“Like everybody else, they came here in hopes of finding a better life,” Kajikawa said.<\/p>\n
Now 84, Kajikawa was a high school freshman when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. While he and his family mourned the tragedy like other Americans, they also feared the repercussions that people of Japanese descent in the country would face, Kajikawa said.<\/p>\n
Their fears were realized when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942. The order authorized the Secretary of War and U.S. armed forces commanders to declare military areas in which any or all persons they deemed necessary could be excluded. Many Germans and Italians also were held in camps under the Alien Enemy Act.<\/p>\n
Although the order did not name a particular ethnic group, it largely was used to evacuate about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the Western Defense Command area, which included states near the Pacific Coast such as California, Oregon and Washington.<\/p>\n
“They figured if we were traitors, we could help Japan by sabotaging ships on the West Coast,” Kajikawa said.<\/p>\n
After the removal notices went out, most people were given two weeks to pack up their belongings and report to an assembly center to await placement. Others who lived in places the government considered critical areas had only 48 hours. People who defied the order were thrown into jail.<\/p>\n
Although he and his family could bring with them only what they could carry, Kajikawa said he knew of other people who were worse off. Shop owners with lucrative businesses had no choice but to abandon them. Because of time constraints, people who owned boats or other valuable property were forced to sell at rock-bottom prices.<\/p>\n
“The Japanese living on the western coast suffered a great economic loss during this period,” Kajikawa said.<\/p>\n
Kajikawa and his family were sent to a camp in Idaho called Minidoka after weeks of anxiety and uncertainty about their situation. The camp consisted of 44 blocks of barracks that could hold about 10,000 people. Although families were allowed to live together, Kajikawa said, family unity suffered overall because children and adults did not often mingle during the day. The presence of guards also was a daily reality for the inhabitants.<\/p>\n
“I was green behind the ears; I didn’t know what was going on,” Kajikawa said. “It wasn’t until we arrived at the camp that I understood we were prisoners of war.”<\/p>\n
Kajikawa said that people in the camp for the most part did not try to resist their situation despite harboring resentment over being deprived of their civil rights as citizens.<\/p>\n
“It was wartime; the government threw the Constitution out of the window,” Kajikawa said. “The Japanese have a saying `shikata ga nai.’ It cannot be helped. I think people on the whole accepted what had happened to us. We were not exactly kicked around in there.”<\/p>\n
The atmosphere of hostility toward Japanese-Americans at the time was so pervasive that even newspapers and celebrities openly made derogatory comments about them, Kajikawa said.<\/p>\n
“I knew that we were in a very dire predicament because we looked like the enemy, but we were not the enemy. We were American citizens, too,” Kajikawa said.<\/p>\n
After living in Minidoka for nearly a year and a half, Kajikawa headed off with one of his sisters to Salt Lake City, where he had a job lined up doing housework for a family while going back to high school.<\/p>\n
The government previously had announced that people interned in the camps could relocate anywhere outside the Western Defense Command area as long as they could find a sponsor or work. The rest of Kajikawa’s family ended up finding jobs with churches and hospitals in Peoria.<\/p>\n
Kajikawa eventually was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned to the 442nd Infantry Regiment, which was an Asian-American unit made up of mostly people of Japanese heritage. Although Kajikawa joined because he was sent a draft notice, other young Japanese Americans volunteered for service, causing a rift in family relationships.<\/p>\n
“Some fathers threw their sons out of the house over it,” Kajikawa said. “They said: You’re fighting my country. How can you volunteer to join the American Army when they were the ones who put us in the camps?”<\/p>\n
After two years in the Army in which he spent time guarding German prisoners in Italy, Kajikawa enrolled in college. He finally settled in the Chicago area near the rest of his family and worked in VA hospitals for nearly 31 years before retiring in 1994.<\/p>\n
As he got older, Kajikawa said he begin to realize the need for his story to be told. Although there are volumes of books dedicated to World War II, Kajikawa said he felt that the history of Japanese internment camps was a rarely covered subject.<\/p>\n
“This is a part of American history, and it should not be forgotten,” Kajikawa said. “As long as I’m alive, it will be told. We need to let young people know that what happened to us should not have happened to anybody under our Constitution.”<\/p>\n
As part of his campaign to educate people about these internment camps, Kajikawa gives talks about his experiences growing up during the war and living in Minidoka. He already has presented his story at an AARP meeting but plans to ask the superintendent of the local school district and the director of the Huntley Area Public Library for permission to share his history with even more people.<\/p>\n
“I may forgive my government for what it’s done to me, but I will never forget,” Kajikawa said. “I want to remind people that they should not let hysteria rule them. I hope that what’s happened to us will never happen to anyone else.”<\/p>\n
In 1983 the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians issued its findings in “Personal Justice Denied,” which concluded that the incarceration of Japanese-Americans had not been justified by military necessity. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush signed H.R. 2991 issuing a formal apology to the 82,000 living survivors of the internment camps. He also granted each one $20,000 in monetary redress and allocated additional money toward educating the public about the camps.<\/p>\n
“I know they’re embarrassed, but that should not stop them from telling our story,” Kajikawa said. “They should be proud that they are trying to right a wrong.”<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Read the original article from WBBM News Radio<\/a>.<\/p>\n Distributed via Chicago Press Release Services<\/a><\/p>\n HUNTLEY, Ill. (AP) — When Frank Kajikawa was 15, the official notices of removal appeared on the telephone poles in his town. Kajikawa, an American-born citizen of Japanese heritage, lived with his parents and five sisters in a small farming community in the suburbs of Tacoma, Wash., an area with a significant Japanese-American community. His […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-339047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339047\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/img><\/a>
\n<\/img><\/a><\/p>\n
<\/img><\/a>
<\/img><\/a>
<\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"