By Emily Duray, Bay Area News Group
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News on June 29, 2019. Reprinted with permission. Photos by Wes Chang, Pro Bono Photo.
Tom Oshidari took his first breaths at the Rohwer Relocation Center, an internment camp in Arkansas where his Japanese American parents were forced to stay during World War II. He spent his first years surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.
Now 75, the San Jose resident is appalled at the Trump administration’s plan to keep migrant children at Fort Sill, an internment camp in Oklahoma used not only to detain Japanese Americans, but hundreds of Native Americans before that, including the Apache leader Geronimo.
“You can see all the parallels,” Oshidari said. “Now the Muslims are the targeted group, the immigrants are a targeted group. The racial prejudice built up against Asians, and Japanese Americans in particular in the 1940s, now it’s focused on these other groups and it’s sad to hear that politicians at the highest level do not seem to have learned the lessons of history and are talking about doing similar things.”
On Thursday night, the retired engineer and around 200 other people gathered on the steps of the Issei Memorial Building in San Jose’s Japantown to protest detaining children at the Army post southwest of Oklahoma City. Similar vigils were held in the nation’s two other remaining Japantowns in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
“It has a dark history as far as we’re concerned,” Oshidari said. “We just don’t want to see children sent there and becoming another set of victims there.”
Organized by a coalition of groups, including the San Jose Nikkei Resisters and the local Japanese American Citizens League chapter, where Oshidari serves as co-president, the vigil brought together not only Japanese Americans, but Native Americans, Latino immigrants, Vietnamese refugees and others.
Standing on a porch draped with colorful paper cranes, a symbol of hope and healing, Kelly Gamboa, co-founder of the Red Earth Women’s Society, greeted the crowd first in her Apache language.
“They tried to beat the Indian out of us,” she said, but added, “Fort Sill didn’t work 100 percent.”
“We need to raise our voices in solidarity,” Gamboa said. “It’s a prison and we don’t have any business putting children in prison.”
Alice Hikido remembers feeling guilt and shame when, as a nine year old after the attack on Pearl Harbor, she watched the government rip her father away from the family and send him to a camp in New Mexico. Soon after, she was sent to a camp in Idaho. Decades later, the government formally apologized for the trauma it caused thousands of families.
Activists can “not let our nation make a similar mistake,” Hikido said.
The Obama administration also kept migrant children at Fort Sill in 2014. But under the Trump administration, reports of squalid conditions and babies taking care of other babies at detention centers have emerged. President Donald Trump has called for a wall along the country’s southern border with Mexico and threatened mass deportations. He pushed for a travel ban on Muslim-majority countries and called Mexicans rapists and criminals.
“We stand here now because we see that it is wrong,” said Huy Tran, head of the Vietnamese American Roundtable. “This is happening on our watch.”
Vigil organizers called on attendees to sign a petition calling for the closure of child detention camps. They also urged people to contact their elected representatives and ask them to support H.R. 1069, the Shut Down Child Prison Camps Act, and H.R. 541, the Keep Families Together Act.
“This does not come down to one person,” Assemblyman Ash Kalra, who represents San Jose in Sacramento, said at the vigil. “One person cannot do this.”
During the internment of Japanese Americans and afterward, Oshidari said, almost no one spoke up for those who were suffering. Schools didn’t address the topic, and families kept quiet, even amongst themselves — sometimes with heartbreaking consequences.
“Not only did my parents not talk about the camps, but really that experience kind of closed the door on family history,” Oshidari said. “They didn’t talk about the past at all.”
Born and raised in the U.S., his parents had settled in Stockton, where his father practiced as a dentist. After the family was released from Rohwer, they spent several years in Kansas City, Missouri so his dad could save up enough money working as a dental lab technician to set up his practice back in Stockton. Oshidari spent his childhood there before heading to UC Berkeley’s engineering school for college.
“I didn’t realize until too late that they had stories that I should know and I don’t and I’ll never know them, because they did a very good job of shielding the children from the degradation and pain of the incarceration that they experienced,” Oshidari said. “But as a result, we grew up thinking we were just an ordinary, middle-class family, nothing different. And you wouldn’t think that we’re historically part of the biggest constitutional violation in the history of the U.S.”
Today, he sees people willing to call out the mistreatment of Muslims, migrants and others.
“That’s a big difference now,” he said.
Even as they expressed anger and sadness at what is happening in the country now, vigil attendees said that coming together provided a source of hope and strength.
Holding candles as dusk turned to dark, people clustered together, listening to prayers and poems.
“Together we can make a change,” said Carmelita Gutierrez, an advocate for undocumented immigrants and others. “Together we can fight and win.”
