My Grandmother Is One of the Few Living Japanese Americans to Have Experienced the Internment Camps

By Emily Butler

Illustration by Rebecca de Araujo

My grandmother, Nancy Yoko Aoyama, is one of the most inspiring people in my life, someone I’ve always admired. She was the daughter of Japanese immigrants who worked very hard to come to America, start a small egg farm, and raise five children, my grandmother being the youngest.

But life as they knew it changed drastically on December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, causing America to join World War II. Many Americans were afraid that Japanese Americans were secretly spying on the U.S. and reporting back to Japan. This led to a pervasive anti-Japanese sentiment, and President Franklin Roosevelt ultimately signed a bill stipulating the forced internment of almost all Japanese Americans.

My grandmother and her family were among them.

In early 1942, they were notified that they would have one week to pack before they would be transported to an internment camp in a desolate part of Arizona for an indefinite amount of time. Because my grandmother’s father was part of a Japanese American social group, he was considered more “dangerous” and would have to go to a high-security prison camp in the mountains, separating him from his wife and five children. He was forced to leave right away. My great-grandmother was able to find a nice family to rent and take care of their property, but others weren’t as lucky. Many Americans didn’t want anything to do with Japanese people at that time, so when they came back from the camps, they usually found their homes looted, vandalized, destroyed, or inhabited by someone else, leaving them destitute.

After the week was up, my grandmother’s family was brought to the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona — one of the largest internment camps in the country. They were only allowed to bring as much as they could carry themselves. In the Poston camp, there were 17,814 Japanese people, all crowded together. As they walked into the camp, they were horrified to notice that they were surrounded by high barbed-wire fences, with several towers where guards with huge rifles stood, ready to shoot if anyone tried to escape. They were shocked to see how closely this so-called “relocation center” actually resembled a jail, except for the fact that none of the people imprisoned had committed any crimes, and all of them were of the same race.

In early 1942, my grandmother’s family was notified that they would have one week to pack before they would be transported to an internment camp in a desolate part of Arizona for an indefinite amount of time.

The conditions were very poor. Poston was an unbearably hot, dry desert in the middle of nowhere. The temperature was usually over 100 degrees, and there were frequent and extremely dangerous dust storms. My grandmother’s family lived in uninsulated barracks furnished with only cots and one coal-burning stove. Typically, there were several families crowded together in one barrack. Other inhabitants had to live in converted horse stalls.

Daily life was incredibly monotonous for my grandmother and her siblings. They ate all their meals at the dining hall; their mother did all the chores and laundry in community facilities; they went to the small internment school, and played outside in the desert when they could. My grandmother once showed me a picture of her and her siblings on an old, rickety ladder which was used as the school’s “playground.”

My grandmother and her family had to stay at the internment camps for three years. They were separated from my great-grandfather the entire time, with no way to contact him, no way to know where he was, or even know if he was still alive. They found out later that he was actually sent to a high-security prison camp and had to move around several times. He was always completely loyal to America, even though Japanese immigrants at the time were barred from becoming citizens.

Life in the standard camps was difficult enough, but the prison camps were far worse. They were stranded in the freezing mountains, often experiencing violent conflicts. There were several incidents of guards wrongfully shooting inhabitants who they thought were trying to escape, while they were merely taking a stroll around the edge of the camp. Once, when forced to march two miles at night to their barracks, a guard thought that two old, disabled men struggling to make the trek were trying to escape, so he shot and killed them both. Even though there were several witnesses who reported that the men were not escaping, but were in fact just struggling to walk, the guard faced no punishment.

After three immeasurably long years, the war had ended and my grandmother and her family were released. And yet they still had no idea where my grandmother’s father was, or if they would ever see him again. They took a train back to their egg farm in Southern California and, miraculously, on one of the many train stops, they saw my great-grandfather. The family was finally reunited after three years with no contact.

My grandmother’s parents rarely spoke about the camps and they tried to assimilate into American culture as best they could. But the terrible memories of this time stuck with them forever.

All these years later, my 81-year-old grandmother is one of the few living people who were in the Japanese Internment Camps. As more of these people pass away, it’s more important than ever that I, and others, keep our families’ stories alive. People don’t talk about the Japanese Internment Camps enough, and I’ve met many people who didn’t even know this had happened. If we forget this important historical event that took away 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans’ civil rights and liberties for three years, how do we know for sure it won’t happen again?

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Emily Butler is a ninth-grader at the online school, Connections Academy. In addition to being an avid reader and writer, she’s also a competitive figure skater. You can check out her book reviews on her Instagram page: @emisbooks77