December seventh

Thinking today about the historical event of the day, one which relates to me and this site only in the most tangential way: as one of the unforeseen consequences of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor sixty-three years ago, here I am. Let me walk through this:

I called my mom tonight. In December 1941, she was a student at Lowell High School in San Francisco. The news broke in to the sunday Philharmonic broadcast. The next day, December 8th, high school boys were talking about enlisting. By spring, many high school classmates had gone, but not all to war. The Japanese-American kids were being sent to way stations and camps. My mom remembers driving down Geary Street seeing piles of furniture and belongings outside people's houses, seeing soldiers with rifles, and not being able to speak to friends as they were leaving.

Meanwhile up the coast, my dad already had joined up and was off to become a naval aviator by the time Western Washington's Issei and other Japanese-Americans were being rounded up. Many people from Seattle, Tacoma, Bainbridge Island, and even Olympia wound up here, not twenty miles from my Idaho desert home:
 

It's the Minidoka Relocation Center, or Hunt, Idaho, in its time one of the biggest cities in Idaho. Nearly ten percent of the camp’s population – about 1,000 internees - were in U.S. military service. Of the ten relocation centers, Minidoka had the most volunteers. 73 soldiers from Minidoka died while fighting for the United States.

The camp ran from August 1942 until October 1945. The site is now the Minidoka Internment National Monument. There's not much left out there, but for me the ruins and the outlines of the tarpaper shacks where people spent the Idaho winters and summers are still a fine rebuke to anyone who wants to speak up in defense of internment.

As for the personal story, the Navy trained my dad to fly multi-engine transport planes, R4D's and R5D's, everywhere from New Guinea to Oakland, which, being one bridge away from The City, is how he met my mom. I arrived 16 years and five kids after V-J Day.

We now resume our regular public-defender-related rambling.