The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange

by Jan Jarboe Russell

  The small white house in Castro Valley, California, fifteen miles from Oakland, where Sumi lives is on a cul-de-sac and shaded by a large magnolia tree in the front yard. Inside the front door the living room’s wooden floor is scrubbed clean. Hanging from rails on two doors in the living room are two banners, emblazoned with CRYSTAL CITY INTERNMENT CAMP. From the kitchen, eighty-four-year-old Sumi steps through the folds of the Crystal City banner and emerges with a slight stoop. Her hair, which she wore in thick, dark pigtails as a teenager in Crystal City, is now grayed and cut short, like a silver bowl around her head. Her clear brown eyes, which for years have appraised the world coolly, now give the guarded expression of perhaps having seen too much.

  “It was wartime,” Sumi said as she sat at her kitchen table, a large bowl of blueberries in front of her. “I was very angry that they arrested my father, that we lost everything, and that I was sent to Japan. It was humiliating. But let’s face it: Mama was right. War doesn’t make any sense.” More than six decades after the end of World War II, Sumi remains haunted by certain euphemisms: evacuation, which was in reality forced removal from her home; internment, which she experienced as prison.

  After her graduation from Fairfax High School in Los Angeles in the summer of 1948, survival was her first priority. Two local colleges offered Sumi art scholarships, but she was undecided about her next step. Into this vacuum stepped Kiyo Shimatsu, a returning veteran from the famed all–Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

  Prior to the war, Kiyo’s father and Sumi’s father were friends. The fathers were from the same prefecture of Japan and knew each other in California. Both Sumi and Kiyo were interned at the same time at the relocation camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. While in Heart Mountain, Kiyo enlisted in the 442nd and served in both Italy and Germany. After the war, Kiyo returned to California and sought out Sumi in Los Angeles. Within a few months, he asked her to marry him. As was the custom of nisei children, Sumi wrote to her parents in Japan and asked for permission. Her father immediately gave his unqualified permission, but her mother, Nobu, had an intuition that Kiyo was “unlucky” and urged Sumi to delay the engagement.

  Nonetheless, just past her twentieth birthday, Sumi married Kiyo in a small ceremony in a Christian church. She walked down the aisle in a long silk gown loaned to her by Mrs. Stern, her former employer. “I know Kiyo loved me, but I think the reason I decided to marry him wasn’t love. It was security,” recalled Sumi as she sat at her kitchen table. “I wanted to find a place where I could feel a part of a family again, instead of working for someone else.”

  They settled in Los Angeles, where Sumi graduated from the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic and opened her own practice. Before that, Sumi worked nights at a Security National Bank as a check sorter. They had six children: Robin, Derick, Nicola, Dion, Paula, and Lukas. By the 1950s, Kiyo had contacts with various film and television producers in Hollywood. A few of those producers hired Sumi’s children as extras and gave them bit parts in various films, including Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii, John Ford’s Seven Women, and ironically Jeffrey Hunter’s World War II film, Hell to Eternity.

  In 1953, Tokiji and Nobu returned from Japan and settled in Los Angeles. For the first time since Pearl Harbor, Sumi felt secure. Her parents lived close by and she had her own large, busy family. Like other suburban American women during the 1950s, Sumi managed multiple roles: wife, mother, and her own chiropractic practice.

  Years passed and Nobu’s hunch about Kiyo proved true. In 1969, at the age of forty-seven, Kiyo suffered his first heart attack. Three years later, Kiyo died of a heart attack, and Sumi became the sole support for her six children. She continued to work at her chiropractic practice and built it into a thriving business. Her main clients were the skycaps and baggage handlers who worked at Los Angeles International Airport and, as a consequence of their physically demanding jobs, suffered from chronic back and shoulder pain. In addition to chiropractic remedies, Sumi offered her clients the kind of Reiki therapy that her aunt Tetsu had taught her during the difficult days in Japan after the war. Sumi practiced until she was seventy. She attributed her success to the ancient values of her parents. “I had the inherited spirit of gaman from my issei parents,” she recalled. “Their perseverance was my greatest gift.”

