Japanese internee inspires audience with lessons of hardship

By Peggy Webber

Catholic News Service

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (CNS) -- Mary Matsuda Gruenewald recently told 600 students at Springfield’s Cathedral High School that she had to spend her teen years during World War II in internment camps on the West Coast for just “looking like the enemy.”

At the start of the war, Gruenewald, now 82, was the same age as many of the students in her audience when her family was taken from its tranquil home on Vashon Island, Wash., and transported to a Japanese internment camp.

It took her more than half a century to break the silence kept by her and most of the 110,000 Japanese-American internees about those years, but in 2005 Gruenewald did so, publishing her story in a widely hailed memoir, “Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps.”

She brought her message of history and hope to the students and others gathered in the Cathedral High School auditorium this spring.

“I wrote my story from the point of view of a 17-, 18-, 19-year-old girl trying to go back to that time and think about what really happened. How did I feel? What was my response?” Gruenewald said in an interview with The Catholic Observer, Springfield’s diocesan newspaper.

The entire junior class at Cathedral was required to read Gruenewald’s book, said Susan Shaylor, chairwoman of the English department. She said all the teachers at the school readied the students for Gruenewald’s talk, addressing an episode in American history that has received little focus.

“Everybody came in prepared. There was nothing but respect and admiration for a woman who has endured so much and whose burdens are not even noticeable,” said Shaylor.

Gruenewald told the students what it was like to have her world upended following the bombing of Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941. “I knew life had changed,” she said.

She said that before that time she lived in a “palace” because her home had running water and electricity. Her family ran a truck farm and raised strawberries. They were Methodists and attended the community church, where they were “accepted.”

Soon after the war started FBI agents began visiting the homes of Japanese-Americans. On May 16, 1942, Army trucks came to take the Matsuda family to the first of three internment camps they would live in over the next three years.

She said she and her family never spoke of that time when they were held captive by the government. She finally revealed this part of her life at the request of her children.

“To be in prison, like what the internment was, was seen as a shameful part of our past and I didn’t want to talk about it, and I didn’t want to reveal my innermost feelings,” she said.

“Culturally, the Japanese people and many Asian cultures do not talk about negative things and clearly don’t reveal their inner feelings and thoughts,” she said.

She was in her 70s when she started writing her book. “The writing process was cathartic,” she said. “To allow myself to cry, to be angry, to be depressed has been a most therapeutic process.”

Even though decades separated Gruenewald from most of her audience, she struck some familiar chords with her young listeners. She spoke about how she didn’t like her own looks during this difficult time.

“I pulled in. I hated the way I looked. I wished I had blonde hair and blue eyes and white skin. I was mad at God that he made me the way I was,” she said.

She said she also resented the United States and did not like pledging allegiance to the flag each day at school in the internment camp.

However, her father advised her and her brother, both U.S.-born, “This war will pass and it’s important for you to remain loyal to the country of which you are a citizen, regardless of this period of time where we have to go through some difficult times.”

Gruenewald said her parents’ wisdom was crucial in helping her survive the years of internment. She said her mother asked her, “What kind of memories do we want to have 20 years from now of how we conducted ourselves with dignity and courage during this time?”

In the interview she said she hoped her book would help the students to “focus on how great a country this is and to look at what is happening in our nation now. The rights that they take for granted every day are being gradually eroded.”

Gruenewald’s older brother joined the Army and served in Europe during the war. Gruenewald became a nurse, married a Methodist minister and had three children.

Asked what she would say to God when her days are done, she responded, “I would say thank you for this experience because without hardship it is hard to appreciate the glory, the joy and the love of God as represented through people and through nature. So I can say, thank you, God, for this hardship. It made me grow and learn to love again.”