When Japanese-Americans were interned, an outraged librarian made sure the child

Clara Breed was an Iowa-born preacher's daughter who grew up to be a librarian, not the kind of background normally associated with someone who rocks the boat. But these were not normal times.

On this day - Feb. 19 - in 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order clearing the way for some 120,000 U.S. residents of Japanese descent to be evicted from their homes and imprisoned.
Breed, the 35-year-old head of the children's department at San Diego's downtown library, was quietly outraged. She knew many of the local residents affected by the order; the kids came in to get books all the time. She marveled at how respectful and loyal they were.

Most of them - about 70 percent - were American citizens, born here. They were no more a threat than she was, Breed believed.

But few shared her warm feelings. About 2,400 American servicemen had been killed at Pearl Harbor, with thousands more injured, and many people on the West Coast feared another sneak attack. They clamored for the president's eviction order to be enforced, especially after a Japanese submarine shelled an oil field near Santa Barbara, Calif., in late February.

On April 1, notices were posted on telephone poles, doors and walls throughout San Diego: "All persons of Japanese ancestry" had one week to get their affairs in order before they would be evacuated. It may have been April Fool's Day, but it was no joke.

They sold what they could, stored treasures with sympathetic friends, and abandoned the rest. When their time was up, they took only what they could carry, and headed to the train station for destinations unknown. In all, more than 1,100 Nikkei were forced out of San Diego.

According to a new book about Breed, the librarian felt she had to do something, especially for the children. At the library, and then at the train station on evacuation day, she handed out postcards with her home address and urged the kids to let her know how they were doing.

"You said once that you were afraid of dissension among the Japanese," she wrote in a letter to one of the youngsters who was leaving. "I have moments of being afraid of America. I want so much to have her live up to your unshaken belief in her."

Breed was being a friend to the evacuees, but once a librarian always a librarian. No matter where they wound up, she promised she would send books.

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Elizabeth Kikuchi was 11 when she got on the train with her family.

They went first to the Santa Anita racetrack east of Los Angeles, where they slept in the stables. The horses were gone, but not the smell.

Then they went to the Arizona desert, to a newly constructed "relocation center" called Poston. It was row after row of tar-papered barracks. Dust drifted in through the walls and scorpions crawled in through the floor. The summer temperature scorched past 110.

They were prisoners in their own country, living behind barbed wire. There were guards in towers, with guns. Elizabeth was too young to see any irony in the American flag flying overhead. She didn't understand what internment was all about.

But she was old enough to know they weren't in San Diego any more, and to miss it. One of her favorite things was reading. She had gone to the library weekly to check out an armful of books.

So you can imagine what it meant to her to get packages in the mail from the woman they all called Miss Breed.

"Books brought us closer to the world we had left behind," recalled Elizabeth, who lives today in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego. "Miss Breed knew that. She knew the books would entertain us, educate us, enlighten us. And give us hope."

One of the books was called "A House for Elizabeth." It thrilled her to see her name on the cover. Like Breed, she was the daughter of a minister, which meant she always living in church housing, never a place of their own. And now they were in the prison camp.

"That book was so special to me," she said. It gave flight to her dreams that things would one day be normal again - normal enough for a girl like her to grow up and live in her own house.

Breed sent packages to dozens of San Diego kids at Poston. They wrote back, sometimes asking for items to make their lives less miserable. She sent what she could: shower caps, candy, clothing, hair curlers, pencils.

Their letters told of life in the camp, what the food was like, the weather and the makeshift school. "Have been doing a little carpentry as many of us here have no furniture other than cots," one wrote.

Some of the older correspondents, those who otherwise might have been going to college or fighting in the war as American soldiers, felt trapped and useless, "like a moth fluttering futilely against a streetlamp," in the words of one.

But the younger ones seemed to be adapting - or at least they put on a brave face in their letters. "When I stop to think how the Pilgrims started their life, similar to ours, it makes me feel grand, for it gives me the feeling of being a pure full-blooded American," one girl wrote.

In San Diego, Breed took her quiet outrage public. She wrote letters to government officials. She pushed for college-age prisoners to be let out so they could attend universities in the Midwest.

And she wrote two magazine articles, one in Library Journal and another in Horn Book, drawing attention to the plight of the detainees and challenging what she saw as a gross injustice.

"There are those who say that Japanese descendants will never be allowed to return to the West Coast," she wrote. "If this is true, California and Oregon and Washington will be the losers, for there are among these Japanese-Americans young people of ideals and courage and creative imagination, young people who may some day be great sculptors, great doctors, great scientists."

