Internment Camps

I immigrated to this country when I was 12 years old. I was naturalized when I reached 21 years old. It was just another day, it was just a piece of paper, a means of convenience. I graduated from college and went to work. I married an American girl. I have a 2-year-old baby girl. It was just life as usual. On Sept. 11, I became an American. When I woke and saw the attack on the World Trade Center, I felt a knot in my stomach. I felt sad toward my fellow Americans, and I felt angry toward the terrorists.

Re "Terror Bill's Effects to Be Immediate," Oct. 26: It has been said that when one gives up a bit of freedom for more security he may eventually find that he has lost both. With the passing of the anti-terrorism bill, Osama bin Laden has caused us to give up some of those freedoms. And while his attacks on the World Trade Center were horrible beyond description, this may be a greater achievement for him. This is a well-intentioned bill that leaves much of the decision-making process up to law enforcement and federal agencies, much like the World War II internment camps for Japanese Americans and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The Rev. Ken Fong is doing what he and many other church leaders once thought was impossible: making a historically Japanese American church look more like multiethnic Los Angeles in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley. Since March 1997 when the third-generation Chinese American became the senior pastor of Evergreen Baptist Church of Los Angeles in Rosemead, Fong has been working toward a church model that reflects the wider community.

Jane Yano was born in an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas, in early 1947 and, along with her family, remained behind barbed wire until August 1947, two full years after the war with Japan ended. So when the U.S. government offered a formal apology and $20,000 each in compensation to the more than 80,000 Japanese Americans who were rounded up from their homes and shipped to camps across the country during World War II, Yano assumed that she too would get a letter and a check.

President Clinton is seeking $4.8 million to further preserve World War II internment camps used to confine 120,000 Japanese Americans. In the federal government's latest effort to atone for uprooting those lives, Clinton's new budget asks Congress to pay for a visitors center at Manzanar National Historic Site--a former internment camp in California about 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles--and to buy or trade land to protect former camps in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Arkansas.

To the surprise and anger of opponents, the name and statements of a controversial Japanese American leader have already been inscribed on a national monument being built to recognize Japanese Americans who fought in World War II or were interned at desolate camps.

President Clinton announced a plan Thursday to preserve sites of camps where the U.S. government interned 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Americans, he said, must "never forget this sad chapter in our history." "We are diminished when any American is targeted unfairly because of his or her heritage," Clinton said in a letter read at the dedication of a memorial in Washington to those interned and to the 33,000 Japanese Americans who fought for the United States in the war.

Among the 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry interned at relocation centers from 1942-'45 were Stanford University history professor Yamato Ichihashi and his wife, Okei (Kei). Yamato was 64 and Kei was 50 in May 1942 when they were sent from their home to a series of camps. Both were isseis, born in Japan. Yamato had immigrated to the United States at 16 on a student visa, arriving in San Francisco. His excellent high school grades led to his acceptance at Stanford in the fall 1903 class.

I read "The Lost Years" (Feb. 16) with interest because I was one of the 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent interned during World War II. I was 11 years old in 1942. We thought we were Americans. This was the only country we knew. The long-ago memory has remained largely hidden for all these years since I was anxious to erase any differentness from myself and blend into the mainstream. I went to college, married and raised three Eurasian sons who now really look like mainstream America.

There are certain childhood memories that still haunt Phil Shigekuni, like the time his mother and grandparents were forced to sell nearly everything they owned in their Los Angeles home, and when he was awakened at night by the sound of people urinating into pails at the Santa Anita racetrack. For the North Hills resident, both are vivid reminders of the U.S.