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By Betsy Brown “I’ve got all these ideas for stories that I’ve never had a chance to do,” Lillian told me, shuffling through a wire basket on her desk in Eshleman Hall. “I’ll never get them done now. I’m bequeathing them all to you. It’s like giving you my mind.” It was December 1941, and she was Lillian Ota, a junior and the only Japanese American on the Daily Cal staff. She couldn’t get the stories done because she was being evacuated from the West Coast, along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans. Before Lillian left, she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. She went to the dinner but couldn’t stay for the ceremony. There was a curfew on Japanese Americans, and she had to go home. In April she got her evacuation orders. She could take only what she could carry. She asked if I would store a trunk for her at my parents’ Berkeley home. We borrowed a car and lugged the trunk into the house. “You’re keeping that stuff for a Jap? A spy?” my father raged. Lillian wrote from Tanforan, a former racetrack, that she was living in a stable. I assumed that the stables were new and unused. I was wrong. The stables reeked of manure, and the evacuees were humiliated, but Lillian didn’t tell me that until later. When the war began there were 15,000 students at Berkeley. Every student of Japanese descent vanished overnight that spring. The student body dwindled further as students joined the services. Some stayed on campus in the uniform of the naval reserves. In the fall, Cal managed to field a football team, and girl students took over the card stunts. We gave blood and danced at USOs; we went to class and put out the Daily Cal, same as ever. But I don’t remember a single voice in protest against the treatment of our Japanese-American classmates. Luckily, somebody cared. Wellesley College plucked Lillian out of Tanforan, with a full scholarship and all living expenses. Japanese Americans, unaccountably, could move freely east of the Rockies. Lillian and I kept in touch through the war and for a few years after. She graduated from Wellesley and earned a master’s from Yale. She married a fellow student—later they both became college professors—and had a baby girl. Eventually, however, our letters petered out and I lost track of her.
As time passed, I felt increasingly chagrined over my callousness at the way Lillian and the other Japanese Americans had been treated. I had taken it for granted, the way I accepted the men going off to war. Belatedly, other consciences were stirred. Newspapers campaigned for restitution, and there were books and documentaries. I thought guiltily of Lillian every time I read these stories, and finally I was impelled to talk to her. It took two phone calls to find her—50 miles away from my home in New York. We met up the very next day, but it took a while for me to get to the point. I told her how ashamed I was that I hadn’t seen the injustice. To my amazement, she laughed. “I didn’t see it either,” she said. “We were kids. We accepted whatever happened.” Her life had turned out well, but her family had not been so lucky. After she left for Wellesley, they were relocated to an internment center in Topaz, Utah. Her brother, 17 when the war began, joined the U.S. Army. He served as a translator for two years and was sent to Japan as part of the post-war occupation. A few months later he was killed in an army plane crash. Lillian’s parents remained interned until the war ended. When her father learned of his son’s death, he suffered a fatal heart attack. Her mother, who had already lost her home, her son, and her husband because of the war, now lost her mind. Lillian and I renewed our old friendship. Ten years ago, on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, I thought back and called my friend. “Hey, Lillian, it’s December 7.” “Ha, the day that will live in infamy!” she answered. She told me she had received the $20,000 reparations that the U.S. government had finally paid to internees. They had waited 50 years—if they had survived. They had lost their homes and personal possessions. They had been uprooted, treated as traitors, and herded like animals into stables. I said I hoped she had gone on a big spree with the money. “No, I gave it to Wellesley,” she replied. “They rescued me.” |
 Elizabeth Jones Brown ’44 has been a newspaper reporter and magazine writer for 40 years. She lives in Ossining, New York.
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