I decided to begin this post with a photograph by Ansel Adams to acknowledge that the WPA photographers played a part in my ability to remember -- and inability to forget -- that nearly 120,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were unjustly imprisoned in this country during World War II. Adams was given the job of documenting the Manzanar Relocation Center in California when Dorothea Lange was removed from the project, and he made a number of portraits of people working at the camp. Go to the Library of Congress archive and you can see Adams’ photographs of a mechanic and a nurse and a woodworker and a pattern maker and a foreman of power sewing machine workers and a line crew at work and an electrician and a tractor driver and a farmer. Most of those people are identified by name, and they were doing work that needed to be done. All of them were prisoners in the camp at Manzanar.
A couple of months ago when Greg and I went to the Tucson Desert Art Museum, I saw some of the photos of Manzanar and other prison camps taken by Lange and Russell Lee. There, in addition to the exhibit on the Dust Bowl (see previous post), we also saw an exhibit called “Citizen Enemy: Japanese-American Incarceration Camps.” And because the work by WPA photographers affected me and made it hard for me to stop thinking about those incarceration camps, I began to look through other WPA photographs I found online. I was drawn to Adams’ photo of the pool in the pleasure park in Manzanar. It’s an ambiguous sort of landscape -- a welcoming place that's entirely deserted. A graceful bridge and a curvy ramada look as though they were built from found wood, while rocks that came from somewhere else line the pool. Flat stones are incorporated into a walkway, and the mountains form the naturally perfect backdrop. Small trees are reflected in the water. Only a few thin clouds occlude the sky. Yet no one is there to enjoy the pleasure park. Maybe that’s because pleasure is hard to find when you are incarcerated unjustly.
Pool in pleasure park, Manzanar Relocation Center, Calif. / photograph by Ansel Adams, 1943.
I learned that the rocks in that park came from the nearby mountains when I read Tucson poet Brandon Shimoda’s “49 Stones for the Poetry of Japanese Incarceration.” In this stunning essay, Shimoda talks about his grandfather, who was incarcerated during World War II, and he interweaves
excerpts of the work of other Japanese American poets with descriptions of the
activities of Japanese and Japanese American prisoners whose creativity helped
them to survive. These creative prisoners included men in Montana who made
gifts of the stones they found and then polished, as well as prisoners at Manzanar who
“relocated stones from elsewhere” to construct what Adams calls a pleasure
park. The poets Shimoda invokes include Brynn Saito, whose “Stone in the Desert Camp, 1942" is told in the voice of a stone found at Manzanar. It begins: “Between the
turtle rock and the crane rock/ the children found me. I was shining/ and
smooth and silent about my secrets.” Earlier in the essay, Shimoda has told us
that “Stones
imply a form of communication that enables silence to express itself." He has also already told us that “One of the few
things that one can, with any certainty, expect to find in the ruins of
Japanese American incarceration—in the physical ruins of the innumerable
incarceration sites—are stones.”
And so I thought about
the kinds of stone and rock we might see when Greg and I decided to
visit the
former Federal Honor Camp in the Catalina Mountains on Christmas Day. I thought about stone and rock while
we drove from our West-side home to those East-side mountains,
a trip we often make on a holiday because traffic is light then. I thought
about stone and rock as we drove up the Catalina Highway, which I knew was built by the
prisoners at the Catalina Honor Camp. I looked out at the mountain stone and rock as the
Sonoran Desert biome, with its arid serenity and impressive array of saguaros,
gave way to oak scrubland and chaparral. And as we neared the site of the former
prison camp, I wondered how prisoners could have built this road – a series of
hairpin turns and S-curves as mountain roads tend to be – when the rock is so
massive and the mountainside so dauntingly steep.
photo by Greg Evans
We parked near the campground at what is now known as the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site and walked over to what’s left of the building that housed prison staff during the war. There are a number of signs that describe what happened there and how the Federal Honor Camp came to include Japanese American prisoners. What’s left of the staff living quarters makes a handsome monument, with a heavy stone staircase leading up the to the foundation of a building that no longer exists. One of the signs answered my question about the hard work of the prisoners who built that road, stating that at first they only had picks, shovels and wheelbarrows, though jackhammers, bulldozers, and tractors were added later, which made the work go faster. "Before I went to the Honor Camp, I thought prisoners only broke rocks with picks in cartoons," one former prisoner said.
