The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (43 page)

A parade was staged in their honor. The high school band marched, beauty queens waved from floats, and students from the Benito Juarez Elementary School depicted the well-known Japanese story
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
, with predominantly Mexican American students dressed as origami cranes.

Finally the internees, many in their seventies and eighties and three participants in their nineties, arrived on a grassy field where the camp once stood. None of the 694 buildings that had once dotted the landscape remained. On the footprint of the former camp were several public schools, built by the Crystal City school district. Taniguchi’s granite monument was the only testimony to what the Japanese had experienced. Sadness descended on the group when they walked to the site where the 250-foot-wide circular swimming pool once was the center of social activity in camp. They paused to pay silent tribute to the two Japanese Peruvians girls who had drowned in the pool. In a nearby city cemetery, the graves of other internees who’d died in the camp, many of them German, were unmarked.

Waves of melancholy swept over Sumi and the others as they searched for a deeper understanding of how they and their parents found the resilience to endure imprisonment in an American internment camp. “I
wanted to come back because I wanted to remember,” recalled Sumi. “For fifty years I carried the weight of the war on my shoulders. The reunion brought resolution. We had all survived and were still together. I felt lighter.”

During the ceremony at the abandoned camp site, the city manager gave all of the Japanese Americans symbolic keys to the city. Sumi offered the best line: “I wish I had this key when I was in the camp. Maybe I could have gotten out of here.”

Many more reunions followed the first one in Crystal City. Every May for the last several years, Sumi and a group of thirty or more of her Crystal City friends from Los Angeles have taken an eight-hour bus trip to the California Hotel, a down-at-the-heels hotel in the old part of Las Vegas, located far from the expensive, glittering hotels on the famous Strip. The bus ride to Las Vegas is a sunny, nonstop social scene. People play cards and bingo. Mas Okabe, who made the trip to Japan in 1945 with Sumi, pours the wine. Toni Tomita passes cookies. Inside the hotel, the casino is shopworn, but no one seems to mind. The casino has it all: blackjack, poker, keno. They look forward to the Hawaiian lunches, the oxtail soup, and juicy rib-eye steaks, to say nothing of shared memories as survivors of Crystal City.

At the reunion in May 2012, Sumi stood hunched over a slot machine. On her head, she wore a Mickey Mouse cap with a generous visor that shielded her eyes. One of her daughters, Paula, stood nearby. All of Sumi’s six children have college degrees and live in California. Nobu, her mother, died at eighty, and her father, Tom, died at ninety-seven. Over the
cha-ching
sounds of the slot machines, Sumi remembered her parents: “I was lucky enough to be brought up by the right parents. They suffered during the war more than I did and learned to be strong. Now I’m an old woman, and a tough cookie.”

•  •  •

Upon Fukuda’s return to San Francisco on September 29, 1947, he confronted the task of rebuilding his church on Bush Street and
starting Konko churches elsewhere in America. Soon, he dispatched ministers that founded Konko churches in Fresno, Sacramento, San Jose, and other cities. Of the fourteen existing Konko churches in America, Fukuda had a direct hand in the formation of ten.

Despite all that he endured during the war, Fukuda became a US citizen in 1951. Six years later, Fukuda wrote a personal petition to President Eisenhower asking for redress and compensation of losses for Japanese and Japanese Americans interned during World War II. In the conclusion of his petition to Eisenhower, Fukuda wrote, “I am proud to be an American. I wish to hear the voice of conscience in this country, which stands on the principles of liberty, equality, justice and brotherly love.” He never received a response from Eisenhower and died of a heart attack in San Francisco on December 6, 1957.

His wife, Shinko, became head minister at the church, and all of his six surviving children took his death hard. Makiko, his only daughter, took the loss the hardest. All her life she’d tried to please her father, to make good grades, and perhaps earn the kind of attention and love Fukuda felt in Crystal City for his dying son, Yoshiro. During church services, Makiko, a flashy dresser, would sit in the back row and during her father’s long-winded sermons call out in English, “Time to wrap it up!”

