Japanese internment survivor shares his experience
Retired high school teacher lived through a Japanese internment camp in the 1940s. // Photo courtesy of Ronald Harry Lodge.
On Tuesday, March 8, the Department of History, the Department of Asian Studies and the Hofstra Cultural Center organized a virtual Zoom event to remember the internment of Japanese Americans in the United States, with guest speaker Tom Hasegawa, a retired Long Island high school teacher.
“On Feb. 19, 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066,” said Dr. Yuki Terazawa, an associate professor of history. “With this, about 120,000 Japanese immigrants who had not been eligible to become a citizen ... and their American-born children ... were relocated to internment camps.”
Hasegawa, a Japanese American citizen born in 1938, spent the first years of his life with his family in Los Angeles until the U.S. government mandated individuals of Japanese descent to report to an assembly center during World War II. Leaving their home and restaurant behind, Hasegawa and his family traveled to the Santa Anita Racetracks with two suitcases, later to discover they would be placed into internment camps with poor conditions.
“They cleaned out the racetrack of horse manure,” Hasegawa said. “We stayed in the horse stables for two months.” Afterward, Hasegawa and his family were relocated to Heart Mountain in Northern Wyoming.
“Nobody was around for miles and miles,” Hasegawa said. “The government [said] this is where you’re going to be located because you are Japanese ... We want to place you and protect you.”
“When you went to the camps, you noticed that was a big lie. There were big barbed wire fences,” Hasegawa said. “There were soldiers that were stationed there in big towers with rifles and live ammunition. The rifles, instead of pointing outward to protect against anybody intruding, were pointed towards the inside. That’s not protecting the people. That’s incarceration, and this incarceration was because of our racial background.”
Hasegawa and his family were moved to Tule Lake, California, near the Oregon border, where more actively resistant Japanese people resided, after his father declined to relinquish his Japanese citizenship.
After the war’s conclusion, Hasegawa moved to Chicago with his family. He completed his biology degree at the University of Chicago and moved to Long Island to teach at Commack High School for 30 years.
Hasegawa said that Japanese people who were interned did not receive an apology from the government until the Reagan era. President Reagan publicly presented an apology speech and, “after many efforts,” the government decided to compensate interned Japanese Americans with $20,000. Hasegawa stated that most who were interned had died by the time the law took effect.
“Today, we have a laden, still atmosphere of white supremacy over thousands of people all around the United States,” Hasegawa said. “So, we have to be very vigilant to recognize that there is still this idea of manifest destiny: a country of white people.”
Students shared their thoughts and opinions about the U.S. government’s actions toward Japanese Americans and Hasegawa’s experiences in internment.
“I found this event to be quite moving,” said Noah Masi, a senior history major. “It’s important to hear the thoughts of those who lived through history while we still can, so we don’t make the same mistakes.”
Many attendees have previously attended Hasegawa’s talks and emphasized the importance of learning from the stories of internment camp survivors.
“Personally, I’m from L.A. and spend a lot of time in Little Tokyo, which was drastically affected, so I feel like if I spend time there, I should also spend the time learning history,” said Badger Kimmel, a senior radio major.
“Trump-era racism against Mexicans at the border, post-9/11 discrimination againstMuslims and Arabs and modern Asian hate movements ... demonstrated that while Japanese internment happened a relatively long time ago, the implications of the event live on today in the discriminatory policies and xenophobia of the U.S. government,” said Sybil Eklof, a junior history and political science double major.
“We must be aware of history, or we will live it again,” Hasegawa said. To reach a future where individuals can “live together as one people,” he suggested we should celebrate other cultures, call out bigotry and hate speech, teach children kindness and how to talk to other people about differences, stand up for people being harassed and support human rights organizations.
Terazawa stated that the town of Hempstead intends to host its first Asian Heritage Festival to honor Tom Hasegawa and other noteworthy Asian Americans this May.
