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This is History for the Reckoning, a podcast that dives deep into the history that's hard to hear but critical to understand. Season one, American Concentration Camp, the story of World War II Japanese Incarceration. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm your host, Spencer Ford. Last episode, Claudia Kadianagi told us about the many people of Japanese descent that were incarcerated within the United States that were not from the United States. They had been forcibly removed or stolen from South America, from Central America. Many of them are only speaking Spanish and were confined in places like Crystal City, Texas. So today I thought it'd be a special treat to play you one of their stories as they told it. So this is an oral history of one of these survivors of those camps, Libya Hideco Yamamoto, courtesy of the National Japanese American Historical Society, who have generously given me permission to play you this oral history on the podcast. So she's going to introduce herself in Spanish and then she'll tell the rest of her story in English. And you'll find out why.

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And during that time my sister was going to school in Chiclayo. The Japanese community had built a private school and it was a boarding school, so my sister was going to that boarding school. And when the war broke out, I started going to the city school. My parents felt that we should even adopt the uh, you know, I I don't know that he himself was a Buddhist in Japan, my mother was a Buddhist, but he felt very strongly that we should try to uh even go into the Catholic religion. So my sister and I went through the first communion. We attended Catholic school, I mean uh church, and even in our school we had a uh a place, a little cha open chapel with the um statue of Mary and with Jesus, you know, and I s I remember the cross. And so we we recited the uh Lord's Prayer in Spanish. We did these things, and it to me it's really um it's almost ridiculous that uh they had so much fear just because we looked a little different and we spoke a different language. It was January 6, 1943, at night, that a detective came to our home in this in the hacienda and took my father to jail. It was late at night and I was in the city of Chiclayo. The next morning my mother came to Chiclayo and uh there was a lot of buzz buzzing around and everybody was so busy making lunch, making food, preparing food. I was asking everybody what's going on, but uh everybody was so busy, you know. And then I remember when we all gathered at a corner and approximately twenty men were put into a truck and uh we were saying goodbye to them, you know. And I said, Where are they going? And nobody could tell me. We didn't know where they were being taken. And the mothers were trying to restrain from crying and and um I remember they got onto that truck and before they went on their truck, you know, one of the um things that uh the Japanese uh people do in time of victory or in you know um or in time of celebration as well. They have their hail, you know, they say bansai, and they said banzai, and they started singing and they left and then the mothers were, you know, sobbing and it was just and then I found out that we didn't know where he was going or if we were to ever see him again. So then it really struck me. I remember that day very well. About a month later we received a letter from my father. Actually, the letter was a birthday card to my sister. Her m her birthday was February 13, and he hadn't forgotten. He wrote to her and uh he said that he was in a camp in Panama. We were told that we were to leave in July of 1943. Uh as far as the business was concerned, I understand my father had told my mother to give one of the employees um a power of attorney in case of anything. But there was really nothing much that they could do. I think she tried to sell some of the machinery that they had, but whether she was able to do that or not, I don't know. There was not too much time. Eventually it was confiscated. He lost the bakery. And I remember my dad telling me that he lost a bakery. His um friend who had the power of attorney uh couldn't do anything. They the government just did not acknowledge, I guess, the power of attorney. I remember my mother said, if take some one thing that you want, and I picked up that doll. It was a doll that my dad had given me when I was very sick. I was three years old when I became very ill, and he get had brought it to me from Lima. And I remember that doll. That's all I wanted. All I remember of the whole deportation is that we were on a ship and there were about eight of us in this small cabin, bunk beds, and hardly any room, maybe about four feet by six feet of space between uh in the middle of the of this cabin where we could change and things. There were about eight of us and a little round porthole. I don't remember the kind of food that was being served at all. But