The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (42 page)

Two weeks later, the Fuhr family were handed release orders from Ellis Island and told their train tickets to Cincinnati would be given to them the following morning. The Fuhr brothers asked if they could leave immediately. The official said yes, and their parents told their sons they would stay and wait for the tickets. Carl and Anna Fuhr understood: Eb and Julius couldn’t bear internment one minute longer. Within a half hour, both of them were on the Liberty Ferry to New York City.

Eb called Barbara from a pay phone in Battery Park, and she hurried to meet him. Eb was seventeen when he was interned and twenty-two when he was released. “No one can appreciate the intense terror of government power and the despair of hopelessness that we felt behind that barbed-wire fence,” Eb said. “By the same token, no one can appreciate the thrilling sense of freedom I felt when it was over.”

A year after his release, Eb and Barbara were married. In a photograph taken that day, Barbara, slender and dressed in a shiny white satin dress, and Eb, in a dark suit, rush arm-in-arm out of the church together. Eb’s dark hair is slicked back and his face creased by a wide grin.

In the summer of 1947, while the Fuhrs were in the process of winning their freedom, the struggle was still on for the few remaining internees in Crystal City. Collins, Fukuda’s attorney, had filed several lawsuits in California to stop the deportations of the Japanese Peruvians in an effort to delay their removal. Finally the INS in Washington, DC, settled on a solution—if the Japanese Peruvians in Crystal City found US sponsors who would secure jobs for them and a place to live, they could be paroled, not deported.

Fukuda told McCollister that the Konko Church in San Francisco would sponsor the remaining Japanese Peruvians. On September 22, 1947, McCollister received a letter from a leader in Fukuda’s church, assuring him that church members would house the Japanese Peruvians, find them jobs, and comply with any other governmental requirements of sponsorship. Meanwhile, the lawsuit in Del Rio involving Fukuda and fourteen other plaintiffs remained unresolved. The strategy of delay had worked. McCollister agreed to release Fukuda and the other plaintiffs into the custody of Collins and they were all paroled.

At long last, on September 25, 1947, Fukuda, Shinko, and their four younger children—Saburo, Makiko, Hiroshi, and Koichi—left Crystal City. Others paroled that day, including the Japanese Peruvians, and the fourteen other plaintiffs in the Collins lawsuit,
departed the camp in a bus. As a sign of respect for the loss of Yoshiro, Fukuda and his family were transported to the train station in a passenger car provided by McCollister. For Fukuda, the departure was bittersweet. Of his internment, Fukuda wrote, “I might have done many mistakes in the past, but five and a half years of confinement and misfortune may be enough to punish my faults.”

Those paroled boarded a train and were given their own Pullman car. As the train pounded the rails, Fukuda reflected on all he and many others had lost: he was destitute, weary from confinement, uncertain about his ability to propagate his faith, and felt guilty that his arrest had inadvertently cost Yoshiro his life. All of the rest of his life, Fukuda considered Yoshiro a victim of internment.

The train trip took three days. When Fukuda arrived in his old neighborhood in San Francisco, Japantown had completely changed. After the Japanese had been evacuated in 1942, new African American arrivals from the American South moved in. In months Japantown became San Francisco’s Harlem. The Konko church on Bush Street had been converted to a twelve-unit apartment building occupied by black families. During a meeting with tenants, Fukuda explained that he and many other church members had been interned because of their race and asked the families to relocate. To his surprise, every one of the black families agreed, found new places to live, and the property was restored as a Konko church. Seven days after his return, Fukuda held a religious service in the church.

On February 27, 1948, the camp in Crystal City officially closed, five years and three months after it opened. Radio Station KYZQ—Crystal City’s station—was dismantled. The flag was taken down. The barbed-wire fence was removed, as were the guard towers. From its inception through June 30, 1945, Crystal City interned 4,751 enemy aliens and their families. Records were not kept after 1945, but in the remaining three years more than a thousand additional internees were received and later paroled, repatriated, or deported. In all, approximately six thousand American citizens and immigrants from other countries—ordinary people—endured confinement
because of an overzealous government, widespread public fear of traitors, and a game of barter: “our” internees in America for “their” internees in Axis countries.

