WW2 Memories of the Camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, Live On
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Updated: November 9, 2012
Not much is left of Richard Yada's birthplace in Rohwer, save for an abandoned, unusable smokestack and a crumbling cemetery.
Yada came into this world behind the confines of barbed wire. His birthplace is the relocation camp where the U.S. incarcerated more than 8,500 Japanese.
"I really didn't think about it until I was 30, 40 years old and looked back and wondered how that was accomplished," he said as we walked through what is left of the camp.
It was through President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 that made it possible for the U.S. government to incarcerate more than 110,000 Japanese, more than 70 percent were American citizens.
It is an ugly chapter of our history that started months after the Japanese Empire attacked the U.S. military installation at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941. The government feared that among these Japanese Americans, may be sleeper agents or had loyalty to the Emperor of Japan.
Yada, now 69 years old and living in Little Rock, read from the apology letter was sent to him October 1990, signed by then President George Herbert Walker Bush.
There are some ironies to Yada's story.
Twenty years after the government shut down the Rohwer camp, Yada became an Air Force officer and served in Vietnam as a navigator aboard a B-52 bomber.
"I look back and this is the same government that did incarcerate my parents," he said, standing among gravestones at the camp cemetery.
The cemetery also tells an ironic tale.
Two monuments pay tribute to the Japanese men who had volunteered to serve in the U.S. military. They were killed in action in Europe, fighting the Nazis on behalf of the same government that incarcerated them at home.
Their ultimate sacrifice also says something about our World War Two history.
UALR Professor Johanna Miller Lewis, who is working to restore the cemetery, writes: "More Japanese Americans enlisted in the military from the Delta than did Arkansans, who received deferments due to lack of education, poor health and farming."
As for Yada, the huge granite monument that bears the names of the fallen Japanese-American soldiers and his father's name, Sam Yada, holds a lesson for future generations.
"At least this would be here to remind people about what happened," he said.
Yada came into this world behind the confines of barbed wire. His birthplace is the relocation camp where the U.S. incarcerated more than 8,500 Japanese.
"I really didn't think about it until I was 30, 40 years old and looked back and wondered how that was accomplished," he said as we walked through what is left of the camp.
It was through President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 that made it possible for the U.S. government to incarcerate more than 110,000 Japanese, more than 70 percent were American citizens.
It is an ugly chapter of our history that started months after the Japanese Empire attacked the U.S. military installation at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941. The government feared that among these Japanese Americans, may be sleeper agents or had loyalty to the Emperor of Japan.
Yada, now 69 years old and living in Little Rock, read from the apology letter was sent to him October 1990, signed by then President George Herbert Walker Bush.
There are some ironies to Yada's story.
Twenty years after the government shut down the Rohwer camp, Yada became an Air Force officer and served in Vietnam as a navigator aboard a B-52 bomber.
"I look back and this is the same government that did incarcerate my parents," he said, standing among gravestones at the camp cemetery.
The cemetery also tells an ironic tale.
Two monuments pay tribute to the Japanese men who had volunteered to serve in the U.S. military. They were killed in action in Europe, fighting the Nazis on behalf of the same government that incarcerated them at home.
Their ultimate sacrifice also says something about our World War Two history.
UALR Professor Johanna Miller Lewis, who is working to restore the cemetery, writes: "More Japanese Americans enlisted in the military from the Delta than did Arkansans, who received deferments due to lack of education, poor health and farming."
As for Yada, the huge granite monument that bears the names of the fallen Japanese-American soldiers and his father's name, Sam Yada, holds a lesson for future generations.
"At least this would be here to remind people about what happened," he said.
