Kristen Hayashi
speaker
189 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Kristen Hayashi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, I think it's common sense. But I'm going to ask this question. What were they suspected of? Why was this necessary and what did it address?
So at the time, it was that there was fear of sabotage and espionage, but there were no cases of sabotage or espionage. There was no due process. You know, at the time, the United States was also at war with Germany and Italy, but German and Italian immigrants were not detained in mass like Japanese Americans were. So anyway, that was sort of the official line.
I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
And when you were relocated, what happens to your home? They just put a place marker for you in the society and say, when all this is over, you can resume?
Yeah, so as we discussed, you know, Japanese Americans didn't, many of them did not own their own homes. They were leasing. Same thing with their businesses. You know, they were sort of leasing space for businesses. But they were given a very short amount of time to sort of wrap up their affairs, just a few days.
Some people, you know, had a benevolent neighbor that would sort of watch over belongings and they were allowed to continue like leasing their home and they kept their belongings there. Some people store their belongings in like the basement of a Buddhist temple or something. But, you know, very quickly they had to just really wrap up their affairs.
What happened to all those people in Hawaii?
Hawaii was put under martial law the day that Pearl Harbor was attacked. And there was a sizable Japanese population in Hawaii, but there wasn't a mass removal like on the continental U.S. So there was a detention center on Oahu, but a lot of the leaders of the community were rounded up.
So maybe if you were a Buddhist priest or you were a martial arts instructor or a Japanese language instructor or just gave a donation to a Japanese organization, you may have been on the list. But leaders of the community in Hawaii oftentimes were brought to the mainland and incarcerated at a Department of Justice camp.
I see. Let's describe these camps. Those of us who've seen the movies understand they were very simple and not easy to live in. They were formal barracks, Topaz in Utah, Minidoka in Idaho, Gila River in Poston in Arizona, Heart Mountain. Now we know how many there were. At the time, this had to have been so disorienting. So uprooting.
Talk to me about the effect emotionally and culturally on these families that had to do this and how long they had to live there for.
Right. So most of the Japanese Americans who were forcibly removed and incarcerated during World War II lived in very temperate climates on the West Coast. And again, they didn't know where they were going or for how long. And so weren't really able to pack accordingly.
I'm not even sure if they would have had, you know, the right clothing to fare the extremely cold winters or extremely hot summers. But these camps were in desolate areas of the interior of the country where the climate was, you know, very extreme. I think, you know, they had no idea where they were going.
They were, these camps, you know, held like some 10,000 people and just in a few square miles. And so they were very crowded. Hastily built barracks is where they lived. And inside each barrack, it was very sparse. There was a single light bulb and a pot-bellied stove and army cots. And that was it. And so I think, you know, it must have been really terrifying.
Like here they were told that this was happening for their own protection. There was barbed wire enclosing the camps. There were guard towers with rifles facing inwards rather than outwards.
Was there a general outcry from any part of the American society? How did people react?
That's something we definitely try to impress upon visitors is, you know, there really weren't a lot of people that stood up for Japanese Americans at the time. The most visible presence of supporters were really the Quakers, the American friends who, you know, did a lot to stand in solidarity with Japanese Americans. But I think that's what's so different today.
You know, today there are a lot of people that remain vulnerable and maybe they're not enough, but there definitely are more people standing up for people who remain vulnerable in comparison to World War II.
One of the really interesting details of this is how much property during their incarceration people lost. I mean, I've seen a statistic, $400 million of property was lost by Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during this time period. How many people were incarcerated during this period of time?
So we think it's over 125,000 were impacted by the forced removal and incarceration during World War II. And you're right, they lost so much. There were efforts to try to reclaim some of that loss. There was an evacuations claim that someone could apply for in the late 40s, but it seemed like many weren't able to really apply. recoup their losses. And so, yeah, they lost so much.
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