Takasugi, now a state assemblyman, also taught Spanish and bookkeeping at a makeshift high school here. And, like other wartime prisoners, he waited to be set free. The Oxnard Republican was among thousands of Japanese Americans interned at the Gila River Relocation Center, each uprooted and deposited on this desert scrubland better suited to scorpions and Gila monsters.
On Saturday, for the first time since the internment camp closed its doors half a century ago, Takasugi returned to the site of his incarceration. He bumped along a rutted dirt road, trying to pick out landmarks to help him piece together a mental image of the place.
The desert has changed since he had last been here. And all that is left of the camp are concrete blocks that poke out of the sand here and there, the skeletal remains of a Japanese community tacked together in a hurry at the start of the second world war. Here in this Arizona dust bowl, nearly 1, people gathered Saturday to mark the 50th anniversary of the closure of the Gila River war camp. More than 13, people of Japanese descent--many of them from the Los Angeles area--were herded to this desolate stretch of desert during World War II, held behind barbed wire by presidential decree and by armed soldiers under orders to gun down anyone who tried to escape.
Authorities, questioning the loyalty of Japanese Americans, forced more than , people off the West Coast and into 10 war relocation centers scattered across seven states. They were told the internment was for their own good, and they should consider it their contribution to the war effort. For more than three years--in places with names such as Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Topaz in Utah and Manzanar in California--these prisoners of war did their part.
They lived and they died behind barbed wire. They held sock hops and Christmas socials and high school graduations. They married and made babies.
