Federal Way woman recalls her time in U.S. concentration camp

Charlene Honda is one of the 125,000 people who were incarcerated for being Japanese in 1942 in the United States, an event memorialized on Feb. 8 at the site of one of these former concentration (also known as internment) camps, in Puyallup.

Honda, a Federal Way resident, is also Federal Way City Councilmember Susan Honda’s mother-in-law. She spent her 92nd birthday at this Day of Remembrance event held by the Puyallup Valley chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL).

Charlene Honda wasn’t held at the Puyallup Assembly Center, but 7,500 other people of Japanese American descent were after Executive Order 9066 was issued on Feb. 19, 1942.

The order paved the way for a directive that required first and second generation Japanese Americans on the West Coast to sell or abandon anything they couldn’t carry and report to concentration camps where they were ultimately incarcerated for three years. Adults had to sign pledges of loyalty to the United States, and many were extensively questioned by the FBI.

This year, the remembrance event was held at the Washington State Fair Expo Hall. Speakers included Andrea Thayer, WA State Fair CFE; Stan Shikuma, Tsuru for Solidarity Leadership councilperson; Eileen Yamada Lamphere, president of Puyallup Valley JACL; and Irene Fuji Mano.

Charlene Honda was 9 years old when her family had to move into the camp. Her future husband, Harry, was 10.

In an interview recorded in 2006 with Charlene and Harry Honda, they are interviewed by their granddaughter Mariko about their experiences there.

One of Charlene Honda’s memories of that time is of her family being questioned three days in a row by FBI agents. They were being investigated because a wedding reception happened to be on the same day as the bombing at Pearl Harbor occurred, and also because they had a friend who had recently left to Japan.

Honda and her family were first held for six months in horse stalls in Santa Anita, California, in 1942, then transferred to roughly constructed barracks in Jerome, Arkansas.

“I remember how stinky it was… we had six cots, and we had to stuff straw into these tickings, that was our mattress, and we had an army blanket, that was it,” she told the Federal Way Mirror newspaper.

“As children we probably didn’t understand what it meant, we just knew that we were having to move away,” Honda said in the 2006 interview.

“Years later when you realize as an adult what had happened, you think about how terrible it was probably for our parents to have lost everything,” she said. Her parents were “citizens of the United States and they tried not to show that they were bitter or anything. They just went along with what we had to do, but in thinking back, our rights as citizens were violated.”

As children, their memories weren’t all bad. “As a young lad 10, 11, 12 years old there was a lot of playmates to play with all of a sudden,” Harry Honda shared in 2006.

Although the living quarters were a bit different between Charlene Honda’s experience and the camp in Washington, one similarity was “this whole camp was with barbed wire and there were sentry posts at each corner with soldiers there with guns and they were pointed in, not out,” she said.

Preserving history

“It’s good that people hear what happened so that it never happens again,” Charlene Honda told the Mirror. “It was just mass hysteria…that caused all that.”

So, do people know about these incarceration camps?

In Honda’s experience, “there are an awful lot of people that don’t know about it.”

When she went to college in Pennsylvania in the early 1950s, she even had a professor that accused her of making up those three grueling years of her life.

The assignment was to tell a “true, unusual event,” Honda said, so she chose to write about her life held in the camps.

“He said that I didn’t follow directions, but that it was very interesting and that I had a good imagination,” she recalled. “He would not…he didn’t believe or accept it…I often wondered if he ever heard about it and remembered that.”

When she or other survivors of the camps would talk about the camps, friends from the East Coast would often think they were referring to summer camp, she said.

At Remembrance Day, a video titled “The Silent Fair” was shown that details life in the Puyallup Assembly Center, called Camp Harmony. In the video, nine individuals share what happened to them and their reflections on the importance of making sure the history is known and remembered.

“You always remember the violation of the constitution that the government made, which denied the Japanese the right to habeas corpus and the due process of the law. Now this is the 21st century, where we have a similar problem right now with another group of people, and we have to be vigilant and try to convince the government what not to do, and so I’m just wondering whether or not the government will take that other road this time,” survivor James Akagi said in the video, which was released in September 2017.