I do not know exactly what I am doing here, but it is my second year here, in what my parents call the "internment camps" and I have been going to school here. My father used to be happy working in his farm and coming home to mom, my three brothers and I. Even though he studied to be a zoologist in college, he is happy with what he does here. Now it is like we are all trapped. I was only five at the beginning of the way, but I still remember how it happened. I saw the little neighbor boy run across th farm land and yell to my father that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I could tell by the expressions on their faces that this was not a good thing. I remember when the military police came to our house. The guys looked like teenagers. They were so young, and they were looking through our stuff. Later there were posters on the telephone posts that said that the Japanese needed to report. I saw that my parents were packing and they were taking a lot of clothes and eating utensils. We slept on cots stuffed with straw. We were living in barracks then. The floor had cracks in it. My little brother likes to pee in the cracks. He is also leaning to say bad words.
About three or four months later, we left the bay area on a train and left to a place called Topaz, Utah. It was in a desert. It was during the summer so the train ride felt really long and hot. When we were in the middle of the desert, the train stopped, and the military police gathered around the exits and held guns up at the people who were getting off of the train. My mother was angry. She said it didn't make sense that a lot of the people there were college graduated, intelligent people. They were supposed to be the leaders of the community, not the other way around. She herself was a UC graduate, so these arrangements made her very angry. There were about 100 of us at the camps. It was not a lot of people, but we were placed in paper barracks that were arranged in blocks. When we woke up in the mornings we would be covered in sand because of the sand storms. We were not protected by windows, because the barracks had no windows. This strange place turned out to be my home for three years.
We were cramped in little rooms with no privacy. This did not matter much to me, but the adults did not have any privacy. I became familiar to this place after three years, but I definitely did not feel attached to it in any way. My mom took us out for walks, and there were people there that missed the green of the Bay Area that were now trying to plant gardens. We go to sleep every day at 7:30. I had one brother that was born in the internment camp. She gave birth to him in a small hospital that they have here. When we got home, he was just a cute little brown boy that was just taking up more of our room to live in. I also had my tonsils removed at that hospital. It was very painful and they fed me orange Jello as my first food. It stung a lot. The doctors and nurses were all Japanese Americans that were also interned with us. The hospitals were also little barracks.
The room we lived in was probably twenty feet by twelve feet, and there were six people living in it. My father is a biology teacher here. He later left the camp to go teach Japanese to United States Navy in Stillwater, Oklahoma. He would send us gifts from the outside. In the camps we were a community. We were like a village where we looked out for each other. One time, a military police took me and another girl to a park outside of the camp, but I was afraid that he would not let us go back to the camp. For some reason, it seemed more dangerous to be outside of the camp than inside of the camp....
Sincerely, Janet Daijogo
No comments:
Post a Comment