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February 21, 2000
REMEMBERING INTERNMENT
Note: This column originally ran in 1998, after I took a bus trip to Amache, the internment camp in southeast Colorado. I thought it would be appropriate to re-run it to mark Feb. 19, the Day of Remembrance. It's the anniversary of the 1942 signing by President Roosevelt of the legislation that created concentration camps for Japanese Americans.
I've read a lot about the internment of Japanese-Americans. I've seen movies, videos, documentaries, drawings and stark, moving, chilling photographs that examine and memorialize the horrible experience that the United States forced upon innocent and loyal citizens during World War II.
| It must have been a grim landscape to serve out a sentence such as internment -- relentlessly hot and dry during the summers, crackling cold and wet in the winters. |
But I've never really felt the pain and deep anger that I imagine is felt by anyone who experienced the internment, or anyone whose family members or friends were interned.
That's because my mother was an Issei growing up in Japan during the war (she had her own horrors to deal with, like the fire-bombing of her city) and my father was a Nisei born in Hawaii but trapped in Japan as a child during the War (that's a whole other story). And when we moved to the States, we didn't live on the West Coast, where I surely would have grown up amongst the children and grandchildren of internees -- we settled in Washington DC, where the fact of internment was never brought up.
When we moved to Denver in the '70s, I knew one girl during high school whose parents I learned were incarcerated -- I think that was the first time I had the opportunity to learn first-hand about the experience, but I wasn't curious enough as a teenager to ask questions. Not long after, I learned a lot by reading Bill Hosokawa's "Nisei," which was a landmark book for me.
But despite the knowledge I've since accumulated about the reality of America's concentration camps, the racist policy of Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment, and the recent, heroic efforts to gain redress from the government, I've seldom felt an emotional connection to what happened to so many Japanese-Americans of an earlier generation.
That's why I signed up for the Denver Central Optimist Club's annual pilgrimage to Camp Amache, Colorado's only internment camp, on June 21.
The day-long bus trip, which has been organized by the Optimist Club since 1983, pays tribute to the tragedy and to keep alive the memory so it doesn't happen again, to Asians or any Americans.
The trip was well-organized (by the Optimists' Jim Hada), and when the chartered bus pulled away from the Tri-State Buddhist Temple at Sakura Square early Saturday morning, it was full with folks of all ages making the trek. This year's visit was special, because the national Amache Historical Society was holding a reunion of former internees in Colorado Springs, and they would be meeting the Denver pilgrimage.
There isn't much left to see today of the 10,000-acre site that held 7,500 citizens from August 1942 to October, 1945. The community was placed on the plains of Southeast Colorado a kiss away from the Kansas line, just outside the small ranch and farm town of Granada. The flimsy, tar-paper shacks that served as multiple-family barracks are all gone, leaving nothing but concrete foundations marked by discreet signs added recently with the original barracks numbers.
As we pulled up to the gate, which was also marked by a sign and a site map marking the land's former purpose, the only things that broke the horizon of the undulating plains were cattle crossing the dirt road within the camp grounds, a scattering of thirsty cottonwood trees amongst the low ground cover of yucca and spiny cactus, and clouds of dust from all the cars and buses gathered on this day. It must have been a grim landscape to serve out a sentence such as internment -- relentlessly hot and dry during the summers, crackling cold and wet in the winters.
The pilgrimage was unfortunately too brief -- because of the added hundreds from all over the country, the Denver contingent wasn't able to take its time and explore and maintain the grounds as it usually does.
We simply pulled up to the restored area by the Amache cemetery, where the Optimists erected a memorial in 1983, for a quick series of tributes and flower presentations, and prayers and homilies from Rev. Kono of the Buddhist Temple and Rev. Miyake-Stoner of the Simpson Methodist Church, both stalwart hubs of the Denver Japanese-American community.
Then, the Denver busload drove off to Granada Park for a picnic while the hundreds there for the Amache reunion went to the town's City Hall for a luncheon. I felt a little cheated of the opportunity to mingle with internees and learn more of their experience first-hand, but also enjoyed very much the chance to make more friends in the Denver community.
After lunch -- all fabulous food prepared by volunteers for the day trip -- we climbed aboard the bus and drove the four hours back to Denver.
Before we left Granada, though, I did make an emotional connection with the historical fact of internment. While we picnicked in the welcome shade of the tall trees, someone pointed out a ramshackle olive-green shed at the other end of the park.
It was one of two remaining original buildings from Amache, being used for maintenance storage by the town of Granada (the other, I was told, is in someone's back yard). I walked over and around the building and felt both awe and anger rising up in me. The olive-drab tar paper was torn off in many places, showing the thin protection of plywood that internees had to protect themselves from the elements. The building was locked up but I could peer inside from a number of cracks and holes, and through some grimy windows. At one end of the building, which I estimated to be about 20-by-60 feet, were the faded military stenciled letters, "Block 11F Rec. Bldg."
As I squinted and saw nothing but shadows of machinery inside, I imagined Japanese-Americans of 50 years ago, trying to fashion a life for themselves in dozens of buildings that looked just like this. Inside this rec center, the men must have played poker and the women must have chatted about the day-to-day details of life in prison. Children must have played games and maybe someone played guitar at night, or perhaps someone had a phonograph player for scratchy big-band 78s.
I tried to hear echoes of these lives, and of course didn't hear anything.
All I heard was a voice in my head saying, "This is insane. I can't believe this happened. And it should never happen again."