announcer: Funding for this program is made possible in part by the State of California, a grant from the National Park Service Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program, and the University of Denver.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Diana Tsuchida: And your family was very tight knit.

Rosie Kakuuchi: Close.

We were close, quiet.

You know, we left and we really lived a quiet life.

And so, when the war broke out, it was just--shocked us.

And my parents, naturally, they were worried because they didn't know--they were aliens, so they would probably be shipped to Japan, but my mother always said, "Once you live in America, you don't want to live any place else."

Diana: Over the course of World War II, the U.S. government forcibly removed more than 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast, two thirds of whom were American citizens.

They were confined in a series of camps with most eventually residing in ten concentration camps managed by the War Relocation Authority.

The U.S. government imposed policies that limited Japanese Americans use of cameras, while simultaneously utilizing photography for propaganda.

The memories of confinement survive today in photos, objects, and spaces, and are stewarded by those who must grapple with the complexity of curating records of the past for future generations.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Diana: My name is Diana Tsuchida, and I'm the creator of an oral history project called "Tessaku."

"Tessaku" is a collection of oral histories that I've done with the Japanese Americans who have lived through and survived the World War II incarceration.

The project really started as a personal capturing, you know, the story of my family, specifically getting my dad's story down of being in camp during the war, both at Topaz in Utah, and after that at Tulelake at the border of Oregon in California.

From there, it just snowballed into a bigger project where I realized a lot of his friends, specifically, did not share their story or weren't asked about it.

And so, I began to sit down with them and interview and capture their stories.

Diana: Hello, hi Rosie.

I'm Diana.

Rosie: Yes, I figured.

Diana: Don't get up, but it's so nice to meet you.

It's so nice to meet you.

Rosie: Nice to meet you.

Diana: Thank you for letting me visit you.

Rosie: Whatever I can do to help find.

It's a shame.

I keep saying there's other people that would have better information, but they're gone.

Diana: The Nisei generation is the one that has the last immediate context and experience with the incarceration.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Diana: Knowing that we have to take on this history or be the stewards of this history without them is a very intimidating idea because they won't be here to vouch for the stories that we want to share or to kind of verify information and to give us the first person experience that they provide.

Diana: Rosie, can we go through one of your family albums and what kind of best showcases your-- Rosie: That would to be history number one.

Diana: Okay.

Rosie: This is my mother.

Diana: Oh, wow.

Rosie: And this is her passport.

Diana: Oh, my god.

And she's smiling.

I feel like you don't see a lot of the Issei photos, they smile, you know?

Rosie: But as Wayne says, you know, what else can you do when they say smile?

So, you smile.

They say, "Everyone looks so happy."

I said, "Well, when you take a picture, they say smile."

Diana: The Nisei is this treasured group that we're really going to miss.

And so, those moments with Rosie, you know, I'm aware when I'm speaking with her that I may not see her again, you know.

And I won't meet a lot of other 96 year olds and 97 year olds, you know.

These are gonna be the last years that we have them.

So, that time with them, I always know, is precious and, you know, don't take it for granted.

I always knew that this history was present and that something really tragic had kind of shifted the trajectory of my family's life, and specifically my grandparents.

My dad, actually, is the only link I have to knowing what my grandparents might have went through because they were both gone by the time I was old enough to ask those questions.

I found this album in sort of a shoe box full of photos from my grandmother.

And so, I've put it together kind of to represent their pre-war and post-war life as best as I could.

These photos are really, like, the only connection I have now to my grandparents and the people they were in this era.

Derek Okubo: My father was Nisei, and he was living in Eagle Rock, California.

On my mom's side, she lived in--she was Sansei and lived in Seattle.

Why I grew up here in Colorado was because my dad's family was imprisoned at Amache in southeastern Colorado.

Diana: When did you first see these pictures of camp and what were your first thoughts when you looked through these albums?

Derek: Yeah, I think the first time I saw them I must have been in junior high or high school.

Of course, you know, they're from the perspective of a 13 to 16 year old individual, so there's a lot of pictures of his buddies, you know, in school.

And when I first saw them, he wanted it to be clear to me that his experience was different than his parents because he was with his friends.

When I first looked at them, I couldn't really relate living in a house and then all of a sudden because of your race, you know, being taken away.

Although, at that time I had been experiencing a lot of racism, you know, as far as in school and everything like that.

But then, to be there and see what was going on with the community, I remember thinking, well, despite everything, they're still trying to live as normally as possible and to create a sense of community.

Diana: Let's talk about, now, your brother, a little bit.

