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Shame

Seventy years ago, today, when I was ten years and two days old, my mother called out to me, as I was walking home from Sunday School, that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.  I knew who the Japanese were, but had no idea at all where Pearl Harbor was.  


My first thought was that I was going to die in a war.


I have no idea what else I ever thought when I was ten years old.  


Now I am eighty years and two days old, and I did not die in that war, nor in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, nor in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Our wars, ever since December 7, 1941, have gotten shabbier and sorrier, and so have I.  But there is a good reason for what has happened to me.  


Eleven years earlier, my mother had graduated from Eatonville High School, in Washington State, and some of her classmates had Japanese names.  The first Japanese came, probably in 1904, before my father had been born in Norway.  They worked in the sawmill, mostly, and for a time there were as many as 140 Japanese in that tiny town.  


A year after Pearl Harbor Day, the high school section of the Eatonville Dispatch wrote:  


“Students who will be missing from school activities next year are:  Hiroaki Hosokowa, junior, basketball and baseball letterman and secretary of the Big E Club; Pete Yoshino, sophomore class president and basketball letterman; Taro Kawato, freshman class treasurer, honor roll student and an active participant in football, basketball and baseball; Jack Murakami, baseball manager; and Jeanne Akiyoshi, sophomore member of the spelling team for two years in a row.” 


They were missing.  Almost every Japanese person was missing.  They were sent to concentration camps that were not called concentration camps.   Still, we do not call them concentration camps.  


There is no public record of any Japanese person ever having been arrested for any crime in Eatonville.  It was a common practice for Japanese families to send their children to Japan when they were about as old as I was on Pearl Harbor Day, "to learn manners".   They lived in wooden row houses within the Eatonville Lumber Company.  The lumber company sponsored a baseball team, and the team won most of its games.  


In the same issue of the Dispatch as the notice that Japanese students would not be in school, the Tacoma News-Tribune and the Seattle Times and the Associated Press sent someone to Eatonville to investigate a report that the Japanese were "rioting".  No one knew what they were talking about.  There were, at the time, 62 men of Japanese origin at the lumber company.  Almost half of them had been born in America, and were citizens.  A number of them had lived in Eatonville all their lives.  There were Japanese names on the draft rolls.  


On May 16th, 1942, when I was ten years, five months, and eleven days old, all the Japanese in Eatonville except one family were loaded on buses and taken away.  The Dispatch notes:  


"The evacuees were given two month’s notice, and had sold their cars, furniture, personal items and even some businesses to local people for any price they could get. During the forced evacuation Japanese people were allowed to take what they could carry away. There have been many stories around Eatonville at that time of residents going into the Japanese homes after they [were] removed and taking various articles which had to be left behind."


I did not learn about that when I was ten.  No one ever told me, when I went to Eatonville High School, that they had Japanese souvenirs.  No one said anything, ever.






See:  http://www.eatonvillenews.net/eatonvillejapanese909.html

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