“Open the Berkeley High School yearbook of 1942 and you’ll notice that Japanese American faces are missing from the pages,” says Nancy Ukai, a Japanese American BHS alumni. Ukai’s family, along with dozens of other Japanese Americans, the majority of which were put in World War II internment camps, now have their stories displayed on the walls of the Berkeley Historical Museum’s newest exhibition — Roots, Removal, and Resistance: Japanese Americans in Berkeley.
The exhibit aims to document the history of Japanese Americans in Berkeley. It does so through various interpretive art pieces and series of didactic panels, which collectively highlight how Japanese Americans have immensely contributed to Berkeley and the rest of the world.
One plaque names Berkeley as the birthplace of the Asian American movement and the term “Asian American,” which was first coined by activists Yuji Ichioka (BHS Class of 1954) and Emma Gee while they were studying at the University of California, Berkeley.
The majority of the exhibit focuses on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. In the aftermath of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an executive order that all people of Japanese ancestry would be detained in concentration camps.
Gary Tominaga, whose name is mentioned multiple times in the exhibit, graduated BHS in 1971. His father graduated in 1939. In 1942, Tominaga’s father’s higher education was cut short when he was interned in the Topaz concentration camp.
Ukai’s mother, who graduated BHS in 1937, had been studying art in Los Angeles when the Pearl Harbor attack happened. She decided to return to her family in Berkeley. Ukai’s grandfather was worried, but her mother was not. Ukai recalls, “My mother said to him, well, we’re okay. They’re threatening to take us away. But anyway, I’m a citizen and I’m safe. And then of course, everybody got taken away.”
Ukai’s mother was sent to the Tanforan concentration camp. Ukai showed the enemy permit her mother was forced to carry with her on her trip from Los Angeles to Berkeley. Where it should list her date of return to LA, someone has scrawled the words not returning, a haunting foreshadowing of what was to come.
By the time the incarcerated were released, they had to begin their lives all over again with nothing. Often, they had lost their homes and businesses. Tominaga’s parents could no longer get work in California. They had to move to the South Side of Chicago, which is where they met.
“Both our families are long-term Berkeley residents,” said Tominaga, “You can only imagine that if this didn’t happen, where would the family be by now if they didn’t have to start all over after the war.” Especially in Berkeley, where property is key in any kind of generational wealth, the years and assets lost to incarceration were devastating.
Tai Tachibana is a BHS senior whose grandfather was interned at nine years old. “His family lost all their stuff, they didn’t have a house anymore. They had to live in a trailer park with a bunch of other Japanese Americans. They had to live on welfare too, and it brought a lot of shame to his family,” Tachibana said.
The exhibit dedicates an entire wall to a list of more than 260 addresses of homes in Berkeley which interned Japanese American families were forced to leave. It displays enlarged images of orders for the incarceration of Japanese families. There are many stories of families who built their lives in Berkeley and were interned, primarily in the Utah Topaz Internment Camp.
Ukai said, “The government has successfully traumatized our community so much that the history has kind of been downplayed, sanitized, minimized, erased.”
Tachibana mentioned how the government tried to cover up the true conditions of the camps. “The U.S. government would send photographers (to the camps) like Ansel Adams … they would make it so the Japanese people in the internment camp would have to pose in front of fake food and they’d have to pretend that they were having a good time,” he said.
The photos that truly showed the horrors of the incarceration of Japanese Americans were impounded. “Dorothea Lange, who lived in Berkeley on Euclid Avenue and was a government photographer, a lot of her photos were censored,”
This exhibit serves as more than a simple remembrance of the events of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. In light of recent events, it has become a warning. Ukai said, “I think the whole thing now about demonizing immigrants and threatening them, describing them as animals, describing them as needing to be penned up and put in camps and deported by the millions, is really a repetition of this history of demonizing people because of their race and having their citizenship in question.”
President-elect Donald Trump has expressed the wish to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a part of the Alien and Sedition Acts, used to detain non-citizens during World War II — this time to deport undocumented immigrants.
Tachibana said, “That’s the importance of not forgetting what happened in the U.S. during the 1940s. Everyone always says the importance of learning history is so that we don’t allow horrible things to repeat themselves. That’s kind of exactly what’s happening. It’s important not to forget what happened in the past.”