Remembering Japanese incarceration: Joe Kamiya’s story
Amache National Historic Site, the newest national park in the United States, held more than 10,000 Japanese internees during World War II. My father was one of them.
Joe Kamiya in 1933, age 8, on the Kamiya family farm in Ballico, near Livingston, CA
On Feb. 15, Amache National Historic Site in Colorado became the newest national park in the United States. Camp Amache, whose official name was the Granada War Relocation Center, was one of 10 incarceration sites established by the War Relocation Authority during World War II. These wartime prison camps, euphemistically called “relocation camps,” were built to detain Japanese and Japanese-Americans who had been forcibly removed from the West Coast of the United States pursuant to Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Feb. 19, 1942. More than 10,000 people were incarcerated at Amache from 1942-1945.
One of them was my father, Joe Kamiya.
Today, Feb. 19, the annual Day of Remembrance of Japanese Incarceration During World War II, I’d like to share Joe’s memories of what it was like to be a Japanese-American farm boy growing up in the tiny town of Ballico in California’s Central Valley, and then of being incarcerated at Camp Amache.
I interviewed Joe on several different occasions in 2016 and 2017, with his wife (my stepmother), Joanne Kamiya, present. This section is drawn from an interview that took place on Aug. 31, 2016, when Joe was 91 years old. He died in 2021, about a month before his 96th birthday.
Joe’s memories begin when he was a sophomore in high school, 15 or 16 years old and about to put into action his plan to become the biggest chicken farmer west of the Mississippi. He ended up abandoning that plan, getting his Ph.D from U.C. Berkeley, and becoming an eminent research psychologist and one of the fathers of biofeedback. But that’s another story.
JOE KAMIYA: I was a sophomore at Livingston High School. I had been taking courses in agriculture and had started a project raising chickens. I was interested in reading up more about agriculture and sent off to the Department of Agriculture in both Sacramento and Washington, D.C. for free pamphlets on the raising of chickens, the economics of chicken farming, the diseases of poultry, and so on. I had all these pamphlets stacked together and put them in a manila folder, dressed it all up nicely and put the title “Poultry” across it. And it was lying on my desk in high school. My teacher, Eldon Callister, walked by and saw this, and he got pretty excited. He went to the head of the class and he said, “I would like to tell everybody what Joe Kamiya has been doing. He has his whole collection of booklets from the Department of Agriculture.” He was doing me up proud. I was so pleased. Like I thought I climbed Mt Everest or something. [laughs]
Eldon Callister happened to be by natural talent a good teacher, someone who had empathy for his students. He didn’t just present a subject matter. He recognized the value of the person and liked his students. He was a very supportive of me personally as a teacher, as he was of many other of my classmates. When the war broke out, one-third of his students were of Japanese descent. And he paid attention to their projects in high school, and then when they had to go to the camps he went and visited them. The students’ parents got to know him, and they decided when the war broke out and they had to leave to make him the overseer of many of their properties, because they trusted this guy.
He was important to me in helping raise my morale and get me out of the dumps. I was going through a kind of purely internal struggle about the time I was 16 or 17, maybe even starting at 15, apparently a kind of unrecognized depression. I kept worrying about the fact that I didn’t know what life was all about. Especially what its purpose was. Yeah, I could play ball and be a good athlete and I could excel at spelling or verbal things, but riding the bus to school it all seemed hollow. The kids were always yelling and playing and riding the school buses and I just sort of felt like, “What the hell’s it all about?” And I told him what my problem was and he brought me this book called Philosophy For the Farmer by Ernest Hawking, a Harvard professor. The book didn’t scratch my itch, it was totally unhelpful to me. But the fact that he recognized me as a person, and that he liked me, meant a lot.
I can’t remember exactly how I originally became interested in raising chickens. It could be that my (older) brother Mark had something to do with it. He himself was interested in poultry. Anyway, I discovered that it was possible to purchase day-old baby chicks from a nursery whose business it was to sell baby chicks. In Modesto. I was 15 or 16. So I got 200 day-old baby chicks, very cheap, only a few cents apiece. Because after all they were just eggs. Now they’re eggs with legs. [laughs]. So anyway, I got 200 of them. I had to have an oil-burning brooder which had a canopy. Much of the heat was trapped under there and the baby chicks could be kept at a temperature of about 100 degrees. The mother is about 98 degrees. And the baby chicks would sleep under that. This was in a barn that my father had built but never used before he died, and I used a section of it to raise these baby chicks. [Joe’s father Mibuji, an Issei, or first-generation, Japanese immigrant, died in 1931 of tuberculosis when Joe was six years old.] It was great fun. And when I got this first batch of 200 baby chicks I stayed up all night, slept on a sleeping bag right next to the brooder. My mom (Shizuko) got worried about me and came out to check on me and I was out there fast asleep.
Joe’s family after his father Mibuji died. From left: oldest brother Smile, mother Shizuko, 6-year-old Joe, sister Mineko, brother Mark.
The chicken house was about 80 to100 feet long and had roosts for them on one side. It was between the house and the shithouse. The outhouse. We only had an outhouse until I was about 14 or 15, around 1939. [Joe’s older brother] Smile installed it. All of the farmer lived like that. It didn’t feel primitive. It just felt like when we got the toilet we moved to modern living. We had electricity from the very beginning. We got running water a couple years before the toilet. Before that we used a hand pump and a well. Fortunately, the well water was high enough that a vacuum pump worked. I had to go get the water ever since I was about 6. Everybody had to take turns getting a bucket of water into the house to wash dishes with. And we didn’t have a hot water heater to heat water until later. We had a galvanized tub. We collected firewood to make fires to heat water and we had a wood burning kitchen stove. It kept us warm in the winter and cooked our meals.