The fundamental questions of citizenship, the status of aliens—indeed the definition of who is and who is not an American—are perennial. The travesty in Crystal City, as O’Rourke implied in his report, is that in the effort to win the war that threatened the existence of the country, these and other constitutional questions were set aside. The heart of the problem was found in a provision of the Alien Enemies Act. Anyone of German, Japanese, or Italian ancestry, regardless of citizenship, was viewed as a perceived enemy. The cost to civil liberties was high. No one knew that better O’Rourke, Harrison, and others who worked in the camp and whose persistence and sense of fair play somewhat mitigated the injustice—except of course to the internees themselves, whose lives were torn asunder.

The men, women, and children of Crystal City were unsure what would happen to them
after the war, but as with many of the “greatest generation,” they imagined that the next chapters of their lives would be better. Few of them, however, lived lives unmarked by Crystal City. Many carried the weight and suffering of the memory of their years of internment with them for the rest of their lives.

The small white house in Castro Valley, California, fifteen miles from Oakland, where Sumi lives is on a cul-de-sac and shaded by a large magnolia tree in the front yard. Inside the front door the living room’s wooden floor is scrubbed clean. Hanging from rails on two doors in the living room are two banners, emblazoned with
CRYSTAL CITY INTERNMENT CAMP
. From the kitchen, eighty-four-year-old Sumi steps through the folds of the Crystal City banner and emerges with a slight stoop. Her hair, which she wore in thick, dark pigtails as a teenager in Crystal City, is now grayed and cut short, like a silver bowl around her head. Her clear brown eyes, which for years have appraised
the world coolly, now give the guarded expression of perhaps having seen too much.

“It was wartime,” Sumi said as she sat at her kitchen table, a large bowl of blueberries in front of her. “I was very angry that they arrested my father, that we lost everything, and that I was sent to Japan. It was humiliating. But let’s face it: Mama was right. War doesn’t make any sense.” More than six decades after the end of World War II, Sumi remains haunted by certain euphemisms:
evacuation
,
which was in reality forced removal from her home;
internment
, which she experienced as prison.

After her graduation from Fairfax High School in Los Angeles in the summer of 1948, survival was her first priority. Two local colleges offered Sumi art scholarships, but she was undecided about her next step. Into this vacuum stepped Kiyo Shimatsu, a returning veteran from the famed all–Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

Prior to the war, Kiyo’s father and Sumi’s father were friends. The fathers were from the same prefecture of Japan and knew each other in California. Both Sumi and Kiyo were interned at the same time at the relocation camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. While in Heart Mountain, Kiyo enlisted in the 442nd and served in both Italy and Germany. After the war, Kiyo returned to California and sought out Sumi in Los Angeles. Within a few months, he asked her to marry him. As was the custom of nisei children, Sumi wrote to her parents in Japan and asked for permission. Her father immediately gave his unqualified permission, but her mother, Nobu, had an intuition that Kiyo was “unlucky” and urged Sumi to delay the engagement.

Nonetheless, just past her twentieth birthday, Sumi married Kiyo in a small ceremony in a Christian church. She walked down the aisle in a long silk gown loaned to her by Mrs. Stern, her former employer. “I know Kiyo loved me, but I think the reason I decided to marry him wasn’t love. It was security,” recalled Sumi as she sat at her kitchen table. “I wanted to find a place where I could feel a part of a family again, instead of working for someone else.”

They settled in Los Angeles, where Sumi graduated from the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic and opened her own practice. Before that, Sumi worked nights at a Security National Bank as a check sorter. They had six children: Robin, Derick, Nicola, Dion, Paula, and Lukas. By the 1950s, Kiyo had contacts with various film and television producers in Hollywood. A few of those producers hired Sumi’s children as extras and gave them bit parts in
various films, including Elvis Presley’s
Blue Hawaii
, John Ford’s
Seven Women
, and ironically Jeffrey Hunter’s World War II film,
Hell to Eternity.

