A Fence Away From Freedom
Ellen Levine, 1995
This book is written in a manner where the author interviewed numerous people who had been interned at the Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming. She also states out front that the book is more a book of remembrance and not one that deals extensively with historical information and details.
Chapter 1 deals with the times before Pearl Harbor and the type of anti-Japanese hate that was present in California. The personal memories are important, especially in that they verify things written about in other books; how the Japanese-Americans were called Japs, made fun of, prohibited from going certain places, etc,, even before Pearl Harbor. The people were subjected to a lot of prejudice, very similar to that suffered by blacks at the time (and in places still today.)
Chapter 2 deals with the time centered around Pearl Harbor. She talks about the FBI raids and the Hearst press which carried on some of the most vicious anti-Japanese rhetoric of all. A lot of these memories center around how people who were students at the time were treated in school right after Pearl Harbor. Another story is about how one house was shot at.
She also writes about roundups on Hawaii, especially aimed at anyone who was a leader of any Japanese American organization.
Chapter 3 deals with preparations for evacuation. One of the main things is how people would offer extremely low amounts of money for the family furniture and possessions, acting like economic vultures.
Chapter 4 deals with life in the camps. The memories make even more real things from other, more "academic" oriented books. One of the memories even revolves around the gradual breakdown of the families as kids ate with their friends rather than their parents. Basically, what this book is doing is putting a personal face on all the more cold facts and figures from other books.
The memories then deal with how people passed their time in the camps including the various arts and crafts and a sort of community pond-building project that happened.
A lot of the people say they had a lot fun, actually, in the camp when they were kids, but at the same time they felt sort of dirty being in the camp. The older kids and the parents had the hardest time adjusting, in general.
There's also personal accounts of various problems in the camp, including the Manzanar riot and the one old guy who was shot and killed while trying to catch his dog.
Chapter 5: The littlest enemies: homeless children. The author notes that anyone who was 1/8th Japanese blood or more was subject to evacuation and relocation. Orphanages had to close down since the orphanage staff were evacuated. There were three orphanages for Japanese children and the children from these three were taken out and shipped to Manzanar. It's also interesting to here what the government did with the orphans when the camps were closed.
Chapter 6: Japanese Peruvians in U.S. prison camps: They were imprisoned not in the internment camps but in camps run by the Justice Department such as at Crystal City, Texas. The Peruvian government made it clear that they didn't want them back, either. Many were deported to Japan; some moved to New Jersey rather than be deported to Japan.
Chapter 7: Nisei Soldiers and the Fight for Democracy Overseas: This discusses the 100th battalion and the 442nd. It also points out that the Nisei helped liberate Dachau, but the fact they did was kept secret by the government and the 522nd FAB (Field Artillery Battalion), which was part of the 442nd, were the ones who liberated the camp.
Chapter 8: Resisters, No-Nos, and Renunciants: A lot of this relates to the infamous loyalty questionnaire that ended up having people classified as "no-no's" and send to Tule Lake Detention Center for what the government considered troublemakers. Over 300 men were tried as draft resisters from the camps for their refusal to report for duty when the government started drafting the people it had put behind barbed wire.
Chapter 9: Life Outside Camp: Most of this chapter deals with what people did after the camps were closed. It was not an easy time for them at all, and the racial hatred at not stopped with the defeat of Japan in the war.
Chapter 10: Setting Things to Rest: One incredibly interesting thing in this chapter is the information on the person called "Tokyo Rose," and that, actually, there was no such person. One woman was arrested, though, the authorities equating her with the "Tokyo Rose" person and she ended up serving prison time in the U.S. The woman who was accused, Iva Toguri, was a dj for a Tokyo radio station. She was an American citizen of Japanese descent who had been trapped in Japan when the war began and had to earn money to survive. The Japanese authorities wanted her to renounce her U.S. citizenship but she refused.
The program in question, Zero Hour, was a propaganda program with Western music added. English-speaking women read scripts written for them. It was directed by three POWs, an Australian male, an American captain, and a Filipino male. After the war reporters bribed witnesses to identify one woman as Tokyo Rose, and Toguri was the one they chose. In 1976 information came out that the two witnesses who testified her had been coached by the government on exactly what to say and threatened that, if they did not cooperate, they would be charged with treason themselves. Toguri eventually got her U.S. citizenship back.
The rest of the chapter talks about court cases and other activities in the redress movement.
The book also includes some more historical information in the ending part.
This is the type of book that can make you made reading it. Reading a straight "just-the-facts-m'am" type of book is bad enough, but when you read the personal accounts of what these people went through it makes it all the more real and all the more upsetting. It was a total denial of Constitutional rights, a total denial of all civil rights, a totally illogical program (for example, the Japanese-Americans in Hawaii would have been closer to Japan physically and should have represented a greater threat, yet they weren't gathered up for economic reasons, and if the Japanese Americans were a threat on the West Coast then, logically, they were a threat anywhere in the U.S. so why didn't the government round up all the Japanese-Americans in the whole country if they were so dangerous?), and a totally unnecessary program. Supposedly some things have changed so such a program could never again be done in the U.S.
Supposedly.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
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