Darlene Mitsui Mukoda, second from right, brother Jeffrey, and her daughters were all in attendence at A Day of Remembrance at Cumberland Regional High School recently.
She remembers the sand, the endless grains of sand. They fell through the walls of the tarpaper shack in the middle of a California desert, where her family was imprisoned.
Darlene Mitsui Mukoda was four years old.
Her family, Japanese-Americans, were among the approximately 120,000 people ripped from their homes and treated like the enemy after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The first stop for the now-Bridgeton resident and her family was Tule Lake, a dried-out lakebed in California, where their new “homes” didn’t even have running water or solid walls, only a thin layer of tarpaper to protect them from the desert wind and sand.
More than 80 years later, Mukoda sees through a child’s eyes, mostly little things.
“I remember the sand coming in. The sunlight would come in, and I would play with the sunlight as it came in on my hand. I didn’t think anything of it.”
Mukoda and her younger brother, Jeffrey, were among those recently marking A Day of Remembrance at Cumberland Regional High School. The event observed the 83rd anniversary of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s executive order of February. 19, 1942—shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor—that allowed the federal government to detain Japanese people as well as American citizens who happened to be Japanese.
The event included the showing of Helga Merits’ film, The Paradox of Seabrook Farms, which tells the story of the journey of 2,500 displaced Japanese families to the company located in Cumberland County, which grew and packaged frozen vegetables like corn and lima beans.
It also tells the true story of other displaced people—African Americans from the South escaping Jim Crow laws, some from Appalachia and the Caribbean, as well as 900 or so Estonian and 200 Latvian refugees who had all lost their homes and had to start over.
The event was sponsored by the Seabrook Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center (SECC). The day was kicked off by an introduction from SECC president Masaru Nakawatase, who was born in an incarceration camp and was a child of Seabrook as well.
“Today, we’re going to mark the Day of Remembrance,” said Nakawatase. “It’s important to note what happened on February 19, 1942.” That is when President Roosevelt signed what became known as Executive Order 9066.
Decades later, a packed house came to watch Merits’ film and observe the 83rd anniversary of that day. The executive order allowed the military to “exclude any or all persons” from regions of the United States considered “military areas.”
The order also didn’t identify any particular group, but that didn’t matter. It was purely designed to remove and incarcerate those of Japanese ancestry who were American citizens as well as those who were legal aliens. About six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese families in military area 1 on June 3, 1942, including California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona, were removed from their homes and placed in one of 10 “relocation centers.”
It would be December 17, 1944, before FDR’s order would end. Another 31 years later, then-President Gerald Ford would sign a proclamation that officially rescinded FDR’s order. Another dozen years after that, President Ronald Reagan would sign the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 into law, officially apologizing for the incarceration and providing reparations to most survivors.
Nakawatase couldn’t help but draw a parallel between the injustice started by FDR’s executive order and more recent events. Before the movie began, he took careful note of recent events involving the potential deportation of millions of people.
“Let’s face it. It seems to be happening again,” Nakawatase said. “And it would be foolish not to acknowledge it.”
Nakawatase said the JACL board acted by officially opposing the “xenophobic” decisions made by the current U.S. administration.
“We do that out of the experiences of people who were from Seabrook,” he told the sold-out crowd who came to watch Merits’ movie. He also urged the crowd to organize against “these moral crimes.”
“There’s no point in marking the internment of Americans unless we stand up against the current wave of anti-immigration,” Nakawatase said.
Darlene’s Story
Darlene Mukoda, now 86, spent 20 years of her life at Seabrook Farms, an experience she largely recalls as happy. It started, however, after her family was sent to a few other internment camps around the country, eventually landing in an Arkansas camp.
Families were permitted to leave the camps, but with one condition: Find a job first. Her father applied for a job at a peach farm in Georgia. He hadn’t heard back when a military recruitment officer approached him and tried to get him to enlist.
Darlene’s family photo and other items from Seabrook families were on display at the event.
Her father turned him down. He would only enlist if he could bring his family. After all, they didn’t have a place to go or the resources to support themselves. But her dad risked imprisonment if he turned the officer down.
“The officer said, “I don’t want to do that.” That’s when he told her dad about Seabrook, in Cumberland County.
“He said to my dad, there is a place in New Jersey that is willing to take people out of camp and give them a job,” she said, adding her dad hadn’t heard back from the peach orchard job. “So, he took this fella at his word and applied at Seabrook.”
He accepted the job, separating from his family for six months to establish a place for them there. Her family was lucky enough to secure a small furnished apartment on the Seabrook complex. Some of the other facilities there were shacks similar to those they had left at the incarceration camps.
“He bought the mattresses and bedding,” she recalled. “And then on my bed and my sister’s bed, we each had a doll.”
That sweet memory lingers in her heart.
“Oh, it was like you’ve died and gone to heaven,” said Mukoda. “We had no toys, nothing. To have an actual babydoll lying on my bed? It was so much joy to my heart.”
For the first time in her life, moving to Seabrook Farms meant she also had an indoor bathroom, complete with running water, a shower and a toilet. It was a stroke of luck, one that others mostly did not have.
One suitcase per person was allowed, if you could carry it, when relocating.
While in the incarceration camps they were imprisoned in, her family had to use the common facilities, with many people forced to use them.
“I was horrified because I was 4 years old and people were lined up waiting for you to finish,” she said.
The Seabrook Years
Life at Seabrook was rough for the adults. Most of the living conditions required them to use outhouses and eat together in a community building. They worked long hours for weeks at a time.
During the growing season, Nakawatase said, “when everything was popping,” the adults worked 12-hour shifts for two weeks at a time, seven days a week. That lasted from June to October.
But the people interviewed in Merits’ film, which included Mukoda, had a different outlook on the Seabrook years.
“It was a happy childhood,” she said. “We went to Sunday school; we got Easter baskets and gifts at Christmas. We had leaders who ran the Brownies and Girl Scouts. We had a normal upbringing. It was just that we were in an isolated community, until the Estonians came.”
Nakawatase, who was born in an internment camp in Poston, Arizona, also has pleasant memories of those years in Seabrook.
“Seabrook was an open space. You had lots of land,” he said. “When you’re 6 or 8 or 10, you have spaces to move around in. We played sports, baseball, football. It was very secure. Our parents were trying to create a normal environment. And I think basically, they succeeded.”
It was less pleasant for African-Americans, who lived behind the plant in wooden shed-like homes that didn’t have running water.
“They had to walk, every day, rain, shine or snow. I can remember them walking to school,” she said. “The white kids (who were not from Seabrook) had buses to get them to school. It was sad.”
Mukoda’s father worked for Seabrook for at least 30 years. She stayed in Seabrook until she was about 18. She went on to earn her Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing, working at the New Jersey School for the Deaf. Later, after raising four children, she worked as a school nurse in Upper Deerfield schools.
Mukoda doesn’t get too political. But the 86-year-old remains worried about the mistreatment of immigrants in recent weeks.
“The Statue of Liberty does not say, ‘Send me your rich.’ It says, ‘Send me your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
