Peruvians Remember U.S. Concentration Camp
Augusto Kague Castillo was only 11 years old on the day that the police detained his father. They lived in Jauja, Junin, where his family owned a restaurant. One morning young Augusto went out to buy rice for Mantaro Kauge, his father, and never saw him again. For three months they received no news of Mantaro. His loved ones assumed the worst, until a letter arrived. In the letter Kague, the “disappeared,” told how he had been taken out of the country and locked in a prison in the United States. “The letter was covered in stains, so that we were unable to read some of the words and even entire sentences.”
It was censored, said Augusto Kague Castillo, who was born on September 6, 1930. “We answered my fathers letters and for two years we receive his answers, censored. During his absence, my father’s business went bankrupt. There was no one to run it and we soon began to live in misery. They threw us out of the house we rented because we couldn’t pay the rent, and we began to wander like gypsies, staying in houses of friends and family members.” Augusto Kague’s was one of almost a thousand families that the government of Manuel Prado Ugarteche surrendered to the United States after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Everyone was detained in a concentration camp near Crystal City, in the burning desert of the state of Texas. The Peruvians were part of a population of 2,200 Japanese and Nisei deported by 13 Latin American countries allied with North America. Those whose fathers and mothers were detained and forcibly sent to the North American internment center, solely because they were born in Japan or of were children of Japanese, became desperate, and the community in Peru had to look for ways for fathers and sons to meet again.
From a Dream to a Nightmare
For the Kagues, there was an element of luck. The wife of Enrique Kague, Micaela, met a friend whose husband, too, was in Crystal City. The friend said that her partner wanted her to join him in the concentration camp, but that she didnÂ’t want to because of their children. The friend offered that Micaela travel in her place, and this is what she did. Soon afterwards, she left for Texas from the port of Talara.
”It was a 20-day trip,” remembered Augusto Kague Castilla, whose mother’s family lived in Piura. “The men traveled in the lower deck of the boat, and the women and children above deck. Each week they would let the men come up for 15 or 20 minutes to walk and smoke a little. Some of them put three cigarettes in their mouths at the same time and smoked. When we arrived in New Orleans, the U.S. officials asked us to remove our clothes. We thought that they were going to kill us right there. But they sprayed us with insecticides and soap. They received us as if we were infected animals.”
Before the mass deportation, anti-Japanese sentiment in Peru was evident in various strata of society. President Prado didnÂ’t hide his antipathy for the children of the Land of the Rising Son, and the Aprista Party, through its official mouthpiece, La Tribuna, leaked rumors of supposed plots by Japanese residents to take over the country. On May 13, 1940, two years before the deportations began, a riot by a mob of students from the Guadalupe academy led to the destruction of 600 Japanese-owned businesses and killed ten citizens of the same origin. In an official visit to Washington in May of 1942, Prado again had a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and General George C. Marshall, in which they requested his collusion in the deportation of 17,500 Japanese, regardless of whether they had been born in Peru or had Peruvian citizenship. Roosevelt and Marshall considered them potentially dangerous enemies. Prado accepted this and lost no time in satisfying his hosts.
The same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor, German Yaki Hishii had just turned ten and was walking with his father Sentei and his mother Ichi on the streets of Lima. Suddenly they realized that something strange was happening. People looked at them strangely. Coincidentally, block after block, people turned to stare at them, some with suspicion and others with fear. When they got back to the house, they heard on the radio that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Two months later, German Yaki was playing in the street when he saw a truck pass with many Japanese inside it. One of them hurled out a rolled up piece of paper. Yaki opened it. It was written in Japanese. He took it to his father, Sentei Yaki, who recognized it as a farewell message from one of the detainees who had been unable to speak with his family. Sentei, accordingly, brought the manuscript to the loved ones of the deported man. From that day, Yaki slept uneasily, believing that one day they would come rapping and take his father away.
A few years later, the nightmare came to pass. Uniformed men came looking for his father in his home on the 12th of January, 1943. They took him away without explanation, although Sentei Yaki already guessed what awaited him. SenteiÂ’s wife brought him clothes at the detention center and didnÂ’t see him again. Six months of anguish and uncertainty later, German and his mother received a letter in which they were granted permission to live at the Crystal City concentration camp. The Yakis were part of the 17,500 Japanese that President Roosevelt and his friend, Prado, wanted to keep in detention at whatever cost. They created the blacklist jointly.