And so, where is he in these photos?

Rosie: He's--that's him there.

This is a hardball team.

And he's here and this is a softball team.

They got the championship of this.

This, they came in second to San Fernando Aces.

And the Isseis, that was their pastime.

They loved baseball.

After the war, I was walking with my friends on First Street, and the Issei man stops me and says, "Oh, Rosie, I want to tell you.

We certainly enjoyed watching you play for the Dusty Chicks."

And I thought, oh, my god.

You know, that shocked me, that he came and rooted for us, that he would stop and recognize me.

Yeah.

Diana: The photos that I see and that the community have collected are something so beautiful to honor because they still captured so much of what everyday people needed to go through to live, and graduate, and go to school.

People had to have funerals, people had to line up outside mess halls and--all of these things that came from a place of injustice and race-based prejudice, they still managed to turn it into something beautiful that they wanted to take with them.

I still wanna preserve this memory, and I have these photos to prove that I was there.

Diana: That's your sister, okay.

Your sister, Grace?

Okay.

Rosie: And, you know, at first we couldn't have any cameras, absolutely no cameras, but later on we were able to.

So, that's why we have all these pictures.

Diana: And this is a question that I think a lot of Yonsei wanna know.

How did you all look so good in all of your photos?

Like, everyone really dressed up, everyone did their hair, you know, and we can't imagine how you pulled that off.

Rosie: Let me tell you, we all looked alike because we all had pull over sweater, skirt, Bobby sock.

What do you call those two toned shoes?

Diana: The saddle shoes.

Rosie: Pompadour and we all looked alike.

Diana: The photo that I actually keep in a frame on my desk as inspiration to do the work is a portrait from Topaz that was set up in some barrack because it's--there's a backdrop and there's seating, so it's a staged photo, and it's with my grandmother's cousin, her sister, my dad, and some of the other children.

It's the last photo that they took together before my dad and my grandmother were sent to Tulelake.

So, they knew they were going to be separated from her family and that they were going alone.

So, they took this family portrait.

But the thing that's striking about the picture is that no one looks happy at all.

Like, you know, they're dressed up and my grandma looks so young.

She even looks like she's a lot thinner, like she had not been eating well in camp, kind of--that's what it looked like.

And it's like they just knew that this was a moment where they would be separated for an unknown amount of time.

So, there's, kind of, this sort of ominous feel to it.

♪♪♪ Diana: My grandfather's name was Tamotsu Tsuchida, but he often went by Tom when he was living in the U.S.

He was born in Loomis, California, but he was taken back to Japan at age three, back to Kumamoto on the island of Kyushu.

They called that generation Kibei.

He was only fluent in Japanese, very culturally Japanese, and so really, identified as perhaps an Issei would, a first generation Japanese migrant.

He was culturally Japanese, but knew his rights as an American citizen.

My grandma was like him, also Kibei.

So, born in Los Gatos, but fully educated in Japan in Fukuoka.

In 1936, my dad was born in San Francisco and the three of them were living a really modest life, living in Japantown, renting a home, just trying to make their living.

Then, when my dad was five, that's when Pearl Harbor happened.

Rose Tanaka: My parents farmed on a piece of land near the Pacific Ocean in a town named Cayucas.

But we were poor and dirt farmers.

My father was a farmer there.

But he raised us well, I think.

We lived in a community where there were Italians and Hispanic, different backgrounds, and we were, you know, it was a community.

That was very strange.

It really was.

And all of a sudden the home where my parents grew up was a country that had attacked the United States.

All of a sudden we were different.

Derek: Some of the corollary factors that impacted the move towards forced relocation, a lot of it was economic based.

A lot of the Japanese Americans and Japanese had become very successful, economically.

They were becoming a threat to the establishment as far as their economic success.

And so, when that was happening, you started to see a lot of the prejudice building, building, building.

And then, when Pearl Harbor happened, it gave the excuse to act and to put a stop to that economic success and put the Japanese and Japanese Americans back down.

Diana: It wasn't until the signing of the Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, that I think that's when everything turned upside down.

One thing that I've read was something like pamphlet for Japanese American evacuees.

And the fourth question is, "What should I pack for this journey?"

And the answer to that was, "You are going to a pioneer community, so dress accordingly for the pioneer lifestyle."

They said, "It's like you're going to live on the frontier and build a community from scratch as pioneers.

But don't worry, you know, what you're about to do is exciting."

The upheaval that started after the executive order is when not only my dad's memories get sharper, but everything gets a lot more dramatic and things moved really swiftly and harshly.

