'I am not the enemy. I'm an American citizen': Jim Tanimoto discusses life in WWII internment camps with MHS students

Michaela Harris, Appeal-Democrat, Marysville, Calif.
Updated ·3 min read

Apr. 11—"What would you do if you and your family were forced into these prisons? ... What would you do if your United States government took away your constitutional rights?" Jim Tanimoto asked students at Marysville High School on Thursday. "This is not a Japanese story, but an American story."

On July 9, 1942, 19-year-old Tanimoto and his family were ripped from their home in Gridley and sent to three different Japanese internment camps until 1945. This was the fate of thousands of Japanese immigrants and Japanese-American citizens during World War II.

Tanimoto, who will be 101 this year, has been sharing his story with students and community members for decades to ensure that this part of history is not forgotten, he said.

On Feb. 26, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 months after the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. According to the Library of Congress, the army issued its first Civilian Exclusion Orders in March, requiring that "all Japanese persons, both alien and non-alien, will be evacuated" and confined to "relocation camps."

By 1945, over 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry were dislocated and sent to assembly centers before being transferred to internment camps throughout the United States. Many assembly centers were converted racetracks or fairgrounds, and housed thousands of people who slept in stables, livestock stalls, or the open air while they awaited transfer.

"When they reached the camps themselves, they saw spare, prison-like compounds situated on sun-baked deserts or bare Ozark hillsides, dotted with watchtowers and surrounded by barbed wire," the Library of Congress said.

Tanimoto was born June 3, 1923, in Marysville and raised in Gridley. Despite being an American citizen, Tanimoto was shipped from Gridley to Siskiyou County where he would be placed in the Tule Lake War Relocation Authority also known as Camp Tulelake.

"We became prisoners of the war without due process of the law," Tanimoto said. "I am not the enemy. I'm an American citizen."

He spoke of the cramped nature and lack of privacy in their living quarters, which were roughly 16 feet by 20 feet with nothing other than a sheet to hang in between bedrooms. Some families had between six and seven people held in these rooms, Tanimoto said. Showers and bathrooms had no privacy or partitions, he said, and those in confinement were escorted by armed guards to use these facilities.

Even in a prison-like setting, those in confinement began to find a sense of routine. Children were sent to schools inside the camps while young adults were given labor-intensive jobs. Tanimoto reflected on playing baseball and other sports for recreation.

In 1943, Tanimoto, like many other Japanese men in internment camps, was asked to fill out a "loyalty form," which was meant to aid the U.S. War Department in military recruitment. Refusal to cooperate was met with a $10,000 fine and 20 years in prison, he said. Tanimoto and others in Camp Tulelake refused to sign this form, which resulted in them being woken by soldiers in the middle of the night and intimidated into answering the form.

Tanimoto remembered thinking when he and others were pulled out of bed that "we were standing in front of a firing squad."

Tanimoto said his life at internment camps forever changed his existence. Over 80 years after the war, he hopes to spread awareness and knowledge of his story and the story of thousands of Japanese immigrants and American citizens.