The Tucson Federal Prison Camp held a number of men who resisted the draft during World War II, including Hopi and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The first and most famous of the 45 Japanese-American prisoners who were sent there was Gordon Hirabayashi, who had violated federal curfew and evacuation orders. Though he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, he lost his appeal and eventually spent three months at the camp. Most of the Japanese American prisoners were also members of a civil rights movement which demanded that men of Japanese descent who were being drafted to fight in World War II should have all the rights of American citizenship or else they shouldn’t have to fight. If they were truly citizens, why were they being sent to prison camps for the non-crime of “looking like the enemy”? If they were dangerous allies of a foreign power, why were they being asked to serve in the U.S. armed forces? In the end, Hirabayashi was pardoned for the crimes for which he had been imprisoned, and the former prison camp he inhabited was named in his honor in 1999. Here, in brief, is how he ended up at the Catalina Honor Camp:
According to Cherstin Lyon in Prisons and Patriots, because of Hirabayashi's curfew violation and resistance to evacuation in Seattle, Washington, he was arrested and spent months in King County Jail. When he was finally tried and convicted, he said he didn't want to spend any more time in a "walled institution" but wanted to serve his sentence in a road camp. In order to accomplish that goal, he asked for a longer sentence than the one he had been given initially because that sentence was too short to justify the paperwork that would have been needed to send him to a road camp. He then offered to go by himself to the Tucson Federal Prison Camp. In fact he hitchhiked to Tucson -- a one-month journey of over 1,600 miles from Spokane, Washington – in order to serve his two concurrent ninety day sentences. During the time he was in the Tucson Federal Prison Camp, he was one of the prisoners whose cheap labor helped to finish the Catalina Highway, which extends 24 miles from Gibbons' Ranch to Soldier Camp. The road gains more than 5,200 feet in elevation, which makes it the equivalent of driving from the deserts of Mexico to Canada's alpine forests. "While building the highway, prisoners busted rocks, hauled pipes, shoveled gravel, and cut this road through an impressively rugged mountainous terrain." (Lyon, p. 111) And among other jobs that Gordon Hirabayashi did while in the camp, including working as a cook and an athletic director, he broke rocks and shoveled gravel, too. (Lyon, p. 117) Though the segregation that was a part of life in the United States during that time also played itself out in the camp, Hirabayashi said that he interacted frequently with the Hopi who were there. They told him they wouldn’t fight the white man’s war, called him a brother, treated him to the ceremony of washing his hair with soapweed and made him tea. (Lyon, p. 113)
When I thought about why the men at the Catalina Honor Camp had to work so hard to build a 24-mile mountain road, part of which was constructed without using bulldozers and other heavy equipment, I thought it was possible that those prisoners may have wanted to work outside while they served out their sentences. In fact, at that time Arizona was considered to have more progressive policies regarding the treatment of prisoners than many of the other U.S. states. (Lyon, p. 107) Gordon Hirabayashi himself chose to go to the Catalina Honor Camp for just that reason after all. But what about all those workers Ansel Adams photographed? Why was it that Japanese Americans during World War II were not only imprisoned but had to work their way through this life-shattering experience?
Brandon Shimoda's work gave me a significant part of the answer to these questions, especially in regard to what happened here in Arizona. In the address Shimoda gave at the Holocaust History Center at Tucson’s Jewish History Museum on Inauguration Day in 2017 ("State of Erasure: Arizona’s Place, and the Place of Arizona, in the Mass Incarceration of Japanese Americans"), he said that during the early 1940s, two of the four largest cities in Arizona were concentration camps. Not only that, but the camps in Arizona were the only ones that were on American Indian reservations. This resulted in what Shimoda called a particular relationship between the treatment of Japanese Americans and of Native Americans, and he tied these two things together by introducing Thomas Campbell, an agricultural engineer who was also the Special Investigator of Native American lands for the Department of the Interior. Shimoda went on to say that Campbell “…was obsessed with the enormous number of what he considered worthless parcels of real estate, that were, in the 1930s and 40s, spread throughout the United States, many of the worthless parcels being, in Thomas Campbell’s estimation, on Native American lands. He was also obsessed with the enormous number of projects to reclaim and rehabilitate those worthless parcels of real estate, projects that either were under-funded or had been abandoned." In other words, Campbell thought that millions of acres of natural desert and scrubland and chaparral were without value and needed to be developed and economically exploited. So after Pearl Harbor, he came up with the idea of incarcerating the Japanese and Japanese American people who had been forcibly removed from their homes on those worthless parcels of real estate so they could be put to work building roads and irrigation systems and other projects that needed to be finished. In this way, Shimoda said, Campbell helped add a fourth reason Japanese Americans were rounded up and imprisoned -- beyond the three Congress eventually acknowledged, which were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership -- and that fourth reason was economic exploitation.
