Another Time of Smoke and Camellias

It’s said that smoke tells the story, but camellias remember the truth. 

Over lunch at Kathleen’s on Lake Avenue, Pasadena resident June Berk told me, “All over Hollywood, you could see these thin columns of smoke rising from people’s backyards, just like pencils. There were lots of us Nisei living in Hollywood then, and all of the families were burning anything with Japanese language on it, paintings, letters, books, breaking dishes. Everyone had a bonfire in the backyard. The only thing we didn’t burn was kimono.” 

What Berk is remembering is now commemorated on February 19th, called the Day of Remembrance for the signing of Executive Order 9066 by then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942. The Order resulted in the mass imprisonment of approximately 126,000-128,000 Japanese Americans between 1942 and 1945. 

About half of that number were children, deemed to be enemies of the state. Approximately 72,000 of the incarcerated were American-born citizens. Their immigrant parents were legal aliens, precluded by law from becoming naturalized citizens. 

If you’re unfamiliar, Nikkei or Japanese Americans typically identify six broad generations: Issei or first generation, born in Japan or Okinawa; Nisei or second generation, born outside of Japan with at least one Issei parent; Sansei or third generation, born outside of Japan with at least one Nisei parent; Yonsei or fourth generation, born outside of Japan with at least one Sansei parent; Gosei or fifth generation, born outside of Japan with at least one Yonsei parent; and Rokusei, sixth generation.

Most Issei immigrated to America prior to the Immigration Act of 1924, meaning few are left. The children, the Nisei like June Aochi Berk, are now in their 90s and are the last who remember the camp experience.

Incarceration, not internment

Berk and her older sister had first learned about the coming incarceration as they walked home from a movie. Signs were posted along the telephone poles alerting all Japanese Americans to prepare to leave their homes and businesses, informing them to bring only what they could carry.

Regarding FDR’s “…date which will live in infamy,” the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Berk recalls “I was 10 when December 7th happened. All Japanese people were fired from their jobs. Japanese students had to leave school. We couldn’t travel any more than five miles from our homes, and there was a 7:30 PM curfew.”

The rationale applied by Roosevelt’s administration was that individuals of Japanese ancestry might be disloyal to the United States. By this reasoning, the presence of Japanese Americans, including citizens born on US soil, posed a threat to national security, especially when these individuals lived near the west coast. That meant the detainees were shipped inland, incarcerated in one of 10 remote locations in central California, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Arkansas.

In addition to the forced removal of Japanese Americans, the DOJ, FBI and other governmental agencies also interned approximately 11,500 people of German ancestry as well as 3,000 Americans of Italian descent, the majority of these being US citizens according to the Densho Encyclopedia.

Flowers with a past

Coincidentally, this time of year is when camellias bloom, with the mature plantings located in Descanso Gardens being among the loveliest in our region.

Descanso Gardens was the former estate of newspaper publisher E. Manchester Boddy, who established plantings of roses and struggling lilacs, and most famously camellias. Descanso is now home to North America’s largest camellia collection and has been designated an International Camellia Garden of Excellence by the International Camellia Society.

All of this beauty carries a profound sting for people of Japanese ancestry.  According to a 2021 report from Juliann Rooke, Executive Director of Descanso Gardens, Boddy purchased the nursery stock of at least three Japanese-owned nurseries, the life’s-work of those families, in 1942. That’s when, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, the owners were imprisoned for their ethnicity and cultural background, or, in simpler if less precise terms, their “race.”

Boddy claimed to have paid “fair market value” for the thousands of plants, many of which were rare cultivars, but research conducted by Wendy Cheng, Associate Professor of American Studies at Scripps College, since proved otherwise.

For example, Cheng uncovered business wartime correspondence from Uyematsu Star Nurseries, which revealed that Boddy paid between $0.15 and $0.16 cents per plant, substantially below wholesale pricing at the time. And Cheng’s findings reveal that Boddy often took credit for cultivating the rarest of the camellias. Among these: “Mary Charlotte” (Camellia japonica ), now thought to have been among or descended from the cultivars imported from Japan in 1931 by F.M. Uyematsu, who founded Uyematsu Star Nurseries in 1912.

In response, Descanso Gardens now identifies and labels camellias developed by Yoshimura, Uyematsu, and other Japanese American grower-families, and will continue to correct and expand its representation of these and other collections.

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Yasuno Aochi’s name was changed to June (Berk is her married name) by government-provided camp teachers whose Southern drawl could not accommodate the Japanese pronunciation.

Berk recalls her father dressed in his best suit, bag packed, sitting on the steps waiting for the FBI to collect him (they didn’t). Instead, he and the family were taken by bus to the Santa Anita Assembly Center, perhaps better known as the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, where between 9,000 and 10,000 Japanese Americans were detained.

Families were held in these centers while the remote camps were readied for their arrival.

After five months literally bedding down on sacks of hay, the Aochis were packed off to Rohwer Japanese American Relocation Center in Arkansas for three years.

Can there be a “fun fact” about a violation of civil liberties? As a child, actor George Takei was imprisoned with his family at the same Relocation Center.

Today, Berk gives tours of Barn 54, the racehorse stall where she and her family slept.

“I can’t believe it was so small, how did we all fit?,” she smiles.

The fragility of civil rights

The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 verified that FDR’s enactment of the Executive Order was unconstitutional, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. 

In another syncretic turn of events, immediately upon taking office in January 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order to end “birthright citizenship” as articulated in the Fourteenth Amendment. Trump’s Executive Order is being challenged as we go to press.

And in this way, perhaps Berk, Kamei and others we interviewed are guardians not only of memory, but of democracy.

