Take Five with Kristin Asai This inaugural edition of “Take Five” is based on a video by Partner Kristin Asai (POR) from Holland & Knight’s Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month video series (for a link to each episode, see page 8). Ms. Asai, based in the firm’s Portland office, describes her family’s experience in the U.S. Japanese internment camps during World War II and recalls her grandmother’s stories about the three years in internment as well as the discrimination they faced after returning to Hood River. Listening to these stories growing up inspired Ms. Asai to become a lawyer and advocate for underrepresented communities so that their voices are heard.
1. FAMILY AND BACKGROUND I’m a Yonsei, a fourth-generation Japanese American. I was born in Oregon, and my family immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s. My great grandfather came to this country with nothing. He brought his wife over a few years later, and they started orchards in the Hood River Valley of Oregon. The Hood River area was very welcoming to the Japanese community. There was a large Japanese community of farmers and orchardists in that area. Because of that, the community started many Japanese-related schools, and the Japanese American Citizens League had a group out in Hood River for that community. But also because of that meant that they were specifically targeted when World War II happened and the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the president’s executive order to remove all Japanese Americans from the West Coast. My family was part of that.
2. SURVIVING THE INTERNMENT CAMPS My great-grandfather was forcibly removed from his home. Several of the family’s artifacts were destroyed. My greatgrandmother and her children were then taken to Portland, which is about an hour and a half from the Hood River 17
Kristin Asai
area, to the Portland Assembly Center, where all Japanese Americans from Oregon were taken to get numbered and determined where they would end up. They boarded trains where the windows were all covered in black so that no one would know where they were going, and first were taken to Pinedale, California, several hundred miles south, then to Tule Lake, where barracks were constructed for the internees, which were basically horse farms. The family was then taken to Heart Mountain, Wyoming. What’s important about this is that, again, my family had only known Oregon. They had had an orchard, they were used to the Pacific Northwest and were taken to communities that were entirely desert, where they had to grow much of their own food because the food provided from the U.S. government oftentimes had expired or gone bad. My grandma told me when I was in college that she has very strong memories working in the kitchen because it was her job to take all of the packaged hot dogs that arrived from the government that were covered with mold, and she had to scrape them off with a knife before they could boil them and serve them. So much of my family lived there for the entirety of World War II. My grandfather and great uncle, who are the eldest in the family, joined the military and have since posthumously received the Congressional Gold Medal for their work in the world war, serving a country that then interned and took away all the civil rights of their family members.
