Chizuko Omori
__________
Seattle, Wa. 98119

I work in a small jewelry production shop.

It is relatively easy to tell you of the privations, physical suffering and losses incurred by us in the relocation experience. Far more difficult is it to try to convey the psychic damage, the emotional trauma endured.

I was 12 years old when incarcerated. I had a birthday a few days before boarding the train taking me to Poston, Arizona. My mother bought me a special dress on that day because we didn't know what was going to happen to us. I was old enough to realize that something extraordinary was happening, but not grown up enough to comprehend the true nature of it. Up to that point, I was an honor student in school, had experienced very little discriminatory behavior. Even after Pearl Harbor, there was almost no harassment or hostility directed against me personally.

You can imagine the confusion in the mind of an adolescent who had mingled freely with white children, learning American ways and then inexplicably forced to move into a tar paper barrack in the desert for no obvious reason. My father lost his farm, had attempted to move us inland and was told that we weren't wanted.

Once in camp, life was surreal, harsh, and boring. I was to spend 3 1/2 years in that place. We were cut off from the outside world, from life as we had known it. I felt very isolated.

My parents were quite embittered by the incarceration and so they decided to return to Japan with my mother giving up her citizenship. One of the reasons for this was because of a loyalty oath they were forced to answer. I was too young to sign one. Looking back on it now, I am outraged at the cruelty of a government which asked people to sign a loyalty oath after putting us into concentration camps. It ripped families apart, set neighbor against neighbor, and was the cause of much anguish.

I did not understand my parents' feelings at the time so I fought them over the decision. I was dead set against going to a country I had never seen and did not consider a homeland. The alienation was so complete I did not speak to my parents for what seemed like months. I felt remote and separate from parents, family, peers, the society around me.

[Page 2]

Somehow, we did not go to Japan like some other families. I don't know why. We did not leave Poston until after the war. I soon left home to work my way through high school, and I was not at home when my mother died of bleeding ulcers 2 years after the war. She was 35, I was 17. I regret that we were not given the time to reconcile and heal the great breach between us. It will haunt me for the rest of my life that I did not come to an understanding with her.

I have grown up with great mixed feelings about my heritage. For a long time, I had a dislike for things Japanese and for many Japanese Americans. Call it a projection of a certain self-hate and discomfort. I feel that the camp experience alienated me from my people. I turned my anger against them rather than the government.

I would like to examine why we have allowed 38 years to pass before asking for redress. These are some of my thoughts.

For many years, I had put the camp experience out of my mind. It was as though a shroud-like covering had been put over the whole thing and so it remained repressed. My father and I never talked about it and only vague generalities were expressed when the topic came up. I got so I could talk about it quite objectively but with a great deal of distance. The emotional content was missing. It was avoidance, a refusal to confront the pain of the experience. Also it was a way of controlling a great mass of anger which was so concealed I wasn't even aware of it. Now, in thinking about it, I am always brought to the point of tears. Beyond the pain and anger is, I believe, a fear which has kept me silent.

I am by nature not a particularly passive person. I am educated, intelligent, and my life has not been sheltered. Yet, again and again I find myself behaving cautiously, not speaking up when I felt I should, not doing things I wanted to do and I have felt anger and self-contempt because of this.

Part of my problem is that I suffer from what I call minority mentality,

feeling very vulnerable and at the mercy of the whims of white society. I try not to rock the boat too much because I will be somehow punished severely for it.

While parts of Japanese culture are admired, like art, flower arranging and architecture, we are "okay" because of our inadvertent association with a cultured society. But when things Japanese are perceived as threats, like Datsuns and Sonys, and Japanese industrial power, once again we become part of the "yellow peril". And having been forcibly herded into the camps, we have been rendered a fearful, docile people. After all, all 3 branches of government, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial, said it was

[Page 3]

all right to do this. It is understandable that there are among us some who wish to forget the whole episode and want nothing to do with this investigation. At bottom, I think that they have fears.

With the passage of time, I feel more able to confront my history. I am impressed by the efforts of the Jewish community to commemorate the holocaust. In books, ovels, dramas, TV shows, and other educational programs, those horrendous events are kept alive in our memories and coming generations will have access to them. We must make sure that coming generations of Americans also know about what happened to us.

I ask that monetary redress be given to every person who was forced into a camp. The government ought to be made to acknowledge the seriousness of its acts against us. It is a matter of simple justice and common decency. Redress would give pause to those who might be tempted to do this sort of thing in the future. If they know that it would result in future expense, they may think about it a bit more.

And there should be some form of built-in safeguard to see that such a gross violation of the constitution never be allowed to happen again. Our glorified system of checks and balances was useless in this instance. This lack remains with us today, and the citizenry of this country should see to it that it be rectified.

[Signed]
Chizuko Omori
August 6, 1981