Page 10 - Sanger Herald 4-12-18 E-edition

Lifestyles
SANGER HERALD • 2B • THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2018
Internment and its effects on Sanger
Sanger
By Mike Nemeth
Sanger Herald
Ralph Kumano was born into the Gila River Relocation Center in 1945.
His family and thousands of others were casualties of war — one so horrific that it left few anywhere on the globe untouched. The conflict drew in the United States after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on the American island of Oahu about 8 a.m. Dec. 7, 1941. The next day, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared it a “date which will live in infamy” in a broadcast address to Congress.
America declared war. Three days later, Roosevelt included in his gunsights the rest of the Axis powers — Germany and Italy. Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania.
On Feb. 19, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, giving the military power to exclude certain people from areas deemed sensitive to protect “against espionage and against sabotage to national- defense material, national- defense premises and national-defense utilities.” While some of German and Italian background were arrested and detained, 9066 primarily affected those of Japanese ancestry.
“We looked like the enemy,” Kumano said. “There was no rationale other than that.”
Thousands were given just days or weeks to settle their affairs and report to assembly centers, or detention facilities, like the one at the Fresno Fairgrounds to await deportation to camps like the one at Gila River, 45 miles southeast of Phoenix, where they would spend the duration of the war. They could bring only what they could carry. They went from citizens to refugees.
The National Archives estimated Roosevelt’s order affected 117,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were native-born citizens of the United States.
“A lot of Japanese thought they’d take us out to the desert and shoot us,” Kumano said. “We were put in the camp without any trial.”
The action broke the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads, in part, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Kumano said it was difficult to get his parents to talk of this part of U.S. history because for them it was a chapter they preferred to keep closed. His father, Thomas Katsuo Kumano, wouldn’t discuss details except amongst his friends on rare occasions, while his mother, Chiyeko
Miike Nemeth / Sanger Herald
Ralph Kumano talks about his early years in a Japanese internment camp and its ramifications on U.S. civil liberties recently. A photo of the Manzanar camp, right, and some of the baseball equipment used by residents to pass the time.
Kumano (her maiden name was Tanimoto) preferred looking forward rather than back at a troubled past.
Kumano spoke of his family and their shared experience as U.S. citizens treated as prisoners of war before the Sanger Woman’s Club on Feb. 6. He brought items from the camp that his family collected, baseball bats, various items carved from ironwood and other items that illustrated a dark time for those of Japanese descent in this country.
Kumano is president of the Japanese American Citizens League Sanger Chapter and with fellow members Paula Kanagawa and Harry Yasumoto helped erect the memorial at Sanger High to “Sanger High School World War II Nisei Diploma Honorees.” They officially dedicated the monument Nov. 30, 2017. The monument recognizes students who would have graduated from the high school had they not been sent to internment camps.
Kumano said when he makes his presentation to school children, many can’t comprehend it. “They don’t understand nowadays,” he said. “(That) they could put people in a camp en masse because of the way we looked.”
But talking about the internment camps, that side to U.S. history, remains important. Kumano repeated the quote from Spanish philosopher George Santayana, who said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Kumano said, “It’s important to understand all the races and people around the world.”
Nationality and country of origin remain an issue in the United States. Nefarious practices by terrorist organizations have tainted many in the Muslim world. Executive
orders have been signed in the past year that restrict entry into the United States from seven countries with high Muslim populations. And controversy over how to deal with the spread of terrorism and illegal immigration continues to bedevil Congress.
Immigration and controversy also didn’t stray much during the formation of America. Millions of Irish in the 1840s sought passage to America to escape dire poverty in their native country because of the potato famine, and millions of Germans also left home for a better life, most ending up in the Midwest. The Irish had it bad, and as author Frank McCourt wrote in “Angela’s Ashes,” there’s no poor like Irish poor. And employers often took advantage of their desperation to take any job and treated Irish workers terribly, giving them the worst and most dangerous tasks.
