Allan Hida, 82, paid a special visit to the Southside Park Clubhouse Wednesday night to share his experience as a Japanese youth sent with his family to internment camps during World War II and shed light on an often-overlooked part of Sacramento history.

He began the presentation by asking the 40 members of the audience to imagine being told they had one week before being forced out of their homes and to figure out what to do with their pets and belongings.

This is what happened to Hida and his family after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and with only one week to prepare, they had to spend more than two years in internment camps.

The event was put together by President Beverly Bumpas and Vice President Paul Trudeau of the Southside Park Neighborhood Association. The event was held for those affected by or interested in the topic, a change to their normally scheduled community meetings held the second Wednesday of each month.

The war came to America on Dec. 7, 1941 after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and by May 1942, Hida – just out of California Middle School in Sacramento – and his family were relocated to Sacramento’s temporary camp, Walerga, which once stood near the present-day intersection of Madison Avenue and Interstate 80. After a few months, the family was moved to the Tule Lake internment camp farther north in Newell, Calif., and then later to Camp Amanche in Granada, Colo.

Executive Order 9066 declared that all people of Japanese ancestry be held under suspicion of committing acts of treason or sabotage. Anyone with Japanese heritage was considered a possible enemy of the United States, and within a few months of the Pearl Harbor attack, the West-Coast Japanese population was relocated to the internment camps.

“One of the things I’m trying to do is share the story,” Hida said. “As far as sympathy – I don’t want any. I’ve been out in the world long enough that I don’t need any sympathy.”

Hida put up a photo of his father’s prized possession, a 1914 Ford Model T, which they had to sell his before being relocated.

“I don’t think we got more than $25 or $50 for it, which was a crime,” he said.

He explained how the internment camps were developed because President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave in to pressure from West-Coast politicians and lawyers like Hiram Johnson, Earl Ward and Culbert Olsen, who were representing a strong anti-Asiatic sentiment from the public.

Hida gave a brief history of the Japanese population in the United States, beginning with the fact that Japanese immigrants arrived before the Irish. The population began to rise quickly around the 1880s. Many of the West-Coast citizens reacted poorly to the influx, and the government responded by creating difficult laws and policies that segregated the Japanese from society.

For example, Hida’s father was not allowed to own land due to the Alien Land Law of 1913, so Hida’s mother, a legally born citizen with Japanese ancestry, put the property under her name. Later, when his parents married, his mother lost her citizenship and the rights to the property on account that it was illegal to marry an immigrant.

“It was not easy to be an Asian in the United States,” Hida said. His mother, Hida said, would confront the challenge by saying, “California doesn’t want us, and I’m staying.”

He put up an excerpt from the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus” (Give me your tired, your poor…) alongside an image of the Statue of Liberty where the poem is featured on a plaque.

While discussing the difficulties of immigration through San Francisco’s Angel Island for Japanese, he said, “There are two things I’d like you to think about. One – (the statue) looks toward Europe. Two – there isn’t a Statue of Liberty in San Francisco Bay.”

The only compensation Hida and his family received after two years of relocation was $25 and a train ticket. He spent a little over six decades staying away from California before coming back in 2005. 

The internment camps were filled with 10,000 people in 100-foot barracks who shared a single coal stove and cluttered living space. There was no insulation, and Hida said the temperature dropped to 10º F and lower in the winter months.

He joked about the camp’s recreation room: “When you say recreation hall, you automatically think about ping pong tables and everything else … There was nothing. All it was was a building. And we were all excited for nothing.”

He ended the presentation with a question-and-answer session, and a few members of the audience shared their own personal recollection of the internment camp. One child was curious if anyone tried to escape from the camp, to which Hida said there was too much fear to organize any escape – though “16 or 17 people were shot by the guards, but for something like chasing a ball too close to the fence.”

Others asked if any Japanese neighbors ignored the notice for relocation, but Hida said a general fear of the government prevented rebellion, and few opposed the orders. The audience also brought up the hypocrisy of having Japanese-American soldiers recruited from the camps fighting to liberate allies in Europe while their families were locked away in the camps on United States soil.

The evening ended with Hida thanking the packed room for listening and reiterated that “it’s important to keep sharing the stories and respecting the history.”

Read more about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, recruited from internment camps, which ended up being the most-decorated unit in the United States Army during the war.