Japanese Peruvian Seeks Justice for Family’s World War II Internment

CRYSTAL CITY, Texas —  His brow creased, Art Shibayama gazes across a wide green field strewn with slabs of concrete.

The barracks that housed families like his are gone. So are the barbed wire and the armed guards.

Still, a recent visit to this chunk of flat South Texas land stirs painful memories more than 50 years old.

Shibayama recalls the fear and confusion that shook him when, at age 13, he was whisked from his native Peru, stuck below the deck of a transport ship and dropped at the gates of an internment camp in a country he’d only heard about.

His 2 1/2-year imprisonment made him part of a horrifying, little-known story from World War II: 2,264 Latin American residents of Japanese descent forcibly deported to the United States, primarily to be exchanged for Americans held by Japan.

After the war, Peru wouldn’t take most of the deportees back. Shibayama had to fight deportation to war-torn Japan for many years, finally winning the right to stay in the United States and settling in San Jose.

His resentment toward the U.S. government deepened over the years, ultimately leading him back to the place where his freedom was stolen 56 years earlier.

He returned to Peru in November as a 70-year-old retired service station owner to be the subject of a documentary on the experience of the Japanese Latin American internees.

He came back with hope in his heart--hope of raising awareness about what happened and of spurring Congress to compensate the victims. Time is short; many already have died.

“I’m here,” Shibayama said softly, the wind kicking up his wispy silver hair, “so the people know what happened--so this kind of thing won’t happen again.”

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Shibayama’s father was among the Japanese who began streaming into Peru around 1900, many drawn by work on sugar plantations. The population swelled to more than 25,000 by 1941, according to “A Fence Away from Freedom: Japanese Americans and World War II,” by Ellen Levine.

The Japanese immigrants became doctors, lawyers, teachers and merchants. Shibayama’s father owned a shirt-making business.

Their prosperity is believed to have fueled racism and contributed to the Peruvian government’s cooperation in the U.S. plan to bring them north.

Leading up to the war, Shibayama lived with his parents and five younger siblings in a five-bedroom brick house in Lima, Peru. They had a maid and a chauffeur. He played basketball and baseball and attended private school.

Everything changed on March 1, 1944.

All Shibayama remembers is suddenly being on a ship guarded by soldiers carrying machine guns. They landed in New Orleans and were loaded on a train to Crystal City, 120 miles southwest of San Antonio.

The eight-member Shibayama family was given two rooms in a three-room barrack.

U.S. federal agents stood guard on towers.

Shibayama’s parents put on a brave face.

“They tried to act like everything was normal,” he says.

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Throughout the western United States, the government was forcing thousands of Japanese Americans into detention camps out of fear they could spy for the enemy.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government urged many Latin American countries to arrest Japanese residents so they could be brought north. Thirteen countries complied; most of the deportees came from Peru.

By many accounts, the United States organized and financed the program with the goal of trading the deportees for U.S. citizens captured by Japanese forces.

“The U.S. cited the safety of the Panama Canal as the rationale for this removal, but the use of the Japanese as pawns for exchange was not overlooked,” according to “Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites,” published by the National Park Service in 1999.

The majority were held at the Crystal City Internment Camp, run by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service rather than the War Relocation Authority, like other camps.

The 290-acre former migrant labor camp was expanded to house 3,500 prisoners, but at one point about 4,000 people were crammed into its shelters. Most were of Japanese descent; German and Italian immigrants were held as well.

In two prisoner exchanges, in 1942 and 1943, more than 800 Japanese Latin Americans were sent to Japan, according to the victims’ rights group Campaign for Justice.

Most who remained at the war’s end faced an unbelievable bind: Their homelands wouldn’t allow them to return, and yet they were told they couldn’t stay in the United States.

The U.S. government, contending they were illegal immigrants who had entered the country without passports or visas, would let them leave the camp only for deportation to Japan.

Most went. Some had never even seen their ancestral land before. Years later, some told of living in poverty and going hungry in the devastated country.

But 365 Japanese Peruvians, with the help of an attorney who took up the cause, fought deportation, according to “Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps,” by Michi Nishiura Weglyn. The Crystal City camp stayed open until late 1947, more than two years after Japan surrendered.

