Mitzi Loftus will talk at Bloomsbury Books about her family’s World War II incarceration for being Japanese American

By Jim Flint for Ashland.news

While her older brothers were serving with the U.S. Army in the Pacific, 10-year-old Mitsuko (Mitzi) Asai and most of the rest of her family were incarcerated in a prison camp a thousand miles away from their home in Hood River, Oregon.

The crime? They were Japanese Americans.

Mitzi Asai Loftus spent three years of her childhood in government incarceration camps in California and Wyoming after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order sent more than 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry — about two-thirds of them U.S. citizens — from their homes on the West Coast to inland prison camps.

The U.S. detained other people based on their heritage, incarcerating a number of Germans, Italians, Austrians, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians during the war. But the greatest in number were the Japanese Americans.

Loftus has had a lifelong mission of sharing her family’s experiences — as a cathartic exercise and as a way to help people understand the effects of what is acknowledged today as a shameful act by the U.S. government.

For more than 70 years, she has given public talks to audiences of all ages. Having lived much or her adult life in Eugene and Coos Bay, Oregon, the 91-year-old now resides in Ashland.

Book talk at Bloomsbury

She will be talking about her book, “From Thorns to Blossoms: A Japanese American Family in War and Peace,” at Ashland’s Bloomsbury Books on April 7. The talk will begin at 4 p.m.

Originally self-published in 1990 as “Made in Japan and Settled in Oregon,” the new edition, published in February by Oregon State University Press, was revised and expanded with the help of the eldest of Loftus’ three sons. David Loftus, a Portland writer and editor, also does video and stage acting and voice work.

The 1990 version was originally intended just for Asai family descendants.

“She wanted to explain what she and we owe to her father,” David Loftus said. Her father immigrated from Japan in 1904, established a farm in Hood River and held strong Zen Buddhist values.

As time passed after the book’s original publication, Loftus heard more of his mother’s personal stories that she had not included in the book. And believing the stories of her camp experiences might be somewhat confusing for readers who know nothing about the prison camps, he saw an opportunity.

An expanded edition

Deciding that a revised and expanded version would serve the story well, he took it on as a project. He had edited and authored several books for a small press in Boston, and had written and published a book of his own in 2003.

After conducting considerable historical research, he interviewed his mother several times to fill in some of the gaps with more of her personal stories. After a final edit, he began searching for a publisher.

“The very first one I approached, Oregon State University Press, snapped it up right away,” he said.

By the time Mitzi Loftus self-published her original book, she had been teaching high school students for several years.

Texts ‘failed miserably’

She was motivated by a desire to inform the next generation — her sons and their cousins — about the experiences she and her parents had endured.

“I saw the need to tell the story since the U.S. history texts failed miserably to cover that period of our history,” she said.

Mitzi vividly recalls the enduring psychological impact of constant surveillance in the camps.

After she transitioned from the Pinedale Assembly Center in Fresno, with its watchtowers and searchlights, to Camp Tulelake, California, the absence of a physical searchlight did little to alleviate her sense of being watched.

“There was no searchlight, but I ‘saw’ it and felt it when I went to bed,” she said.

The haunting presence persisted even after the tangible threat had vanished.

Similar traumatic wartime experiences had profound and lasting effects on the psyche of many camp survivors. And they certainly shaped Mitzi’s perspective of resilience and identity.

“Painful discrimination during my teen years led me to live a life of trying to shed my Asian heritage,” she said.

“But I successfully made a turnaround at age 25, when I became a Fulbright teacher in Japan. I became a whole person, as I was meant to be.”

She says the strength and influence of her Zen Buddhist father provided a great help in the process. And living a year in Japan did much to reinforce a healthy level of self-esteem and seeing herself in a positive light.

A reminder and a warning

Her son believes her experiences serve as both a reminder and a warning.

“Most of the Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) of my mother’s cohort remained ashamed and silent about the camp experience,” he said, “much the way survivors of the Nazi concentration camps said nothing for decades after the war.”

In many cases children of incarcerated Japanese Americans learned about their parents’ experiences only very late in life, or from other sources — if at all.

“My mother was unusual,” he said. “She was perhaps just young enough and ‘American’ enough to have started speaking out about it in the mid-1960s in her 20s.”

That was two decades before activists who were mostly Sansei, or third-generation Japanese Americans, began pushing for an apology and reparations from the U.S. government. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law a measure that gave survivors $20,000 in reparations and a formal apology.

A survivors’ pilgrimage

“At 91, my mom has very few peers still alive, but we will see some of them over the July Fourth holiday weekend at the biannual Tule Lake Pilgrimage,” Loftus said.

Survivors and their descendants will gather in Klamath Falls and then visit the national monument on the site of the original Camp Tulelake, run by the U.S. National Park Service near the town of Tulelake.

Loftus hopes “From Thorns to Blossoms” will contribute to the ongoing dialogue about the wartime lockup of Japanese Americans and help readers understand the long-lasting effects on individuals and communities.

If the book were to help eradicate the use of euphemisms like “internment” and “internees,” David Loftus said, he would be grateful.

“Scholars of the event have made the case for years, but these labels persist in common usage,” he said.

Under international law, an “intern” is an alien enemy who has been captured and legally imprisoned under the terms of the Geneva Convention.

Ten-year-old U.S. citizen Mitzi Asai was no enemy.

Reach writer Jim Flint at [email protected].

March 18: Adjusted Tule Lake and Tulelake to conform to U.S. National Park Service usage.