Life in the camp

She knows it sounds odd, but Mary Chadwick has fond memories of a Japanese internment camp during World War II. To her, it was a time of friends, family and not a care in the world.

"I had a lot of fun there," said Chadwick, whose maiden name is Sato.

But she was only 10. Her parents thought otherwise.

They remembered federal agents confiscating cameras, leaving behind a leased farm and losing all contact with family. They didn't talk to their youngest daughter about it, but she sensed their fears.

"I could tell they were kind of scared and unhappy," said Chadwick, now a 77-year-old retiree in Yakima.

Chadwick's family lived in Sumner, Wash., before World War II, when 110,000 Japanese -- many American citizens -- were incarcerated by the U.S. government in camps throughout the West. More than 1,000 Yakima Valley residents of Japanese ancestry were among them.

Chadwick was technically third-generation Japanese, or Sansei. Her grandparents had operated a laundry service in Idaho in the 1920s. In 1929, the family moved back to Japan. That's where Chadwick, the youngest of four siblings, was born.

When she was about 6 months old, her parents -- Masami and Kaneyo Sato -- brought her to the United States, this time to a Sumner rhubarb farm. Her two sisters and brother stayed in Japan. The plan was to save money for a while and eventually return.

"Then the war broke out so they couldn't," Chadwick said. "They just lost all contact."

She barely recalls news of Dec. 7, 1941, the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, or Feb. 19, 1942, the day President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering all people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast to inland internment camps.

In spring 1942, federal agents came into their house, confiscated their cameras and sent them first to Puyallup, Wash., where they stayed in rooms built out of livestock stalls.

"We just left everything," she said. "We went to Puyallup with what we could carry."

After a few months, they boarded a train to Minidoka, an internment camp in southern Idaho.

She remembers it as a place of dust when it was dry, mud when it rained, and 44 block homes with a pot-belly stove on which her family boiled rice. She lived in Block 16. She never saw fences, but her family was not free to leave.

It was a couple of years before the Army allowed the camp's residents to work for small wages in the nearby potato fields. Her parents worked in the cafeteria, earning $16 per month each. She cleaned floors in the camp hospital.

The time of school, movies, softball games and dances passed quickly and easily, a sort of suspended fantasy.

Then it ended.

In 1945, Japan's surrender brought release for the 110,000 or so incarcerated Japanese. Chadwick's family moved to Hazelton, Idaho, and later to Ontario, Ore. She was a teenager by then and found high school a tough, prejudiced place.

Her parents also began receiving letters from their family in Japan. The news was bad: Food was so scarce that family members boiled dandelions and chewed on wheat chaff. Malnourished, Chadwick's oldest sister, Masako, died of tuberculosis.

Her parents had hoped to save money so they could return to Japan; instead, her brother and surviving sister moved to the United States.

Chadwick married Sam Wakasugi, a Japanese man whose family had not been interned because they lived far enough inland. In 1964, the couple moved to Yakima and partnered in Bow Distributing, a forerunner to the Big R store.

Their six children attended West Valley schools and never learned Japanese. Chadwick grew up speaking English with her father and Japanese with her mother. But she hasn't spoken Japanese since her parents died in 1982. Her husband died in 1980, her brother in 1993.

In 1994, she married Ben Chadwick after meeting him at church in Wiley City. They live near the Yakima Air Terminal. Together they have 11 children and 29 grandchildren.

She has never returned to Japan and doesn't plan to go.

However, she and her sister, Yuki Mori, are close. Mori also lives in Yakima.

And she thinks about Minidoka often. She keeps in contact with old camp friends and wistfully recalls camp dances whenever she hears Glenn Miller songs on satellite radio.

"That music just reminds me so much of camp," she says.

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