In 1953, Tokiji and Nobu returned from Japan and settled in Los Angeles. For the first time since Pearl Harbor, Sumi felt secure. Her parents lived close by and she had her own large, busy family. Like other suburban American women during the 1950s, Sumi managed multiple roles: wife, mother, and her own chiropractic practice.

Years passed and Nobu’s hunch about Kiyo proved true. In 1969, at the age of forty-seven, Kiyo suffered his first heart attack. Three years later, Kiyo died of a heart attack, and Sumi became the sole support for her six children. She continued to work at her chiropractic practice and built it into a thriving business. Her main clients were the skycaps and baggage handlers who worked at Los Angeles International Airport and, as a consequence of their physically demanding jobs, suffered from chronic back and shoulder pain. In addition to chiropractic remedies, Sumi offered her clients the kind of Reiki therapy that her aunt Tetsu had taught her during the difficult days in Japan after the war. Sumi practiced until she was seventy. She attributed her success to the ancient values of her parents. “I had the inherited spirit of
gaman
from my issei parents,” she recalled. “Their perseverance was my greatest gift.”

Crystal City was never far from Sumi’s mind, or those of her parents. When her father was in his nineties, Sumi said that he often placed his clothes and personal items from his drawers—his billfold, keys, and pocket change—inside his pillowcase. It was a flashback to his internment, when he stored those items the same way. When Sumi or one of her older sisters asked him what he was doing, Tokiji became agitated and told them that he might be moved to another camp. “It was difficult to watch,” recalled Sumi. “He never wanted to be caged in another camp.”

In 1980, Sumi attended the first reunion of friends from Crystal City in Los Angeles and surrounding cities, held at Knotts Berry Farm, a theme park in Southern California. Thirty-seven years after her
arrival in Crystal City, Sumi reconnected with many of those friends who shared the stigma and suffering of internment. Many had never talked about their experiences. Over several hours, they shared memories of school days, daily counts, family dinners in the bungalows, and the lingering, injurious effects of the war. A bond of support was formed. After the reunion, Sumi started a newsletter called the
Crystal City Chatter
, which she published from her home—at first she wrote it on an IBM typewriter and later on a computer. In time, the
Chatter
’s mailing list grew to more than two thousand, and it is now the main source of connection among the nisei survivors of Crystal City, providing notices of birthdays and deaths, plans for future reunions, and ongoing news of internment issues.

In 1985, a granite monument designed by Alan Taniguchi, former dean of the school of architecture at the University of Texas, was placed in Crystal City under the marker
CRYSTAL CITY CONCENTRATION CAMP
. An inscription on the monument read in part, “This marker is situated on an original site of a two-family cottage as a reminder that the injustices and humiliations suffered here as a result of hysteria, racism and discrimination never happen again.” Taniguchi’s marker referenced only the Japanese experience in the camp. The Germans and Italians from North America and Latin America who were interned in Crystal City were not mentioned, even though their experiences in camp were virtually the same. Thirty-seven years after the closing of the camp, the intense rivalries between the German and Japanese internees continued to hold sway.

In November 1997, Sumi returned to Crystal City with sixty former Japanese internees to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the closing of the camp. The reunion was well timed. During the 1960s, Mexican Americans in Crystal City had organized against the racially exclusionary politics they suffered under Anglo-minority political and educational control. Jose Angel Gutierrez, one of the founders of the Chicano political party La Raza Unida, was elected county judge in 1970, and it was Gutierrez who had encouraged
Taniguchi to design the granite marker. After fifty years, the ghosts of all that had happened during the war in Crystal City were ready to be confronted.

City Manager Miguel Delgado and a coterie of other city officials met Sumi and the others at the San Antonio Airport. On the bus ride, sixty-five-year-old Toni Tomita, interned in camp as a nine-year-old in 1942, led the group in the “Shojodan,” a Girl Scout song. Seven miles from Crystal City, an official police escort joined the former internees, now treated as VIPs. Sumi and Toni stared out the window; both had knots in their stomach as they remembered the fear of their original bus ride into the camp in Crystal City. Instead of the hateful signs and anti-Jap jeers they had received during the war, the streets of Crystal City that day were lined with smiling spectators.