When Margaret Nakamura-Cooper was 11 years old, she looked down at her newborn cousin, nestled in a lettuce crate and wrapped in a towel. Even as a young child, she knew there was something deeply wrong about the conditions her family was living in.
Cooper is one of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans who were interned throughout the United States following an executive order issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942. Speaking in a gentle voice, Cooper detailed the hardships of her early life marked by a year-and-a-half of internment in two separate camps, during a speech to a standing-room-only crowd on Feb. 23 at the Santa Maria Public Library.
To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the forced internment of Japanese-Americans, the library hosted a free event featuring a short documentary film and a presentation by Cooper, a Santa Maria resident and library board member.
In an interview with the Sun before the event, Cooper shared her memories of the time following Dec. 7, 1941, the day Japanese fighter planes bombed the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
“We were told that we had to pick up stakes, sell all our material goods or have them stored,” said Cooper, who was 11 years old and living in Mountain View at the time. “By April we were living behind barbed wire.”
Before Cooper spoke, workers at the library had to carry in extra chairs to accommodate all the attendees eager to hear her story.
“Many of you don’t remember how it was for people like myself,” she told the crowd packed in the library’s Shepard Hall, “people that had skin color like mine.”
Cooper spoke first about her parents. Her father was a raspberry farmer who migrated to America from Japan, seeking to escape a strict family and rigid upbringing.
“When my father came to this country and married my mother, who was a U.S. citizen, she lost her U.S. citizenship because she married an alien,” Cooper said, referring to an early 20th century law which revoked U.S. citizenship for people who married non-citizens.
“He wasn’t thinking of doing any espionage for his mother country,” she added. “Not at all.”
The family was not wealthy, and what little possessions they had were sold or left behind when President Roosevelt’s order went into effect.
The family was sent to the Santa Anita racetrack, which served as a makeshift “assembly camp,” a title Cooper said was little more than a euphemism for a concentration camp. From there, the family was transferred to one of the more distant camps, at Heart Mountain, Wyo.
“The idea was the same,” she said. “They rounded up certain kinds of people and forced them from their homes.”
She said she was confused as an 11-year-old and felt shameful, “because only bad people went to prison.” When the family arrived, there were rows of barracks and stables.
“You could still smell the manure,” Cooper said.
That stable was where her aunt gave birth to her cousin, with no running water and no real medical aid. Even as a young girl, she said she knew it wasn’t right for a baby to be born in such conditions.
There was no hot water. The only running water available was a quarter-mile away near the race track’s grandstand area. Cooper described the harsh physical environment of the camp, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by machine guns on watchtowers, pointed inside.
At night, armed soldiers made their rounds, while searchlights swept over her as she tried to sleep. She had to fill a cotton sack filled with hay, often finding a lump of “humiliating” dried manure in her bed.
“We were allowed only what we could carry,” she said of the meager possessions they were allowed to keep in their cramped quarters. “[Six of us] lived in a room that was 20 feet by 20 feet.”
Her younger brother Kenny, a 10-year-old when the family was interned, died in the camp as a result of spinal meningitis. Cooper recalled the aching details of the loss, which weighed heavily on her mother.
“My mother saved his ashes and buried them with my father, when he died many years later,” she explained.
In the freezing winter, they had to walk long snow-lined paths to get to the bathroom. One of the only good memories she has is reading Nancy Drew books in the camp’s library, which was converted from a former barracks.
When the war ended, the Nakamura family was finally released and she found herself back in California, only to be met with an even colder reception.
“I went back to high school,” she said. “I met many of the friends I had before I was gone … but none of them spoke to me.”
Joyce Fisher, librarian at the Santa Maria Public Library who helped coordinate the event, said it was an “emotionally powerful moment to sit beside someone who is a survivor,” and watch others learn about Cooper’s experience.
“This is a powerful story and it’s oftentimes almost forgotten,” Fisher said. “In order to grow as community and country we need to understand our collective history.
“It’s important to hear from those who have experienced history, both the positive and negative,” she added.
For George Kiriyama, whose parents were also interned during World War II, the opportunity to see Cooper speak was extremely important.
“For those old enough to remember, like Margaret, it’s almost like reliving a nightmare,” he said. “They vividly remember how they were treated and what happened to their lives. It was total disruption.”
Kiriyama said he hopes that people understand internment is one of the darkest periods in American history. There are enough people in the country who have learned from it, he said, and would prevent a similar event from happening in the future.
Cooper told the Sun that she wanted to speak at the event to help others learn from the mistakes of the past.
“It’s important to me, because if we don’t learn from history, this could happen again,” she said. “If not to Japanese people, then maybe to Muslims or Hispanics or who knows what other group might not be in favor.”
In November, Roanoke, Va., mayor David Bowers cited Roosevelt’s order to sequester Japanese as justification for suspending assistance to Syrian refugees in the city. Cooper said instances such as these imply that the government could intern its own citizens again if it felt justified.
“That really angered me,” she said. “We should learn from history. Three-quarters of us were children. What bad things could we do in the way of sabotage to our country, when we went to school every day and pledged our allegiance?”
Cooper said images on the news of young children detained in airports in the wake of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order were hard to see.
“I think it’s our duty, those who have suffered through this bad period during World War II, to take it upon ourselves to be super-aware of others who are being singled out,” she said. “It’s a mass hysteria that happens when the economy is bad or when things are not going well. People find a scapegoat, and we were definitely the scapegoat.”
To contact Rebecca Rose, email her at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 2-9, 2017.