Irene Sato Yamasaki was just 18 months old when she boarded a train with her family for a World War II internment camp in Tule Lake, Calif. What is today an overnight trip took them four days due to numerous sideline waits because freight trains bearing war accoutrements had priority.
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The mainline railroad is just about 25 feet away, so the brick walls of the Lewis County Historical Museum couldn’t keep the horns of passing freights from temporarily drowning out those inside who spoke of what happened 75 years before when another train had left town on those tracks.
That had been an Army train on June 2, 1942, and those boarding it outside that museum building, which at that time was the Chehalis Railroad Depot, were 86 Americans of Japanese descent who were being forced to leave Chehalis and other nearby Washington cities due to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s relocation executive order. Some of those people had emigrated from Japan, and had been here long enough to have children who were born with the status of full U.S. citizenship.
On Saturday, June 3, 2017, one day and 75 years after that train left the station, about 60 people gathered inside the depot-turned-museum for a ceremony to honor those who were forced to make that journey.
Their age or status in the community didn’t matter. If it was someone with Japanese blood and they lived within 60 miles of the Pacific Ocean, from Washington to California and even including parts of Arizona, they were ordered to either move east on their own (many could not afford to) or report to the relocation camps. (Canada put a similar order in force.)
Julie McDonald Zander, who has written numerous area history books, spoke at the ceremony, noting that, “at this very depot ... As they waited to board the three-car passenger train, we can only imagine the fear and uncertainty in the minds of those parents. What would happen to them? Where were they going? How would their children survive?”
The train from Lewis County took four days to reach the Tule Lake internment camp in northern California due to frequent sideline waits while freight trains, some bearing war supplies, were given priority.
“Bewildered, concerned, perhaps angry,” she continued, “these incarcerated Americans made the best of a bad situation. The men built additional barracks for more interned prisoners. Children helped bring in food harvests and attended mediocre schools. Women did their best to tend makeshift homes inside barbed wire fencing.”
But even before the internment, she said in her remarks, restrictions were being forced on the people who had done no wrong. “The government required Japanese Americans to turn in their radios, cameras, flashlights, guns and even heirloom swords,” she said. “They were ordered to paint their windows black and comply with an 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew. They were prohibited from driving more than 5 miles from home.”
The United States had entered World War II after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. Franklin’s Executive Order 9066 came two and a half months later amid fears, suspicions and even racism on the part of many who thought that Japanese people could at some time assist the Hirohito regime in its war against the U.S.
The occasion in Chehalis saw the unveiling of a plaque containing the names of those 86 who boarded that passenger train that day to make the trip to the relocation camp.
One of those at the ceremony was Irene Sato Yamasaki, who was an 18-month-old daughter of the Tom Sato family, which was farming in the Adna-Littell area a few miles west of Chehalis at the time the order came.
Others included families from Centralia, Long Beach, Raymond, South Bend, Bay Center and Onalaska, all in the Lewis and Pacific counties of Southwest Washington.
Those who boarded the train that day included Japanese who lived and worked at Onalaska’s Carlisle Mill, for minimal wages.
The crowd included friends of the Sato family as well as members of the Carlisle family and many others who either were descendants of the Japanese, or friends and their families, and many who came simply to join in the tribute.
When a plaque is designed, it needs a heading, and the one unveiled Saturday simply but meaningfully stated, “A Tribute to Our Neighbors.”
The hurt at the time was not only felt by the Japanese, who had to leave their homes with nothing more than what would fit into a suitcase, but also by their neighbors in the communities surrounding their homes.
But there were also those in the U.S. who harbored ill will and even racial prejudice against the Japanese, and a 1983 U.S. Commission concluded that the interment was the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” Even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said the interment was “... based primarily on public and political pressures rather than factual data.”
Little Irene was certainly no threat to the security of the U.S. at the time she was interned with her family. Due to her youth, she has only faint memories, but would have been about four and a half by the time her family was allowed to go back home. She said at the Saturday ceremony, “This is a wonderful tribute to the Japanese community. Hopefully it will never happen again. On behalf of my family, thank you all very much.”
When Irene’s family returned to what remained of their Adna farm, they became reacquainted with the Hastings family, and daughter Doris asked Irene and her sister Janie to be flower girls at her wedding to Clayton Bier on June 13, 1947.
In the local history book, “Life on the Home Front,” by Zander, it was noted that even after the war there was still prejudice against their innocent Japanese neighbors. T
he book notes that “Some people invited to the wedding refused to attend if the girls took part.” Doris summed it up this way in the book: “We were there; the complainers weren’t.” Doris spoke briefly at the Saturday ceremony, remembering that, before the internment, “We all went to Sunday school together.”
Peter Lahmann, president of the Lewis County Historical Museum Board of Directors, made introductory remarks, noting some important dates leading up to the interment and the war. Lahmann is also a military historian and a member of Friends of Willie and Joe, a living history group authorized by illustrator Bill Mauldin, who created the namesake GI comic characters.
The group members keep old military vehicles in running shape and dress in period military uniforms at various events. Saturday some came clad in the types of Army uniforms worn by stateside soldiers at the time of the internment.
Edna Fund, a Lewis County commissioner, was master of ceremonies; Ted Livermore, interim museum director, unveiled the plaque. He said he had grown up in the “Little Tokyo” area of L.A. and had made many Japanese friends.
Fund had noted at the start of the ceremony that the day’s event really sprang from two local history books. The full title of Zander’s is “Life on the Home Front, Stories of Those Who Worked, Waited and Worried During WWII.” It is for sale at the Lewis County Museum, the Veterans Memorial Museum, and Book ‘n’ Brush, all in Chehalis.
The book is primarily about the women — the Rosie the Riveters — who labored during wartime to keep the fighting men supplied with armaments. Many of those featured in the book had worked at the Boeing Wing Factory in Chehalis, building wings for B-17s to ship to the assembly plant in Seattle.
Zander devotes Chapter 3 to the Japanese who were incarcerated, as well as to the many Japanese who served in the U.S. military, including the 100th Battalion of the Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, whose Japanese soldiers won the most individual decorations in history — 3,600 Purple Hearts and 810 Bronze Stars.
In addition, 21 Medals of Honor were awarded to members of the 442nd in all. The Japanese Americans fought in Germany, Italy, and France and were among the U.S. units which liberated Dachau and also rescued the trapped Texas battalion.
While they fought, many had family members who were living in concentration camps in the U.S., in tar paper-covered buildings with three to four families sharing the interior, separated only by hanging Army blankets. The door was also a blanket and let in summer dust and winter cold, the one stove per building rather inadequate to its task.
The other history book is Vic Kucera’s “Onalaska,” Second Edition, which includes additional information not in the first — telling of the Japanese families whose breadwinners worked at the mill. Said Nancy Carlisle Thomas, daughter of mill owner Kenneth Carlisle, “One day they were there; the next day they were gone.” Kucera’s book is also available for purchase in Lewis County outlets.
School children saw their Japanese classmates disappear. One woman from Adna said, “I remember vividly when they came to school with what looked to me like a cattle truck and put them in and took them off.”
Redress payments have been made to those still living who had been in the camps. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill awarding $20,000 to each survivor (60,000 of the original 120,000 at that time), saying, it would “right a grave wrong.” Those payments began in 1990.
Lahmann sounded a warning, pointing out that, although the internment law was suspended as of 1949, it had actually remained “on the books” until 1976. “We have to be eternally vigilant,” he said.
And Dennis Dawes, mayor of Chehalis, added, “History is probably our best teacher. Please listen to that teacher.”
