[OPINION] What my father and Tule Lake pilgrims taught me about World War II

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I grew up not knowing anything about the internment of around 110,000 Japanese-Americans, including small children, who were suspected of being 'enemy aliens'

SAN FRANCISCO, USA – Two memories stand out for me as we mark this year the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II: my father’s nightmares and an elderly woman choking back tears as our bus entered a former camp in Tule Lake, California.

My father, Benjamin Pimentel Sr., was in his teens when Japan invaded the Philippines shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Like thousands of young Filipinos, he joined the resistance.

He was once detained and interrogated by the Kempetai, the Japanese secret police. They later picked up his brother, my Uncle Jesus, who was never seen again. Our family presumed he had been executed.

My father had been an athletic young man. But the time he spent in the jungle as a guerrilla left him a physical wreck. He never fully recovered from the war. For decades, my father had nightmares.

But I never heard my father express any bitterness toward the Japanese. He recalled his experiences with barely a hint of anger and always with language that was fair and precise. 

Benjamin Pimentel Sr. joined the guerilla resistance movement during World War II. Pimentel family

“The Japanese soldiers back then were very brutal,” he would say. Or, “The Japanese imperial forces really caused a lot of damage.”

After I moved to America, I never had to worry about introducing him to my Japanese-American friends. In fact, the way my father looked back on the most grueling time of his life set the tone for my education on another side of the war.

I grew up not knowing anything about the internment of about 110,000 Japanese-Americans, including small children, who were suspected of being “enemy aliens.” I got an up close look at what happened as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. 

In June 1994, I covered Emperor Akihito’s visit to San Francisco. I watched the monarch do something extraordinary. During a Japantown event, the emperor bowed before a group of former internees and apologized for the suffering they endured during the war.

Just a few years before, then-US president Ronald Reagan had apologized for the camps, which led to the payment of reparations to survivors.

Two months after the emperor’s visit, the tragedy of the internment became even clearer to me. 

I joined former detainees on a pilgrimage to Tule Lake, the largest of 10 concentration camps built during the war. It was there that authorities sent internees considered dangerous. Internees had to go through a loyalty test by answering two questions: Were they willing to serve in the US military? Were they willing to forswear their allegiance to the emperor and government of Japan?

Many of the detainees sent there said “no” to both. Tule Lake became known as the “No-No Camp.”

Did some of the internees support Japan in the war? Based on Japanese graffiti found in the barracks, yes, some probably did. One read: “The Emperor came from the sun.” 

But many internees said “no” out of utter frustration and in defiance of a government and a society that had collectively branded them traitors.

Barbara Muramoto was 9 when she and her family were sent to Tule Lake. “Fed up with the prejudice,” she said, her parents said “no” to both questions.

She was 61 at the time of our trip. As our bus entered the desolate field of sagebrush and dirt that once was her home and prison, I watched Barbara choke back tears.

Young Japanese-Americans played a critical role in reclaiming and preserving stories of what their parents and grandparents went through during the war. One of them was Jiro Yamamoto, who wore earrings and had flowing locks of a rock star back then. He spent months organizing the 1994 pilgrimage.

During our trip, Jiro, watched the faces of the former internees, grim and sullen. Suddenly, he realized the pain of remembering.

“‘Oh, God,’ I thought. We were finally going to the camp,” Jiro, who later became a San Francisco firefighter, told me. “I saw how hard it was for them to return — but how much they wanted to return.”

In fact, returning to Tule Lake helped ease Barbara Muramoto’s pain. At the end of our trip, she told me, “I feel like I’ve released my parents’ spirits.”

My father and most Tule Lake Pilgrims like Barbara have passed. I remembered them four years ago as I watched my son take his oath as a US Army officer at the Ke-ehi Lagoon Memorial Park near Honolulu. 

The park was built to honor US military veterans, including members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most highly decorated American combat unit to serve in World War II. 

The team’s members were nearly all Japanese-Americans. They fought in Europe while their families were living in internment camps. As the war was ending in April 1945, they helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau.

Seven years after our trip to Tule Lake, the history of the internment was back in the spotlight. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, memories of what happened during the war became critically important.

Then-US president George W. Bush’s response to the attacks was in a way tempered by the memory of what happened to Japanese-Americans in World War II. He was known to have rejected calls to round up Muslims and Arabs, similar to what happened to Japanese-Americans during the war.

Bush had listened to and was moved by stories shared by his transportation secretary Norman Mineta who was a 10-year-old boy when he and his family were sent to the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming.

“Sometimes we lose our soul as a nation,” Bush said in a documentary about Mineta. “I didn’t want our country to do to others what had happened to Norm.” – Rappler.com

(Benjamin Pimentel is a journalist and technology editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. This essay was first posted on LinkedIn.)