  Crystal City was never far from Sumi’s mind, or those of her parents. When her father was in his nineties, Sumi said that he often placed his clothes and personal items from his drawers—his billfold, keys, and pocket change—inside his pillowcase. It was a flashback to his internment, when he stored those items the same way. When Sumi or one of her older sisters asked him what he was doing, Tokiji became agitated and told them that he might be moved to another camp. “It was difficult to watch,” recalled Sumi. “He never wanted to be caged in another camp.”

  In 1980, Sumi attended the first reunion of friends from Crystal City in Los Angeles and surrounding cities, held at Knotts Berry Farm, a theme park in Southern California. Thirty-seven years after her arrival in Crystal City, Sumi reconnected with many of those friends who shared the stigma and suffering of internment. Many had never talked about their experiences. Over several hours, they shared memories of school days, daily counts, family dinners in the bungalows, and the lingering, injurious effects of the war. A bond of support was formed. After the reunion, Sumi started a newsletter called the Crystal City Chatter, which she published from her home—at first she wrote it on an IBM typewriter and later on a computer. In time, the Chatter’s mailing list grew to more than two thousand, and it is now the main source of connection among the nisei survivors of Crystal City, providing notices of birthdays and deaths, plans for future reunions, and ongoing news of internment issues.

  In 1985, a granite monument designed by Alan Taniguchi, former dean of the school of architecture at the University of Texas, was placed in Crystal City under the marker CRYSTAL CITY CONCENTRATION CAMP. An inscription on the monument read in part, “This marker is situated on an original site of a two-family cottage as a reminder that the injustices and humiliations suffered here as a result of hysteria, racism and discrimination never happen again.” Taniguchi’s marker referenced only the Japanese experience in the camp. The Germans and Italians from North America and Latin America who were interned in Crystal City were not mentioned, even though their experiences in camp were virtually the same. Thirty-seven years after the closing of the camp, the intense rivalries between the German and Japanese internees continued to hold sway.

  In November 1997, Sumi returned to Crystal City with sixty former Japanese internees to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the closing of the camp. The reunion was well timed. During the 1960s, Mexican Americans in Crystal City had organized against the racially exclusionary politics they suffered under Anglo-minority political and educational control. Jose Angel Gutierrez, one of the founders of the Chicano political party La Raza Unida, was elected county judge in 1970, and it was Gutierrez who had encouraged Taniguchi to design the granite marker. After fifty years, the ghosts of all that had happened during the war in Crystal City were ready to be confronted.

  City Manager Miguel Delgado and a coterie of other city officials met Sumi and the others at the San Antonio Airport. On the bus ride, sixty-five-year-old Toni Tomita, interned in camp as a nine-year-old in 1942, led the group in the “Shojodan,” a Girl Scout song. Seven miles from Crystal City, an official police escort joined the former internees, now treated as VIPs. Sumi and Toni stared out the window; both had knots in their stomach as they remembered the fear of their original bus ride into the camp in Crystal City. Instead of the hateful signs and anti-Jap jeers they had received during the war, the streets of Crystal City that day were lined with smiling spectators.

  A parade was staged in their honor. The high school band marched, beauty queens waved from floats, and students from the Benito Juarez Elementary School depicted the well-known Japanese story Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, with predominantly Mexican American
students dressed as origami cranes.

  Finally the internees, many in their seventies and eighties and three participants in their nineties, arrived on a grassy field where the camp once stood. None of the 694 buildings that had once dotted the landscape remained. On the footprint of the former camp were several public schools, built by the Crystal City school district. Taniguchi’s granite monument was the only testimony to what the Japanese had experienced. Sadness descended on the group when they walked to the site where the 250-foot-wide circular swimming pool once was the center of social activity in camp. They paused to pay silent tribute to the two Japanese Peruvians girls who had drowned in the pool. In a nearby city cemetery, the graves of other internees who’d died in the camp, many of them German, were unmarked.

