Somewhere around 1978 I was learning the science of landscape maintenance horticulture and working as a gardener where I lived on the Monterey Peninsula. A colleague I became friends with told me about an organization of professional gardeners the Japanese Americans Citizens League had, and that they had monthly meetings he attended and thought I would be welcomed as well.
These men were so gracious to me, one of the first of two women to walk into the meeting and ask to sit in. They had just opened their group to Caucasians, and now here come two women! Over the years, meeting with them taught me a great deal, not the least of which were tips on how to run my business and, of course, caring for gardens. They also opened up to all of us non-Japanese folks about why they had become gardeners.
There was a general panic at the start of World War II and a fear that the Japanese had planted spies in America. The government took the drastic action of rounding up over 10,000 Japanese Americans and herding them into internment camps for the duration of the war. Conditions were horrible, leading to much suffering and even death.
After their release from the internment camps at the end of WWII, they returned home to almost nothing of what they had before. There are tens of stories I could tell from our conversations, some heartwarming — such as how their neighbors preserved their homes for them — but others about how others’ homes had been ransacked, and how so many just had to pick up the pieces and start all over from scratch with a rake and a broom as a gardener, and work their way back to security on their own. By the time I met them, they had both a Northern California Professional Gardeners League and a Southern one. It was large.
In this organization we had a Mutual Support System. If one of us got disabled and could not work for more than a week, the other local members would each take one of his or her jobs and go there to do minimum maintenance each week until the gardener was able to return (The homeowners were happy to go along with this and kept on paying their regular gardener). On the rare occasions we needed to enact that system, it worked really well, and it felt good.
Even as the Japanese members began to retire, others of us filled up the organization. We continued their spirit of brotherhood. These wonderful men taught me a great deal about grace and dignity. If they were bitter and angry and resentful, they never showed it to me. They did not minimize the impact of internment and the suffering it caused them as they leaned on each other. Later, they did compile a picture book to commemorate that time and their recovery from it, which, my friend, George Takagawa, brought over to my house one day to share with me.
I deeply treasure what I learned from these gracious men in my years of meeting with them. When they were released from the camps, there was some money apparently utilized to help them, but information about that is a bit sketchy. There was a case of some 60 folks who sued and were partially compensated for lost property. It was not until 1988, though, after a class action lawsuit brought by a Japanese American legal team, that congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, and the American Government and Ronald Reagan formally apologized and gave each interned Japanese individual still alive or their descendants $20,000 ($49,000 in today’s money) as reparation for the three years of their imprisonment in the camps.
As a nation we are now considering reparations for Black Americans, but this is not America’s first go round with reparations. However, in numbers and cost, there is a large difference. The duration of the abusive treatment of Japanese Americans lasted a handful of years as compared with centuries of abuse of the African slaves. The imprisonment of my friends’ families was the result of fear of this sudden “enemy in our neighborhoods,” but I do not think it can compare with the fear of enslaved Black people that was generated in White folks by their own meanness and the fear of reprisal for that brutality. It exists still as a huge psychological block in America’s psyche.