Читать книгу Hawaii End of the Rainbow - Kazuo Miyamoto - Страница 5

BACK IN 1929, I HAPPENED TO READ Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rolvaag, a novel depicting the life of Norwegian fishermen struggling to homestead in the Dakota Territory. I was so impressed by this narrative that I said to myself, "Some day I'll tell our story!"

During the war years I found myself moved from one camp to another as a civilian internee and then as a relocatee, a victim of World War II when my ancestral country aligned herself with the Axis nations. That I was so treated was not for the same reason that the 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry residing in the Pacific coastal states had to endure three years behind barbed wire fences.

Prior to the war, I lived in Tokyo for two years, doing research work at a medical school and exploring the countryside leisurely. It was a vacation for me and my family after practicing medicine for ten years in Honolulu. Japan was then engaged in a war against China and was in control of most of the strategic coastal cities of the Chinese mainland. There was an opportunity to visit these occupied areas in the company of two elderly members of the Japanese Diet. These men belonged to the Silkworm Farmers' Association and their aim was to uncover enough material first-hand to help end the war if it were at all possible. The cost of war was materially impoverishing the nation, and the silkworm industry in the Shanghai area, improved by Japanese variety, was posing a serious threat to farmers in Japan. This trip was, therefore, a serious study in statesmanship and I listened in at the daily conferences with the Japanese leaders, both military and civilian, from Canton to Peiping. A diary that I kept later became a monograph, "Glimpses of Formosa and China under Japanese occupation in 1939."

On December 7, 1941, 1 spent the day at Tripler Hospital, attending to the wounded from Hickam Field. But that night I was among the three hundred persons of Japanese ancestry rounded up as potentially dangerous characters by the FBI on the island of Oahu. Until November 15, 1942, I was interned in spite of my citizenship and honorable discharge paper? from the US Army in 1918. After eleven months of incarceration I was released, but was exiled with my family to a relocation center on the mainland. The only crime I had committed was to write the aforementioned book. I spent three years in relocation centers with people evacuated from the Pacific coast states. I could have settled anywhere outside of the hundred mile strip along the Pacific coast, but I chose to remain with the people in the camp because, as a physician, I was most needed there.

The life in the concentration camps and relocation centers as depicted in this story is factual and is one man's experience. There is neither exaggeration nor bitterness. One of the characteristics of any people, inured to natural calamities for generations, is a resignation to holocaust and an attempt to make life endurable. The Japanese are such a race because their country is in the path of typhoons and is periodically beset with violent earthquakes. There was much laughter in the camp. Educational projects for the young and old enriched many oldsters who learned the finer things in life. For the young the experience was not welcome or wholesome, but it gave them a taste of pioneering life.

For Americans of Japanese ancestry, the end of the war in 1945 marks the end of the first era, which is made up of a half century of struggle against persecution and unacceptance by the majority group. The culmination of this harrassment was the wartime concentration camp. The second era is characterized by acceptance. This change in attitude was brought about by the model behavior of the 100,000 people in relocation centers and also by the gallantry of the Nisei soldiers in Europe and in the jungles of the South Pacific. Now job opportunities have become numerous in all fields of industry. Our sons are being accepted at West Point and Annapolis. Before the war there was not a single citizen with Japanese blood employed at Pearl Harbor. The Hawaiian National Guard limited its enrollment of Nisei to not more than ten percent of its roster.

Having experienced this half century of travail by a minority group in America, I am sending this manuscript to press with a feeling of relief. A segment of the American people will read it and I hope a vast majority of the Japanese Americans of future generations will be reminded of the thorny years of their ancestors. In any case, had I not written this story there is perhaps no one else who could have presented it to the world as it actually happened in the concentration camps and relocation centers. I may sound bombastic, but it may be the truth. I do not wish for another Andersomville to be written one hundred years from now by a writer highly gifted with imagination, using for his materials memoranda of the War Relocation Centers of 1942-1945 found in dusty, faded files long buried in a forgotten corner in Washington. I did not write in an indictive mood and I did not materially deviate from the truth. What happened is important history and, as such, is recorded so that in the future—in the handling of her minorities—America may not repeat the gross mistakes of the past.

The first half of the novel deals with the sugar plantation life of the immigrant Japanese in Hawaii at the turn of the century. The Americanization of the second generation in an environment that was itself peculiar and unique is depicted. Monarchy had just ended by forced abdication of the Queen and Hawaii became a territory of the United States. The aura of monarchy was everywhere. The deposed queen was still living. Even in such an atmosphere, the process of Americanization in the schools was a success. Physiognomy could not be changed, but the heart was captured for American ideals. The characters in the story are composite and thus resemble no one in particular. But some of the minor characters that appear incidentally are identified by their real names. I hope that their names will survive, and if I shall have contributed in a small measure to this tribute for their good work to my people and also to humanity, then I shall feel amply rewarded.

KAZUO MIYAMOTO

June, 1963

Honolulu, Hawaii