The watercolor painting shows a vast field at the foot of a mountain. Boys are playing baseball, with groups of other kids cheering them on. Another spectator at this baseball game is a soldier carrying a rifle with a bayonet, guarding the interned Japanese inside barbed-wire fences from a watchtower. In the lower right-hand corner is a signature: Kenge Kobayashi, Interned in Tulelake, 1944-46.
“Internment was a sad part of our history,” said Kobayashi, 74, recalling his camp life in Tulelake, Calif., where he spent part of his youth more than half a century ago. Kobayashi, a retired graphic designer now living in Eugene, and another ex-internee, Bob Kono, 68, will come to the University on Tuesday to share their experiences during the war. Their presentation, titled “Japanese Americans and World War II,” will be held at 7 p.m. in the Gumwood Room of the EMU. The Asian/Pacific American Student Union (APASU) invited the speakers as part of May’s Asian Heritage Month series.
Like other Japanese Americans on the West Coast, Kobayashi and his family were shipped to internment camps after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, despite his U.S. citizenship as a Nisei, a second-generation Japanese American.
In addition to a speech about the camps, the presentation will include an exhibit of Kobayashi’s watercolor paintings of internment camps and a showing of the film “Honor Bound,” which features veterans of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
Composed of Nisei soldiers, the 442nd is “the most-decorated unit in the history of the U.S. Army,” said Kono, who is currently writing a novel about the combat unit. “[Some] volunteered from the camps to prove their loyalty to the United States, in spite of being classified as enemy aliens,” he said.
It is critical not to look at the internment as an isolated incident in the American experience, said Lauren Kessler, journalism professor and author of an award-winning book, “Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family.”
“Internment was [a] serious legal and extralegal episode of racism in the United States,” Kessler said.
“The idea of having [internees] talk about their experiences is very rare,” said Sugie Hong, co-director of APASU. “They were there, but we weren’t.”
Once labeled as enemies or aliens, many ex-internees hesitate to speak about their camp experiences, Kobayashi said. However, he said he is not shy about talking about his own, because “we didn’t do anything wrong.”