On a cold night on November 8, 1961, Makiko, who had by then been married for a year, took a walk toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Makiko, who years before as a small child had tugged at her mother’s dark coat while posing for a photograph for Dorothea Lange, climbed onto a railing, jumped into the icy water, and died. In interviews, Makiko’s surviving brothers—Nobusuke, Saburo, Koichi, and Hiroshi—said that the family never knew the exact motive for Makiko’s suicide. However, they noted numerous studies that indicate that many nisei who were incarcerated at a young age, as the Fukuda children had been, suffered lingering feelings of betrayal by their government, shame, and depression that extended well past the war. According to her brothers, Makiko fit that pattern. They consider her death a ripple effect from the war.

Shinko continued to serve as minister of the Konko Church until her death on April 3, 1972. At sunrise that morning, she got off a bus on Geary Street and was struck by a driver who was blinded by the sun. Shinko was sixty-six. “Both of our parents lived their lives practicing
gaman
—patience and resilience,” said Nobusuke, the second-born son. “They never wasted anything—not food, time, or anger. Instead, they waited for things to work out.” Today, the Konko Church, in which the Fukuda sons remain active, serves about one hundred families in Japantown.

Neither Fukuda nor Shinko lived to see the nation’s official attempt at redress. Fukuda’s petition was filed thirty-one years before President Ronald Reagan formally apologized on August 10, 1988, for the mass incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans. Congress appropriated $37 million for restitution, and Japanese American survivors were awarded $20,000 per person.

In June 1996, a class-action suit was filed in federal district court in Los Angeles on behalf of the twenty-two hundred Latin Americans of Japanese descent who were deported to the United States during World War II and were forcibly interned on the orders of FDR. Many of those who filed the suit, including Carmen Mochizuki and Alice Nishimoto, were former Crystal City internees.

The lawsuit requested the same redress that Japanese Americans received under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by Reagan: a formal apology and $20,000 in reparations. The Justice Department, under President Bill Clinton, argued that the Japanese taken from Latin America were not citizens upon their arrival on US soil and entered the country as illegal immigrants. “The argument was as bizarre as it was false,” said Carmen. “After all, we were abducted by the American military, brought here on American ships, and many Japanese Peruvians from Crystal City were used as hostages in prisoner exchanges.” The lawsuit,
Carmen Mochizuki v. the United States of America
, was settled with a formal apology from the government and $5,000 per person for Japanese Latin American survivors, $15,000 less than Japanese Americans received.

•  •  •

The postwar paths of US officials involved in the fraught history of internment at Crystal City were variously impacted. Some stayed silent about their part while others formally recanted.

After the war, Joseph O’Rourke continued his contact with some of the internees from Crystal City. After Fukuda became a citizen, O’Rourke traveled to San Francisco and had dinner with him and other former issei internees at Yamato Restaurant in Japantown. By then O’Rourke was director of the INS office in Kansas City, a job he held until his retirement. He and Mary, his second wife, then moved to Dallas, where they settled in a midcentury home on McFarlin Boulevard in University Park, a tree-lined neighborhood not far from downtown.

O’Rourke died at sixty-two on April 5, 1959, of a heart attack. A funeral mass was held at a small Catholic chapel in Dallas. Though his daughter, Joan, was listed as a survivor, they never reconciled, and she did not attend the funeral. O’Rourke is buried in Restland Cemetery.

During the postwar period, Harrison, a lawyer and civic leader in Philadelphia, devoted himself to civil rights issues. He continued to press his proposal for the settlement of Jews in Palestine. Historians have credited the Harrison Report as having laid the groundwork for US support for the state of Israel. In 1946, Harrison testified on behalf of Heman Marion Sweatt, a black student who was denied admission to the University of Texas Law School.

Harrison left no record of what he thought about the efficacy of the Crystal City Internment Camp. His son Barton speculated his father would most likely have been conflicted. “I think that he would have been comfortable and proud of the fact that the camp was mixed nationalities and reunited families. He would have been in favor of that and proud of the accomplishment,” said Barton. “I’m not sure he would have supported the trades, especially of American children, but he would probably have concluded that it was his job to run the camp and the State Department’s job to handle the exchanges.”

