“The four-day train ride to Arkansas was a real adventure,” remembers Bob Uyeyama, who was just 7 years old when he, his six brothers and sisters, and his parents were evacuated from near Sacramento, California, in early May 1942. Bob, now head elder of the Sacramento Japanese-American Adventist congregation, adds, “I had never been on a train before, and I really enjoyed that.” His older brother, Jack, then 11, recalls that the family was forced to travel light: “Each person was allowed only two suitcases, and we weren’t able to take any of our furniture, of course.”

The family was assigned two 20’ x 25’ rooms in a six-apartment military-style barracks at the Jerome, Arkansas, camp, where common mess halls, latrines, and showers challenged their cultural expectations of family structure and privacy. Though the diet at the camp sometimes reflected Caucasian misunderstanding of the Japanese diet (“They heard that the Japanese liked pickles, so they unloaded pickles, cucumbers, but not the kind made with horseradish that Japanese like,” says Bob), there was plenty of food for all, a welcome change for the Uyeyama family, which had often had less than enough to eat in the prewar Depression years.

The Uyeyama brothers attended the camp public school, also conducted in barracks-style buildings, and played in camp ball leagues. When their father elected to return to Japan (an offer made available to “enemy aliens” by the U.S. government), he was initially transferred away from the family to an internment camp in Tule Lake, California, leaving their mother, Uto, with seven children ranging in age from an infant to a high school senior.

When the government decided to use the Jerome camp for other purposes, the family moved to another WRA facility at Rowher, Arkansas. There the Methodist Uyeyamas “happened” to live adjacent to a family then taking Bible studies from a Seventh-day Adventist internee. Uto Uyeyama joined the Bible study, along with the oldest sons. Within months Uto, two sons, and a daughter were baptized at services in Caucasian Adventist churches in nearby Hot Springs, Arkansas, and McGehee, Arkansas. Bill and Jack were invited to attend the 10-day conference junior camp in Monroe, Louisiana, and remember both the kindness of the other campers and the size of the Louisiana mosquitoes!

“I’m sure that the adults in the internment camps had a rough time,” says Jack. “They didn’t know how long they’d be in the camp; they didn’t know what to do after the war was over, or how they would support themselves. But the children of our age group kind of enjoyed it, because we never had so many friends all in one place. We kids had a pretty good time.”

Misako Sumida’s arrival at the Poston, Arizona, internment camp followed that of her husband and other friends by more than a month, and for a very good reason: she had just given birth to her first child at the White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles, where a kindly hospital administrator allowed her to stay for a month after the delivery. Her husband, Perry, was an ophthalmologist and a resident at the hospital, but had been required to go on ahead to Poston to help in setting up the camp medical facility.

Mrs. Misako Sumida

“Poston was very hot, very hot,” says Mrs. Sumida of the camp where summertime desert temperatures sometimes reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit. “When I would wash my clothes—all those diapers—and hang them on a line, by the time I got to the end the first ones were dry already.” Her husband soon saved enough from his top $19-a-month salary to purchase a water cooler from the Sears, Roebuck catalog that made the Poston stay more bearable.

“The lumber used for our barracks wasn’t really dry enough, so it began to shred,” she recalls. “So all the people used to get tape or something to cover the cracks.” Fierce dust storms—a common experience at several of the Western camps—frequently interrupted the daily routine.

Misako and her husband, both U.S. citizens, attended small gatherings of Adventist members at the Poston camp, where Pastor A. T. Okohira, also an internee, led out. (See photograph, p. 8.) Another Poston Adventist internee, Richard Iwata, unsuccessfully petitioned Adventist leaders in Washington, D.C., to make some statement about the injustice of the incarceration of U.S. citizens (see p. 10).

“Being required to go to the camps didn’t bother me a bit,” Misako says with the confidence of a survivor. “It’s all in your outlook: if you have to go [to the camps], you have to go, even though you don’t like it.”

Perry and Misako Sumida were able to transfer out of the Poston camp a

little more than six months, receiving government permission to relocate in Hawaii. They made their home in Hawaii for the next 45 years.

Sakae Fuchita was just over 20 years old when the U.S. entered the Second World War. Born in Colorado and a U.S. citizen, he had also lived in Japan and completed part of his education there before returning to the U.S. as a teenager.

