George Sakata raised a patriotic display in his front yard in Martinez after the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Sakata, 74, whose grandparents were born in Japan, was held in an internment camp in Arizona during World War II. MICHAEL HOLAHAN/STAFF

For his part, Mr. Sakata doesn't hold a grudge. He later spent two years in the Air Force. He's the kind of person who gets irritated when people don't take their hats off during the national anthem.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the 74-year-old Martinez resident erected an expansive display of patriotism on his front lawn using lumber, plastic, metal beams, construction paper and spotlights. Large letters spell out "God Bless America," "United We Stand" and a prayer for troops abroad. In the center is Old Glory with blinking lights on all 50 stars.

"This country is without a doubt the greatest nation in the world," Mr. Sakata said, sitting on the porch of his home in Maple Creek subdivision, where he has lived since 1998. He moved to the area to be near his son, Gregory Sakata, who settled in Columbia County after being stationed at Fort Gordon.

Like a lot of Japanese-Americans who lived through one of the most shameful chapters in this nation's history, Mr. Sakata has never liked to talk about it. He was a teen-ager when the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, inciting the United States to enter World War II.

Within months, his family boarded a train to the Gila River Relocation Center about 40 miles south of Phoenix. He has never spoken to his wife or children about what followed.

"It was something that we had no choice about and had to accept. If you had to go, you had to go," Mr. Sakata said. "I'm not bitter about it, and I don't dwell on it. It didn't bother me like it did some people."

Different views

What seems like a travesty now came about in the early 1940s without much protest. There was a different climate on the home front after the last attack by a foreign enemy.

After the fall of the World Trade Center towers, President Bush demanded an end to the backlash against Muslims and Arab-Americans. After the Pearl Harbor invasion, "Jap" became a buzzword, and President Roosevelt swiftly issued an executive order banning people of Japanese ancestry, including children and the elderly, from living on the West Coast.

The order essentially made POWs of more than 120,000 people from California, Arizona, Oregon and Washington. They left their homes to live in desert camps, surrounded by barbed wire fences and armed guards. The same happened to thousands more in Canada.

On the inside, American internment centers came to resemble communes more than prisons. Security became lax, the fences eventually came down and men were permitted to farm on the surrounding land.

What hurt the most, other than the loss of freedom, was the stripping away of livelihoods.

One way or another, most of the camp residents' property ended up belonging to their former neighbors, as they hastily had to sell what couldn't be carried on their backs, said Hubert Van Tuyll, a military historian and professor at Augusta State University. Most families came out of the camps poorer than they went in.

Even before the invasion, a lot of white Californians didn't trust their Japanese-American neighbors, whom they saw as a separate community, the professor said. That probably had a lot to do with their silence when the government rounded up their neighbors as potential saboteurs.

"There was a real fear that the Japanese were going to invade the West Coast," Mr. Van Tuyll said. "Looking back on it, I don't think many people would defend it. Japanese-Americans clearly were loyal to the United States during World War II."

Back then, Mr. Sakata's attitude toward America wasn't much different from what it is now. He remembers saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning and singing The Star-Spangled Banner in elementary school.

His father, Takeo Sakata, was a farmer who grew strawberries, tomatoes and onions on leased land in San Martin, Calif., about 27 miles southeast of San Jose. He and his wife, Evelyn, had four sons and a daughter.

When a 14-year-old Mr. Sakata came home from school one day, his mother had grave news to tell him. The empire that ruled the country where his grandparents were born had bombed U.S. soil, she said. Tough times lay ahead for the Sakata family.

They moved farther inland when they heard Japanese people along the West Coast were being relocated, but it did no good. In spring 1942, they were ordered to assemble in the town of Turlock in the San Joaquin Valley.

Each family was assigned an identification number. Mr. Sakata remembers printing 32908 on every piece of luggage they could carry. A train took them to Gila River, an Indian reservation.

The Sakatas lived on a block with a mess hall and communal bathrooms and showers. The barracks had been constructed in a matter of months, with walls made of tar paper and cracks in the floors where boards didn't quite meet.

Mr. Sakata went to classes taught by white women and worked in an ice house, carrying ice and milk to the mess halls before school. His father sold newspapers. Each of them earned $16 per month.

During free time, blocks would hold dances for the children. Boys played baseball, calling guards to retrieve balls they hit over the fences, Mr. Sakata said.

Arizona temperatures sweltered during the summer months. Only a few people had fans.

"Me and some of the other kids dug a hole underneath our barracks," Mr. Sakata said. "We used to go under there to get cool. We'd play pinochle and things like that."

Men were given the option of enlisting in the military. Many of them did, forming the highly decorated 442nd battalion. Some of them never came home, Mr. Sakata said.

Allegiance pledge

On their way out of the camps, people were made to fill out loyalty questionnaires, which asked, among other things, if they would swear "unqualified allegiance" to the United States, said William Hohri , a former detainee at Manzanar in California and a columnist for Rafu Shimpo, a Japanese-American daily newspaper.

It wasn't a fair question, as part of what makes America America is the freedom to question authority, Mr. Hohri said.

Mr. Hohri was part of an effort that began in the 1980s to seek redress for interned Japanese-Americans. In 1988, President Reagan signed legislation that included a presidential apology and $20,000 for anyone who lost liberty or property.

Mr. Hohri, 74, said pride and a continuing desire to assimilate probably account for the general reluctance of people who survived the camps to speak out about it.

"It was humiliating," he said. "It's a bad experience, and when you have a bad experience, you just want to put it behind you."

Mr. Sakata said it was enough for him that the government admitted it was wrong. He's forever grateful to have been born an American, he says.

"It was a time of crisis," he said. "In such times, decisions are made that may be wrong. It's something you accept, and hopefully endure."

Reach Johnny Edwards at (706) 823-3225 or johnny.edwards@augustachronicle.com.