Internment Camp Experience as a Family Tradition

As you have read earlier, I was born in a Japanese internment camp in the Philippine Islands during WW2. The camps were set up to imprison Americans civilians who were living in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded the Islands. The US had similar camps here for Japanese civilians as well as for Japanese Americans. The experience involved many hardships beyond the pains of imprisonment. In our camp they included inadequate diet, very limited medical supplies, crowded living conditions, uncertainty about the future, and in a few cases torture to extract information from people they thought might have been spies.

In this class we will find out that sociologists think language (a shared symbol system) is what makes people different animals.

Since I have almost no memories from my first three years of life in the internment camp, the meaning of this experience came to me by way of the stories my parents told.

Interestingly enough, they did not portray the Japanese as unmitigated bad guys, in spite of the fact that my father was tortured by the Japanese.

Instead they presented a picture of Japanese people as human beings doing what they had to under war conditions under the leadership of officer who sometimes seemed very cruel by Western standards.

So along with the stories of hardship, I also learned about the Camp Commandant Mr. Tomibe. A decent Japanese man who did everything he could to make life better for the internees.

He made conditions more humane by letting families live together instead of segregating the men from the women and children; by letting men go out side the prison area to cultivate gardens to increase the food available to the camp; and even letting the internees out for picnics. The end result, unfortunately, was that two men escaped and Tomibe was sent to a combat zone.

When my mother told this story, she said that Mr. Tomibe had been relieved of command because of the escape. My mother has since died and on a recent visit with my father he said that he knew that was how she told the story but it was not correct. The reason he was relieved of command according to my father was because he wouldn't kill a specific number of internees in retaliation for the escape.

However, Tomibe survived the war and as a commandant of a prison camp was brought before a tribunal investigating war crimes. However, former American internees who were still in the Philippines went to the hearing to testify on his behalf.

Since he had done a good job of running a camp for the Japanese the American Army put him in a position of responsibility in one of their own camps which had Japanese soldiers in it who were confined pending return to Japan.

Also included in my family's stories is a story of how a Japanese enlisted man gave my father his overcoat to wear after my father left a torture session. My father was wet and cold and was shivering (also probably in shock). Clearly an act of kindness from a stranger.

I write this to illustrate that fact that the way in which I came to understand the world and the meaning of WW2 is quite different from others lived through this experience.  Their experience and the context led them only to see the Japanese in terms of the atrocities that some committed.

From a simple statements of "the facts", however, the meaning that events have for individuals are often lost and with that loss, a substantial loss of understanding of the social situation in question.