In 1942, Cho Shimizu was 5 years old when the exclusion order came into effect, forcibly removing Japanese Americans from what were deemed zones of exclusion on the West Coast. Shimizu’s family was ordered to leave everything except what they could carry, and be imprisoned at the so-called “Camp Harmony” at the Puyallup fairgrounds, and later at Minidoka in Idaho.
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Unlike others who were transported by bus or train, Shimizu’s family rode to Puyallup on a flatbed truck, taking clothes wrapped up in bedsheets.
“It was hard for me to understand why we were leaving and where [to,]” he remembered. “Take only what you could carry. What about toys? When will we be back again? When will I see my friends again? My parents had no answers for me because they had no answers for themselves.”
Before imprisonment, Shimizu enjoyed the freedom of growing up on a farm in Fife, with his mother, father, and 10 brothers and sisters. At the Puyallup concentration camp, privacy and freedom were impossible. Shimizu’s family was squeezed in one 20-by-20-foot room with only a light bulb, a stove, cots and no running water. One barrack included six of these rooms, with a family per room.
Roofs were made of tar paper, which leaked when it rained. Each camp had common mess halls and laundry rooms where clothes were washed by hand, and taken back to the barracks to dry. Food was from army rations like vienna sausages and bread, with little to no fresh produce until a later date. Gastrointestinal distress and diarrhea were common. Shower facilities consisted of a pipe with holes running along the top of a room to spray on people. Latrines were just as dehumanizing. There were no stalls, just rows of wooden planks with holes. People sat side-by-side and buttock-to-buttock. Shimizu said they were treated “like cattle at the fairgrounds.”