On July 28, 1955,
while on a trip to a remote camp operated by Quakers in the Adirondacks, Harrison suffered a heart attack and died at the age of fifty-six. His funeral was held at Race Street Meeting House in Philadelphia. His three sons—Paul, Barton, and Earl—were in college or graduate school at the time of his death. Paul later became a surgeon. Barton followed his father as a Philadelphia lawyer. After graduation from Yale Divinity School, Earl became headmaster of Westtown School in Philadelphia and later head of the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. “We used to joke that all we needed was one more brother—an undertaker—and together we’d be able to take care of any family situation,” Barton recalled.

As attorney general, Francis Biddle acquiesced to Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to intern Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants in the United States, but regretted his part in the internment for the rest of his life. In his autobiography, Biddle wrote that the program was “ill-advised, unnecessary and unnecessarily cruel.”

After Roosevelt died, Truman appointed Biddle as the leading American judge at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. As Biddle sat in court, lawyers for Nazi war criminals attempted to justify their concentration camps by pointing out that the United States operated internment camps. In addition, the German lawyers invoked US Supreme Court decisions, including the pivotal 1944 case
Korematsu v. the United States
, in which Hugo Black, the liberal leader of the court, writing for the six-to-three majority, legalized the American camps in disregard of the Bill of Rights.

Tom Clark, Biddle’s successor as attorney general, later publicly apologized for his part in the internment. On December 7, 1941, he became civilian coordinator of the evacuation of the Japanese from the West Coast. Truman later named him to the Supreme Court. After his resignation from the Court in 1967, Clark purged his conscience. “I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. One is my part in the evacuation of the Japanese from California in 1942. . . . I don’t think that served any purpose at all. . . . We picked them up and put them in concentration camps. That’s the truth of
the matter. And as I look back on it—although at the time I argued the case—I am amazed that the Supreme Court ever approved it.”

On May 8, 1945, V-E Day, Eleanor Roosevelt listened to the radio as Truman, Churchill, and Stalin announced the surrender of Germany. Later, she confessed to a friend, “It was sad Franklin couldn’t have announced it.” In December 1945, Truman telephoned Eleanor in New York and asked her to serve as a member of the American delegation to the first United Nations General Assembly in London. Eleanor debated the offer for several days, but finally accepted the position.

During her highly public second career as a leader in the United Nations, Eleanor devoted the next twenty years of her life to human rights for Jews in Europe, and for blacks and women in the United States. At the time of her death on November 7, 1962, she was consistently voted in international polls as “the most admired person in the world.”

•  •  •

Upon his deportation to Germany on September 11, 1945, Fritz Kuhn, formerly the leader of the Bund in America, returned a defeated man to a defeated country. He was imprisoned at the infamous Hohenasperg Prison, located near Stuttgart, for more than a year. Upon his release, Kuhn moved to Munich and lived with his wife, Elsa, and their two children, Walter and Waltraut, in a poor neighborhood. “He will now, like other Germans, have to live on 1,275 calories per day,” gloated one newspaper account.

When Kuhn died at fifty-five on December 14, 1951, the
New York Times
described him as “a poor and obscure chemist, unheralded and unsung.”

In contrast, Bert Shepard, the young P-38 pilot who repatriated to America during the exchange that included the Eiserloh family, returned wounded but unbowed. Shepard lost his leg when his plane was gunned down near Berlin, but while a prisoner of war he trained himself to walk with an artificial leg. Prior to the war, Shepard, a left-handed pitcher, played in the minor leagues. During the long, difficult days in a POW camp, Shepard continued to practice his pitching.

When he returned to the United States in late January 1945, Shepard went out for spring training, and the Washington Senators hired him as a pitching coach. On August 4, 1945, only seven months after Shepard left Germany, he was on the field when the Senators played game two of a fourth consecutive doubleheader against the Red Sox. In the fourth inning, the Senators trailed the Red Sox 14–2. The manager of the Senators made the call to the bullpen for Shepard to enter the game in relief with the bases loaded and two outs. Shepard took the mound, threw a few warm-up pitches, and then struck out his first batter, ending the inning with the bases loaded. He pitched five and a half innings of impressive relief, allowing three hits and one run. While the Red Sox won the game 15–4, the crowd went wild for Shepard, a hero in baseball as well as in World War II. Instead of a laurel, they crowned Shepard, the first man with an artificial leg to pitch in a major league game, with a standing ovation and wholehearted applause.