Democracy, she concluded, "must be defended at home as well as abroad."

- - -

The war ended, the camps closed, and gradually many of the prisoners returned to San Diego. They had been away for more than three years. Some of the adults had lost almost everything - jobs, houses, furniture, cars - and had to start over.

The kids were older now, and they had other interests, so they didn't go to the library as much. But they never forgot Miss Breed. And she never forgot them. For the rest of her days as a librarian - she retired in 1970 - she kept on her desk a nameplate made for her by a young man at Poston. He had used a bedspring to carve it out of mesquite.

Elizabeth went to the University of California Berkeley and studied English literature. She married another San Diegan, Joe Yamada, who also had been at Poston. He enjoyed a successful career as a landscape architect, and they eventually settled in San Diego.

About 15 years ago, Elizabeth got a phone call from Breed. The retired librarian was living in a senior home in nearby Spring Valley, anxious, as people who reach a certain age often are, to pass along some of her possessions.

I have all these letters from you and others who were in the camps, Breed told her. Nobody seems to want them. Would you take them?

"I couldn't get there fast enough," Elizabeth said.

She recognized the historical value of the letters, she said, but part of her interest was selfish. "I wanted to read what I had written again. It was like coming across a lost diary."

She was surprised to find in one of her letters that she'd likened the mountains near Santa Anita to the Egyptian pyramids. "I'd never been to Egypt," she said. "I don't know where I got that."

Where she got it, probably, was books. Miss Breed's books. "She knew that we would eventually be experiencing a normal life out of camp," Elizabeth said. "The books brought us closer to the world we had left behind. They were so precious to us."

Precious enough that, at age 75, she still has "A House for Elizabeth" and five of the other books Miss Breed sent her.

Elizabeth shared the letters with some others who had been in the camps, including Ben Segawa, whose wife, Katherine, was one of Breed's most prolific correspondents. He was surprised at how many there were, and counted them: 256.

"You read the letters and you really understand what it was like back there," said Segawa, a lifelong Chula Vista, Calif., resident. (He, too, was at Poston, but he wasn't one of the correspondents.)

He doubts many of the young writers understood back then what it must have taken for the librarian to stick her neck out for them. "Looking back at it, she could easily have lost her job," he said.

But they understood it now, reading the old letters. Most of them had been involved in a decades-long push to get the U.S. government to acknowledge the internment camps as a mistake - a push that eventually led to apologies and reparations, but also to renewed hostility. There were some who still called for the "ungrateful Japs" to be deported immediately.

In 1991, the former Poston inmates held a reunion, and Miss Breed was the guest of honor. (That's what they still called her, after all those years, "a sign of respect," Elizabeth said.) The crowd of 700 gave her a standing ovation.

"We wanted to show her that she had made a difference in our lives," Elizabeth said.

Clara Breed died in 1994 at age 88. Ben Segawa delivered a eulogy at the funeral. After the service, Breed's relatives gave him a gift: the nameplate from Poston that she'd kept on her desk for so many years.

Elizabeth Kikuchi Yamada donated the letters to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, where she knew they would be safe and might someday help tell a story she believes needs to be remembered, "so what happened to us doesn't happen to anybody else ever again."

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Joanne Oppenheim is a New York City-based author of more than 50 children's books. She is seen regularly on the "Today" show and is president of the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio, a review guide.

Five years ago, while planning a high-school reunion, she was searching on the Internet for a former classmate who had been at Poston. She clicked her way to the Japanese American National Museum's Web site and stumbled across Clara Breed and the letters.

"I was just so moved by them," she said recently. "I knew right away I wanted to do a book. I couldn't believe one hadn't been done already."

Oppenheim said she knew very little of the internment story. As she immersed herself in it, she felt "horror that this could have happened in my America."

Her book, "Dear Miss Breed," conveys some of that horror. Written for teenagers and up, it includes several "doublespeak" translations that skewer attempts by government officials and journalists of the time to sanitize what was really happening.

"These were people who were punished solely on the basis of having the wrong ancestors," Oppenheim said. As the daughter of an immigrant, 7 years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked, she felt it just as easily could have been her family sent behind barbed wire.

She said she wasn't looking to write a "message book," that she just wanted, through the letters, to tell a story of friendship and bravery. "But it's important for young people to understand that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance," she said. "Anytime people in power are willing to ignore the law, this could happen again."

She came away from the project awed by Clara Breed. "Given her time and place, she really took a chance at being so open with her sentiments. Hers was not the popular view, and she took a stand in the articles she wrote, traveling to the camps to visit the kids, openly sending books and gifts.

"I wish I could have met her."