Remembering Japanese American Incarceration
On Friday, February 19, Japanese Americans marked an annual Day of Remembrance, in which we memorialize the removal and incarceration of over 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent in the United States.
Seventy-nine years ago to the day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which gave the Secretary of War the authority to “prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded.” Only 3 months after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan, this meant that Americans of Japanese descent living on the West Coast were no longer legally allowed to live within the exclusion area.
One third of this population were the first generation of immigrants from Japan called Isseis. Earlier legislation and court rulings prevented immigrants from Asia from becoming naturalized citizens. The remaining two thirds were American citizens born in the United States, most of them second generation Japanese Americans called Niseis. (Some Sanseis, the third generation, would be born at the camps. I am Yonsei, or fourth generation).
Citizens or not, it didn’t matter to most non-Japanese Americans in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack. The national mood towards people of Japanese descent took a nosedive from suspicion into pure hostility. Fake “Jap Hunting” licenses circulated. Japanese homes and businesses would be burned in the coming years.
Some examples of the fake “Jap Hunting Licenses”—anti-Japanese propaganda from World War II—that circulated after the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were issued by bars, the "Cessna Keep 'Em Flying Club" of Wichita, KS, The Quapaw Chieftain of the Quapaw tribe, even a local judicial candidate (pictured on reverse). This set was auctioned off in 2018.
The federal government encouraged Japanese Americans to leave the exclusion zone of their own accord. But most Japanese Americans could not afford to leave their businesses or plots, if they owned them at all. My own grandmother and her family worked long hours at a laundry in Tacoma and were barely able to make ends meet before the war began. My great-grandfather caught fish in nearby streams to put food on the table most nights.
For these people, the newly formed War Relocation Authority (WRA) began the grim process of rounding up and exporting Americans of Japanese descent, first to assembly centers then to concentration camps.
“I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ‘em up, pack ‘em off, and give ‘em the inside room in the badlands... Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”
My family
Honor and shame are deeply entwined with Japanese identity. For most, incarceration was generally held as the greatest shame that could befall our community. Many survivors remained silent about their experiences in the camp for decades.
My grandfather was naturally untalkative, so I can’t definitively say shame silenced him on the subject. All we knew about his incarceration was that he was at Tule Lake from 1942-1946.
Thankfully, my mother had the brilliant foresight to interview my grandmother and my great-auntie about their lives before they passed away. So much of what I know about her life came from these interviews. I probably think about how grateful I am to my mother for taking that time to record our history at least once every week.
My grandmother Kay (left) at 16 or 17 with her sister Sachi at Tule Lake War Relocation Center in 1942 or 1943. They were incarcerated there from July 20, 1942 to September 28, 1943 before the family was transferred to Minidoka.
From where they lived in Tacoma, WA, Kay (short for Keiko) Nomiyama, her mother, and 4 siblings were initially sent to the Pinedale Assembly Center in Fresno County, CA in 1942. From there, they were sent to Tule Lake, CA.
When I asked my grandma about her imprisonment there, she remembered that there were some boys “near the middle of camp” that formed gangs that the family tried to avoid. She recalled the relentless dust storms that swept over the barracks and how few school supplies she had in her chemistry class. She told me how her high school yearbook made a mistake and forgot to put her picture in. (I’m still pretty annoyed by this.)
In 1943, the family was transferred to Minidoka in Idaho. When Kay finished high school, she worked as a nurse’s aide in the camp hospital and as a waitress in the food hall. As a waitress, she had access to extra food and received $8 a month in pay. She remembered that after rainstorms in Idaho, the camp became impassable with thick mud. But she also said that she didn’t mind camp living because it relieved her single mother from having to support five children alone.
Kay left the camps before their official closure by attending Ursinus College in PA, outside of the exclusion zone. She was one of the 4,300 who received such permission.
Kay and a friend at Ursinus College, where she attended from 1944-1948 and majored in Chemistry.
My grandmother and grandfather (Harry) in 1950 before they were married. We only know that he was incarcerated at Tule Lake from 1942-1946.
Do we truly belong?
The crux of Japanese American incarceration was the question of loyalty and belonging. Can a Japanese person belong in the United States as a loyal citizen?
I grew up thinking the answer was yes, of course. In fact, the answer is no. We’re not Native, so we actually don’t belong here. But the people putting Japanese in camps didn’t belong here either.
It’s fitting that many of the concentration camps either took names from local tribes, were the sites of Native resistance against relocation, or on reservation land forcibly taken from Native tribes.