About once every year or two years, it became necessary to move the outhouse. They sat on a pretty deep hole, about 6 feet deep, big enough for a man to get into and dig. But after a while the shit would begin piling up and get terribly smelly. So what we did was to throw dirt over it and cover it up and dig another hole about 6 feet farther away so we could simply slide the outhouse over to the new hole. [laughs]. That was standard operating procedure.
Joe Kamiya on bike, age about 10-12?
In about the 2nd grade I was a little bit scared to go out in the middle of the night. It was dark. There were no thugs or thieves, but I created thugs and thieves in my mind. So I carried a wooden Japanese style sword, a katana, with me when I went to the outhouse. I kept it in the sheath. I tell you, it’s amazing how that wooden sword gave me a sense of security. I was armed, when before I was not. [laughs]
Anyway, so now I have these 200 chicks. They were so-called straight-run chicks which meant that about half of them were male. At about 6 or 8 weeks they reached a pound and three-quarters and I was able to sell the males. The guy came out with his truck and took the males. I made a little profit. I might have made as much as a dollar a bird, $100. But the main point was to get rid of those males. There’s no sense in keeping a bunch of roosters around.
So now I had 100 females and they grew into egg laying hens. And because I purchased them from a well-known egg-laying breeder, they had very high rates of egg laying, an average of 120 per year from each chicken. That was the beginning of my serious hen-raising career. I had a long trough filled with straw nesting material, and I put plastic dummy eggs out as a decoy because the hens tend to want to lay where another egg is. That helps prepare a clutch of eggs. Which they can then sit upon and hatch. Their fate in life is to sit on eggs and hatch. The commercial hens can lay I think 200 eggs a year. 200 is what everybody aimed for. With 200 you could make money selling the eggs.
But the process of doing so was not as simple as it sounded. I had to gather the eggs, and then make sure that they were clean of any fecal material or any dirt. I would have a little sandpaper like buffer that I would clean them off with. And then put them in a crate with 4 or 5 layers of 3 dozen eggs, a couple hundred eggs. So I did that every day and I took them to the Central California Poultry Producers Association, which was a statewide coop. They took my eggs and they paid me for them. It was in Turlock, so I took them in a car. I drove in whether I had a license or not. [chuckles] I drove our Model A Ford.
By the 5th grade, I had full experience driving the Model A stripped-down truck that we had, which we used to deliver groceries and so on. We also had a Model A sedan which our family used. I learned driving around on the farm. Carrying these strawberries and eggplants that we raised to the co-op which was 3 miles away, near the Santa Fe railroad tracks. That was a daily chore that I had. This was because my two older brothers, Smile and Mark, were in the army, in the Japanese language U.S. Army school being trained. They both went to Monterey. I remember going down there with them to Monterey and I think I drove back.
When I was in grade school my mother and other Japanese parents had us go to a Japanese language school after regular grade school. It was damn near three miles from one school to the other, it was impossible to walk, so in the 5th grade I used to drive other kids to grade school. And on days when the Japanese language school was held—I think it was twice a week—I would take them also over to the Japanese language school, and after it was over I would deliver them home. And then I’d go home. This was driving on the county roads and they were mostly unpaved. I could sit on the regular seat, although I’m not sure if I had a panoramic view. [laughs] The police never showed up in the country. A lot of kids drove. But I noticed that most parents depended on me to drive their kids around. Most people didn’t have their kids do that. They were afraid of getting in trouble. You were supposed to have a driver’s license, after all. [laughs]
Anyway, every day you’d get these eggs and take them to a coop, created by big time chicken farmers. They candled them. They took time to examine every egg. They’d put it in front of a light beam to see if they had blood spots.
Every day I had to get up and lift the chickens out of the corral so they could feed in the weeds and the grass outside. I guess they were free range, but it was a very limited range. It was fenced. I had to lock them up because at night dogs could invade the chicken coop. Some of them became almost like mad dogs, they’d just kill for the sake of killing. They could kill 12 or 15 in no time. So I locked them up at night in the henhouse. But I didn’t want to have to get up early every morning because chickens get up with the sun, and that could mean 5 o’clock, 6 o’clock. I wasn’t ready to get up until 8. So I devised a very clever thing, which was another trademark of Joe Kamiya, devising gadgets. I made a thing that was a trip lever, about this high (a few feet). So when the chickens saw this they jumped on it. Chickens are birds, and they like to perch. And when they did that, it released a lever that was held by a weight and opened up a door so the chickens could go outside. I didn’t have to get up and it was reasonably safe by that time, sufficiently light that the dogs would not victimize them. That was one of my first inventions.
Then the war came along, and I had to sell all my chickens. That was a very sad day for me. I had to go and capture all of these wonderful hens that were laying eggs like crazy. At one point I had 600 laying hens. I sold them to an outfit in Turlock. They brought a truck out and helped me capture the birds in a special trap thing and load them up in this truck. The guy weighed them and gave me money for how much it was. I felt very sad about it, I was near tears. I didn’t want to be crying in the presence of this guy. I loved these birds and they were my project and I was bring forced to give them up. You bet I was sad.
The guy who bought the chickens was friendly enough and clearly didn’t intend to cheat me. He paid me the going rate. I think he was probably under instruction not to do anything different.
Then I went to the camps.
In the next piece, Joe Kamiya recalls being incarcerated first at the temporary camp at the Merced County Fairgrounds (where the previous year he had shown his blue-ribbon chickens) and then at Camp Amache in Granada, Colorado.