Headline       PAINFUL HISTORY

Subhead        JAPANESE ALASKANS RECALL IMPRISONMENT DURING WORLD WAR II      

Run Date       5/22/1997      Day     Thursday       

Page    E1     Section         Lifestyles     

Story Byline    By Sandi Mcdaniel Daily News Reporter  

 One day in 1942, Mark Hiratsuka was trapping near his village of Ekuk on the southwestern Alaska coast. The next day, he was en route to a desolate internment camp in Idaho called Minidoka, where he was crammed into substandard housing and imprisoned behind barbed wire. Federal agents evacuated an estimated 200 Alaskans of Japanese descent from Alaska during World War II. What happened to them is part of the story behind ''A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the United States Constitution.'' The traveling exhibit at Loussac Library is a joint venture of the American Library Association and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. Just 20 libraries nationwide will host the collection of panels, photographs and an interactive video. The exhibit explores how executive order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt in February 1942, violated the rights of 77,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry and 43,000 Japanese nationals living in the United States. In the first of a series of lectures and events related to the exhibit, Ron Inouye, with the Alaska and Polar Regions Department of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, brought the story home when he spoke Tuesday about Alaskans caught up in wartime hysteria and racism. For 15 years, Inouye has collected oral histories from Alaskans displaced during the war because of race. He became interested in the story while working as a community college teacher in Ketchikan in the 1970s, where he met people who had been interned during the war. ''I knew about that history, but didn't know Alaska had been included,'' he said. Alaska is just barely a footnote in most histories of the upheaval. While there is little documentation, scenes played out up and down the West Coast were happening here, too. Fhoki Kayamori was a cannery watchman and amateur photographer in Yakutat. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, children were sent to fetch Kayamori in his quarters, but found he had committed suicide, according to Inouye. Some in the community speculated he was a spy. Others concluded he couldn't face the prospect of being forced out of his longtime home. In Ketchikan, Teruo Ohashi and his family had just sat down to a salmon dinner when soldiers appeared. Ohashi's father was taken away to Lordsberg, N.M., where he was imprisoned. Ohashi and other family members eventually were interned at Minidoka. ''To this day, I still can't eat salmon,'' Ohashi once told an interviewer. In the 1940s, the Japanese-American community in Alaska was dispersed, but a majority lived in Southeast communities like Juneau and Wrangell. Ketchikan was home to the state's largest concentration of Japanese. Many were single men working in the canneries. Frequently in Alaska, Japanese-American men married Native women. When the men were arrested, their wives were given the option of remaining behind. Some wanted to keep their families together and joined their husbands. Others were afraid of the camps and stayed. But their lives were made difficult and sometimes tragic by the loss of their men. About 150 American citizens in Alaska were interned under Roosevelt's order. Another 50 or so noncitizens were imprisoned in Texas and New Mexico during the war. In Minidoka, Alaskans were assigned to Area A, Block 6, marked by a homemade sign: ''Alaskan Way.'' They segregated themselves in the camp, little more than a sagebrush dust bowl, recalled Sylvia Kobayashi, who was sent there from Seattle but now lives in Anchorage. The dryness and heat made their skin dry, their hair brittle, she said. Living conditions were impersonal and degrading. Inouye believes internment was particularly hard on Alaskans, who were accustomed to open country and solitude. They suffered, jammed into overcrowded barracks where families found intimacy only behind makeshift walls of bed sheets hung from rafters. Most spent about three years in the camp. Only 40 percent of evacuees returned to Alaska after the war, nouye said. Some chose to remain in the Northwest or other areas of the country, searching for opportunity among a postwar boom. Some never made it through the war. ''There