The camps that held my family, Minidoka and Tule Lake, were no exception. According to Wikipedia, Minidoka is a Dakota word meaning “a fountain or spring of water.”
Tule Lake War Relocation Center (now National Monument) is on traditional Modoc land. A treaty with the U.S. in 1864 led to a decade of Modoc resistance against removal from their homeland to the Klamath Reservation in Oregon. The Klamath/Modoc artist Natalie Ball is descended from Kintpuash, called Captain Jack by the American colonizers, who led a band of 50-70 Modoc fighters at Tule Lake in holding off a US Army battalion nearly 1,000 strong before they succumbed to reinforcements in 1873.
Modoc Chief Kintpuash in 1864. Original photo is in the collection of the Autry Museum of the American West.
Two other camps were built on reservation land. Gila River War Relocation Center was on the Gila River Indian Reservation, home to Akimel O'otham (Pima) and Piipaash (Maricopa) people. When the tribe learned that the WRA would be seizing land on their reservation for incarceration, the tribal council rejected the proposal in favor of a community vote. The WRA continued building the camp even after the council rejected it a second time. On the third vote, the council narrowly approved the construction that had already been completed.
Poston Relocation Center was on the Colorado River Indian Reservation, where people of four tribes (Mohave, Chemehuevi, Hopi, and Navajo) live. At first, the camp was operated jointly by the WRA and the Office of Indian Affairs (renamed the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1947). The Colorado River Tribal Council opposed construction, explicitly stating that they did not want to be party to inflicting the same injustice they faced on another group. Today, the Colorado River Indian Tribes seek to create a museum to memorialize the Japanese Americans who suffered and died there.
The ties that bind us
Japanese American inmates at the Leupp Isolation Center in 1943. (Photo via David Yamane)
While on the Navajo Nation a few years ago working for the human rights nonprofit DigDeep, I learned that Leupp was some kind of camp during the war. I’d grown up hearing the names of all the concentration camps like Manzanar, Tule Lake, Minidoka, and Heart Mountain, but Leupp was never on that list. I’d had many conversations with Navajo colleagues and friends about the generational trauma shared by Native Peoples and Japanese Americans, but this was an unexpectedly direct connection. One of our project sites is only 40 miles from Leupp.
The core inmate population at Leupp was originally pulled from Manzanar in California in the aftermath of the Manzanar Riot of December 5-6, 1942. Personal and political divisions within the Manzanar population predated the camps. A leader of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) named Fred Tayama was attacked and beaten by 6 unknown assailants. He accused Harry Ueno of being behind the attack. As head of the Mess Hall Workers’ Union, Ueno was well-respected at Manzanar. When he was arrested, thousands of inmates demanded his release, assembling in huge crowds all over the camp. The tension reached its peak when Military Police dispersed one crowd of unarmed protesters by shooting into it, killing 2 and injuring 9.
The US military swiftly rounded up and exported some of the “troublemakers” (including Ueno) accused of fomenting the violence to a former Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) facility in Moab, UT, about 100 miles north of the Navajo Nation. Called an Isolation Center, the facility at Moab was a hastily assembled prison. Its security stemmed from its remote location and the threats of its guards. The Director of the facility reportedly told Ueno and other inmates, “You know, this place is wide open country. Nothing but sagebrush. Anybody could die in here, and they will never find his body.”
The Leupp Isolation Center before it was destroyed. It was formerly a boarding school for Navajo children.
Inmates from other camps trickled in over the next few months. Most were sent on the shaky grounds that they interfered with registration for the soon-to-be infamous “Loyalty Questionnaire.” Some were draft resisters. At least one was sent for mocking a white nurse. None were formally charged with any crime.
Five months later, the entire Moab prison population was transferred to a new facility in Leupp, AZ on the Navajo Nation. Still despised by the officials for his supposed role in the Manzanar Riot, Ueno and four other inmates made the 13-hour journey in a coffin-like box on the back of a flatbed truck with only one air hole.
Previously a boarding school for Navajo children, the Leupp Isolation Center was more fortified than the Moab facility. Guard towers and barbed wire fences encircled the prison. 150 military police guarded a fluctuating population of 50-60 unarmed men.
To their (very small) credit, the authorities at Leupp were appalled at the lack of evidence levied against inmates, and explicitly compared the WRA’s methods to the Gestapo. Within 6 months of its opening, Leupp’s inmate population was transferred to Tule Lake. “Tule Lake” became a byword for Japanese American dissent and resistance against incarceration, while the Moab/Leupp Isolation Centers have faded into obscurity.
