THE HAWAI'I NISEI STORY
Americans of Japanese Ancestry During WWII

One of the two concrete monuments, cracked and crumbling with age in a small cemetery in Desha County, Arkansas, is inscribed in Japanese and English with the names of 30 young Americans who died on the battlefields of Europe during World War II. Little else remains to remind the world of the young nisei who volunteered to serve their country from behind the barbed wire of the Rohwer Relocation Center.

"We don't forget," stated former internee Sam Yada, a 76-year-old retired nursery owner in Sherwood in a recent Arkansas Gazette article. Along with Rev. Joseph Boone Hunter and Rev. Nat Griswold, former Rohwer center staff members, Sam and his spouse Haru Yada initiated a $10,000 fund drive to build a permanent marble obelisk at Rohwer center cemetery to replace the present crumbling monuments. On May 30, their efforts were rewarded with the dedication of a new memorial for the 30 442nd Regiment war dead from Rohwer center and the innocent citizens of Japanese ancestry who were incarcerated during the war.

In 1942, Hawaii-born Sam Yada was working as a mechanic for a company farm in Lodi, California, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the evacuation order. After being held at the Stockton fairgrounds, Sam and Haru Yada and their four year-old son Robert were placed on a train for Arkansas. Four days and four nights later, they arrived in the morning at a city of barracks surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers with armed guards. Rev. Griswold was among the staff members assigned to meet incoming trains with a truck to bring the newcomers, "standing like cattle, "to the Rohwer Relocation Center.

Sam Yada recalls his family was assigned to a single 20 feet by 20 feet room, furnished with only a bed and a blanket for each person. During their internment, he worked as a lumberjack, a mechanic, a mechanics teacher and a cook and was paid $16 a month. Mrs. Yada had their second son, Richard, in the camp hospital in August, 1943. Although Sam Yada answered "no" to both loyalty questions asked of all internees because he objected to his treatment by the U.S. government, he says there was no organized protest.

In an interview with the Arkansas Democrat, Rev. Griswold remembered, "The soldiers who had been stationed around the camp to guard it soon left the bayonets off their guns, and soon, they stopped carrying guns." Although the internees were occasionally allowed to go into town in cars and Army trucks and were allowed outside the camp at their own will, they usually would not venture far because of possible danger from unfriendly civilian residents. Haru Yada describes the life as "dull" because there was no freedom and no future for the internees.

Although Rev. Hunter, who served as an assistant director of the center, says that the administration tried to show the internees that they were "worthy American citizens" despite being behind barbed wire, he admits that he didn't organize to try to stop the internment because it would have been too difficult. Today, he supports the monument as a reminder to Americans that "you can quickly misjudge and mistrust people if you do it out of suspicion and racism." "We need a permanent marker to remind us Americans that America will never again do the sort of thing she did here, sending boys off to war while keeping their parents and sweethearts confined behind wire fences," he stated in an Arkansas Gazette article.

Nine thousand internees were held for three and a half years at Rohwer Relocation Center.