were a number of people who died,'' Inouye said. ''Some of them were very elderly when they left. ... Others couldn't take the heat in Santa Fe and Texas.'' When Komatsu Ohashi returned from Minidoka to her home in Ketchikan where her husband's family had opened a grocery in 1906, she found many homes and businesses left in the care of others were in disrepair. William Tatsuda felt a residue of anti-Japanese sentiment upon his return to Ketchikan. But fellow veterans in the town publicly lauded he and his brothers, who had all served in the war. MarkHiratsuka, who got out of Minidoka by joining the Army -- along with more than 300 other men from the camp -- distinguished himself with other nisei (second-generation Japanese) in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The heroics of the ''Purple Heart Battalion'' during service in Europe drew such notoriety, they became the subject of a Hollywood film, named for their motto ''Go For Broke.''Hiratsuka now lives in Anchorage. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 went a long way toward mending the psychological wounds of the war, Inouye said, because it inspired a generation to talk more openly about what happened to them. ''They were really embarrassed,'' he said of the nisei. ''They didn't want to talk about those things, even to their own kids.'' But reliving the war was cathartic, he added, and inspired the interest of many sansei -- third-generation Japanese-Americans who had never heard their parents speak of these painful memories. Sylvia Kobayashi, who wrote of her wartime experiences, ended her story this way: ''It is painful for me to remember the past. I want to forget. But, after 50 years ... I feel compelled to tell the story. To all of you I say, please remember what I want to forget. It is part of America's past. It is part of America's history.''  ''A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the United States Constitution,'' will be on display at Loussac Library through June 23.  Related Events  * May 29: Sylvia Kobayashi, an Alaskan interned at Minidoka during the war, will show the film ''Honor Bound'' and speak about her experiences. 7 p.m. Wilda Marston Theatre * June 3: The June meeting of the Loussac Book Discussion Group will focus on David Guterson's ''Snow Falling on Cedars.'' 7 p.m. Ann Stevens Room * June 5: Brenda Wong Aoki, a nationally acclaimed storyteller, will entertain grade-schoolers. 7 p.m. Wilda Marston Theatre * June 11: Mary Jo and Michael Thrill, producers of the film ''Aleut Evacuation,'' will show and discuss their film. Alice Petrivelli will share her memories of the Aleut relocation during the war. 7 p.m. Wilda Marston Theatre * June 12: Brenda Wong Aoki will tell stories of the internment for a general audience. 7 p.m. Wilda Marston Theatre  BIBLIOGRAPHY  * ''Alaska's Japanese Pioneers: Faces, Voices, Stories,'' by Ron Inouye, Carol Hoshiko and Kazumi Heshiki * ''The World War II Evacuation of Japanese-Americans from the Territory of Alaska,'' by Ron Inouye * ''The Relocation of Alaska's Japanese Residents,'' by Claus-M Naske, Pacific Northwest Quarterly * ''When the Wind Was a River: Aleut Evacuation in World War II,'' by Dean Kohlhoff * ''Alaska at War, 1941-1945: The Forgotten War Remembered,'' edited by Fern Chandonnet * ''I Can Never Forget: Men of the 100th/442nd'' by Thelma Chang  VOICES  Voices from ''Alaska's Japanese Pioneers: Faces, Voices, Stories,'' by Ron Inouye, Carol Hoshiko and Kazumi Heshiki  ''I was in the (movie) theater when the war news broke out. Someone asked me what I thought. I said, 'I don't believe any of those things.' And then later when I did hear on the radio myself, I realized it was the truth.'' -- Isamu Sam Taguchi of Juneau, interned at Minidoka  ''I did find out (during World War II) the Hawaiians were different from the mainland Japanese. But the advantage I had over the mainland Japanese -- I could get along with the Hawaiians because they realized I was from Alaska. ... I wasn't part of the mainland group.'' -- Walter Tsuneo Fukuyama of Juneau, interned at Minidoka  ''When we were in camp, the Episcopal priest, Father Joseph Kitagawa, worked like mad to get a lot of the young people out to the East Coast to some of the better schools. I hadn't planned to go to college because my mom said we just didn't have the money, (but through varied circumstances) I went to the University of Rochester.'' -- Hope Ohashi of Ketchikan, interned at Minidoka