Trump first proposed this move during his first term, citing “birth tourism” as one of his problematic targets. Now, the Executive Order has been issued as part of the President’s sweeping “immigration crackdown.” The key issue: “jus soli,” or “right of the soil,” which has long meant that children born in the US are citizens, even if their parents lack legal documentation to be in the country.

Uncomfortable history

By some accounts, many Yonsei, Gosei, and Rokusei have only a patchy knowledge of the incarceration, due to, perhaps, a combination of factors including euphemistic accounts by mainstream reporting, and revisionist history books.

For instance, in 2023, the senior archivist for The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Colleen Shogan removed photographs taken by Dorothea Lange in the Japanese incarceration camps from an exhibit on the basis that the images threatened exhibit ticket sales because they were too negative and controversial.

As context, among Shogan’s other similar cut-and-pastes for a different exhibition: replacing an iconic photograph of MLK during a 1963 civil rights march with the equally iconic 1970 grip-and-grin of then-President Nixon with Elvis Presley.

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Another element in what may seem a paradox is the sunny — or at least stoical — attitude of many Nisei regarding their wartime camp experience.

Consider the word “gaman.” Not only does it mean something like “grit” (resilience, stamina, perseverance); it’s also the word for works of art created by imprisoned Japanese Americans while detained.

In camps built around dry lake beds, like Tule Lake, California and Topaz, Utah, prisoners carved delicate brooches from shells they dug up. Elsewhere, using scraps, detainees made paper flowers, sewed and embroidered, drew and painted, cast clay and metal tea ceremony implements, and made graceful furniture.

Berk, a still-glamorous former dancer and model, recalls her mother buying her a pair of white majorette boots because she hated the heavy brown work-shoes the others were wearing to protect their feet against the local snakes and tarantulas.

“My brother wanted to be a pachuco,” she says. “He had the zoot suit with the narrow, tapered pants and everything.”

She laughs “My husband keeps telling me to stop talking about how much fun we had at camp.”

Her favorite memories include jitterbug contests, baton-twirling classes, parades, awards for keeping the cleanest block, basketball and baseball games, Cub Scouts, movie nights, and so-named Victory Gardens tended by the imprisoned.

Berk recalls “My mom grew strawberries, morning glories and green onions. They were terrified of being deported back to Japan, so being in a camp was kind of a relief.”

On February 16th, Berk will be speaking alongside her friend Dr. Susan Kamei at UC Irvine. Kamei is a USC Adjunct Professor of History in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts  and Sciences and is the author of the book, “When Can We Go Back to America?”

We spoke with LA-born Kamei, who is Sansei and has been a Pasadena resident for the past 44 years, shortly before the Eaton Fire. The granddaughter of Japanese immigrants, she’s recognized as one of the field’s most prominent scholars to address the Japanese American incarceration.

Both of Kamei’s parents as well as both sets of her grandparents and her father’s grandparents were initially held at the Santa Anita Assembly Center, then incarcerated at camps in Wyoming and Arizona. Kamei’s parents were born in the US, and met in Pasadena after camp. Her grandparents were legal immigrants who could not become citizens.

Regarding the erosion of civil liberties, “it’s a slippery slope,” says Kamei who was instrumental in facilitating the Civil Liberties Act of 1987-1988.

Kamei received her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center and was a member of the legislative strategy team for the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in the successful passage of the federal legislation that provided the $1.5 billion appropriated by Congress for redress to survivors of the camps, disbursed as $20,000 per individual along with an official public apology stating that “a grave personal injustice was done.” The 467-page report of the Commission of Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) may be reviewed here.

The Civil Liberties Act was preceded by the adoption of HR 442 by the 100^th Congress. The corrective NHR4 process had been initiated by the late President Jimmy Carter on July 31, 1980.

In 1983, a bipartisan federal commission determined that FDR’s assessment of the mass incarceration as a “military necessity” was without basis and that in fact the action had resulted from “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”

Although she deftly sidesteps partisan talk, Kamei says plainly, “Our civil liberties need to be protected now more than ever. Our system of checks and balances is inadequate,” adding that the lessons of the Japanese American incarceration apply to constitutional issues, civil liberties, and national security considerations. 

As background, Hiroshi Motomura, the Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, a leading scholar of American immigration and citizenship law, has stated that President Trump’s intended reversal of the Fourteenth Amendment would be far more radical in its effects than the overturn of Roe v. Wade.

Currently, 36 countries provide automatic citizenship to people born on their soil, although the President has stated that the US is the only nation offering this protection, currently promising to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as part of his mass deportation initiative.

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Kamei’s father was 14 years old, picking celery on the family farm in Garden Grove when the news of Pearl Harbor reached the family.

Kamei recalls asking her father about that morning as they sat in a coffee shop in Washington, D.C. on the morning of the adoption of the Civil Liberties Act after taking a red-eye flight from LAX.

“I asked him, ‘Dad, could you ever imagine that life as we knew it was over?’ He could not answer. His eyes filled with tears,” said Kamei.

Her father went on to attend Caltech to pursue his dream of becoming an engineer. She adds, “My father also planted camellias.”

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Deets

• Day of Remembrance Tomo No Kai (“group of friends”)
• June Berk and Dr. Susan Kamei
• https://tomonokaiuci.com
• February 16, 2025 at 6:00 PM
• UCI Student Center, University of California, Irvine 92697
• 949-824-5011

More

June Berk will also speak at USC Nikkei Student Union on February 13, and at the Tuna Canyon Exhibit Days at Descanso Gardens, March 7 – 9 2025.

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