honor

Sometimes it just hits you. It's a feeling that slams into you with brute force, and it comes along when you should have known something all along. And what, pray tell, was my marvelous revelation?

There is no national anthem better suited to our nation.

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Well... does it??

A story that many people don’t know about is the brave members of the 442nd Combat division. The 442nd was made up entirely of Japanese Americans who wanted to fight for their country and show that they weren’t traitors.

Yeah it doesn’t sound right huh? They were fighting for the same country that just finished putting their families into a four year prison. These people were true hero’s in my eyes.

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The saddest art about the whole experience was when they were finally released. They were so happy that they were allowed to return home, until the actually got there. They arrived to betrayal and hate.

They returned to burnt down homes, or broken windows and doors. They were missing their possessions that they had to leave behind. And they returned to graffiti painted on the walls “Japs ain’t welcome anymore�.

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Life inside of the camps was harsh.

The toilets were holes in the ground and out in the open. Imagine having to use the restroom without any privacy what so ever. It was so bad that people would put a paper bag over their head so they would get at least some sense of privacy. The showers were community so you had to shower with everybody in the camp, like I said, no privacy.

The Beds were only straw mattresses.

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When they arrived at the camps, the sight must have been pretty pathetic. The buildings that would be their homes for the next four years were nothing but tar paper roofed wooden barracks. The barracks had big knot holes in the wood, and since the camp was located in the desert, they had to sweep out the dust from their “homes� several times a day.

Whole families were only allowed one room inside of the barracks and they were separated into sections.

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The Japanese Americans were first sent to places called Relocation centers where the Japanese families waited to get “placed�.

My family was sent to the Relocation Center located at the Tulare Fair Grounds. Each family (no matter how many there were) was allowed one horse stall. The temperatures inside of the horse stalls would reach over a hundred degrees at times.

My father was one year old when he entered the camp and my aunt was actually born there. My Grandma and Grandpa from my mother’s side were married inside of the camp.

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As a Japanese American, I have grown up on the stories of my families past. One of those stories happens to be when the Japanese Americans were illegally sent to the Internment Camps during WWII. I was personally appalled when I found out that many people didn’t even know that the Internment camps even existed. This is the first of a six part description of the Horrors that went on in those camps.

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Syndicated columnist Joan Ryan, appearing in today’s edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, has discovered that most teen suicides in America (86% of them) are of males. And that she can find no level of concern about this, no expert on the phenomenon, no funding for research on it. She is aghast. How can this be? If it were 86% of girls … Let it go for the moment that there is precious little being funded in this country right now on anything that doesn’t go BOOM in the night, or ka-CHING in some oilman’s or music mogul’s stock portfolio. Even those girls might have trouble scaring up shekels in this climate. I respectfully submit that the very same people who brought you details on the size of bat genitalia have something to contribute here. Not to mention a cursory look at human history, pre-Betty Friedan.

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