How we talk about internment matters
Out the front windows of our bus, we could see acres of sun-dried grasses in hot and arid Northern California. On either side of the road: barbed-wire fences, like the ones many of our family members spent years behind, surrounded by armed guards and guard towers, living in crowded tar paper barracks with little to no privacy.
“How many of you have been here before, or were here during World War II?” our tour guide asked. A few Japanese Americans — in their 70s and 80s, or even older — raised their hands. Many of us were stunned by what the tour guide said next, almost in passing. “Welcome back.”
Did the guide just welcome our elders back to the site of their wartime imprisonment? Dismayed murmurs arose among us.
I think what the guide — a park ranger partnering with the Tule Lake Committee for this community pilgrimage — meant was, we are honored you have returned. This is just one of the strange rhetorical situations I find myself in, as a direct descendant of a Japanese American concentration camp survivor.
As a society, we are still developing the right vocabulary for recognizing the damage of Japanese American wartime incarceration. Because we do not have the right descriptors or labels, community pilgrimages like the one I embarked on in 2014 are misread, illegible or invisible. The wrong language can prevent survivors and descendants from visiting former sites of Japanese American incarceration to honor our history — and to heal.
My father and his family members were among the thousands of incarcerated people at Tule Lake during World War II. In total, the U.S. government imprisoned 125,384 “persons of Japanese descent” living on the West Coast during the war years, roughly half of them American citizens held without due process. The nonprofit Densho has mapped close to 100 sites of Japanese American incarceration across the country.
Today, most of these sites have faded into the landscape without visible historical markers; those that remain are at risk of closing off access to community pilgrimages. One of the more publicized battles is taking place at the Minidoka concentration camp site in Idaho, listed as one of the 11 most endangered historic places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2023.
Most of the camp buildings are gone but, currently, the site is open to visitors daily, with guided tours on summer weekends. A proposed wind farm threatens to put hundreds of 720-foot-tall wind turbines there, undoing its potential for public education and forever disrupting the remote and desolate views that Minidoka visitors experience now. Adding insult to injury, in the Bureau of Land Management’s 2023 draft environmental impact statement, officials listed Minidoka as site for “recreation.” In response, Japanese American survivors, descendants, and allies from the Friends of Minidoka mounted a powerful campaign against this terminology.
“I am not a tourist,” read one poster by protester Paul Tomita. “I am a survivor.”
What’s happening in Minidoka is happening across the country. Six years ago, I joined other Japanese American activists organizing a community protest to stop the construction of a 3-mile long, 8-foot high, barbed wire-topped fence around the Tule Lake airfield that would have effectively closed access to the site off to the public. The indignity of another barbed wire fence on this historic site led to protests from far and wide.
“We lived near the fence all our lives,” my uncle, Tule Lake survivor and poet Hiroshi Kashiwagi, wrote in a 2017 poem protesting that construction. He knew the power of fences — which have stayed with him and other survivors throughout their lives.
At Tule Lake, the airfield fence is just one problem. Battles between different entities have occupied stewards of the site and its history for close to five years now. Each organization has different degrees of protection, access, interest and control of portions of the full thousand-plus-acre site where the camp originally sat, of which only 37 acres are protected as a national monument.
Language won’t solve this tangle but it can help clarify the stakes. Tule Lake is perhaps the most infamous of the World War II concentration camps. Its population eventually swelled close to 18,000 after it was designated as a segregation center for “disloyals” — a label given to people based on their responses to a poorly worded government questionnaire to determine (supposed) loyalty. Because Tule became known as the camp for “troublemakers,” many did not want to admit that they were incarcerated there for decades after the war. Even within the Japanese American community, those who resisted in any way, like those who intentionally answered no to both loyalty questions, “no-no’s,” including my uncle Hiroshi Kashiwagi, were shunned and ostracized. This history is still being reckoned with, as is its telling.
How we recognize these sites matters; how we name the site visitors matters. As Manzanar survivor and researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga once wrote, “Words can lie or clarify.” Let’s take that further: Words have lied about this history — so they should clarify how we remember it.
When I came to Tule Lake in 2014, I didn’t come in a traditional pilgrimage sense: to receive blessings, or to see where a miracle happened. But I can say the reasons for my journey was transcendent, spiritual. So much so that I’d use, hesitantly, a different word with religious overtones to describe my time there now: communion.