  Waves of melancholy swept over Sumi and the others as they searched for a deeper understanding of how they and their parents found the resilience to endure imprisonment in an American internment camp. “I wanted to come back because I wanted to remember,” recalled Sumi. “For fifty years I carried the weight of the war on my shoulders. The reunion brought resolution. We had all survived and were still together. I felt lighter.”

  During the ceremony at the abandoned camp site, the city manager gave all of the Japanese Americans symbolic keys to the city. Sumi offered the best line: “I wish I had this key when I was in the camp. Maybe I could have gotten out of here.”

  Many more reunions followed the first one in Crystal City. Every May for the last several years, Sumi and a group of thirty or more of her Crystal City friends from Los Angeles have taken an eight-hour bus trip to the California Hotel, a down-at-the-heels hotel in the old part of Las Vegas, located far from the expensive, glittering hotels on the famous Strip. The bus ride to Las Vegas is a sunny, nonstop social scene. People play cards and bingo. Mas Okabe, who made the trip to Japan in 1945 with Sumi, pours the wine. Toni Tomita passes cookies. Inside the hotel, the casino is shopworn, but no one seems to mind. The casino has it all: blackjack, poker, keno. They look forward to the Hawaiian lunches, the oxtail soup, and juicy rib-eye steaks, to say nothing of shared memories as survivors of Crystal City.

  At the reunion in May 2012, Sumi stood hunched over a slot machine. On her head, she wore a Mickey Mouse cap with a generous visor that shielded her eyes. One of her daughters, Paula, stood nearby. All of Sumi’s six children have college degrees and live in California. Nobu, her mother, died at eighty, and her father, Tom, died at ninety-seven. Over the cha-ching sounds of the slot machines, Sumi remembered her parents: “I was lucky enough to be brought up by the right parents. They suffered during the war more than I did and learned to be strong. Now I’m an old woman, and a tough cookie.”

  • • •

  Upon Fukuda’s return to San Francisco on September 29, 1947, he confronted the task of rebuilding his church on Bush Street and starting Konko churches elsewhere in America. Soon, he dispatched ministers that founded Konko churches in Fresno, Sacramento, San Jose, and other cities. Of the fourteen existing Konko churches in America, Fukuda had a direct hand in the formation of ten.

  Despite all that he endured during the war, Fukuda became a US citizen in 1951. Six years later, Fukuda wrote a personal petition to President Eisenhower asking for redress and compensation of losses for Japanese and Japanese Americans interned during World War II. In the conclusion of his petition to Eisenhower, Fukuda wrote, “I am proud to be an American. I wish to hear the voice of conscience in this country, which stands on the principles of liberty, equality, justice and brotherly love.” He never received a response from Eisenhower and died of a heart attack in San Francisco on December 6, 1957.

  His wife, Shinko, became head minister at the church, and all of his six surviving children took his death hard. Makiko, his only daughter, took the loss the hardest. All her life she’d tried to please her father, to make good grades, and perhaps earn the kind of attention and love Fukuda felt in Crystal City for his dying son, Yoshiro. During church services, Makiko, a flashy dresser, would sit in the back row and during her father’s long-winded sermons call out in English, “Time to wrap it up!”

  On a cold night on November 8, 1961, Makiko, who had by then been married for a year, took a walk toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Makiko, who years before as a small child had tugged at her mother’s dark coat while posing for a photograph for Dorothea Lange, climbed onto a railing, jumped into the icy water, and died. In interviews, Makiko’s surviving brothers—Nobusuke, Saburo, Koichi, and Hiroshi—said that the family never knew the exact motive for Makiko’s suicide. However, they noted numerous studies that indicate that many nisei who were incarcerated at a young age, as the Fukuda children had been, suffered lingering feelings of betrayal by their government, shame, and depression that extended well past the war. According to her brothers, Makiko fit that pattern. They consider her death a ripple effect from the war.

  Shinko continued to serve as minister of the Konko Church until her death on April 3, 1972. At sunrise that morning, she got off a bus on Geary Street and was struck by a driver who was blinded by the sun. Shinko was sixty-six. “Both of our parents lived their lives practicing gaman—patience and resilience,” said Nobusuke, the second-born son. “They never wasted anything—not food, time, or anger. Instead, they waited for things to work out.” Today, the Konko Church, in which the Fukuda sons remain active, serves about one hundred families in Japantown.

