Japanese Americans, caught between the fierce confrontation between the United States and Japan, experienced a distinctive kind of suffering because of World War II.
Nisei, or second-generation Japanese immigrants, who were segregated as "enemy aliens" despite being U.S. citizens, have largely avoided talking about their experiences. Seventy-five years after the end of the war, how would their children's and grandchildren's generations be able to tell the stories of their kin's wartime incarceration?
Shirley Ann Higuchi, a third-generation Japanese American who has been working to preserve the remains of a former incarceration camp and hand down its history, spoke about this question to The Yomiuri Shimbun. The following are excerpts from the interview.
--Silent second generation
Heart Mountain rests on grasslands around a small mountain in the western state of Wyoming, about 65 miles (100 kilometers) east of Yellowstone, famous for being the world's first national park. There, the U.S. government opened one of 10 incarceration camps for Japanese Americans following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Out of the 120,000 people being incarcerated nationwide, about 14,000 were kept there under tough living conditions.
The site was surrounded by barbed wire fences and guards with machine guns in watchtowers. There, my mother, Setsuko, and father, Bill, first met in the sixth-grade classroom of the camp's makeshift school.
My parents never spoke to me about their time at Heart Mountain. Being a third-generation postwar child, I did not hear any details of my mother's experience until I was a sophomore at university. I interviewed her for a philosophy class project about the Japanese American incarceration camps.
"It was where I met Dad. It was a fun place to be," my mother said with a smile. I repeatedly asked her whether she was sad, or if the experience was hard, but her answer remained the same. In the end, she insisted, "I was happy!"
She made it very clear by the look on her face and by her body language that she did not want to answer any questions. It was a strong message: "You don't understand."
The lives of nisei were greatly affected by the war. Many of them volunteered to serve in the U.S. military to show their loyalty to the United States, and many of them lost their lives. For them, the experience of confinement was a negative history of being "rejected" by their homeland. Not many were willing to talk about it.
The U.S. government kept a lot of information hidden regarding the Japanese American incarcerations, and the nisei have been reluctant to talk about their experiences. The topic was not in my textbooks in high school or college. In order to find out anything about the Japanese American incarcerations, one had to look for it. As a result, their offspring could not understand the situation.
--'Model minority'
In the postwar period, the nisei had a strong tendency to assimilate into American society, partly as a reaction to their experience of extreme discrimination. They expected the third-generation to act as a "model minority," and they strove to play an active role in the mainstream of American society.
My mother referred to those nisei as the "quiet Americans." Looking back, the silence was a means to mask a multitude of scars from the incarcerations and accompanying racism.
My father, a pharmaceutical scientist, worked in Michigan, which was a majority white state. Growing up, there were hardly any Japanese Americans except for my immediate family. My mother tried to be more American than Americans. Just like the postwar ideal American life, she lived in a single-family home and bought U.S.-made cars every two years.
She tried to give me all the social and material means to excel. I had three pairs of the same pants, but in three different colors. Sometimes, if I did not like the color, I would give that pair to my friend across the street. My mother pursued in me what she wanted in her own childhood.
As model minorities, Japanese Americans back then, and even now, were expected to excel. I think I went through undergraduate and law school just trying to get through school. I did not really want to spend too much time thinking about stuff. Now, I think that was my own coping tool as a third-generation Japanese American.
--Site preservation
After the war, some nisei became proactive in U.S. politics and business fields. At the end of the 1980s, the U.S. government apologized and provided restitution for the incarcerations of Japanese Americans. That became a milestone in one of the war-related issues, and more Japanese Americans started to speak out about their experiences at incarceration camps.
My mother, in later years, gradually began to deal with her experience of being incarcerated. In 1982, my family moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, and she started interacting with other Japanese Americans who had been in the same camp. That was one element that led to her opening up.
The other element was being "successful" in American society. My father was the chair of the pharmaceutics and pharmaceutical chemistry department at The University of Utah and founded pharmaceutical companies, which brought the family financial stability. My mother also built up wealth in the real estate business.
Without even telling the family, she started giving anonymous donations to a Heart Mountain group in the late 1990s. Some nisei who knew her then later said, "Your mother kept saying, 'We have to build something.'"
Earlier in her life, my mother was just focused on moving forward. If she started saying, "Oh, my life was horrible," then it would have held her down. All Japanese Americans who played active roles in the postwar era also succeeded by overcoming difficult experiences.
Living away from home, I was not aware of how my mother's viewpoint on her incarceration had changed. The first time I went to Heart Mountain was right after my mother's death in 2005 at the age of 74. After she passed away, I received a phone call from a person at the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, which was working to preserve the site, inviting me to a walking trail named after my mother. I got on an airplane and went there, and my life completely changed.
My tears fell as I stood on the wide grasslands of Heart Mountain. I felt the magnitude of its effect on nisei and their families, and I realized how important it was. The desire to leave something was not just my mother's dream. It was the dream of all those that experienced this incarceration and were deprived of freedom and dignity.
I got involved with the foundation and, in the summer of 2011, we were able to open the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, which conveys the history of Heart Mountain. I also interviewed other nisei who were incarcerated and wrote the book "Setsuko's Secret: Heart Mountain and the Legacy of the Japanese American Incarceration," which was published this year. Without telling these stories, the future generations would not be able to fully understand.
Many Japanese Americans are marrying people from other ethnic groups, and many younger than the third generation are identifying themselves as simply Asian. How to maintain the identity of having Japanese ancestry is becoming an issue.
Many Japanese Americans no longer speak Japanese. I do not know what the future generation will think of their roots. However, I think it is even more important in today's America, which is increasingly divided, to think of the history of racial discrimination and incarceration that Japanese American society faced during the war.
-- Shirley Ann Higuchi is a third-generation Japanese American born in 1959. She is a Washington, D.C., attorney who has carried on the work of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation following the wishes of her late mother. She has been the chair of the foundation since 2009.
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