How Pearl Harbor brought sorrow to Sonoma County’s Japanese community

The hammer would drop on Feb. 19, 1942, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, directing Japanese American residents in all of California and parts of Washington, Oregon and Arizona to prepare for compulsory relocation.

The incarceration facilities built by the United States during World War II were not the Nazi death camps, by any means.

But they were armed prisons, remote and desolate sites created to isolate people who overwhelmingly considered themselves loyal Americans. Most, in fact, were American citizens, born in this country — like Murakami.

In mid-May 1942, residents of Sonoma, Napa and Marin counties reported to Santa Rosa’s railroad depot, effectively ending whatever sense of security they had been clinging to.

Their first destination was a sweltering, hastily constructed assembly center in Merced, where they would spend four months.

Most were then transferred to a prison camp near Granada, Colorado, on a wind-scoured prairie close to the Kansas border. When the train approached Granada, guards instructed passengers to pull down their window shades, so as not to inflame white citizens.

Jim Murakami, Margarette’s future husband, was in high school when his family was dispatched to Granada. The night they arrived, their son Alan said, was the first time Jim saw his mother cry. She wept because, for the first time as a mother, she was unable to cook a family meal.

They ate government hot dogs.

The “relocation center” — a disfavored term now, as it could imply a voluntary move — was popularly known as Camp Amache.

A letter from a 19-year-old Sonoma County resident conveyed the harsh setting.

“The weather here at Granada is the funniest kind of weather I have ever met up with,” Kazuo Ito wrote on Sept. 14, 1942, to Lea Perry, who had offered to take care of the family’s property in Sebastopol.

“The day time everything is quiet, but during the night, the wind blows like everything and due to the fact that soil is very sandy here, you could hardly step outside and face it. Also during the evenings, the sky will cloud up and will lightning and thunder quite frequently.”

Oh, and the fauna.

“Here, there are all kinds of deadly insects and snakes,” Ito reported. “By that I mean there are rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions, and centipedes. Since I have been here, we killed 2 scorpions and our neighbor killed a rattler 36 inches long with 7 rattles just last evening.”

At its peak, Amache had a population of 7,318 people, crammed into 29 barracks within an area 1 mile square. It was the 10th-largest city in Colorado during World War II.

Yet, it was the smallest of America’s war relocation centers. It also stood apart in other ways. Colorado’s governor, Ralph Carr, was alone among his Western counterparts in opposing Japanese incarceration, and the treatment at Amache was generally considered more humane.

It was also the only one of America’s 10 wartime camps situated near a town. Granada was just 2 miles away, and it was common for prisoners to gain leave and walk into town for shopping. One store there, Newman Drug Co., foresaw demand and stocked a warehouse full of saké.

Despite the barbed wire and guard towers, Amache functioned like a typical community in many ways.

The camp offered baseball and softball games, sumo matches, dances and talent shows. There were classes in crafts like sewing and woodcarving. Inmates worked as policemen, firefighters, teachers, medical and dental staff, postal workers, blacksmiths and mess hall cooks.

In the fields surrounding the barracks, they raised livestock and grew enough produce (eventually including mung beans and daikon) to feed the camp.

The lengths to which Japanese Americans went to create a sense of normalcy in an environment of deprivation were remarkable.

One of the first thing families at Amache did was dig up cottonwood trees from near the river and replant them as landscaping. On the walls of the Masuoka family’s 20-by-20-foot unit were an American flag and a portrait of Douglas MacArthur.

Margarette Murakami’s sister-in-law, who worked off-site, once sneaked in a kitten for the girl.

Men and women frequently took work outside the camp, and young adults were permitted to enroll in colleges away from the West Coast. Some families left entirely, bound for new lives in the Midwest or Great Lakes region.

Those who remained had to cope with a society turned upside down. It was especially hard on the older Japanese immigrants, the Issei, who were raised in a strictly patriarchal culture. They felt deep shame in being branded disloyal, and in losing their sense of independence and agency within the family structure.

As part of the far-reaching Japanese American Oral History Project, compiled across the Cal State University system over a span of decades, a Santa Rosa native described that void. Michael Ishikawa’s grandfather had run a successful chicken ranch, and he seemed to be on the way to prosperity.

“When he had to give that all up within a matter of a few days, it kind of broke him, in terms of his macho image,” Ishikawa said in 1976. “He had to be viewed as the breadwinner, the head of the family. But when you go to camp, you don’t work. The mother, essentially, has the same rights as the father, and that’s very difficult.”