I do remember that when we we went into the Panama Canal, we started looking out the portholes and the soldiers who were guarding the ship, and we were always under the uh guard, you know, other soldiers. They came around and closed the portholes so we couldn't see very much anymore. And then after we left Panama, um we went into a real bad Caribbean storm, and uh everybody got seasick. And that morning the only people in the mess hall was my mother, this very sickly lady, and I. Everybody else was sick. It didn't take me very long to have to rush to my cabin. As soon as I started eating, I I couldn't hang on to it. When we arrived in New Orleans, that's where we landed. I remember we had to get inspection, had go through inspection of our personal properties. And I remember having to watch our property, our trunks. I don't know where my mother was going, but you know, most of these people that were on the ship were mothers and children. And I I was told to watch my trunk as I watched other people go through their inspection. I remember seeing things, these inspectors taking things out of their suitcases and trunks and throw throwing them overboard. And I remember the cartons and things floating on the water, and I was fearful that the inspector was going to take my I I was able to bring one thing that I liked, and that was a doll. And uh I was afraid that he was going to take my doll and throw it overboard, but fortunately he didn't. But after we arrived in uh New Orleans, we stayed there for a few days, as I recall. We were put in this great big building with rows of carts, and I think we were there two nights, and then we were put on a train and went to San Antonio, Texas. After we got to San Antonio, they put us on a truck, and um we went to Crystal City where the camp was. And I don't remember how long after we arrived there, I think it was almost a month, my dad arrived, and all the men arrived from the camp that they were in, which was Kennedy, Texas. So that's when we were reunited. It's a happy day. He looked much thinner. He looked like he had been working hard. He was a little more tanned than I recalled. He still had his mustache, but uh uh but I was so happy to see him. When he was gone, they were put to uh hard labor when he was in the Panama camp, in the Panama Canal zone, interned there. They were taken from Panama and shipped over to California, San Pedro, and from there they were put on a train and taken to Texas to Kennedy. I recall my friends who came subsequent to us in 1944. They came about eight months later. I remember one of the girls saying that they were processed and they were stripped and taken having to take mass shower and then sprayed with DDT. We had none of that. I recall though in um, I guess this was after we arrived in camp that we had to go through the smallpox vaccination. And we were all lined up for that, I recall that. But I remember seeing these cabins, and they were bare. I mean, they you know, it was just a bare ground and these little cabins lined up. And in a way, I think my heart kind of sank. You know, I thought, oh, we're gonna live in this kind of a place. And at first we thought we had the whole cabin, you know. Then we found out that we only have one side of the cabin, which was one big room, and uh, and then we had in between the two two rooms in one cabin was a little uh toilet and a basin. And that was the that was uh a connecting the bath, the toilet was a connecting room between the two. We had to share that one. And as far as the um taking shower and things like that, we had to go to the community uh bathhouse, which was um uh shared by about 80 families. We had uh showers there, open shower stalls, and we had laundry room where we had a big tub. We could do our wash. They also had the scrub board that was another building altogether. For some people, it was like walking a block to get to the bathhouse. It was hot through August, and in the winter we had snow. That first winter we got all excited because it was the first time we had seen snow. We took our little housewares they gave us. You know, we had a little pot and little bowls. We would take the bowl out to so that it'll accumulate snow and we would have that. That was a real treat for us. Sprinkle a little bit of sugar. We had snow cone, real snow cone. We uh had to go to mess hall to eat our meals at first. I remember getting into lines and having a plate. I don't remember what we ate, but I was not impressed. I think it might have been four or five months before they started giving us allotment of cardboard money, different color coins, cardboard coins. Some were red, some were green, some were blue. They gave us allotment according to the number in the family for food, uh, mainly for food and toiletries. And uh then families were allowed to go to the grocery store with this uh money and buy the groceries that we needed and cook ourselves. The camp itself was surrounded by uh barbed wire fence and guard towers. We had guard towers