The definitive version of the list came out on September 13, 1944, under the title “Official List of Unwelcome Foreigners.” Roosevelt, for his part, wanted more prisoners of Japanese origin to exchange for U.S. prisoners of war. Under the letter H appeared “Higashida, S. of Ica.” This referred to Seiichi Higashide (1909)-1997), a native of Hokkaido, Japan, who emigrated to Peru in 1931.
Gente sin patria
Higashide lived in Ica, started a business and became a community leader, until he was kidnapped and deported to Crystal City, where he was imprisoned for two years. When he was freed, he chose to remain in the United States in order to demand reparation from the government on behalf of those who, like himself, endured violations of their human rights. In 1981, he testified in Congress.
Higashide, with his children, wrote Adios to Tears: Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in a U.S. Concentration Camp (Adios a las lagrimas: Las memorias de japones-peruano internado en un campo de concentracion de los Estados Unidos), a revealing memoir of an episode that is known yet has remained virtually unknown. Higashide died in 1997, having never received his rightful compensation from the United States government.
The Yakis, as well, were on the blacklist of Roosevelt and Prado, whose names today adorn main streets of Lima. Life in Crystal City was life without liberty. The center was surrounded by barbed wire, preventing any possibility of escape. “Cowboys with rifles and horses appeared each hour, patrolling the area to prevent escapes,” recalls German Yaki, who has a photographic memory. “All of the houses were prefabricated. The foreign detainees lived in these small wooden buildings. Besides us, there were Germans.”
Bathrooms were communal and each family had to take turns using the toilets. On the south edge of Crystal City there was a hospital, on the northwest a baseball field. The prefabricated housing was on the east side. On the southeast was a preschool in which children were taught to speak English, Yaki said. The detainees were responsible for the upkeep of the concentration camp. Everyone earned the same amount: 10 cents an hour –- which came to less than a dollar a day.
German Yaki indicated that in Crystal City there was only one form of currency, the only form that the detainees could use. Some of it carried inscriptions as to what one was allowed to buy with it, so that the detainees wouldn’t try to buy something that was prohibited by their U.S. wards. “We weren’t allowed to exercise choice about anything,” German Yaki said with sadness.
One morning the fire alarm sounded. The detainees thought that a house was on fire, but they quickly realized what was happening. In English and Japanese, it was announced over the loudspeakers that Japan had surrendered and that it had lost the war. It was September 2, 1945. Some received the news with relief, imagining their speedy release. Others refused to believe that Japan had been defeated, and took the news as a lie told by the North Americans.
Without a Town and Without Housing
According to the North American non-governmental organization Nissei for Civil Rights and Redress -- whose founders included Seiichi Higashide -- of the 2,264 prisoners in the concentration camp, 945 Japanese –Peruvians were deported to a decimated Japan once the war ended; another 300 remained in the United States, as illegals, and fought to obtain citizenship; and about 100 returned to Peru. Miyotaro Shima, who was kidnapped with his wife Hisae and their children Tamotsu and Kuniko, were exchanged for North American prisoners and sent to Japan. Shima was a businessman and lived in Trujillo. He was 51 years old at the time of his deportation.
Those who remained in North America included Art Shibayama, one of the leaders of the movement that seeks recognition and just reparations. When he lived in Peru, he was called Isamu Carlos Arturo Shibayama; today in Chicago he’s simply Art Shibayama. “I was born in Lima. My parents imported fabrics and manufactured clothing for retail.
“My maternal grandmother was the first woman to be kidnapped, deported, and exchanged for a North American prisoner,” he told the North American authorities upon filing his lawsuit. “We left the port of Callao in a North American war ship; they took us to Cuba, where they took our passports. I was only 13 years old and my sister was 11. They put me with the men. They forbade us to speak with members of our family during the 21-day journey to New Orleans. They put us in a train to Crystal City. My brother believed they were going to kill us en route.”