Despite the heaped indignities, a total of 953 men and women from Amache entered military service when given the chance, the highest rate of volunteerism among the incarceration camps.

They became medics, interpreters and soldiers. Most of the latter fought with the all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most highly decorated unit of its size in American military history.

Thirty-one Amache fighters died in battle, including three local boys — Leo Kikuchi, Joe Yasuda and Pete Masuoka, a former class president at Analy High School and Margarette Murakami’s older brother.

On Oct. 15, 1945, less than a year after Masuoka’s death in France and two months after the second atomic bomb fell on Japan to herald the end of a gruesome war, the last prisoners left Amache.

Many Japanese families had been unable to pay loans, rents and mortgages during three years of incarceration. All over the West, they lost their houses and businesses.

Sonoma County presented a contrast.

Opinion had been sharply divided on the homefront during the war, with letters to The Press Democrat presenting fervent pro- and anti-Japanese sentiment. But for the most part, white residents (and, in some cases, the feed companies that valued a reliable customer) looked after the properties of their expelled Japanese neighbors.

One example: A friend of the Fujita family — a Realtor and an elder in the Presbyterian church they attended — found a tenant for their 4 acres outside Petaluma and made regular payments to Bank of America on their behalf.

When household patriarch Henry Fujita got work managing a 100-acre ranch near Salt Lake City and secured the family’s release from Amache in 1944, his son Dennis said, other friends drove his car from Petaluma to Utah and took a Greyhound bus home.

One group of local teens even kept watch over Enmanji Buddhist Temple in Sebastopol, taking shifts after several arson attempts.

Several sources interviewed for this story said they don’t have confirmation of a single Sonoma County family that didn’t regain its property after the war.

“It’s possible some explanation for that might be the rural nature of the community, and that other immigrants were involved in that same sort of business — in agriculture,” said Dana Ogo Shew, an oral historian at Sonoma State University’s Anthropological Studies Center who has studied the local Japanese experience extensively.

“There may have been a sense of immigrant unity driving some of that.”

Still, reentry was fraught.

“When I came back, we were not wanted!” Kichizo Morita of Sebastopol told a CSU Oral History Project interviewer in 1979. “A Caucasian came to our home and ordered us to get out! I called the police, but they didn’t respond. I told my children to sleep with their clothes on that night since I didn’t know if that crazy man would come back.”

Morita visited the War Relocation Administration office the next day, and the intruder was arrested.

Some challenges were more persistent.

Japanese enterprises had withered during incarceration, and bigotry lingered. Jim Murakami, for instance, wanted to go to college on the GI Bill after serving in the U.S. Army, but his application was denied. He had earned his high school diploma at Amache. The government didn’t accept its own program as accredited.

Even those who bounced back quickly had to deal with the scars of imprisonment. Many elders simply buried the pain. The young people found it harder to forgive.

Mark Hayashi, who lives in Petaluma, thinks of his wife’s family, the Miyanos — now in their fifth generation in Sonoma County. They owned a successful egg ranch outside Petaluma at the time they were incarcerated and returned to it postwar. But the gap was crushing for Cynthia Miyano’s aunt, Lily, who had graduated from Petaluma High School in June 1941.

“It came at a time when she should have been doing career development, going to college,” Hayashi said. “And then she winds up being in this prison for 3½ years. So she never went to college. When she came back, she had to stay in Petaluma to help get the family egg business started again. She told me once she was still kind of bitter about it.”

While some victims of forced expulsion withdrew, others became more vocal. And driven by a growing activism among Japanese Americans, the federal Civil Rights Division created the Office of Redress Administration in 1988.

For the first time, the American government formally apologized for the harm it inflicted on families of Japanese ancestry. Over the subsequent decade, the United States would send $20,000 reparation payments to each of more than 82,000 claimants, a mea culpa with a total price tag of over $1.6 billion.

The public acknowledgment of one of our nation’s most atrocious decisions meant a great deal to some Japanese Americans.

Dennis Fujita, one of 412 babies born inside Amache, has cycled through many stages of emotion while reflecting on the era over his 78 years of life.

“I felt a lot of puzzlement when I was growing up, and bitterness maybe. And subdued anger,” said Fujita, who lives in Sebastopol. “How could people be treated so unfairly?”

His position softened over the past decade when he made several trips to Amache, where he stood on the foundation of his first home.

“Seeing these young grad students digging through the dirt, discovering historical artifacts and being excited about the stories behind them, that really helped give me a more positive view of it,” Fujita said.

“Had I been older,” he quickly added, “I may have had a very different view.”

You can reach Staff Writer Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.