with soldiers and machine guns facing not outside but into the camp, so that we were cautioned not to go too close to the fence. But once a year we were permitted to uh go out of the camp and go on a picnic of 2,600 Japanese uh Latin Americans that were uh deported, and in turn 1800 were from Peru. This number uh really indicates that Peru wanted to get rid of the Japanese people. There was a big riot in 1940, and uh the Peruvian government probably took this opportunity. They thought there was a great opportunity to get rid of all the Japanese people, sort of like ethnic cleansing, you know. And uh so 1,800 were from Peru, and they were all interned in the Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service uh camps. I understand there were 27 camps that were under the jurisdiction of the INS. Uh I only know about five of them. One in Missoula, Montana, one in Cuski, Idaho, and there was one in uh Seagoville, Texas, Kennedy, Texas, Crystal City, Texas, the largest family camp, and uh Santa Fe, New Mexico. I'm not familiar with the others. But these these uh interned Latin American Japanese were interned in these camps. And as I mentioned, the largest of them being Crystal City. Most of us were in that camp. There were a lot of Japanese Americans in there too that had come from other camps, as well as uh from Hawaii. These were Japanese civic leaders, you know, like uh Buddhist priests, Japanese school teachers, uh, Japanese paper editors, uh, lawyers, doctors, and uh they were sent to our camp. So we had Japanese Americans, but we also had uh Germans and Italians. I believe about 900 Germans and Italians were in our camp. We from Peru went to Japanese school. We learned the Japanese etiquettes, songs, reading, writing. The uh Japanese Americans did attend English school. They were separate from us. They had their own classes and they learned um everything in English. We learned everything in Japanese. We spoke Spanish among ourselves, and um especially because we didn't know how to speak English, and when we whenever we were confronted by Germans, we usually talked to them in Spanish. There were 554 Japanese uh Peruvians that were sent to Japan as prisoner exchange in two ships, two shiploads, um in 1942 and in 1943. But I remember when the war ended, there was a lot of buzzing and a lot of uh, you know, um uh relief, a sigh of relief, and and yet there was a lot of um anticipation also because we didn't know what was going to happen. Why didn't my family go back to Peru? Well, when the war ended, the US government said that uh we were illegal aliens, even though it was the government that brought us without the passport and they confiscated the passports that my parents had, um, and they did not uh give us any visas or anything like this. Uh the Peruvian government would not take us back. The Peruvian government said no, we you know you can't come back. And in 1946, the government said that uh we if we found sponsors that we could leave the camp. Well, there was a um a food processing plant in New Jersey that uh said they needed cheap labor. And they said they would sponsor a group of people if if the government could send them cheap labor. And so about 200 of our people that were remained in camp uh went to Seabrook, New Jersey. And the remaining a hundred and so, 160 of us, we uh tried to find other means of getting out of camp. So we stayed uh even after 1946. We came out of camp, you know, it had been many years, four years since I had ridden in an automobile. But they came to escort us out of camp in an automobile, and they took us to this town called Uvade, I think, and that's where we had to wait for the train. And we took the train to Los Angeles, stayed there for a few days, and then took the train to Berkeley, California, and this is where we settled in Berkeley. I just want to um add that um the camp experience did bring a lot of us together, even though um many the of the older ones, the older children as well as our parents did suffer a great deal, uh, a lot of humiliation. The very uh essence of of living is that we make the most of the situation and never be defeated. That has carried me through. And I think that what uh carried my parents through their attitude, their philosophy, you know, of doing the best that you can no matter what the circumstance, and look to things in a positive way. And uh that has carried us through.

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Season one of History for the Reckoning is made possible by support from the JCL Mount Olympus chapter, as well as generous financial support from the Takahashi Family Foundation and the JA Community Foundation. The music was produced by Patrick Coffin. If you want to support the show, follow us on Instagram at History for the Reckoning. Sign up for our newsletter at History for the Reckoning on SubTech, where you'll also find the show notes for each episode, or support us financially through Patreon at patreon.com slash history for the reckoning.