Bill Sumida revisits the site where he was imprisoned more than
60 years ago
Gilroy – When Bill Sumida left the Tule Lake Relocation-Segregation Center, he never planned to set foot in the concentration camp again.
But more than six decades later, he did return to the site where he and his family were imprisoned without trial by America’s federal government.
From July 1 to 4, the 82-year-old Gilroy resident joined other Japanese Americans on a “pilgrimage” to the location of America’s internment of its own citizens during World War II. There, he heard and shared the stories of how other internees survived their ordeal at Tule Lake.
Sumida didn’t know it at the time, but his journey to Tule Lake began on Dec. 7, 1941 when he was a 17-year-old high school senior living in the Seattle region. “I was shocked” he recalled when he first heard news of Japan’s surprise assault on the United State’s Hawaiian naval base. “I was playing football on that Sunday and someone came onto to the field and told us Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. I went home and listened to the radio and was pretty shocked.”
His father was a truck farmer, and Sumida had three sisters. (Sumida’s mother died shortly after he was born.) Like the rest of the nation, the family worried about the future as America entered the war.
“My older sister’s husband was taken shortly after Pearl Harbor,” Sumida recalls. “The FBI came and picked him up and took him. He was taken to Minidoka (an Idaho camp), but my sister didn’t know where he was. She didn’t hear from him until many months later.”
When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the presidential Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, the teenage Sumida, along with the Japanese-American community, faced an uncertain future. Shortly after, he and his family traveled by train to the Pinedale Assembly Center near Fresno.
At Pinedale, he recalled making friends with a young Japanese American man about his age. The friend was soon severely injured during a game of baseball. “A week into camp in Pinedale … he got in the way of a bat that slipped out of a guy’s hands and into the stomach” Sumida recalls. “They tried to take him to the hospital in Fresno, and the people in Fresno wouldn’t accept him. So there was no alternative for him than to go back to the (assembly) camp. Boy, I’m telling you, he died in agony.”
From Pinedale, Sumida and his father and one sister were sent to Tule Lake, a desolate dry lake bed in northern California just south of Klamath Falls, Ore. Another sister was sent to the Manzanar Camp in the Sierras and his oldest sister was sent to Minidoka to be with her husband.
“I went to Tule Lake in September 1942,” Sumida said. “A month later, I went off to farm sugar beets. Then my dad got sick and I had to come back to the camp.”
Shinjiro Sumida, Bill’s father, had suffered a mild stroke and also had a heart problem. The weakened man was put in the camp’s hospital.
Living in a tar-papered barracks watched over 24 hours a day by armed guard towers, young Sumida saw how the more than 18,000 Japanese-American people in the 1.25-square-mile camp endured the often brutal conditions.
“I was young,” he said. “It didn’t really affect me as much as my dad. He went into the camp very healthy, but he had money problems because we had a crop (in the Seattle area) that just at that time needed to be harvested when we had to leave. So we sold the crop. But the guy never paid my dad. They took our equipment and everything and so we had nothing after the war.”
In May 1943, Sumida was able to leave Tule Lake for Chicago because that city needed workers during the war years. He did odd jobs wherever he could find them.
The United States draft board caught up with Sumida in 1945 and he was inducted into the Army. While his dad and sisters were moved to be united at Minedoka, Sumida went to Europe to serve his country as a soldier.
Following the war, he sought a college education. He applied to the University of Washington but didn’t get in. However, the Illinois Institute of Technology, an all male engineering school in Chicago, did accept him and he began his studies and started his own family.
After retiring several years ago, Sumida moved to Los Banos for a time. Last year, he moved to Gilroy to live with Kevin, one of his sons.
This year, he participated in the Tule Lake Pilgrimage – which takes place on the Independence Day weekend during even numbered years. On the morning of July 1, he boarded a hired bus in San Jose’s Japan town and took the eight hour ride to the Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls where participants from across the country all gathered.
During the trip, Sumida joined other participants in a tour of the former camp site. The only building remaining on the site is a concrete jail. At the town of Tulelake’s history museum at the county fairgrounds, Sumida wandered into a former barracks that had been moved from the camp and renovated as a reminder of where the Japanese Americans made their home.
Reliving the dark chapter of the internment during World War II is important because many take their freedom for granted, Sumida said.
“There’s no mention of the incarceration of Japanese Americans in the history books in Illinois,” he said. “My kids never hard of it. I got them to write a thesis – an English paper – for their senior year. I gave them the resources. One of their English teachers said, ‘I don’t believe it happened.’ They had no idea about what the Japanese Americans had to go through.”
