Bill Nishimura: Poston, Tule Lake, Santa Fe — and a Change of Heart

Written from Bill Nishimura's oral history interview.

A farm family

Bill's parents, Tomio (born about 1884) and Sada (about 1896), came from Iwakuni, Japan. Tomio, who had studied electricity in Tokyo, came to the United States in 1907, sent by a father who hoped he would make a fortune. It did not work out, and he ended up farming in southern California. Bill's sister Tomiiko was born in 1917 and Bill — Toru — in 1920; he took the name Bill in high school.

• The family spoke only Japanese at home, and Bill spent two or three hours a day at Japanese language school, so English at the public schools in Lawndale came hard.
• In the Depression, when they could not pay the rent on their land, the owner took sweet pea seed instead of cash.
• Bill started farm work at 12 or 13. The family worked Sundays to get produce ready for Monday's market, and drivers on the highway yelled, "Oh you money-hungry Japs, working on Sundays."
• He graduated from high school in 1939, 13th in a class of 125. He wanted to be an aircraft mechanic, but there was no money for more school.

The war

His father volunteered for the Gardena Valley Japanese Association, which helped farmers translate English documents — nothing political. But in the war hysteria after December 7, 1941, anyone connected with it was suspected. The FBI searched the house and took his father, saying he would be back in two or three hours. Two weeks later the family learned where he was held. Visiting, Bill saw many familiar faces behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

In spring 1942 came the removal order, with no date. Farmers could not harvest yet, and white buyers pressed them to sell crops at rock-bottom prices. The family finished the August harvest before leaving — "a really dirty trick," Bill thought, since the government surely knew the date all along.

• His sister and her husband, Shinichiro, had to abandon their grocery store and much of its stock.
• Distrusting the government's offer of storage, Bill left the family's pianos, clothes, tractor and farm equipment at the farm. After they left, the farm manager took everything valuable and burned the rest. "This wiped us out."

Poston

They arrived at Camp Three of the Poston Relocation Center on August 8, 1942. Families were separated only by partitions with no side walls; mattress covers were stuffed with straw; wind and dust came through knotholes and gaps. It was hot.

• His father was eventually released to join them.
• Bill worked as a mess hall crew chief and then first engineer in the fire department — $19 a month each.

The loyalty questionnaire

To Question 27, on serving in the military, Bill answered no. To Question 28, on forswearing allegiance to Japan and the emperor, he wrote: "If my constitutional rights were restored." When the camp administrator pressed him, he shouted back: "If you were in my position — what would you do?"

Tule Lake

In January 1944, Bill and his father were sent to the Tule Lake Segregation Center.

• Coal smoke darkened the sky; snowmelt turned the camp to mud — but their block had an ofuro, an outdoor hot bath, wonderful in falling snow.
• His old Poston fire chief, visiting, got him a job as a fire inspector.
• Censors cut holes in their mail; some people smuggled notes in balloons hidden in jars of homemade pickles.
• Shoichi Okamoto was shot dead by a guard, a Guadalcanal veteran who hated Japanese people. Incarcerees' representatives asked that no more veterans of the Pacific fighting be posted as guards. The guard was fined $1, and the case was closed.

At the time, Bill admitted, he hoped Japan would win, following the war on a neighbor's homemade shortwave radio.

Renunciation

At Tule Lake Bill renounced his U.S. citizenship and asked to be sent to Japan. Before the war, he said, Nisei college graduates could find only menial work because Americans would not hire them; then they were imprisoned without due process. Japan seemed the only place to start over.

To prepare, he joined Hoshidan, a volunteer group that kept members fit and ran its own school of Japanese geography, history and language, and respect for the emperor and elders. As it grew, the government worried it could not control it.

Santa Fe and Crystal City

In January 1945, about 200 members were sent to a men-only internment camp at Santa Fe; his father followed with another group. Work there was unpaid; when his father was hospitalized with ulcers, Bill volunteered as an orderly.

He was at Santa Fe when the war ended, expecting to be deported. Instead the government announced that no one would be forced to go — anyone who wished could stay. "My feelings just turned 180 degrees," he said. "I felt that the US did have some warmth in its heart." From then on, he thought of it as his country.

When Santa Fe closed on April 18, 1946, the remaining men, Bill and his father among them, went to the family camp at Crystal City, Texas — "really a heaven," with sinks and stoves in the rooms and families together again. Bill typed for the camp manager, including release petitions. He was held until May 27, 1947 — longer than most, he believed, because he had talked back at Poston. His father was released a month later.

After

• The family worked on a farm in Visalia for three years, then bought a house in Gardena, where Bill still lived.
• He started a gardening business and in February 1952 married Michiko Kamikawa, whom he had met at Poston. They had two daughters and grandchildren.
• On a pilgrimage to Tule Lake in 2000, he was amazed by young people's interest. Once tight-lipped, he now wanted to explain how he had felt and how he overcame it to become a good citizen.

He came to feel grateful — for his family, for raising children who went to college and found good work, for a good life. Citizens, he said, should appreciate the United States.

Sources

Based on "Bill Nishimura," one of the ID booklets of Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service, written by park rangers with the people profiled and their families, drawn from his oral history interview; the booklet's first-person account is retold here, with short quotations. The booklet closes with "Wind and Dust," a poem written at Manzanar in 1943 by George Nishimura, age 16, which is not reproduced. For more on the ten camps, see the Park Service's "War Relocation Centers." The booklet spells the name of the man shot at Tule Lake "Okomoto" and the family's home city "Iwakune."