CINCINNATI — An entire family was swept away and relocated to a foreign place within the country they’ve called home for years. It was a new world following the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the truth of what happened the two months following the Japanese attack wasn’t always an open book to those whose parents and relatives faced it.
“My parents, like many of their generation who were in the camps, just really didn't talk about it. If I asked a question, they would give me a specific answer. But they really didn't elaborate,” said Denny Kato.
It was executive order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that created military areas wherein “any or all persons may be excluded.”
The focus was on all people of Japanese ancestry and approximately 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese descent including about 70,000 Japanese-American citizens were sent to ten different relocation centers to live.
For Kato, the vague discussions when he was younger weren’t much of an incentive to dig much deeper at the time.
He attended Walnut Hills high school and says he felt welcome there and in the community. While the topic of World War II was taught in history class, Japanese internment camps were not much of a highlight.
“It's still a footnote, it’s literally a footnote in most, most schools,” said Kato. “I know when I was in Walnut Hills, I can't even remember if the instructor talked about it for more than a couple sentences.”
Flash forward through his schooling at the University of Cincinnati, service within the United States Army and eventual marriage to his wife Janet in 1977, new discussions suddenly began about his family’s personal experience in the internment camps.
“We were discussing something, and I just mentioned, yeah, my parents and all the Japanese were interned in World War II and she had no clue. She had absolutely no clue. She was like, shocked. What are you talking about? I explained to her as best I could. And she was like, Wow, that's crazy,” Kato said.
His wife was the inquisitive one and began peeling back the layers of stories to chronicle the family history tied to a pivotal part of our country’s history.
“She was the one that started going to my relatives and asked him, 'Hey, tell me about your experience. What were you doing? What was it like?' And they were very reluctant to talk. And she finally got my mom and dad to write kind of a narrative, which was only about two pages of stuff, some of their experiences and what but there was no expression of feelings or no expression of feelings or no expression of, 'I was angry,'” Kato said.
Even at that point, Kato admits he still hadn’t developed much of an interest in the history, but his wife continued the journey and soon he found himself diving into it further. In fact, he and his wife would end up visiting all 10 locations of the former camps which closed in March 1946.
His uncle, who was also interned, helped fill in the blanks even further when he discovered his grandfather and his other family had been transferred from one camp to another.
“I didn't know the circumstances of why they got transferred, but then my uncle had revealed to me he says, 'Your grandfather,' he says, 'was a resistor and he was very, he was an ardent Japanese national,'” Kato said. “He asked for repatriation for he and his wife and he wanted his children to renounce their US citizenship and go back to Japan with him.”
Kato said his uncle told him as a result they were transported to Tule Lake Internment Camp where all the troublemakers were kept in one place.
Nowadays, on the shoulders of years of research within his own family and others, Kato is sharing the history both with students of his alma mater Walnut Hills and with other groups across the country.
His hope is to shed light on the history and to not have it repeat.
If you'd like to add your own personal story to the history of internment camps or discover connections to others Denny Kato has a Facebook group called Beyond Barb Wire. You can read much more about Japanese American history and get involved at www.jasgc.org.
If you have a veteran story to tell in your community, email homefront@wcpo.com. You also can join the Homefront Facebook group, follow Craig McKee on Facebook and find more Homefront stories here.
