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By JANET COOK
News staff writer
February 14, 2007
In the frenzy of the United States’
entrance into World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued
Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942.
The unprecedented order authorized the forced removal of more than
100,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens
from Japan from their homes in the western United States to internment
camps. The order gave the military the authority to ban any citizen
from a 50- to 60-mile-wide coastal area stretching from Washington
state to California and inland to southern Arizona.
In the days after the order was issued, there was much confusion in
the Hood River Valley as to whether the area would be included, given
its distance from the coast.
In the Feb. 27, 1942, edition of the Hood River News appeared the
first mention of the issue in an article entitled, “Problems of
evacuation are discussed.” The article covered “a large meeting of
white American growers” who discussed the uncertainty of whether the
Hood River Valley was going to be included in the order.
The outcome of the meeting was a unanimous resolution “urging the U.S.
Army and Treasury department to reach a decision at the earliest
possible moment as to whether it is planned to declare Hood River
valley a defense area and evacuate all first and second generation
Japanese, to the end that orchards belonging to these enemy aliens be
placed in competent hands to not only save the crops this year, but
also to protect other orchards in the vicinity of these properties
against damage from pests and diseases …”
It was soon decided that Hood River — as well as The Dalles — would be
included in the evacuation area.
Throughout the spring, brief articles appeared in the Hood River News
about local Japanese making plans to leave. On May 13, 1942, more than
500 Japanese-American residents of Hood River and the valley were
ordered to the Hood River Union Pacific train station. There, they
were loaded on trains bound for California, where most of them wound
up at Tule Lake, a camp built just south of the Oregon border which
eventually housed more than 18,000 Japanese.
After the forced removal of all of the Hood River Valley’s Japanese
residents — many of them American citizens born here — there was
little mention about the situation.
A brief item in February 1944 tells about farmers in Wasco County who
adopted a resolution asking the state of Oregon to buy all farmland in
the state owned by Japanese and make it available to returning
veterans.
Beginning in late 1944 and continuing through at least 1946, the Hood
River News ran ads from the Hood River American Legion — spearheaded
by local resident Kent Shoemaker — telling “Japs” that they were not
welcome back to Hood River. In many of them appeared rows upon rows of
names of local residents supporting Shoemaker.
These ads begin to speak to what Hood River’s Japanese community
endured during World War II and after, but the real story remains
largely untold.
“The silence in Hood River I am trying to address has hung over this
valley for 65 years,” said Joan Yasui Emerson, the daughter and
granddaughter of prominent Japanese citizens of Hood River who were
forcibly removed from their homes in 1942. “It is like an eerie crime
scene, which nobody dares discuss.” She has spearheaded the Day of
Remembrance, an event happening Sunday, Feb. 18, to commemorate the
anniversary of Executive Order 9066 and the impact it had on Japanese
citizens of Hood River.
The Day of Remembrance is designed to help break the silence.
Historical displays, cultural activities and panel discussions by
local and regional speakers about Hood River’s Japanese American
history and heritage will be followed by a concert by renowned ukulele
legend Jake Shimabukuro. (Please click on
‘Remembrance’ events schedule)
“American citizens of Japanese ancestry were forced from their homes
and into concentration camps, with no charges against them, with no
due process,” Yasui Emerson said. She added that, at the end of the
war, the U.S. government had not found a single case of espionage or
any other crime among the Japanese.
“While their families were locked up in these camps, Nisei young men
fought in the U.S. Military in segregated units,” Emerson said. Issei
mothers of soldiers who were killed were not allowed out of the camps
to receive their bodies or to receive their honors.”
Yasui Emerson decided to organize the Day of Remembrance in an effort
to make the events of that time “part of our collective, mutual
history.”
“What happened to our parents and grandparents was horrifically
wrong,” she said. “Most of them, including my parents, are gone now. I
am sorry they went to their graves with this silence hanging over this
history. They bore these injustices with such uncommon endurance and
with such dignity.”
Yasui Emerson said she is calling Shimabukuro’s concert “a
celebration.”
“Nobody ever gave the Nisei and Issei a ‘Welcome Home’ party,” she
said. “I guess this is finally it, 65 years later.” |
