LIFE DURING WARTIME
Sadie Yamane was among the Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II. Sharon Schnall listened as Yamane told a group of students about her experiences.
The photo above shows Sadie Katano Yamane (left) with her sister, cousin, and aunt in 1940.
At age six, Sadie Katano Yamane was forced from her home and transported to an internment camp. The only “crime” she had committed was, by virtue of ancestry, resembling her country’s wartime enemy.
Yamane was among the 120,000 Japanese Americans who were relocated to the camps during World War II.
For 20 years, Yamane has talked to students and other audiences in Cleveland and northeast Ohio about this largely ignored piece of history. A former teacher, she is at ease before groups of people, although her voice occasionally shakes as she shares her memories. She spoke recently to one fifth-grade class:
The story begins when Sadie was a first-grader in Delano, Calif.
“We played in the poppy fields. We played games. We went to church on Sundays,” she tells the youngsters. “Our life was the ordinary American life.
“Everything changed with Pearl Harbor.”
On Dec. 7, 1941, hundreds of Japanese bomber and fighter planes attacked the U.S. naval base on Oahu. In the aftermath, fear, hysteria, and hatred were highest on the West Coast, where citizens and officials believed the Japanese could invade and be abetted by Japanese Americans.
“People weren’t allowed to play with us because we looked like the enemy. They called us ‘Japs.’ As young as I was, I knew it was wrong,” Yamane says.
Two months after the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the evacuation of West Coast Japanese Americans to 10 internment camps in desolate locations throughout the U.S. Most of the camps had armed guards watching over them day and night.
More than two-thirds of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens. Sadie and her family, all of whom had been born in California, were among them.
With less than two weeks’ notice, the Katanos packed what they could carry. They discarded, gave away, or sold the rest.
A young boy asks: “If the people hated Japanese Americans so much, why were they willing to buy your belongings?”
“They were looking for bargains, and they did get bargains because we had to get rid of everything,” Yamane says. “Cars would go for a few hundred dollars.”
Sadie’s aunt loved her fancy possessions: rugs, draperies, and one of the first refrigerators acquired in her small town. If people weren’t going to pay a fair price for these treasures, she reasoned, no one would own them.
“She was sitting with her box of crystal and she was breaking every piece,” Yamane tells her audience. “She pushed the refrigerator off the truck, and I remember seeing it bounce.
“Her beloved Frigidaire. She decided to destroy it.”
The Katanos were among the earliest arrivals at Poston, in Arizona, in spring 1942.
Electricity and plumbing had not yet been installed. The first time water was trucked in across the desert, Sadie was at the head of the receiving line. The disinfected water tasted foul.
“I was so thirsty,” she recalls. “The water was hot. I started to cry. I set off a chain reaction of crying. I liked hearing that sound. It had been so quiet.”
Yamane asks the students to imagine living in one 16-by-20-foot room, as her family did for more than a year. She tells how people hung blankets from rafters to give themselves privacy. She describes how they slept at first on canvas sacks stuffed with straw, placed on wooden floors. She talks about having to shower in groups and use latrines without stalls.
The adults worked to make life bearable. Schools were set up, along with a dispensary and a recreation hall. Mr. Katano, an elected block manager, feared the breakdown of the family unit and made it mandatory that families sit together in the mess hall.
Mr. Katano gained early release in 1943 to work on a Nebraska beet farm. The family relocated to Chicago and then Cleveland. Their possessions, including their house, were never recovered.
Populations in the camps eventually dwindled as young men were drafted and families were allowed to leave on work permits. The last camp closed in 1946.
By 1998, more than 82,000 former internees each had received a presidential letter of apology and reparation totaling $20,000. The redress resulted from the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
The money was important, but the apology meant so much more, Yamane says. She is not bitter, she tells the students; she understands the shock that followed the Pearl Harbor attack.
Yamane married an architect, Arthur Yamane, in 1958 and taught school in Cleveland until the early 1960s. She continues to value educating young audiences.
“I want them to know something like this happened in our country that prides itself on being fair, on having liberties for everyone,” she says.
“I want them to know if good people don’t do anything, these things can happen again.”
This story appears in the March/April 2006 issue of Ohio State Alumni Magazine. The magazine is a benefit of membership in the Alumni Association. Learn more about the benefits of membership and how you can make Ohio State stronger at membership services, or call 1-800-762-JOIN.