“After two and a half years, my father resolved to return to Peru, but they didn’t want us to return. So my father accepted that we would live in a state of partial liberty on farms in Seabrook, New Jersey,” Shibayama said. There they exploited us worse than in the camp, until after years of waiting they were granted residency. Art Shibayama today is a recognized leader of the Japanese Latin Americans who, for more than 50 years , have demanded reparations. In 2002, he received the Fighting Spirit Award, given by Nissei for Civil Rights and Reparation [sic] (NCRR). Despite having served in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1964, Shibayama received his citizenship only in 1970.
He was lucky, because many were exchanged for U.S. prisoners and taken to a decimated Japan. According to the same source, Nissei for Civil Rights and Redress, 68 babies were born in captivity in Crystal City. Among them was Luis Kitsutani Ogata. His mother, Margarita, was pregnant when it was announced that the internment was ended, but she and her father, Kosuke, chose to remain until she gave birth while the rest of their families left the concentration camp.
“I was born in a concentration camp. They didn’t take my mother to the hospital, and the U.S. government uses this fact to deny me the compensation that was granted others who were there,” said Luis Kitsutani.
He was born January 12, 1942. The former prisoners who remained in the United States formed an organization called Campaign for Justice, which sought $20,000 per person in reparations, as was granted to the U.S. Japanese who were detained in internment camps. The U.S. government offered the Latin Americans only $5 million.
“We demanded that we be compensated the same as the others, but we haven’t succeeded. There wasn’t solidarity, and the majority of those who went back [to Peru] accepted this money, explained German Yaki. We continue to contest the matter in court, but it’s difficult because we don’t have a lawyer there. I’m 77 years old and I believe I won’t see a cent.” Many families who remained there after being released from the camp were warned that they would be regarded as illegals and as such would be thrown out of the country, so were advised to leave the country and return legally.
It was a trap. “The families who followed this advice were taken advantage of, because at the moment they claimed their reparation money, they were told that they were in the United States voluntarily and that they therefore could not claim any compensation,” noted Augusto Kague Castillo.
Meanwhile, those who remained in the United States received, in addition to reparation money, a personal letter of apology from Bill Clinton, in which he acknowledged “the errors of the past” and said “we offer our most profound regrets to those who suffered grave injustices;” the Japanese-Peruvians were simply forgotten. Neither Yaki nor Kague nor Kitsutani nor any of the other victims of the fateful agreement between presidents Roosevelt and Prada received anything. Those who suffered in Crystal City feel that their lives are valued even less than the currency that circulated in the concentration camp.
It was censored, said Augusto Kague Castillo, who was born on September 6, 1930. “We answered my fathers letters and for two years we receive his answers, censored. During his absence, my father’s business went bankrupt. There was no one to run it and we soon began to live in misery. They threw us out of the house we rented because we couldn’t pay the rent, and we began to wander like gypsies, staying in houses of friends and family members.” Augusto Kague’s was one of almost a thousand families that the government of Manuel Prado Ugarteche surrendered to the United States after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Everyone was detained in a concentration camp near Crystal City, in the burning desert of the state of Texas. The Peruvians were part of a population of 2,200 Japanese and Nisei deported by 13 Latin American countries allied with North America. Those whose fathers and mothers were detained and forcibly sent to the North American internment center, solely because they were born in Japan or of were children of Japanese, became desperate, and the community in Peru had to look for ways for fathers and sons to meet again.
From a Dream to a Nightmare
For the Kagues, there was an element of luck. The wife of Enrique Kague, Micaela, met a friend whose husband, too, was in Crystal City. The friend said that her partner wanted her to join him in the concentration camp, but that she didnÂ’t want to because of their children. The friend offered that Micaela travel in her place, and this is what she did. Soon afterwards, she left for Texas from the port of Talara.
”It was a 20-day trip,” remembered Augusto Kague Castilla, whose mother’s family lived in Piura. “The men traveled in the lower deck of the boat, and the women and children above deck. Each week they would let the men come up for 15 or 20 minutes to walk and smoke a little. Some of them put three cigarettes in their mouths at the same time and smoked. When we arrived in New Orleans, the U.S. officials asked us to remove our clothes. We thought that they were going to kill us right there. But they sprayed us with insecticides and soap. They received us as if we were infected animals.”
