SAN JOSE — Jimi Yamaichi was 19 when he and his family were torn away from their farm in San Jose and incarcerated in a desolate, treeless internment camp in northern Wyoming with thousands of other Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“When we were leaving home and going to the camps, I saw Mom and Dad with tears in their eyes, looking at the green fields ready to be harvested, and they had to leave,” said Yamaichi, a 92-year-old San Jose resident and the curator of the San Jose Japanese-American Museum. “After 20 years of work, their investment had gone down the tubes.”
For Yamaichi and the dwindling number of surviving Japanese-Americans who were forced into the camps, this dark period of American history is an indelible part of their own stories.
But before their recollections fade with the passing generations, a new project is under way to preserve the family letters, photographs and government documents connected to the World War II internment camps.
Over the next two years, San Jose State and 14 other campuses in the California State University system will be digitizing 10,000 documents into a searchable database called the CSU Japanese American History Digitization Project. A $320,000 grant from the National Park Service will soon make these pieces of history available to the public online at http://csujad.com/.
The project is aimed at shedding light onto an aspect of American history that is often overlooked.
Yamaichi was among the 100,000 Japanese-Americans forced to leave their homes when Executive Order 9066 was issued in February 1942 after Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japan two months before. The order mandated that anyone on the West Coast who was deemed a threat to national security be confined in internment camps across the country.
“It’s a part of our national history that is not well known across the country,” said Rebecca Kohn, associate librarian of SJSU’s Martin Luther King Jr. Library. “It’s a warning and caution for the future in terms of what happens in wartime. An entire community’s lives can be uprooted and disrupted.”
San Jose State has the fourth-largest collection of internment archives in the CSU system, behind CSU Fullerton, Sacramento State and Cal State Dominguez Hills. The San Jose State archives include letters that concerned family members sent to the superintendent of Tule Lake internment camp, near the California-Oregon border, begging for their relatives to be released. At Tule Lake, people were arbitrarily segregated and separated from their families, according to Greg Williams, director of archives and special collections at CSU Dominguez Hills.
“Tule Lake was a prison,” Williams said. “There’s a lot of euphemism attached to this part of our history because bureaucrats and other people have tried to soften what it was — for instance, the term ‘evacuation.'”
Yamaichi said he hopes this project will change the terminology associated with the wartime incarceration of Japanese-Americans. For example, he believes the camps should be called “concentration camps” rather than “internment camps” because a single demographic was intentionally removed from society.
“They didn’t kill us or shoot us, or put us in the oven, but all of our rights were taken,” Yamaichi said. “We didn’t go to court, we didn’t have any hearings whatsoever. Just because you looked like the enemy, you were concentrated.”
SJSU also has archived hundreds of pictures showing daily life in the camps, such as a talent show, a community dance and even a watermelon-eating contest.
While flipping through the photographs, Kohn pointed out that they show the massive scale of the camps, which had industrial-sized kitchens, seemingly endless rows of barracks, and mess halls to accommodate hundreds at a time.
“There are a few lighthearted scenes like children in costumes and kids at a table, but there is a somberness to them,” Kohn said. “The attempt to normalize an abnormal experience is intentional.”
Castro Valley resident and camp survivor Bessie Kawachi Chin, 92, said that adding the personal experiences of the camp survivors to the database would be most important because of the value of each individual story.
“People might be able to research family members or understand other patterns of oppression in wartime,” Kohn said. “We don’t know yet what will come out of it, and in a way that’s the beauty of it, because we will set out new data for researchers to look at.”
Contact Sophie Mattson at 408-920-5764. Follow her at Twitter.com/mattsonsophie.
