps after Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent U.S. entry into World War II. But in a little known piece of that history, the U.S.

For more than 60 years, the students have not forgotten their teachers. How could they? When their country locked them up in remote internment camps during World War II, these Japanese American students say one group of people in particular gave them hope: the teachers, most of them white, who volunteered to join them. When their world seemed upside down, the teachers tried to bring them the normalcy of school dances and football teams.

Manzanar, Calif., May 1942. It's a warm morning at the dusty, inhospitable World War II internment camp on the bleak edge of the Owens Valley. Latino teenager Ralph Lazo arrives by bus to join his Japanese American friends from Belmont High School. Lazo, a 16-year-old Mexican-Irish American, was motivated by loyalty and outrage at the internment of his friends. He became the only known non-spouse, non-Japanese who voluntarily relocated to Manzanar.

Guard Tower No. 8 has returned to Manzanar, a vivid symbol of what the place was and what it was not. Above all, it shows that living here, for Japanese American families, was not optional. "The tower represents what the whole thing was about: imprisonment, loss of civil liberties, loss of identity," said 82-year-old Sue Kunitomi Embrey, who was honored Saturday at a dedication for the re-created tower. "The tower was the only icon -- that and the barbed wire."

Sadayashi (George) Fujii, 76, of Garden Grove is a retired businessman. He was interned at Poston, Ariz. Fujii, born in Seattle, was sent by his parents to Japan at age 9 for his education, an experience that created a strong sense of Japanese nationalistic pride. That kibei (American-born but Japanese-educated) pride often clashed with Nisei (second-generation Japanese-American) beliefs. While other Japanese-Americans pushed loyalty to America, Fujii rode a cultural tightrope.

Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, a California poet and scholar who wrote, collected and translated haiku that compressed into a few lines the heartaches and realities of the detention camps where thousands of Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II, died Wednesday at her home in Salinas. She was 90. De Cristoforo died two weeks after returning from Washington, D.C.

Two survivors of Nazi Germany's brutal effort to exterminate the Jewish people a half-century ago retold their heart-wrenching stories to some 100 Valley College students Wednesday in the first of nearly a dozen Holocaust Remembrance observances scheduled for the next four days. Erika Jacoby said she started talking about her experiences of death, deprivation and degradation about 35 years ago. "Every year now, I decide I won't talk about it again, but when the invitations come . . .

"Today is the dawn of the CCC camp of Tujunga which is outside of Los Angeles. . . . We are prohibited to go within 10 feet of the fence, and it is most painful to be cut off from the outside world." --Daisho Tana's diary, Sunday, March 15, 1942 From the day after the Pearl Harbor attack until the end of 1943, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ran a little-known detention center in Tujunga for civilians classed as enemies of the United States.

Bill Sowles intently viewed a 37-year-old film showing a darkly handsome American prisoner of war scowling at his communist captors in the Korean War. It is, he believes, his dad, Willy. And if it is, there is a chance he is still alive. Korean War POWs and MIAs were long overlooked as attention focused on missing GIs in Vietnam.

The men are wearing neckties. The women are in hats, many of them holding babies. There are 187 people in the black-and-white photograph standing in front of a building, all of them Japanese except for three white people, a man toward the back with a long white beard and two partly obscured women. The photo was taken Nov. 24, 1923. "Commemorative photograph of the dedication ceremony for the farm cooperative hall at the Port of San Pedro, Calif., U.S.A." is the caption, written in Japanese.

On an uninviting swatch of arid desert, marked by sagebrush and mesquite trees just east of the California border, the winds of war blew together the fates of two beleaguered peoples. In a now familiar tale, 120,000 Japanese Americans were removed from the West Coast and relocated to internment camps after Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent U.S. entry into World War II. But in a little known piece of that history, the U.S.

Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, a California poet and scholar who wrote, collected and translated haiku that compressed into a few lines the heartaches and realities of the detention camps where thousands of Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II, died Wednesday at her home in Salinas. She was 90. De Cristoforo died two weeks after returning from Washington, D.C.

Manzanar, Calif., May 1942. It's a warm morning at the dusty, inhospitable World War II internment camp on the bleak edge of the Owens Valley. Latino teenager Ralph Lazo arrives by bus to join his Japanese American friends from Belmont High School. Lazo, a 16-year-old Mexican-Irish American, was motivated by loyalty and outrage at the internment of his friends. He became the only known non-spouse, non-Japanese who voluntarily relocated to Manzanar.

THESE long-ago games don't show up in baseball's official records. They are preserved in the memories of men and women who are very old now, and in the speckled black-and-white photos that survive from that time: shots of sheepish young men showing off their batting stance or a boy caressing a favorite bat, of crowds squeezing around the crude infields for a better view of the game, of a lanky kid kicking up dust as he slides hard into home. Americana, 1940s vintage.

"A combined throng of 600 dance lovers jammed the coronation ballrooms ... to pay tribute to queens Kideko Maeyama and Chiya Sokino in the Farm Management-sponsored 'social of the year.' " -- Gila (Ariz.) News-Courier, Nov. 28, 1942 "On tiny suede match covers bearing the inscription, 'It's a match -- Ruby and George,' the engagement of Miss Ruby Kanaya to Pfc. George K. Suzuki of Ft. Sam Houston, Tex., was made known before a group of 16 girls at the betrothed's home."

President Bush signed into law a $38-million grant program to preserve notorious internment camps where Japanese Americans were kept behind barbed wire during World War II. The money will be administered by the National Park Service to restore and pay for research at 10 camps. The law is intended to help preserve the camps as reminders of how the United States turned on 120,000 of its citizens in a time of fear.

While Lane Ryo Hirabayashi was growing up, he heard family stories of how his uncle Gordon defied the World War II internment of Japanese Americans in a case that decades later helped prompt a historic congressional apology. At a UCLA celebration Saturday, Hirabayashi took his own place in Japanese American cultural history as the first professor in the nation to hold an academic chair dedicated to the study of the internment.

On the night of Feb. 21, 1942, the FBI surrounded the Torrance home of Nikuma Tanouye. "They didn't even bother to knock, just kicked the door down," Tanouye's granddaughter, Diane Tanouye, said in an interview. He was arrested and imprisoned along with four other Japanese nationals. From days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor until the end of 1943, the U.S.

It's nearly impossible to envision now, scanning the dusty, vacant lots that butt up against California Highway 139. But beginning in the spring of 1942, this was one of the state's largest settlements north of Sacramento. A community of nearly 20,000 people, it had more than 1,600 buildings spread across 7,400 acres, with vast vegetable fields, a pig farm, a newspaper and a school.