This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at cpr.org.
Carol Furuta has a message for Americans as immigrants across the country are apprehended and detained by ICE.
“Know what's going on and speak up,” she said. “And don't [judge] people just because someone looks different or is a different color or comes from a different country.”
Furuta, who is 88 and lives at the Holly Creek Retirement Community in Centennial, sees echoes of her past in the Trump administration’s current immigration policy. Like many Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast during World War II, Furuta’s family was forcibly taken from their Sacramento, California, home and relocated to three separate internment camps. The first two were in California, one near Sacramento called Walerga and another known as Tule Lake, before the family was put on a train to Amache, also known as the Granada Relocation Center, in southeastern Colorado.
Furuta was 5 years old at the time. She said she can’t remember much about her life at Amache except for the harsh weather and sparse living conditions.
“It was extremely hot [and] extremely cold and windy,” she said. “We lived in barracks and our living quarters were very bare.”
Furuta said the camp was divided into blocks and the meals and bathrooms were communal. She said the mess hall where they ate reminds her of military movies where soldiers sit shoulder to shoulder at long tables to eat their meals. Their rooms had no restrooms and no running water.
“It was just communal life in unpleasant quarters,” Furuta said.
When she looks back at that chapter in her family’s life and in American history, she wonders how it could have happened.
“We were not able to leave. We were enclosed. We were prisoners, basically,” she said. “I remember being surrounded by barbed wire, and I believe there were about 10 watchtowers with a soldier up there and a rifle.”
As she’s watched immigration officials in cities across the country detain and arrest people, including American citizens and those legally permitted to be in the U.S., Furuta sees parallels between her experience and the singling out of Latino immigrants. “I don't know how you can just walk in and arrest somebody,” she said. “The Japanese were seen as the enemy because we were different. And we were all American citizens except for our parents who came from Japan. They were not allowed to get their citizenship. It was against the law. When I look back on it now, I think how difficult it must have been for my parents. And I just feel so badly for my parents who were immigrants and did not speak English well. And the whole history during that time, to me, is painful."
Another internment camp survivor, Ruth Kawamura, also lives at the Holly Creek Retirement Community and she and Furuta have shared their experiences with each other and with the rest of the residents.
Kawamura was 2 years old when her family was taken from their home in Los Angeles and eventually were confined at Amache. She and Furuta didn’t know each other then. Kawamura is struck by the injustice of the U.S. government actions against those of Japanese descent at the time.
“It was a terrible experience,” she said. “Our parents and grandparents, the older people, just really suffered and we were all just put away just because of the way we looked.”
Kawamura doesn’t remember much about the internment camps, particularly early on when she and her family were taken to what had been the Santa Anita racetracks. She knows her family lived with thousands of other people of Japanese descent in horse stalls that, along with no space and no privacy, still smelled like manure.
Like Furuta’s family, Kawamura’s family was taken by train to Amache. She said even after she and her family were released, they never discussed their life there.
“I never did ask my parents about the camp or what they went through, and I really regret that,” she said. “But they didn’t talk about it.”
Carol Furuta’s family lived with that same code of silence. She also never asked her parents about the camps and they never brought it up.
“I think [in] a lot of the Japanese culture, there was a lot of shame,” she said. “Although the shame wasn't theirs. It was our government’s.”
After they were released from Amache, both Kawamura and Furuta’s families lived in what is now the LoDo section of Denver. It’s where many Japanese Americans who had been imprisoned at Amache resettled at the end of the war.
Furuta said she hopes that by reminding Americans about the US government’s persecution of families like hers, she can at least try to prevent history from repeating itself.
