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Aiko Herzig-Yioshinaga, 86, was removed from her Los SecondAngeles High School senior class nearly 60 years ago, dining rom table in Gardena, California, reading docuand imprisoned in an internment camp during the ---- —---■—•- -»—..... -aboutSearch for truth brings justiceto Japanese-American interneesBy Kate LinthicumLOS ANGELES TIMESANGELES— Every morning, she climbed the wide marble steps of the National Archives in Washington. D.C.Aiko Her/jg-Yoshinaga was not trained for this work. She was a homemaker, not a historian. But she had a lifetime ofsimmering anger and unanswered questions.By lamplight in the grand reading room, she scoured thousands of documents, inventing her own organizingsystem to keep track of the information. She brought homeso many copies that she commandeered a bathtub and usedit as a Tiling cabinet.Eventually, after years of labor, she happened upon files that would help correct injustices committed during one of the darkest periods of American history — and of herown.These days, she works ning room table at herGardena, Calif.Now 86, she is busy finishing a book of first-person remembrances of the Japanese-American experience in World War II. Asked about her dead-the bookout a low laugh.“Yesterday, she says.Her home is quiet and light-filled, with Japanese screens and a budding fuchsia orchid. Scattered about are bankersixes packed with files. She sits surroundedbypapers, reading and taking notes until long after the sun goes down. Behind her, a black-and-white photograph hangs on the wall — a reminder of what dnves her.It shows a dust-blown desert and rows of wooden barracks.In 1941, Aiko Yoshinagawas 17, a senior at Los Angeles High School. She loved roller skating and swimming with her friends at Santa Monica Beach.forwardprom.Then Imperialbombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States was thrust into World War 0.Some officials questioned the loyalty of Japanese-Amerieans like Yoshinaga, who was bom in California butwhose parents had emigrated from Japan years before.After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that authorized the forced removal of Japanese -Americans from military areas” in 1942, about 110,(XX) were rounded up on the West Coast and shipped to internment camps. The government said it was a military necessity.Her father and mother and her siblings were sent to live in the stables at Santa Anita racetrack before being transferredto camps.Yoshinaga had eloped withher boyfriend when she learned they might be sent to separate detention centers. 'I’he newlyweds were bused to the Manzanar War RelocationCenter in the eastern Sierra,250 miles from Los Angeles.Like many people of Asian descent living in America in the 1930s and 1940s, Yoshinagahad known bigotry. She had been called names on a city bus and discouraged from starting a Japanese club at school.But as she lay on an Army-issue cot in Manzanar, a wetcloth draped over her faceagainst the dust that blewrelentlessly, she felt the weight of prejudice on a much larger scale.“We were stunned,” she remembers. “Absolutelystunned.**barbedgrew from a teenageryoung woman.At Manzanar, she gave birth to a baby. At a camp in Arkansas, where she was sent to visit her oiling lather, shewatched him die.After three years, the government closed the camps.Yoshinaga followed some relatives to New York City with her young daughter, hut without her husband. They had divorced after he was drafted toserve in the military in World War II.She uxik a secretarial job and tried not to make waves. She eventually remarried and had two more children.It was only decades later thatshe began to confront her earlier traumas.Watching news coverage of the Vietnam War, and especially the killing of 500Vietnamese villagers by American soldiers at My Lai, she began to question what shesaw as the contradictionbetween American policy andAmerican values.When a friend invited her tojoin a left-leaning political group called Asian Americans for Action, she went. At onemeeting, someone mentioned the concept of institutionalized racism. It was an idea shehad always felt” but had never been able to put into words.An activist was bom — in her 5(K. She soon found herselfswept up by the causes of the era. She was arrested while picketing against apartheid outside the South AfricanEmbassy. At a march callingfor a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, a heckler shouted, “Go hack to where you camefrom!”Where? she spat back. “California?In 1978, she was living in Washington, D.C. She had divorced again, and marriedJack Herzig was a fonnerU.S. Army paratrooper who had fought the Japanese in World War II and was nowworking for the Department of Defense as a counterintelligence expert. His new wife was astonished to learn that heknew almost nothing about the internments.She decided that more people needed to know what their government had done toJapanese-Americans in the1940s. But first she would haveto educate herself.Yorkwho had written an acclaimed txxk about the internments, Michi Nishiura Weglyn, recommended she look through the World War 11 records at the National Archives.Every morning, her husband dropped her off there on his way to work. Some evenings, he wtxild join her, and they would pore over documents together until the buildingclosed.loyal and who was not.But the document Herzig-Yoshinaga found, an early draft of a report by Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt to his Army superiors,said that time had not been the issue. DeWitt wrote that intem-At first, Herzig-Yoshinagasought information about her family’s experience. Then, on a whim, she asked researchlibrarians to help her locale some of the government documents cited in the footnotes of Weglyn’s book.She was angered hy the language in some of the records, such as descriptions ofJapanese-Americans asenemy alien;Her outrage fueled her research. If she found anments were necessary because Japanese cultural traiLs prevented officials from distinguishing between loyal and disloyalJapanese-Americans — it wasimpossible to separate sheep from the goalsHerzig-'Yoshinaga\ lt;cry played an important the commission’s comthat internment was a product of race prejudice, war hysteria and tlx; failure of political lead-ershipThe findings led to an official government apology andreparations of $20,000 per survivor.**intriguing letter from a War Relocation Authority official, she would hunt down the letters dial preceded and followec it. If a Stale Department menu was copied to a group of people, she would ask for the records related to each of themRECYCLEIOne document led to anoth er, she said. Soon, she and he husband were traveling tin country to visit other institutions that housed records frouAfter 60 years ofthat eraWhen Congress, in 1980, established a Commission on Wartime Relocation andclosing our doors.and retire.Internment of Citizens, Her/ig-Yoshinaga applied for a job as researcher. By that time she had accumulated about 8,000documents, and she knew thelayout of the byzantineNational Archives as well asJune 20-24 we wiInventory Systemprice. All other iteAll sales will be fishe knew her own hoards.She got the job.The commission had beencreated to examine the intem-Pay with cash orVehicle bodies wilment. One day, Herzig-Yoshinaga stumbled upon a report that suggested the policy was based more on racism thanto obtain a title.military necessity.Government lawyers had argued that the U.S. rounded upall Japanese-Americans on the West Coast because there wasn’t time to determine who wasmmmmExperienced Psychiatrist JoinsGroup (PRMG) welcomesgrowing family of providers Dr. Ortiz’swill enhance the services provided by PRMG’s BehaviexperiencevaluableworkedAlbuquerque, Artesia, Espariola, Las Vegas, and Santamedical degree from the University ofcompleted her psychiatry residency(Center) and George Washington University. She completwith the Washington Psychoanalytic SocietyFor more information or to obtain a referral for Dr. Ortiz, |(575) 769-7577. Office hours are Monday through Friday, I PRESBYTERIAN
Newspaper Details
Clovis News Journal
Clovis, New Mexico, US
Sun, Jun 19, 2011
Page 11
Full Page
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USA 25 Aug 2019
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