cup of tea, “You remarked on my satsuma platter. At the camp we had these cups and plates that were enormously thick and large. They all had ‘U.S.Q.M.C.’ on the back, and I can remember wondering what kind of company would make porcelain so thick and clumsy. I eventually found out that ‘U.S.Q.M.C.’ stood for ‘U.S. Quartermaster Corps.’ The plates were old army plates from World War One.” She laughed. It was a light, friendly laugh.
“From the time I was a little girl I loved porcelain. It came from my mother. When they gave us orders to go to camp we could only take what we could carry. Before we left I remember my mother packing her beloved porcelain away in a barrel for storage. A white man was going door-to-door in our neighborhood buying things from Japanese at just pennies on the dollar. When he got to our house he told my mother everything in storage would be confiscated anyway, and that he’d buy the plates for a penny apiece. I can remember my mother walking to the front door of the house with a handful of plates and throwing them on the sidewalk. They hit and shattered into a thousand pieces. She preferred breaking them over selling them to a profiteer. It turned out our things in storage weren’t confiscated, but some were stolen. This satsuma platter is one thing that survived.” She lightly touched the edge of the platter.
“It sounds like a terrible time.”
“We actually tried to have what we thought was a normal American life in camp. We had schools and clubs and even a boy scout troop. But it was a hollow kind of life. In the camps the whole family structure disintegrated. That’s what I think was sad. The men felt low and helpless. Kids were uprooted and put in a strange environment. The women put up with things they never had to put up with in civilian life.”
“Such as?”
“Well, for instance, the toilets had no doors on them. They were just open-faced stalls, with one side open up for everyone to see. The government wouldn’t provide materials for doors. It was humiliating. We had pieces of cardboard we would hold in front of us while we did our business. It was things like that. Little indignities that chipped away at the kind of family we had before the war.
“With the adults adrift, the kids ran loose. It was hard to have a normal life. Everything we had been taught about America and justice and democracy all seemed to have no meaning. Most of us were raised to believe in America, and we felt we were Americans. We couldn’t understand why we were shipped off to these camps just because Japan, a foreign country, had attacked us. Eventually, family discipline broke down so much that some of the kids formed gangs. Even some of the men got together in gangs. And the prison guards were no better. Some were okay,” she corrected, “but like I said, a lot of them stole rations and sold them on the black market. Besides the squid, for awhile we just had rice and peaches to eat, because the meat they provided was rotten. They were selling all the good meat on the black market. The peaches actually turned out to be a bad thing, even though we kids liked them, because some of the men made stills and fermented alcohol from the peaches.”
Mrs. Okada looked at me and laughed. “I’m just running on about bad times! Until recently I wouldn’t talk about the camps at all and now I can’t seem to shut up!”
“Why didn’t you talk about the camps?” I asked, puzzled. The reticence to talk about the camp experience was something I had always noticed in Japanese-Americans who were in them. My family was from Hawaii. Although my grandfather lost his fishing boat because they thought all Japanese with boats must be spies, we were relatively untouched. My mother was at Pearl Harbor during the attack, and during the war she worked as a Red Cross volunteer. The experience of the mainland Japanese-Americans was different from Hawaiian Japanese-Americans, and I was frankly
“From the time I was a little girl I loved porcelain. It came from my mother. When they gave us orders to go to camp we could only take what we could carry. Before we left I remember my mother packing her beloved porcelain away in a barrel for storage. A white man was going door-to-door in our neighborhood buying things from Japanese at just pennies on the dollar. When he got to our house he told my mother everything in storage would be confiscated anyway, and that he’d buy the plates for a penny apiece. I can remember my mother walking to the front door of the house with a handful of plates and throwing them on the sidewalk. They hit and shattered into a thousand pieces. She preferred breaking them over selling them to a profiteer. It turned out our things in storage weren’t confiscated, but some were stolen. This satsuma platter is one thing that survived.” She lightly touched the edge of the platter.
“It sounds like a terrible time.”
“We actually tried to have what we thought was a normal American life in camp. We had schools and clubs and even a boy scout troop. But it was a hollow kind of life. In the camps the whole family structure disintegrated. That’s what I think was sad. The men felt low and helpless. Kids were uprooted and put in a strange environment. The women put up with things they never had to put up with in civilian life.”
“Such as?”
“Well, for instance, the toilets had no doors on them. They were just open-faced stalls, with one side open up for everyone to see. The government wouldn’t provide materials for doors. It was humiliating. We had pieces of cardboard we would hold in front of us while we did our business. It was things like that. Little indignities that chipped away at the kind of family we had before the war.
“With the adults adrift, the kids ran loose. It was hard to have a normal life. Everything we had been taught about America and justice and democracy all seemed to have no meaning. Most of us were raised to believe in America, and we felt we were Americans. We couldn’t understand why we were shipped off to these camps just because Japan, a foreign country, had attacked us. Eventually, family discipline broke down so much that some of the kids formed gangs. Even some of the men got together in gangs. And the prison guards were no better. Some were okay,” she corrected, “but like I said, a lot of them stole rations and sold them on the black market. Besides the squid, for awhile we just had rice and peaches to eat, because the meat they provided was rotten. They were selling all the good meat on the black market. The peaches actually turned out to be a bad thing, even though we kids liked them, because some of the men made stills and fermented alcohol from the peaches.”
Mrs. Okada looked at me and laughed. “I’m just running on about bad times! Until recently I wouldn’t talk about the camps at all and now I can’t seem to shut up!”
“Why didn’t you talk about the camps?” I asked, puzzled. The reticence to talk about the camp experience was something I had always noticed in Japanese-Americans who were in them. My family was from Hawaii. Although my grandfather lost his fishing boat because they thought all Japanese with boats must be spies, we were relatively untouched. My mother was at Pearl Harbor during the attack, and during the war she worked as a Red Cross volunteer. The experience of the mainland Japanese-Americans was different from Hawaiian Japanese-Americans, and I was frankly
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