Memories of Internment

THE CAMPS: George Fujimoto wrote in his diaries about the World War II internment of Riverside-area Japanese families.

By Gordon Johnson
The Press-Enterprise
Published 8/2/2001

The diaries, most of them hard-bound red, sit on a shelf in the air-conditioned hush of UCR's Special Collections.

They are silent until opened. But once opened, lives, times, places, events unfurl on time-yellowed pages.

Even the handwriting -- tight, methodical script etched in fountain pen -- speaks of George Fujimoto's quiet, his reserve, his sobermindedness.

At 21 years of age, he had the presence of mind to recognize history in the making.

For most of his life he had seen his father, Toranosuke Fujimoto, seated nightly at a desk penning Japanese characters into a diary. Son George decided to do the same. Only George wrote in English.

George's diaries started Wednesday, March 11, 1942, the day FBI agents banged on the door to take his father.

The first entry:

"Went to school as usual. Shok at work in packing house. Came home about 5 p.m. and was shocked to learn that Pop was taken into custody by federal officials today. 28 Riverside Japanese aliens were rounded up in today's raid; Mr. Sanematsu and Pop included. Fortunately, Pop was partially prepared."

For six years, from 1942 to 1948, one volume per year, one page per day, George recorded his life, detailing the World War II evacuation and internment of Riverside-area Japanese families in remote camps.

The diaries remained silent for decades. George hasn't even read them since writing them. ears ago, he donated the stack of them to UCLA and forgot about them. UCLA, in turn, donated them to UCR.

And there they sat, shelved, a silent testimony to turbulent times.

Enter Deborah Wong, 42, a UCR ethnomusicologist. She arrived in Riverside in 1996 from Philadelphia where she had been teaching at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Wherever I'm living I try to get involved," Wong said.

She came to Riverside expecting to meet many Asian Americans. But she looked around, perplexed. Only 5 percent of Riverside's population is Asian American, she said. Where were they?

She decided to find out. She landed a research grant from the California Council for the Humanities, hired three research assistants and began looking into the history of Asians in Riverside.

As part of her detective work she went to Special Collections and was directed to the Fujimoto diaries.

Intrigued, she asked around. Did any locals know George Fujimoto? Indeed. In fact, he had brothers and sisters residing in the Inland Empire. Best of all, he was alive and well in Ferndale, Wash.

In a matter of weeks, they were corresponding via e-mail. They arranged to meet. She found him both charming and possessing a rich memory for details.

Ideas percolated, and she dreamed up a project that would intersperse taped interviews with George and his diary entries.

Now she is hard at work collecting stories and writing "From Riverside to Poston: The Fujimoto Diaries."

She expects the book to be done this winter, and with luck to come out next year.

The FBI arrives

The Fujimotos lived in a four-bedroom frame house -- white with green trim -- built by the father in 1923 at 3153 Chase Road just north of the Riverside city limits in the community of Highgrove.

The children, four girls and two boys, helped farm their six acres and an additional 10 leased acres. They grew truck crops, tomatoes, corn, squash, strawberries and such. They also had a small walnut grove, and rows of egg-laying chickens.

The barn out back housed a small steel-wheeled tractor and a mule used for cultivating.

George grew up helping out. He fed the chickens mash, weeded the row crops, picked strawberries. He drove the 1938 Dodge pickup loaded with harvest, stopping at markets to sell his produce. He drove to San Bernardino to sell eggs.

His father managed the business, George and his brother Charles, "Cha" for short, provided much of the labor.

In addition to farm work, George went to school. He earned his associate of arts degree from Riverside Junior College (now Riverside Community College) in predentistry, then returned to college for self-development classes, studying music, art and photography.

George's life was unfolding in normalcy until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941, and awakened the sleeping giant.

Overnight, it seemed, George and his family went from being friendly neighborhood farmers to subversives, enemies, sly members of the yellow peril.

The Fujimotos subscribed to a Japanese-language newspaper from Los Angeles and local newspapers to keep apprised of wartime evacuation and internment plans for people of Japanese ancestry.

"We heard that community leaders were going to be rounded up and incarcerated before the regular evacuation, so my father made preparations, he had a suitcase packed with the clothing he needed," George Fujimoto said.

His father had come to America in the 1900s, and built a shack near the city of Orange, where he leased land to raise strawberries.

He married in 1911, and in 1912 bought the Highgrove land. He dismantled the shack, brought it by horse and wagon and reconstructed it on his six acres. The Fujimotos tilled a life for themselves in the land.