Not yet an Adventist, Sakae had been studying the Bible with Pastor Okohira, leader of the Japanese church in Los Angeles. In April 1942 he and his family were ordered to the Manzanar internment camp 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the hot, dry Owens Valley, a site made famous in the 1973 memoir Farewell to Manzanar, by camp survivor Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. There they experienced the oppressive weather—hot and cold—of the region.

“Manzanar is a desert,” Sakae says. “The wind blows all the time, the sand blows, you cannot see. You cannot see anything before you.”

At the camp Sakae soon found employment as a mail carrier, delivering letters and parcels for $16 a month from the camp post office. “I think they censored the mail sometimes,” he adds, acknowledging the tight controls on everything that moved in or out of the guarded camp.

At least six other Adventists were also interned at Manzanar. The small group gathered for Sabbath Bible study in the room of one member and occasionally were led in worship by the pastor of the Bishop, California, Adventist congregation some 50 miles away.

After 15 months at Manzanar, Sakae applied for and received government permission to study at Emmanuel Missionary College (now Andrews University) in Michigan, where he was finally baptized. There he took the religion course, graduating in 1947. Committed to one day ministering in Japan, he completed a two-year course at the church’s theological seminary in Washington, D.C., in 1949, and then began 13 years of postwar service in Japan as a theology teacher and pastor. Returning to his homeland, he served in southern California as a teacher and pastor until his retirement.

Dr. Crashi Mitoma and his sister-in-law Ruth Hiroshima sit quietly in the living room of his Sacramento home, recalling the turmoil of 60 years ago.

Crashi, a first-year student at Pacific Union College in Angwin in 1942, was one of 26 PUC students who eventually had to leave the college and settle in the internment camps. “The college administration, they fought it [the evacuation order] for the longest time,” Crashi remembers warmly. “They tried to keep us up there. But eventually everyone had to go. The frustrating thing for those of us who were citizens was that we had never gone to a Japanese school in our lives. All we knew was English.”

Mitoma, who had completed the college’s medical cadet training, was asked to help in the hospital at the Merced, California, assembly center to which he was sent. From Merced he was part of the first contingent of 250 internees sent to Amache, Colorado, to ready the medical center at the new camp.

Mitoma spent a year at Amache, “wondering what was going to come off.” Next he was transferred to the camp in Topaz, Utah, where the rest of his family was incarcerated. Like other internees, he was required to sign a statement of allegiance to the U.S. government in order to leave the camp, a memory that still frustrates him. “We were U.S. citizens,” he says emphatically. “We were born here, but citizenship didn’t mean a thing.”

“I wanted to get back into school again, and Madison College [in Tennessee] kept writing me to come to school there,” he adds. “Unlike some of the students who came from Hawaii [where parents could still find employment], I didn’t have the money. I had to stay in the camp until a Japanese-speaking teacher from Madison College visited the camp on a recruitment trip and stuck up for me.”

Dr. and Mrs. Crashi Mitoma (left) and Mrs. Ruth Hiroshima

Ruth Hiroshima was a wife and mother of three young children when she and her chiropractor husband were deported from Sacramento to the internment camp at Tule Lake, California. With an infant of just three weeks in her arms, she struggled to manage the family in the difficult camp environment. “When we went into the camp, I literally had the two older children on a leash so they wouldn’t get lost while I carried the youngest one and the baby bottles, diapers, and stuff,” she remembers. “It wasn’t easy, I can tell you that!”

Ruth and her family spent more than a year at the Tule Lake camp and then were transferred to Minidoka, Idaho, where they stayed until the end of the war. Her husband, William, was employed by the Idaho Conference as a pastor for the nearly 20 Adventist internees at Minidoka. He conducted weekly Sabbath services for adults at the camp and covered the huge site on a bicycle during the week as he gave Bible studies and made pastoral visits.

The Hiroshimas were interned for almost three and a half years—from April 1942 to September 1945. When the camps closed they received $500 from the government to relocate and resettle. “When they brought the money, they asked if I owned a washboard—you know, to wash clothes—and I said, ‘Yes.’” She grimaces as she remembers: “Then they deducted that amount—the price of a washboard—before they gave us the money.”

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Bill Knott is an associate editor of the Adventist Review.