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Page 6Portales News-TribuneSunday I May 41 2014Welcome back to the homestead■'% on Fbihara loti his lt;hometown in fear i on Jan. 2:1. 1942. Awakened from our sleep, we were herded into state patrol cars and rushed out into the darkness,” he wrote in a 2008 essay for Discover Nikkei,” a website dedicated to Japanese emigrants and their descendants. “I cried and cried myself to sleep off and on. We traveled for endless miles in the darkness of the night.”Ebihara, 8 at the time, was among 10 men, five women and 17 children escorted away from Clovis, purport-edly for their own safety,™ 0 ' Wseven weeks after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.He remembers his father learning about the attack hours before most of Clovis, listening to news reports from Radio Hawaii on a shortwave Philco radio.“We didn't go to Sundayschool that day, nor did we go to school after that Sunday,” he wrote in hisIIDavid StevensPNT editoressav. Even mv father cameW‘:' : ;?’i( ; -;. • . »home carrying his lunch pail the next morning, being told that lie was nolonger need- ,-ed (at his job j with the rail- |Jroad 1. We IBwere now i H scared, worried about how we would survive with nofood on thetable.”All 10 of the men had worked for the railroad in Clovis 20 years or more, theWchildren were active in thepublic schools and manyattended the Christianchurches, but suddenlytheir loyalty to the U.S. was% •in question.“There were dark suggestions that if the Japanese continued to wrork (for Santa Fe Railway), theymight meet with accidents,West Texas State Universityhistory Professor John I.Culley wrote in a 1982 *research paper for the»»Western Historical Quarterly.Hie families were taken to Civil Conservation Corps barracks at Fort Stanton near Ruidoso. “When Dad turned on the lights, hundreds of bed bugs were crawling all over the place,”Fbihara remembers.Hie Fbihara family wasWreleased from the custody*of the U.S. government in 1943 and settled in Cleveland where Roy still lives after retiring from a career in optometry. But, especially in those years immediately following the war, he wrote that “we were constantly harassed and. ’W'badgered about our race.We passed as Chinese.” While the children had all been born in Clovis and never lived anywhere else until 1942, none of the 32 from the Clovis “Japanese Colony” returned to live in Clovis after the war.Their stories are not widely known, but Clovis nativewAdrian Chavez is trying to change that. He learnedCourtesy photoRoy Ebihara, left, poses with siblings Mary, Kathy and Bill during an Easter celebration outside their Clovis home in 1941.about the 32 in a college history class and has been working to tell them all that we’re sorry about what happened.Only three are believed tor ybe alive today, but Chavez has invited them to participate in this year’s “Pioneer Days” the first week ofWJune.The annual celebration’s theme is “Welcome Back tothe Homestead.They can’t visit their old homes south of the railroad tracks; those were torn down soon after they were forced out. But at least we can show them they don’t have to be afraid anymore.David Stevens is editor for the Portales News Tribune. Contact him at:dstevens@pntonline.com
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Portales News Tribune
Portales, New Mexico, US
Sun, May 04, 2014
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