Yet the FBI came and got Toranosuke Fujimoto. George, who rode his bike back and forth to junior college, pedaled home to find his mother sitting in the kitchen. "She was so forlorn, in a state of shock, it looked like she had cried herself dry," George said.

The house was a shambles. In their zeal for contraband -- guns, shortwave radios, cameras -- the FBI emptied drawers, pulled knicknacks off the shelves.

Never wavering from duty, George asked his mother, "Have you done the chores, fed the chickens, gathered the eggs?"

She looked blank. "I immediately did the chores," George said.

Breaking curfew

Only 21, George shouldered full responsibility as the man of the family. Evacuation was imminent. What to do? "The thing that really weighed on me was how to take care of the farm and dispose of belongings in time to evacuate?" Riverside imposed a curfew. No Japanese were allowed on city streets between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. Downtown Riverside was designated off-limits. Travel was limited to five miles.

George had to ignore that rule. He had eggs and produce to deliver. "But nobody ever stopped me," he said.

Just as his father was taken off to county jail, then to a work camp in Tujunga Canyon, the strawberries began to ripen.

George quit school. With his world falling apart, he picked strawberries, wet the mash and fed the chickens, gathered eggs and delivered them to market.

About a month after Pearl Harbor, before his father was picked up, George tells of riding his bike near Agua Mansa cemetery, a camera slung over his shoulder, looking for landscape shots for a school assignment. When he approached the cemetery, he noticed a parked car where several guys were having a drinking party.

He ignored them, scouting for good pictures. They drove off, and George thought no more about them. But they returned, leading a police car to George.

"Whoa, boy, I'm in trouble now," George said. "Here I am trying to get scenic shots and there's the Colton Cement plant in the distance, and huge natural gas reservoirs, 50 feet high, nearby."

The San Bernardino cop arrested him, locked him up for a night in solitary confinement and had his film developed.

Sure enough, pictures of pleasant landscapes came back. Nothing subversive. They let him go, sent him packing without his camera. But George had a permit for his twin-lens reflex camera, so he went back to San Bernardino to get it. No doubt about it, George said, things had changed.

Evacuation begins

With his father incarcerated, George did what he could to provide for the family.

He traveled to Tujunga to get his father to sign a power of attorney. But seeing his father with the other detained Japanese shook his confidence even more.

"I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what was going to happen. I didn't know if we were going to be deported, or lined up and machine-gunned down," George said.

John Kolb, head of the poultrymen's cooperative, stopped by to console George. "Don't panic," Kolb advised. "Don't do anything rash. Don't sell the farm. Lease it out."

Kolb expressed confidence that the family would be allowed to come back.

"But who could I lease it to?" George asked.

The Fujimotos often contracted with a tractor operator, Charlie Gibson, who disced the weeds between the trees in the walnut grove.

"Why not lease it to me?" Gibson asked.

Sure, why not? Relief eased George's worries. They drew up the lease and Gibson signed it.

The work of evacuation began. The family made boxes, crated everything up and nailed them shut. They piled everything into a bedroom and locked it tight.

They read the news accounts. They noted the posters stapled to the telephone poles all over town: "Notice to all people of Japanese ancestors, aliens and nonaliens . . . "

George was rankled at being called a nonalien. "They didn't want to call us citizens, which I was. Citizens have rights. Citizens are not to be detained without due process of law. So they came up with nonaliens."

Evacuation proceeded. They sold the 1934 Nash, but stored the Dodge pickup, hoping it would be around if and when the nightmare ended. On the morning of May 23, 1942, the Fujimotos caught a ride with a neighbor to the corner of Fifth and Main in Riverside, across from Sears, and joined groups lined up for red Pacific and Electric buses that pulled in.

Several church women sat at tables and handed out coffee and doughnuts. "They were the only white people in sight. I sure did appreciate their kindness," George said.

It was a grim wait. No laughter. No jokes. No smiles. Just somber, tight-lipped faces, creased with worry, the way farmers might look at the sky in time of drought.

Each family had been issued a number, and all their belongings were tagged with the number. The military threw their stuff into a big truck, and families clambered onto buses. Shades were drawn so people couldn't see where they were going. An armed soldier stood guard at the front of the bus.

It was a silent ride.

Life in the camp

Many hours later, the Fujimotos' bus braked to a stop in Poston, Ariz., at one of the 10 internment camps thrown up around the country to hold Japanese detainees.

George recalled the desolation. Mesquite and cactus and emptiness as far as the eye could see.

