Salt of Tears and Desert Soil

My father's birthday—February 19—coincides with the Japanese American Day of Remembrance. I grieve for losing him too early, and for the losses felt by 120,000 Japanese Americans and their families.

photo by the author

Two seemingly unrelated events share space in my psyche on February 19. I think of my father and of the Japanese Americans who were ordered to internment camps on his birthday in 1942. My father, if he were still alive, would be 97 today. Born in 1928, Dad was a thinker, a man whose rivers ran deep. Yet our relationship was a difficult one. Me, the rebellious young woman. He, the strict and nervous father who feared I would fail in life and disapproved of many of my choices. I know that if he’d lived beyond my twenty-third year, beyond his own fifty-fourth, we would have ironed out some differences between us and found common ground.

Alas, it was not to be. I didn’t cry for him when he died, couldn’t access the grief that seems a normal response to loss of a parent.

I mourned him silently, without tears or tantrums. Years passed, and the salt of unshed tears ossified, heaps of tiny glistening crystals reflecting light, blinding me, binding me to a grief buried so deep that neither pick nor probe nor specialized tool of therapy could tap the aquifer of pain flowing underneath the everyday mask I donned.

I now know how to cry for my father, though he surely would direct me to save my tears for those who need them more. He cared deeply about how people treated one another, abhorred injustice, and fought against racism before it was considered best practice by his white, middle class friends. I don’t think Dad knew about an action taken by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on his fourteenth birthday, an action that affected thousands of Americans on America’s West Coast.

On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, giving the U.S. Army the authority to remove civilians from certain military zones in the states of California, Oregon and Washington. The result was incarceration of nearly 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry in one of ten concentration camps in desolate, remote regions. Many of the camps were in the high deserts, places too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter.

Japanese Americans underwent several years of immense suffering from displacement, property loss, family separation, harsh conditions, and humiliation, yet none were ever charged with espionage or sabotage against the U.S. The incarceration was, as stated in a 1982 congressional study, due to “racial prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Now, a Day of Remembrance is held each year on February 19.

The National Park Service preserves many of the former concentration camps. Tom Leatherman, Superintendent of Pearl Harbor National Memorial, was awarded a 2022 regional Cultural Resource Award for establishing the Japanese American Confinement Sites (JACS) Working Group (A Legacy to Uphold). Sadly, the recent cuts to the park service will make visiting the sites more difficult, at least in the short run (National Park Seasonal Hiring Overshadowed by Reckless Staff Cuts).

I’ve visited the Tule Lake Internment Center, located in the high desert in Modoc County, California. Close to the Oregon border, it’s lonely, windy land abutting the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in the Klamath Basin. I don’t have a photo of a restored hut at the Tule Lake center, but here is a photo of one at Manzanar Internment Camp in Southern California. Manzanar is also a windy, dusty place with hot summers and cold winters. Not a location where one wants to spend years on end in hastily built, un-insulated quarters.

photo courtesy of DepositPhotos

There are excellent resources online for those who want to know more about the three-year stint of incarceration experienced by these citizens of the United States, people whose only sin was physically resembling those whom the country was battling overseas.

For a basic history lesson, along with live and online events happening during the week of February 17-23, check the Japanese American Citizen League’s Day of Remembrance site.

Densho, a nonprofit organization whose mission is "To preserve and share history of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans to promote equity and justice today,” has been around for decades. The organization collects oral and written history about incarcerated Japanese Americans and their families and advocates to ensure that this history is never repeated.

Ruth Chizuko Murai has written a thoroughly researched, very personal account of her Sacramento-area family’s displacement from their farm and eventual re-establishment of family life in the article My Family Lost our Farm during Japanese Incarceration.

I’ve tried to understand why the Japanese Internment cuts so deeply with me, but a better question is: Why shouldn’t it? My upbringing and schooling in the Midwest during the 1960s and ‘70s failed to include this sad chapter in American history. When I learned of it some twenty years ago, I was angry. How could something of this magnitude, that affected so many Americans, not be taught in my high school American history class?

I was angry at the fact that we had concentration camps on American soil, angry that I didn’t know of them, angry that Japanese American kids I grew up with had parents who’d lived in such deplorable conditions. I didn’t have a word for it at the time, but this was one of the many ways that history was “white washed,” sanitized for my protection. Who was really being protected? Not the school kids.

My visit to Tule Lake made such an impression upon me that once I wrote a novel, I knew I needed to include a character touched by life in the camp. This character became Brenda Kato, daughter of a Tule Lake internee, a woman whose mother wouldn’t talk about the camps with her or even reveal the identity of her father.

photo by the author

I think of the salt of tears and the alkaline high desert soil, the coincidence of Dad’s birthday and the Day of Remembrance. My heart aches over personal and collective losses. I know that Dad’s innate goodness would make him feel the same shame, the same horror that I feel when confronted with this scar on our national conscience. Maybe that is the common ground between us now, the shared grief over racist policies, a grief that goes beyond the grave.

Photo by Pavel Neznanov on Unsplash