The Chinese, who streamed across the Pacific Ocean in large numbers during the California Gold
Rush, found an even worse reception. “The flood of immigrants began to alarm many native born Americans,” wrote Joyce Bryant in “Immigration in the United States” for the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. “In some instances, mobs attacked Chinese immigrants, who were accused of lowering wages and unfair business competition.”
Armenian immigrants, fleeing the Hamidian Massacres of 1895-96 and the Armenian Genocide about two decades later, likewise faced bigotry. Fear of Armenian land ownership in California “caused the passage of laws restricting their right to freely buy land,” according to Armeniapedia.org.
But all of those populations were never rounded up and locked into camps.
The Japanese in the central San Joaquin Valley had to figure out a way to either sell their belongings and property quickly or do the near impossible and find a caretaker who could also pay the taxes. Many
lost everything because of 9066.
The Kumano family had a friend in constable Charlie Deaver. He and his family lived in the Kumano home on North Avenue in Sanger during the Kumanos’ stay in the internment camp and returned it shortly after they came back in October 1945.
Kumano said his family was given a number — 40896. They had to wear a tag that identified them.
“You couldn’t take pets,” Kumano said. “You had to leave them. That was hard, especially on the kids.”
He said school children he speaks to relate to the no-animal restriction. He said he asks them what they would bring if they hadtogotoacamplike the Japanese. Many said the would prioritize their electronic devices, video games and the like, he said. “Hopefully they have electricity,” he said.
Kumano graduated from the University of California Davis and taught science for more than 30 years.
At Gila River, four families lived in barracks 100 feet long and 25 feet wide. In each of the one- room “apartments” there was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling and a wood stove to keep it warm in the winter. Summertime temperatures could heat up to 125 degrees, and the houses had no insulation. Communal latrines were outside.
Wind-borne dust bothered many residents. It was everywhere all the
time. “People would have white in their hair from the dust,” Kumano said. And there were other irritants — from rattle snakes to scorpions that would crawl up through the floorboards.
But life went on, even in the camps. Schools formed. Newspapers served the thousands at Gila River. Baseball became a big deal.
At the war’s end, people were allowed to return. They were required to sign out from the camp. Kumano’s father refused. Some had homes waiting. Many didn’t. Thomas Kumano brought three families with him when he returned to Sanger.
Ralph Kumano said the camp’s baseball players who returned to Sanger High won a Valley championship for the school shortly after their return.
Many of those from Fresno went to the Manzanar detention camp at the base of Mount Whitney and east across the Sierra from Fresno. Christine Erickson, a member of the woman’s club, said as a child she went to the ruins of the camp to just look around. “It was open,” she said. “You could just wander through it.”
It’s since become a national historic site maintained by the National Park Service and some of its buildings have been rebuilt so visitors can get a better idea of life in the camps. “We’ve gone back,” Erickson said. “It’s haunting.”
In the National Archives was this passage: “One of the most stunning ironies in this episode of American civil liberties was articulated by an internee who, when told that the Japanese were put in those camps for their own protection, countered, ‘If we were put there for our protection, why were the guns at the guard towers pointed inward, instead of outward?’”
Kumano wrote in a family history of the period, “The 1988 Civil Liberties Act and presidential apology was very much wanted but it came over 20 years too late since over half of the affected detainees had already died. But it was better late than never.”
His grandfather, Tamejiro Kumano, died in 1943. He had come to this country about 1900 from the Hiroshima area in southern Japan. He was first generation Japanese, or Issei. His wife was a “picture bride,” who came to this country thinking the picture of the man she was to meet was Tamejiro. It wasn’t. He sent a picture of his brother.
Kumano said she married him anyway. Ishi Yasuda Kumano died in 1954. They were Nisei, or second generation Japanese, first generation American since they were born in this country. Kumano was third generation, or Sansei.
The reporter can be contacted by email at nemethfeatures@gmail.com or by phone at the Herald at (559) 875-2511.