Before the mass deportation, anti-Japanese sentiment in Peru was evident in various strata of society. President Prado didnÂ’t hide his antipathy for the children of the Land of the Rising Son, and the Aprista Party, through its official mouthpiece, La Tribuna, leaked rumors of supposed plots by Japanese residents to take over the country. On May 13, 1940, two years before the deportations began, a riot by a mob of students from the Guadalupe academy led to the destruction of 600 Japanese-owned businesses and killed ten citizens of the same origin. In an official visit to Washington in May of 1942, Prado again had a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and General George C. Marshall, in which they requested his collusion in the deportation of 17,500 Japanese, regardless of whether they had been born in Peru or had Peruvian citizenship. Roosevelt and Marshall considered them potentially dangerous enemies. Prado accepted this and lost no time in satisfying his hosts.
The same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor, German Yaki Hishii had just turned ten and was walking with his father Sentei and his mother Ichi on the streets of Lima. Suddenly they realized that something strange was happening. People looked at them strangely. Coincidentally, block after block, people turned to stare at them, some with suspicion and others with fear. When they got back to the house, they heard on the radio that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Two months later, German Yaki was playing in the street when he saw a truck pass with many Japanese inside it. One of them hurled out a rolled up piece of paper. Yaki opened it. It was written in Japanese. He took it to his father, Sentei Yaki, who recognized it as a farewell message from one of the detainees who had been unable to speak with his family. Sentei, accordingly, brought the manuscript to the loved ones of the deported man. From that day, Yaki slept uneasily, believing that one day they would come rapping and take his father away.
A few years later, the nightmare came to pass. Uniformed men came looking for his father in his home on the 12th of January, 1943. They took him away without explanation, although Sentei Yaki already guessed what awaited him. SenteiÂ’s wife brought him clothes at the detention center and didnÂ’t see him again. Six months of anguish and uncertainty later, German and his mother received a letter in which they were granted permission to live at the Crystal City concentration camp. The Yakis were part of the 17,500 Japanese that President Roosevelt and his friend, Prado, wanted to keep in detention at whatever cost. They created the blacklist jointly.
The definitive version of the list came out on September 13, 1944, under the title “Official List of Unwelcome Foreigners.” Roosevelt, for his part, wanted more prisoners of Japanese origin to exchange for U.S. prisoners of war. Under the letter H appeared “Higashida, S. of Ica.” This referred to Seiichi Higashide (1909)-1997), a native of Hokkaido, Japan, who emigrated to Peru in 1931.
Gente sin patria
Higashide lived in Ica, started a business and became a community leader, until he was kidnapped and deported to Crystal City, where he was imprisoned for two years. When he was freed, he chose to remain in the United States in order to demand reparation from the government on behalf of those who, like himself, endured violations of their human rights. In 1981, he testified in Congress.
Higashide, with his children, wrote Adios to Tears: Memoirs of a Japanese-Peruvian Internee in a U.S. Concentration Camp (Adios a las lagrimas: Las memorias de japones-peruano internado en un campo de concentracion de los Estados Unidos), a revealing memoir of an episode that is known yet has remained virtually unknown. Higashide died in 1997, having never received his rightful compensation from the United States government.
The Yakis, as well, were on the blacklist of Roosevelt and Prado, whose names today adorn main streets of Lima. Life in Crystal City was life without liberty. The center was surrounded by barbed wire, preventing any possibility of escape. “Cowboys with rifles and horses appeared each hour, patrolling the area to prevent escapes,” recalls German Yaki, who has a photographic memory. “All of the houses were prefabricated. The foreign detainees lived in these small wooden buildings. Besides us, there were Germans.”
Bathrooms were communal and each family had to take turns using the toilets. On the south edge of Crystal City there was a hospital, on the northwest a baseball field. The prefabricated housing was on the east side. On the southeast was a preschool in which children were taught to speak English, Yaki said. The detainees were responsible for the upkeep of the concentration camp. Everyone earned the same amount: 10 cents an hour –- which came to less than a dollar a day.
German Yaki indicated that in Crystal City there was only one form of currency, the only form that the detainees could use. Some of it carried inscriptions as to what one was allowed to buy with it, so that the detainees wouldn’t try to buy something that was prohibited by their U.S. wards. “We weren’t allowed to exercise choice about anything,” German Yaki said with sadness.
