WORLD WAR II A Japanese detainee's story

A professor's research on internment is also a look at her grandfather's past.
By JoANNE VIVIANO
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- As World War II began, the Rev. Tamasaku Watanabe was asked whether he was on the side of America or Japan.
His halting English delivered his answer.
"No, I don't think such things; I don't like to think such things, only I want to come peace quickly," he said. "That is my desire."
The Rev. Mr. Watanabe was 59 when he was arrested Dec. 7, 1941, suspected of being an "alien enemy" of the United States. His comment came during a hearing through which a U.S. civilian board was to determine if he should be placed in an internment camp.
The words have recently been unearthed through the research of his granddaughter, Dr. Gail Y. Okawa.
Okawa, an associate professor of English at Youngstown State University, presented some of her work last week during a Faculty Research Colloquium at YSU's Center for Working Class Studies.
"We never talked about it in our family, and he never discussed it," said Okawa, who learned of her grandfather's incarceration from a neighbor when she was in high school.
Okawa said she had always recalled her grandfather as "tall, quiet, stoic and ... formidable, to a child at least."
Another side
That was before Okawa's mother showed her letters written by Mr. Watanabe from a New Mexico internment camp, and before she found documents, photos and other writings about his time there.
"This was my attempt to understand him posthumously, because I really didn't understand him as a child," she said.
As Okawa researched Mr. Watanabe's FBI file, the man looked at his granddaughter from a police mug shot.
"When I first saw it, it was jarring," she said.
"He was treated in a dehumanizing matter," she added. "But at the same time, reading his words humanizes him for me."
Okawa's research focuses on Justice Department and U.S. Army camps run by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, as opposed to camps of the War Relocation Authority. She offered a map showing 18 locations of these Justice Department camps in 11 states, most west of the Mississippi River.
Such camps are relatively unknown, she said, but are now becoming the topic of more research. (She recommends "Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment During World War II" by Tetsuden Kashima.)
Internment procedure
Mr. Watanabe immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1905, when he was 22, and settled in San Francisco. He spent 17 years on the mainland before moving to Hawaii in 1922, working as a Christian minister, helping immigrants with paperwork and literacy and expatriate issues.
After his arrest and hearing, the civilian board said Mr. Watanabe had allegiance to Japan but was not necessarily anti-American.
The group voted 3-1 to release him; the board's president, a retired judge, voted for internment. A military board agreed with the judge, and Mr. Watanabe was incarcerated with several other men considered leaders in their Hawaiian communities; he eventually was held in Santa Fe, N.M.
Okawa said she found records written by Lt. Col. George S. Patton Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover and others that discussed the tracking of the Japanese as early as the late 1930s.
"Before any hostilities broke out, the die was cast for him," Okawa said. "My grandfather actually had no clue these events were going on."
Epithet in writing
One letter, written to New Mexico's governor, calls all Japanese "skunks."
"[N]o matter where a skunk is born, or under what star or flag, he is still a skunk, the same stripe, the same odor and the same characteristics," the handwritten note says.
The tactic of U.S. officials, she said, was to round up Japanese-American leaders. Ten boatloads, amounting to nearly 900 Japanese-Americans -- mostly men -- were taken from Hawaii to mainland camps.
Okawa said sentiment against Japanese meant they were sometimes abused and mistreated; she found documentation of the shooting of two men who were sick. However, treatment changed after a directive was circulated from the U.S. attorney general's office, ordering humane treatment for interned Japanese in accordance with Geneva Convention rules.
Okawa said she has attempted to explore the lives of prisoners, from the rock gardens they created at their internment camp tents to the poetry and plays they shared to the funerals they held.
"There have been relatively few, perhaps no, studies documenting the real experience of the men in the camps," Okawa said.
"It's a different picture of how the men actually felt and how they coped with their experience. ... It's been incredibly moving for me."