  Neither Fukuda nor Shinko lived to see the nation’s official attempt at redress. Fukuda’s petition was filed thirty-one years before President Ronald Reagan formally apologized on August 10, 1988, for the mass incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans. Congress appropriated $37 million for restitution, and Japanese American survivors were awarded $20,000 per person.

  In June 1996, a class-action suit was filed in federal district court in Los Angeles on behalf of the twenty-two hundred Latin Americans of Japanese descent who were deported to the United States during World War II and were forcibly interned on the orders of FDR. Many of those who filed the suit, including Carmen Mochizuki and Alice Nishimoto, were former Crystal City internees.

  The lawsuit requested the same redress that Japanese Americans received under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, signed by Reagan: a formal apology and $20,000 in reparations. The Justice Department, under President Bill Clinton, argued that the Japanese taken from Latin America were not citizens upon their arrival on US soil and entered the country as illegal immigrants. “The argument was as bizarre as it was false,” said Carmen. “After all, we were abducted by the American military, brought here on American ships, and many Japanese Peruvians from Crystal City were used as hostages in prisoner exchanges.” The lawsuit, Carmen Mochizuki v. the United States of America, was settled with a formal apology from the government and $5,000 per person for Japanese Latin American survivors, $15,000 less than Japanese Americans received.

  • • •

  The postwar paths of US officials involved in the fraught history of internment at Crystal City were variously impacted. Some stayed silent about their part while others formally recanted.

  After the war, Joseph O’Rourke continued his contact with some of the internees from Crystal City. After Fukuda became a citizen, O’Rourke traveled to San Francisco and had dinner with him and other former issei internees at Yamato Restaurant in Japantown. By then O’Rourke was director of the INS office in Kansas City, a job he held until his retirement. He and Mary, his second wife, then moved to Dallas, where they settled in a midcentury home on McFarlin Boulevard in University Park, a tree-lined neighborhood not far from downtown.

  O’Rourke died at sixty-two on April 5, 1959, of a heart attack. A funeral mass was held at a small Catholic chapel in Dallas. Though his daughter, Joan, was listed as a survivor, they never reconciled, and she did not attend the funeral. O’Rourke is buried in Restland Cemetery.

  During the postwar period, Harrison, a lawyer and civic leader in Philadelphia, devoted himself to civil rights issues. He co
ntinued to press his proposal for the settlement of Jews in Palestine. Historians have credited the Harrison Report as having laid the groundwork for US support for the state of Israel. In 1946, Harrison testified on behalf of Heman Marion Sweatt, a black student who was denied admission to the University of Texas Law School.

  Harrison left no record of what he thought about the efficacy of the Crystal City Internment Camp. His son Barton speculated his father would most likely have been conflicted. “I think that he would have been comfortable and proud of the fact that the camp was mixed nationalities and reunited families. He would have been in favor of that and proud of the accomplishment,” said Barton. “I’m not sure he would have supported the trades, especially of American children, but he would probably have concluded that it was his job to run the camp and the State Department’s job to handle the exchanges.”

  On July 28, 1955, while on a trip to a remote camp operated by Quakers in the Adirondacks, Harrison suffered a heart attack and died at the age of fifty-six. His funeral was held at Race Street Meeting House in Philadelphia. His three sons—Paul, Barton, and Earl—were in college or graduate school at the time of his death. Paul later became a surgeon. Barton followed his father as a Philadelphia lawyer. After graduation from Yale Divinity School, Earl became headmaster of Westtown School in Philadelphia and later head of the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. “We used to joke that all we needed was one more brother—an undertaker—and together we’d be able to take care of any family situation,” Barton recalled.

  As attorney general, Francis Biddle acquiesced to Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to intern Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants in the United States, but regretted his part in the internment for the rest of his life. In his autobiography, Biddle wrote that the program was “ill-advised, unnecessary and unnecessarily cruel.”