Poston, the largest of the concentration camps, was a beneficiary of Campbell's plan, and many work projects were proposed in order to develop the reservation there. As a result, the Japanese built an irrigation system and schools for the Hopi and Navajo, among other things. I learned more about those projects when I watched the 2009 documentary, Passing Poston: An American Story. Filmmakers Joe Fox and James Nubile show that Japanese prisoners were brought to Poston on the Colorado River Indian Reservation to build schools, dams, canals, and farms in order that scattered groups of Native Americans could be brought together into one place after the war. In other words, they provided free, forced labor for the American government.
Ruth Okimoto, who was imprisoned at Poston when she was a child, later researched the beginnings of the camp and she was startled to find that the Office of Indian Affairs ran Poston along with the War Relocation Authority. According to Michael Tsosie, a historian of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, another government official played a similar role to that of Thomas Campbell; he was John Collier, a commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Roosevelt
Administration, who wanted to build an irrigation project to bring Colorado
River water to the reservation near Poston so more Native people could be moved to this desert area.
"Japanese internment was the justification needed for the expenditure of
federal funds," said Tsosie. A council member of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, Dennis Patch, said the house he grew up in was
once part of the Japanese barracks. He said that Native people felt bad about the suffering of imprisoned Japanese people and could “identify with mass relocation against our will.” He
also noted that American Indian reservations were places where native
people were not free to travel at will, and he called Poston “an internment
camp within an internment camp.” In commentary included with the DVD I watched, filmmakers Fox and
Nubile said that the idea that Japanese Americans were brought to this remote
desert location to work and complete projects that would lead to
intensification of the control over American Indians was the most startling
thing they learned while making Passing Poston.
Of course, Japanese American and Japanese prisoners didn’t just do the work
that was imposed on them while they were in the camps; they also engaged in
voluntary work as artists and artisans to make their lives a little more
satisfying. Many works of art made from found materials were produced in the prison camps. The Ansel Adams photo shows a
large-scale example of this – a garden park made from wood and stone and other materials that were at
hand. But there are countless other, smaller examples of arts and crafts ranging
from walking sticks and bird pins to watercolor paintings and teapots. In the play based on Gordon Hirabayashi's life called Hold These Truths, after his time at the Catalina Honor Camp has ended, he is sent to Idaho
where his parents are working the sugar beet harvest. One day his mother gives him a small black stone, which was polished by an artist in another camp when his only son is killed fighting in Italy with American forces. Hirabayashi says the stone shines like a small black moon and has a few tiny characters etched on its surface which say "I carve on this stone from the high plateau, but I have no song." Hirabayashi adds, "So many lost so much. So many lives shattered. So many hopes destroyed." Yet in spite of the sorrows they experienced, artists and artisans in the camps continued their creative work, like the artist who polished the stone Hirabayashi's mother gave him, like the workers who made the pleasure park Ansel Adams photographed, as a way to show that they were not entirely defeated by their experiences.
But being unjustly imprisoned is the kind of experience that can defeat people,
make them question their own significance and importance. While at the place
that now bears the name Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site, I read the signs and thought how unnerved and
disrespected these men must have felt when they were given only unacceptable choices, none of which would lead to full citizenship rights. Would they deny
their Japanese citizenship? Would they allow themselves to be drafted and
possibly die in wartime for a country that didn’t value them as true Americans? The Tucsonians, as the Japanese American men who were imprisoned at the Federal Honor Camp were later known, spent a great deal of time talking about these issues, trying to understand how they could demand justice.
Lyon, Cherstin M., Prisons and patriots: Japanese American wartime citizenship, civil disobedience, and historical memory, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.
