Relocated' idealist lived — and died — devoutly
‘pro-American'
July 05, 2004
By VANESSA DE LA TORRE, Staff Writer
Yoko Thomas never knew her father.
When she was born, he was dead, and since
it confused her as a 5-year-old why no daddy lived in the house, Yoko sidled up
to her mother one day and asked, as little kids do, "How come?"
Miye had not prepared for this moment.
"She became hysterical and started
sobbing," remembered Yoko.
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| Pfc. Joe Shiomichi |
There was no talk of freedom, no mention
of sacrifice, or even of her father, Pfc. Joe Shiomichi (Poston 6-5-D) of
Brawley. Just fury and a lifetime of silence on the issue.
Yoko,
now 59, was so disturbed by her mother's reaction that she suppressed her
curiosity for the next half century. The life of Joe Shiomichi, however, could
not easily be ignored.
Joe was the youngest of three kids, a Boy
Scout while at Westmorland Grammar School, then a top shot-putter at Brawley
Union High School. After graduating as salutatorian in 1938, Joe left the
family farm for the University of California, Berkeley. But history would take
its course.
On Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed
American ships at Pearl Harbor, Joe's older brother, Tokio, was delivering 12
tons of pears from Chico to Los Angeles when he heard the news on his truck
radio. Immediately he thought it was a joke. Didn't Orson Welles fool a lot of
folks with "War of the Worlds" not too long ago?
Tok went to a football game after dropping
off the pears. It was at halftime, however, that he realized the seriousness of
the situation when an announcer ordered all military personnel to report to
their posts.
The next morning Tok signed up for the
Army but was rejected by the draft board. Military officials classified him as
a 4-C enemy alien.
A day of infamy would pave the way for
another.
On Feb. 19, 1942, about two months after
the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed
Executive Order 9066 that created 10 internment camps for 120,000 Americans of
Japanese ancestry as a "protection against espionage and against sabotage
to national defense material."
Joe Shiomichi had just graduated from UC
Berkeley, where he was president of the Japanese Students Club and a member of
Phi Epsilon Chi fraternity, when he was forced to "relocate" with his
family to Poston, Arizona. The Shiomichis were driven at gunpoint from their melon
farm in Brawley.
Most descendants of the two other Axis
powers, Germany and Italy, were left untouched.
Bitterness, however, was a road that Joe
refused to stumble across.
After 10 months at Poston Relocation Camp,
Joe Shiomichi kept his patriotism much like his brother Tok, who became one of
the first Japanese Americans to volunteer for the war once President Roosevelt
allowed it. Joe wanted to sign up soon after, but their mother begged him not
to — one son, she said, was enough.
But in a letter dated March 11, 1943, Joe
revealed to his college roommate and best friend since third grade, Eddie
Tokeshi, his trouble sticking to that fear-driven order. At the time he began
his courtship with Miye Kojaku, another Berkeley student at the camp, adding to
the "thoughts constantly in a turmoil" in his head.
A decision was at hand.
"I've become more and more convinced
that we must take a firm stand now in asserting our beliefs in regards to being
Americans. We may have just causes for some of our grievances but I certainly
don't feel that those grievances should be kept so long and harbored within us
to the point of distorting our views for the future. …
"Because there have been a few
uprisings and a few outbursts of pro-Axis feelings, I've gone the other extreme
and have continually asserted that I am pro-American," Joe wrote. "By
volunteering for the Army, I feel that the Niseis are building up something
concrete with which to fight discrimination after the war is over."
Joe Shiomichi, known as the gentle
chemistry teacher at Poston camp 1, also had little patience for the Niseis, or
second-generation Japanese Americans, who refused allegiance to the United
States — they "are either damned fools or want to be deported to Japan,"
he told Eddie.
But many of his younger students, such as
Lawrence Yatsu (Poston 35-14-C) , felt the oppression of internment. It was undeniable. They had
no textbooks, lab materials or classrooms. So the teacher gave the students a
few words to chew over.
