by Tom Kawakami, as told to Ruth Sasaki
“Crystal City was home to more than 4,750 prisoners of Japanese, German, and Italian nationality or ancestry.”
My wife Hana’s father, Toyoji Abe, was the publisher of the New World Sun (Shin Sekai), one of San Francisco’s two main Japanese-language newspapers before the War. After Pearl Harbor, he was arrested as a “dangerous enemy alien,” and the rest of the Abe family (wife Yuka, son Victor, and daughters Sophie, Alice, Martha, and Hana) were incarcerated in Topaz Relocation Center in Utah.
Over a year later, in early 1944, Mrs. Abe and fifteen-year-old Hana, the youngest daughter, joined Mr. Abe in Crystal City, Texas, the government concentration camp for families that lay west of San Antonio near the Mexican border. By that time, Hana’s older sisters had resettled in other cities in the Midwest. Between mid-1942 through 1945, Crystal City was home to more than 4,750 prisoners of Japanese, German, and Italian nationality or ancestry. Two-thirds of the incarcerees were Japanese, Japanese American, or Japanese Latin Americans.