One morning the fire alarm sounded. The detainees thought that a house was on fire, but they quickly realized what was happening. In English and Japanese, it was announced over the loudspeakers that Japan had surrendered and that it had lost the war. It was September 2, 1945. Some received the news with relief, imagining their speedy release. Others refused to believe that Japan had been defeated, and took the news as a lie told by the North Americans.
Without a Town and Without Housing
According to the North American non-governmental organization Nissei for Civil Rights and Redress -- whose founders included Seiichi Higashide -- of the 2,264 prisoners in the concentration camp, 945 Japanese –Peruvians were deported to a decimated Japan once the war ended; another 300 remained in the United States, as illegals, and fought to obtain citizenship; and about 100 returned to Peru. Miyotaro Shima, who was kidnapped with his wife Hisae and their children Tamotsu and Kuniko, were exchanged for North American prisoners and sent to Japan. Shima was a businessman and lived in Trujillo. He was 51 years old at the time of his deportation.
Those who remained in North America included Art Shibayama, one of the leaders of the movement that seeks recognition and just reparations. When he lived in Peru, he was called Isamu Carlos Arturo Shibayama; today in Chicago he’s simply Art Shibayama. “I was born in Lima. My parents imported fabrics and manufactured clothing for retail.
“My maternal grandmother was the first woman to be kidnapped, deported, and exchanged for a North American prisoner,” he told the North American authorities upon filing his lawsuit. “We left the port of Callao in a North American war ship; they took us to Cuba, where they took our passports. I was only 13 years old and my sister was 11. They put me with the men. They forbade us to speak with members of our family during the 21-day journey to New Orleans. They put us in a train to Crystal City. My brother believed they were going to kill us en route.”
“After two and a half years, my father resolved to return to Peru, but they didn’t want us to return. So my father accepted that we would live in a state of partial liberty on farms in Seabrook, New Jersey,” Shibayama said. There they exploited us worse than in the camp, until after years of waiting they were granted residency. Art Shibayama today is a recognized leader of the Japanese Latin Americans who, for more than 50 years , have demanded reparations. In 2002, he received the Fighting Spirit Award, given by Nissei for Civil Rights and Reparation [sic] (NCRR). Despite having served in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1964, Shibayama received his citizenship only in 1970.
He was lucky, because many were exchanged for U.S. prisoners and taken to a decimated Japan. According to the same source, Nissei for Civil Rights and Redress, 68 babies were born in captivity in Crystal City. Among them was Luis Kitsutani Ogata. His mother, Margarita, was pregnant when it was announced that the internment was ended, but she and her father, Kosuke, chose to remain until she gave birth while the rest of their families left the concentration camp.
“I was born in a concentration camp. They didn’t take my mother to the hospital, and the U.S. government uses this fact to deny me the compensation that was granted others who were there,” said Luis Kitsutani.
He was born January 12, 1942. The former prisoners who remained in the United States formed an organization called Campaign for Justice, which sought $20,000 per person in reparations, as was granted to the U.S. Japanese who were detained in internment camps. The U.S. government offered the Latin Americans only $5 million.
“We demanded that we be compensated the same as the others, but we haven’t succeeded. There wasn’t solidarity, and the majority of those who went back [to Peru] accepted this money, explained German Yaki. We continue to contest the matter in court, but it’s difficult because we don’t have a lawyer there. I’m 77 years old and I believe I won’t see a cent.” Many families who remained there after being released from the camp were warned that they would be regarded as illegals and as such would be thrown out of the country, so were advised to leave the country and return legally.
It was a trap. “The families who followed this advice were taken advantage of, because at the moment they claimed their reparation money, they were told that they were in the United States voluntarily and that they therefore could not claim any compensation,” noted Augusto Kague Castillo.
Meanwhile, those who remained in the United States received, in addition to reparation money, a personal letter of apology from Bill Clinton, in which he acknowledged “the errors of the past” and said “we offer our most profound regrets to those who suffered grave injustices;” the Japanese-Peruvians were simply forgotten. Neither Yaki nor Kague nor Kitsutani nor any of the other victims of the fateful agreement between presidents Roosevelt and Prada received anything. Those who suffered in Crystal City feel that their lives are valued even less than the currency that circulated in the concentration camp.