The camp was arranged in rows of tarpaper-and-lath barracks, each about 100 feet long and 20 feet wide, each divided into four rooms, with a family assigned to each room.

Camp life was depressing, but exciting and entertaining in another way, he said. "You had all these Japanese together, and everyone was reduced to the same level. The wealthy were housed just like the poor."

Wages were $16 a month. Professionals like doctors and dentists got $19. Teens earned $12.50. A camp canteen was set up as a nonprofit cooperative, where daily essentials like soap and toothpaste could be purchased.

It took several months to organize the camp as people arrived from all parts of the country, but people were divided into blocks of about 300 with a manager for each block.

The manager took grievances to the administration, a civilian group called the War Relocation Authority. The manager explained the rules and disseminated information.

George worked as an assistant to his block's manager, working at a desk. Better then getting baked in the desert sun while clearing mesquite for the crops that would later help feed the people.

Each block had a community mess hall, and one vacant building to serve as a recreation hall where dances and games were held.

Some men worked as janitors cleaning out the latrines, others cooked the meals, others worked the fields.

The barracks were poorly wired for electricity so managers had to devise a system to allow women to take turns ironing or risk blowing the fuses.

Piles of scrap lumber littered the camp. The wood became valued for building shelves and furniture.

"People were really ingenious to make furniture. They would take a dark wood, like cedar, and alternate it with white pine, to make a decorative dresser. The place kind of took on a homey atmosphere," George said.

Life in camp settled down. People took excursions to the Colorado River for picnics so the kids could swim or fish.

George was the only one in camp who had the foresight to bring his bicycle. So he rode where others walked.

People cut trimmings from willows and cottonwoods and planted them to provide shade in front of stoops.

"It was really hot. Almost unbearable. And when the camp was built they didn't compact the earth, so dust devils would roll in and send dust flying everywhere. People would stumble around closing windows, trying to take down their laundry, scrambling to get out of the dust," George said.

Kids organized softball and volleyball games to keep busy. Everybody ordered from the Sears catalog. Eventually, everyone started dressing alike, all clothes from Sears.

Each block ate in the mess hall. Each mess hall had a length of train track or a tire rim or something that would clang for a dinner bell. Each block differed in sound, and people could tell if it was time for dinner by the sound of the clang.

They ate regular Army food. But some cooks were better than others at preparing it, so people would occasionally sneak into a better cook's mess hall.

"Community meals did steal the closeness of family away from the parents. Mealtime is when the family gets together, discusses things. But family life deteriorated that way," George said.

At the dances they would play big-band music and dance the swing. "We'd stand and ogle the girls. And there were some pretty ones. But a shrimp like me didn't have much of a chance. I was always the smallest guy around," he said.

His father came to camp and the family was reunited. But his mother didn't run out and throw her arms around him. It wasn't the Japanese way. "Maybe, she bowed," George said.

How prejudice works

After 13 months, George got out of camp. He got permission to drive his brother-in-law, Harrie, and his sister, Lily, and their 11-month-old daughter to Des Moines, Iowa. Harrie had a job working as a jeweler.

They loaded a 1939 Plymouth until it was almost riding on the frame and headed across the country.

They met with prejudice everywhere. A waitress refused to heat milk for the baby "Jap."

"Man, I just felt like turning tail and running back to camp," George said.

A gas station man in Phoenix wouldn't sell gas to Japs. They were scared to try to stay in motel rooms. They got hassled in Salina, Kan., when a tire blew and they tried to buy a replacement. But they made it.

After a long search, George got a job in the upstairs room, away from public view, at a film development company.

One couple almost quit when he was hired. They didn't want to work with a Jap. But the couple ended up being his best friends at work.

"That just goes to show you how prejudice works. After they got to know the individual, to know me, we became friends," George said.

George got drafted in Des Moines. He served basic training in Florida and was transferred to language school to work for Army Intelligence as a translator.

He lucked out. He never did have to see action.

But he did see the devastation of Tokyo. "Oh, man, everything was just leveled," George said.

The war ended. His family went back to the farm. He went to school, earned a degree in poultry management and returned to form a farming partnership with his father. He married, had children and lived a good American life. He's retired now in Ferndale, Wash., and volunteers part time at the local senior center.

His ordeal is now almost 60 years past.

Still, the memories remain fresh.

"Those were days that would be impressed on your mind," he said. "I always felt I was an American. That's why I felt so hurt when they wouldn't treat us as Americans."