In Piedmont, Tokuda to detail family’s Japanese internment experience

The second of three events in a “Never Again” series at the Piedmont Center for the Arts unveils the rippling, generational impact of Executive Order 9066.

Signed in 1942 by President Franklin Roosevelt, the order required all people of Japanese ancestry moved from West Coast military exclusion zones to internment camps. About 120,000 U.S. citizens and legal residents of Japanese descent were forcibly “relocated” to these camps.

At 7 p.m. Saturday, “Remembering, 80 years later,” continuing the series sponsored in-part by the Piedmont Asian-American Club, will host award-winning journalist and primetime television news anchor Wendy Tokuda (bpt.me/6449591). Joining her will be Kimi Hill, the granddaughter of renowned artist and UC Berkeley instructor Chiura Obata and author of the book honoring his legacy, “Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata’s Art of the Internment.”

Washington native Tokuda is well-known in the Bay Area, having anchored prime time evening newscasts at KPIX CBS5 and KRON4 from 1977 to 1991 before departing for a prestigious anchor post at NBC4 in Los Angeles. Returning to San Francisco in 1997, Tokuda picked up her mantle as the first Asian American to anchor weekday primetime newscasts, notably expanding her influence by creating special projects, such as “Students Rising Above.”

The program profiled low-income high school students who overcame significant obstacles and went on to attend college. The series ran for 17 years. An outgrowth project, a multimillion dollar nonprofit bearing the same name, continues beyond Tokuda’s retirement from broadcast journalism in 2016 to raise funds for academic scholarships.

Tokuda’s parents met at the Minidoka internment camp in the Idaho desert. The camp at one time held more than 13,000 Japanese Americans. Tokuda was born four days after her mother and older brother left the camp. In a recent phone interview she said that although her parents rarely referenced their incarceration directly, she and her siblings “felt it was always in the air. We felt all their anxieties and fears, although we didn’t know where they came from.”

Without explanations, the forced relocation and camp years were mostly a plot point on their lives’ timelines, she explained, with that history existing in their household like a ghost.

“Everything was ‘before camp’ or ‘after camp,’ Tokuda said. “We grew up feeling like we were not real, like we were second-class citizens. We were just different, and we knew it.”

Tokuda learned the history and details of the camps in high school — and even more personally, after discovering her mother’s files. Reading government documents, official camp correspondence, personal journals and letters that her mother, a librarian, had kept, Tokuda said she realized that her mother had been a gifted, aspiring novelist whose college years were harshly interrupted by being interned.

Despite her mother recording the indignities of the initially unheated barracks and dust as thick as flour coating every surface and precluding being able to see from the doorway to the opposite end of the small space, she wrote poetically and purposefully about the surroundings.

“She deserves to have her story told,” Tokuda said. “One example: She wrote about the weather — what else was there? She wrote, ‘The wind no longer seems like energy alone. It’s an animal, hovering above the earth, whipping its mighty tail. I can really see where it began with the illusion of a dragon’ — that’s my mom.”

Her mother also wrote about her first night in a “holding” camp on a fairground. A knock on the door was accompanied by an unseen person’s “lights-out” order. Floodlights cast an eerie effect on outside areas, and everyone was kept awake by a child who cried into the early morning and said repeatedly, “I want to go home.”

Tokuda’s words when reading from the materials and speaking about her family’s experience in the camps travel in two speeds. The first is halting and broken, as if there’s not enough oxygen in her lungs when sharing personal stories. The second is like a torrential river. Swept up by the crosscurrent of camp documents especially, Tokuda rushes to read the language in advisory materials she knows the camp officials intended to be helpful. Released during what was still wartime, the world to which they returned continued to hold dangerous stereotypes and demonstrate animosity to Japanese Americans.

A “Helpful Hints for Successful Relocation” document was given to everyone leaving Minidoka. The introductory comments advise they are returning to “life in a normal American way” and a community expressing “willingness to include you as one of its residents.” Among the “hints” are, “Don’t speak Japanese in public places,” “Don’t gang up in large groups on sidewalks and in public places to inconvenience and antagonize the local people,” “Don’t be loud or boisterous,” and “Don’t patronize honky tonks, night clubs, bars and other such places that might reflect unfavorably on all Japanese Americans.”

Thinking about the document caused Tokuda to realize how deeply her family’s experience in the camps had affected her. It is not the entirety, but a part of the building blocks of her character.

“What’s the message behind being told to avoid actions that would reflect on ‘all Japanese Americans?’ It means there’s something wrong with you. I remember my father saying something similar to us. It was a blueprint for raising my generation. What they were saying (of the environment) was true and not mean. It just described the environment and how to manage that. But we internalized that.”

She says people are surprised when she expresses her internal responses because she is most often recognized as a successful person in a highly competitive field.

“I’m like the living example of the American Dream. The model minority of the bootstrap thing.” After hesitating, she reveals she is working on a book drawn from her mother’s files. “I once understood this history in broad brush strokes. Doing this work, I’m feeling every bristle in the brush.”

Aware the endeavor could be viewed as entirely political, she resists, but admits the current environment does trigger protective “primal fears.”

Hearing politicians and others speak of Haitian people eating pets, she says, “I felt just like I do when I hear the word Jap.’ That rhetoric, that othering, that saying ‘they’ve got to leave’ and the hatred? Or comparing the January 6 insurrection people who broke the law, were convicted and are imprisoned to Japanese Americans in the camps? Excuse me, 11 members of my family were interned and none of them did anything (illegal).”

Tokuda says her presentation in Piedmont offers a highly valued opportunity to share her mother’s talents as a writer and the experiences of Japanese Americans during a seminal time in America’s history. The series will conclude Nov. 23 with the screening and moderated discussion of “Alternative Facts,” a film by Jon Osaki.

Lou Fancher is a freelance writer. Reach her at lou@johnsonandfancher.com.