As Yatsu recalled to The Times-Picayune in
2000, Joe Shiomichi took him for a walk one day and said, "Larry, all this
is a temporary aberration. We don't belong in a camp. But don't be bitter.
Don't let this get you down.
"America is the best country in the
world. There will be flukes and aberrations along the way. But get past it. This is temporary.
America is the greatest country — don't forget that."
Yoko Thomas, in discovering her father for
the first time, read his words and grieved for her mother, whose sentiments
were opposite of his.
The two married April 16, 1943, in Poston,
and after a few months Joe Shiomichi signed up for the Army to join his brother
in Europe. In seeking out his legacy, Thomas also attended the 60th reunion of
the 442nd Regimental Combat Team last April in Honolulu.
"By a fluke," Thomas said, she
sat at the table of Daniel Yamashita, co-author of "And Then There Were
Eight," the story of the most decorated military unit in U.S. history: The
all-volunteer, all-Japanese American 442nd RCT. Though hundreds were killed
during the crucial battles to save the "Lost Battalion" (141st) from
German annihilation, one of the most painful moments of the war, Yamashita told
her, was before they entered combat.
Of all the memories that had since faded,
Yamashita still remembered, clearly, the stark image of a pregnant woman
running along the train tracks, calling to her husband, Joe, as the men were
shipped off to Camp Shelby, Mississipppi, for basic training.
And then began the times that tried these
men's souls.
Thomas Paine, months before July 4, 1776,
stood before a depleted army, battered by the December cold and British forces,
and was ordered by Gen. George Washington to deliver this message: "The
summer soldier and sunshine patriots will, in this crisis, shrink from the
service of their country, but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks
of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this
consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the
triumph."
A sniper's bullet caught Pfc. Joe
Shiomichi three months into his combat duties in the Rome-Arno Campaign in
Italy. The Graves Registration Report No. 113, dated July 19, 1944, was
received by Miye Shiomichi a month before she gave birth to daughter Yoko.
Two days earlier, Graves Registration Report No. 112 had been
filled out for Pfc. Shaw Kojaku, Miye's closest brother.
Then came Aug. 31, the day Joe would have
turned 24, when his brother Tok stepped on a land mine that blew off his right
leg. Last July he died at age 86.
Heaven has a price for all its goods,
Thomas Paine had said, "and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an
article as freedom should not be highly rated."
After World War II ended, veterans of the
442nd Regimental Combat Team returned home to storefronts and restaurants that
posted signs that read, "No Japs wanted."
But throughout those times, Larry Yatsu,
the wary chemistry student, remembered the words his teacher had said to him
while walking along the dusty trails of Poston: "This is a temporary
aberration … America is the greatest country."
Yatsu would consider the man his lifelong
mentor.
"Here's Joe Shiomichi, torn away from
his home, pilloried and put down by his neighbors. They stuck him and his
family in a concentration camp, and they stripped him of everything. And he
still didn't lose faith. He still believed. I think he belongs up there with
the greatest of patriots."
Pfc. Joe Shiomichi, the soft-spoken
idealist, was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart, the Combat Infantryman's
Badge and the Bronze Star. He is buried next to his brother-in-law, Pfc. Shaw
Kojaku, at the Nisei Veterans Memorial at Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles.
A yard away lies Miye.
Yoko Thomas, married with a grown daughter
of her own, now has a compilation of letters and remembrances that she has
bound into a booklet called, "A Guy Named Joe." The title is taken
from a letter written by Arthur L. Harris, Superintendent of Education at
Poston, after he received word of her father's death.
Joe fought to end "that dark era when
man let greed, passion and hate rule his thought and his behavior," Harris
wrote. "But never has this war hit so close to home as it did through that
bit of news …
"In June I received a letter from him, and his closing phrase was,
‘Take care of the students back there and we'll try to do our best up here.'
Six weeks later Joe gave his life for his country, for the people, — yes, for
all of us here in Poston.
"He had ‘done his best.'"
Source: http://articles.ivpressonline.com/2004-07-05/internment-camps_24191553