Many of those who remained, including the Shibayamas, finally escaped by going to work for a frozen-foods processing plant in New Jersey that had used the labor of German POWs during the war.

Again, the Shibayama family lived in barracks.

“It was just like camp,” said Shibayama, who was then 16. “Only there were no fences.”

The boy who once dreamed of taking over his father’s textile business in Peru spent the next 2 1/2 years laboring over a garden and heaping frozen spinach onto a conveyor belt, often for 12 hours a day.

The family then moved to Chicago and applied repeatedly to become legal residents.

In 1952, when Shibayama was 21, he received a draft notice from the U.S. Army.

“Here I’m fighting deportation,” he says. “If I refuse to go, they might deport me for sure. So I went.”

He served for 16 months in Germany and France during the Korean War but was not granted U.S. residency until 1956.

Though he went on to become a U.S. citizen and make a life for himself, his wife and two children in San Jose, Shibayama never shook his disdain for the government.

His anger grew when he and other Japanese Latin Americans were denied the $20,000 in redress granted to Japanese-American internees in 1988. The government’s explanation? The Latin Americans were not citizens or legal residents when they were interned.

Ten years later, the government settled a class-action lawsuit by agreeing to pay them $5,000 each.

“This was a tragic chapter in the history of our nation,” Atty. Gen. Janet Reno said at the time. “It’s time to right this wrong and close the book.”

Some, like Shibayama, opted out of the settlement to fight on for equal reparations.

“I thought that was like throwing a bone to a dog,” he says.

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When he met Grace Shimizu, Shibayama knew he had a partner in battle.

Reeling from a final letter denying him compensation in 1994, Shibayama joined Shimizu’s effort to document the experiences of former internees.

Shimizu got involved on behalf of her elderly father, a Crystal City internee. In 1991 she formed the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project in her hometown of El Cerrito, Calif., and five years later started the nonprofit Campaign for Justice to press Congress for redress.

“The money is a symbolic thing,” she says. “This is about getting the U.S. government to acknowledge what happened, and it’s about getting a sincere apology.”

Her activism helped inspire the Wartime Parity and Justice Act pending in the U.S. House. The measure by Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) would provide $20,000 for each victim and an official apology.

Becerra’s bill never made it out of the immigration subcommittee last year, but he reintroduced it in February.

The legislation also calls for the government to provide $45 million for an educational program about the U.S. internment camps. The money was promised under the 1988 Civil Liberties Act but never rendered.

Becerra said he was shocked to learn the story of the Japanese Latin Americans a few years ago.

“This is one of the things that smacks you in the face and cries out for a remedy,” he said. “I love this country and I love what we stand for. I don’t think we stand for kidnapping people, holding them hostage and using them as trade bait in exchange for Americans caught by our foreign enemies.”

Rep. Ciro D. Rodriguez (D-Texas), who represents the district that includes Crystal City, vowed to keep pushing the bill despite last year’s failure.

“These things sometimes take time,” he said. “But the truth is with us, so I think eventually we’ll be able to pull it off.”

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First they must repeat the story.

Many Americans are aware of the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans and immigrants during the war. But the plight of Japanese Latin Americans is seldom told.

Since last year, Shibayama and Shimizu have been holding news conferences to discuss the legislation.

And now they are filming a documentary.

With independent filmmaker Casey Peek following along, Shibayama and Shimizu toured what little remains of the Crystal City camp: an old wooden barrack moved into town and converted into a home, a swimming pool filled in with concrete and overgrown with weeds.

Now a senior citizen with a round belly and fine lines sprouting from his eyes, Shibayama stiffened as he read from a granite-block memorial, put up as a reminder so “that the injustices and humiliations suffered here as a result of hysteria, racism and discrimination never happen again.”

Peek, a community organizer in the San Francisco Bay Area, and his colleague, Irum Shiekh, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, are producing the film with a $50,000 grant from the state-funded California Civil Liberties Public Education Program.

They plan to show it at California universities later this year.

“A lot of the community doesn’t know about the Japanese Latin American experience and the challenge they’ve had,” said Diane Matsuda, the program’s director. “We wanted to make sure that story got out to be known to all.”

For Shibayama, that’s a big part of it--but not all.

“I want the government to admit that they did something wrong,” he said. “That this was a war crime.”

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