Others have made pilgrimages to the remains of Leupp Isolation Center and written far more eloquently than I could about the ties that bind Navajos and Japanese Americans in trauma, particularly those who were imprisoned at Leupp.
For my part, I think a lot about the fact that many Navajos still suffer from the legacy of Cold War uranium mining on their land, poisoning thousands of homes, waterways, and people. The Cold War that started with an atomic bomb over Hiroshima and another over Nagasaki. The US EPA is still cleaning up abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation; the US government has never apologized for the atomic bombs on Japan, nor acknowledged the thousands of their own citizens who are hibakusha, survivors of the bombs.
We don’t suffer colonization, imperialism, or racism alone. These things manifest differently for different groups, but they’re the same beasts that stalk us all.
Why it still matters
Japanese Americans held at the the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Arcadia, CA.
The photo above is of the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Arcadia, CA. While there is a plaque acknowledging the role the track played during the war, the official website makes no explicit mention of Japanese American incarceration (and I have it on good authority that Santa Anita reps get very snitty when you point this out).
I had never seen this particular picture before this month. I grew up in Arcadia, went to Arcadia High School (which, sidebar, continues to use the Apache as its mascot), haunted the food court at the mall next to the race track, and ran cross-country routes around it. I graduated from high school here. I knew that it was an assembly center during the war, but I’d never seen a photo that actually mirrors what I saw when I accepted my diploma in front of those stands and looked up at the crowd of proud parents and families, snapping pictures and blowing contraband air horns.
My heart still hurts seeing photos like this, where people like me stood in their worst moments and where I stood in one of my best. I’m still angry when I think of my grandma taken far from her home for no better reasons than fear, racism, and ignorance.
My grandma once repeated to me what many survivors said about incarceration—shikata ga nai, or “it can’t be helped.” She never expressed any regret or anger about her circumstances. My mother said she “was guided by the spirit of gaman, or perseverance in the face of adversity.” She was cheerful and energetic and always had patience for her grandchildren.
The only sympathy she held for herself was her poor education in the camps. In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which granted every living internee $20,000 in reparations and a formal apology. She saved this money for her grandchildren’s college educations because her own had been so lacking.
The grandkids looking rough on X-mas morning in 2010. Grandma hosted all her grandkids every Christmas at her home in Oakland, CA. I’m second from the left!
My grandma passed away last year. I hadn’t realized just how much of my own identity as a Japanese American was tied to her existence until she was gone. I’m yonsei (fourth generation) and half-Japanese American. I didn’t go to Obon festivals or New Years’ celebrations growing up. I’ve never been to Japan. I learned Japanese in high school and promptly forgot it in college. I have few of the social, cultural, or, frankly, aesthetic trappings of being truly quote-unquote Japanese American.
But you can’t say my grandmother wasn’t incarcerated during the war. So I grew up intimately aware that even if I didn’t speak Japanese, look Japanese, or act Japanese, I could find myself in an inside room in the badlands if the US government decided it. Any of us could.
My identity as a fourth generation Japanese American is wholly tied up in my responsibility to remember this chapter in our history. Remembering incarceration still matters because we are still on stolen land, there are still detention centers putting blameless migrants in camps, Muslims can still be banned from entering the country with the stroke of a President’s pen, and millions of Black and Brown people are still behind bars for nonviolent offenses.
So thank you for sharing this moment to remember with me. We still have so much left to do.
Kay at the beach in 1950.
More Resources/Orgs
Densho Encyclopedia and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles (when it reopens to the public) are great general resources to dive into. There is also an online Names Registry where you can look up the names of people who were incarcerated, where they were relocated, and how long they were there.
I highly recommend reading more about the Loyalty Questionnaire, No-No Boys, the Tule Lake Segregation Center, and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Claudia Katayanagi directed the film A Bitter Legacy about the Leupp Isolation Center and how it is a precursor to the illegal detention of inmates at Guantanamo Bay.
For what happened after the war, read up on the Return to West Coast, Sanseis (third generation Japanese Americans), the Redress Movement, and HR 442.
For lesser known but very important stories, please read about Japanese Latin Americans (who never received reparations or an apology), the “stranded” Japanese Americans in Japan during the war, and Japanese American Hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
Check out and support great JA orgs working on closing modern detention centers in the US like Tsuru for Solidarity, Nikkei Progressives, and JAs for Justice.
