Edward Miyakawa ’62 is an architect, the father of six adopted children of different races, and author of Tule Lake, named in 2005 by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission as one of the 100 books best exemplifying the state’s literature in the past 200 years. Miyakawa’s account of life inside a World War II Japanese American internment camp is fictional but based largely on The Salvage and The Spoilage, academic studies by Berkeley sociology professor Dorothy Swaine Thomas, and on his own experience as a young child interned at the Tule Lake camp.
Edward Miyakawa

When my family left tule Lake, we thought white people hated us because we were Japanese. But then the governor of Colorado let it be known that Japanese Americans would be welcome in Colorado. A family called the Parkers had a beautiful home in Colorado Springs, and they gave us the keys to their house, they left the jewelry in the drawers and disappeared, and the four of us moved in until my dad established where we were going to go. It was the first time I understood that there are different kinds of people in this world—the kind of people who hated us because we were "slimy yellow Japs" and people like the Parkers, who gave their home to us.

Once Japanese Americans left the internment experience behind, we did not want to think about it very much. I concluded that nobody understood exactly what had happened to us, or why. So in the early ’60s I went to the UC Berkeley library to do some research, and stumbled on The Salvage and The Spoilage. [Professor Thomas had hired interned Cal students to conduct the research for these studies.] I started reading, and I was in a state of disbelief about what had happened at Tule Lake.

The Japanese American internment experience was really about two things: the evacuation itself and the questionnaire, or the "loyalty oath," that has divided Japanese American people— some to their graves. It was a 33-question questionnaire; numbers 27 and 28 were the key questions. [They asked whether the respondent was willing to serve in the American military and forswear allegiance to the Japanese emperor.]

Say there was a young man in his mid 20s whose parents and grandparents lost everything they owned and ended up in a concentration camp. Maybe this young man decided he didn’t want to join the military because he wanted to stay and look after his mother and father; he would answer no to questions 27 and 28. He would become known as a "no-no," and he would be able to stay in the concentration camp with his family. If he wanted to go into the military, then he would answer yes-yes, and they would take him.

I became interested in the no-no’s, and I would call these guys and say, "Hey, I understand you were a no-no. I want to write about the Japanese American experience, and I was wondering if I could talk to you." These guys slammed the phone on me. By this time, most Japanese American people had turned against these young guys who were no-no’s. They were ostracized. It made me realize we Japanese Americans are just like everybody else. We’re persecuted and then we turn against each other.

I couldn’t interview the no-no’s, and few would want to read The Spoilage and The Salvage, because they are a very complex kind of a sociological study. So I thought, maybe if I could write a novel, it would reach people and tell the story of what really happened at Tule Lake. I read John Steinbeck and William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner half a dozen times just to find out how people write novels. I had never written anything creative in my life—I was just a highly skilled plagiarizer when I was in college.

I forgot the book for more than 15 years after it was first published, because my wife, Mary, and I adopted six children from Korea, India, Vietnam, and the United States, and we just had to survive from that point on. But in 2002 a professor I built a home for on the Oregon beach said that after 9/11 it’s really important to re-publish the book, because it tells the story of what can happen when we lose our minds about what democracy is.

Mary keeps saying I should write another novel, but people are writing so many books now that I go to the bookstore and I get overwhelmed. I am working on some short stories.

Dr. Thomas’s academic papers were a gift: they helped me understand who we are as human beings. I’m just amazed at the human species, how horrible we can be and how beautiful. My father was a great lover of Mozart and Beethoven, and so we go from the absolute ugliness of human beings to Mozart, who created music that brings tears to my eyes. This is where I feel my Japanese American experience was so important to me: it taught me that I can’t allow myself to look on the ugly side of life and get depressed about it. I have to look at the positive side, too.