It’s the ladies of the clan that suck the blood, using the protein to produce eggs. The average female can live from three to 100 days and they can lay 100 to 300 eggs at a time.

As some of you may have guessed, I am a bit of a history buff. So I’m going to tell a historical story.

It’s December, 1941, and it’s a day of infamy. In one two and a half hour period of time, a sleeping nation was jolted from it’s lazy pre-Christmas funk and thrust head long into a period of time known as the Second World War. In this state of “total war”, the major participants over a very short period to time, would place their economic, industrial and scientific capabilities at the service of the war effort.

It is also a period of time when government actions took place that were based solely on racial prejudice, war hysteria and a complete lack of political leadership.

One such action called for the internment of all persons of Japanese ancestry, to be forcibly removed from the West Coast of the United States and placed in War Relocation camps. Then president Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February, 1942, and 110, 000 Japanese Nationals and Japanese Americans were uprooted, forced to sell homes, belongings and businesses at a loss and take up residence in camps that had been shot-gun placed in the interior of the United States in areas that were almost uninhabitable.

I’ll spare you the gory details, but this was a period of the great West Coast Unrest. Journalists, most notably William Randolph Hearst, citied the need to be watchful of the peoples of the great yellow nation. Racial hated and treatment towards anyone who even looked Asian was cruel, painful and in some cases, final.  The relocation of whole families under the guise of protecting the citizens seemed the most reasonable answer.  Internment was popular among many California white farmers who resented the Japanese American farmers. These individuals saw internment as a convenient means of uprooting their Japanese American competitors. In fact internment was likely responsible for a massive influx in immigration from Mexico. Significant labor was necessary to take over the Japanese Americans’ farms at a time when many American laborers were also being inducted into the Armed Forces.

So, in 1942, 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, 62% of them U. S. citizens, were trucked/bused to Assembly Centers in such places as Sacramento/Walerga, Marysville/Arboga, Stockton, and Woodland California, to name but a few. From these assembly centers, entire families were shipped to camps located in Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Arkansas and California. These Internment camps were set up in desolate and hostile country. Temperatures waffled between 100+ during the summer and a minus 5 in the winter. The housing consisted of a tar paper, clapboard hut that could house as many as 10 families. Each family was resigned to living in a 10 foot by 20 foot area.

But the Japanese people interned in those camps persevered. In December 1944, at the end of the war, they were given $25 and a train ticket to their former home. In some cases there was no home to go to. Their losses were compounded by theft and destruction of items placed in governmental storage. A number of persons died or suffered for lack of medical care, and several were killed by sentries. Racial hatred and rights violations became a normal part of their return to their previous homes.

The phrase “shikata ga nai” (loosely translated as “it cannot be helped”) was commonly used to summarize the interned families’ resignation to their helplessness throughout these conditions. This was even noticed by the children, as mentioned in the book “Farewell to Manzanar”. Although that may be the view to outsiders, the Japanese people tended to comply with the U.S. government to prove themselves loyal citizens. This perceived loyalty to the United States can be attributed to the collective mentality of Japanese culture, where citizens are more concerned with the overall good of the group as opposed to focusing on individual wants and needs.

It was eventually decreed that the ten sites on which the detainee camps were set up are to be preserved as historical landmarks: “places like Manzanar, Tule Lake, Heart Mountain, Topaz, Minidoka, Amache, Jerome, and Rohwer will forever stand as reminders that this nation failed in its most sacred duty to protect its citizens against prejudice, greed, and political expediency”.

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This week, the Expresso Riders, of which I am a part, will be traveling to Midway, Utah, for a convention of BMW motorcycle enthusiasts. On the way, we will pass by several of these Internment Camps. I hope to visit and pay respects at the Minidoka, Idaho camp and the Heart Mountain, Wyoming camp. My wifes parents were sent to Heart Mountain in 1943 as “transferrees” from the camp in Jerome, Arkansas. Her sister was born at the Heart Mountain camp’s hospital. To relive that time in history through their eyes and their stories is a testament to their survival as a family. The chance to be at or near that geographical location, to see today what they may have seen in the past, can only be understood and appreciated by someone on the outside of a historical event gazing backward into history.

I once asked my father-in-law about life at the harsh conditions at the camp in Heart Mountain. I asked about bugs, mosquito’s, etc. And he said, “Nope, no mosquito’s in camp. If was just too damn cold, or the wind was blowing like crazy for any bugs to live in”.

Until next week…