Derek: My mom told me more about that.

You saw folks having to sell everything.

Pennies on the dollar.

She remembers the curfew.

She remembers being spat on, which is just hard to imagine, someone spitting on an eight year old girl.

Diana: You couldn't have short wave radios, cameras, weapons of any kind, and they had a very general phrase which was "other contraband," which, of course, they could just deem whatever it is.

So, my grandpa was trying to sell his cameras and he was stopped by a cop and they took his cameras away.

Rose: We were picked out as enemy aliens.

We were sent to places that were built with barracks.

Diana: The place to think about the whole journey is, first, the experience of being taken from your home, taken to your closest Assembly Center where you registered with the War Relocation Authority, then getting on a train, and you were told nothing about where you were going.

You didn't know how many days you'd be on the train.

Rosie: Oh, my goodness.

It must have been horrible for my sister being pregnant riding on the rickety train.

Diana: People weren't sure if on the other side of that train ride they were being led to something really sinister or if they were going to somewhere that they would be killed.

Derek: My aunt was about seven at the time.

There were armed guards in the cars.

They had to keep the blinds down.

My aunt wanted to peek and she got yelled at to keep the blind down.

Diana: They were told that that was for their protection from curious people from the outside, but it really was so they would be, really, kept in the dark about where they were going and they would be disoriented.

People passed out on trains, people had to stand for hours.

It was crowded.

There were mothers who needed milk for their infants and they couldn't get it.

Derek: I can't imagine what my grandparents must have been thinking.

When they got off the train they realized that, wow, you know, we aren't in L.A. You know, we're out here surrounded by this desolation.

Diana: Before that train to Topaz, my grandparents were taken from the Assembly Center to the Santa Anita Racetracks in Arcadia in Los Angeles.

And that's where my dad shares some of the worst memories.

They had to sleep in the horse stalls.

He can still remember that stench and that they had to shovel out the hay, the horse droppings, it just reeked.

And that never left.

That was his first experience of the incarceration, is living in the horse stalls in this famous racetrack, because Seabiscuit ran there, and they were there for a few months.

Rosie: We had a train ride from L.A. to Lone Pine and we all had to get up and line up, get into the buses, and the buses transported us to Manzanar and the ride was five, ten minutes, and we're driving in there and you see a bunch of people standing around.

I said, "Boy, they sure look terrible.

They look windblown.

They sure look dirty."

Anyway, then finally the bus landed in Block 21.

Then we had to line up again and we were given pickled--extra large pickled army or navy leftovers, two army blankets, and a bag stuffed with straw for our mattress.

Grabbed all that and we led to barrack eight, apartment three.

Marge Taniwaki: I go by Marge now, although my given name was Margaret Aiko Yamada, and I was born close to Los Angeles in the San Gabriel, kind of a suburb of Los Angeles.

At the age of seven months, my extended family was sent to Manzanar concentration camp.

My strongest memories are of being four years old there.

The wind that blows there is something that I always remember.

And with the wind, it brought sand from the desert, and the wind was so strong that it would blow into the barracks that we lived in, and we didn't have pillows or anything like that.

And I used to bring the blanket up to cover my nose and my mouth at night to try and keep the grit out of my mouth.

During the day, all of the children were lined up and I was in the front because I was one of the smaller children.

And I remember that the photographer said to us, you know, "Smile."

And so, we were obedient and we smiled, and I now consider those kinds of photos propaganda photos to make it look as if we were being treated well.

And that the photographer was probably a War Relocation Authority photographer.

Bonnie Clark: There were lots of different people who were invested for often conflicting reasons in terms of what was actually going on in the camps.

Some of those folks, like Dorothea Lange, who documented as people are being taken out of their homes and rounded up, and then when they're first going to the Assembly Centers, she had been part of the Works Progress Administration and the government knew that photography was gonna help move people and that it documented important parts of American history and that if we need to spend government money, we needed to show what was happening.

You know, photography played a really important role from the very beginning.

And these photos, a lot of them are propaganda to sort of show like, "Yeah, things aren't so bad and here's where, you know, the inside of a mess hall, and here's where people are eating together, and here's Christmas time in camp, and here's Santa."

Derek: Whenever I see those wartime pictures, I think about intent.

What was their intent?

You see the government pictures, it was very staged.

Whenever I see those pictures, it doesn't tell me the trauma.

The viewer doesn't get the trauma of what folks were going through.

That's why some of the perspectives that are out there are, "Oh, it wasn't that bad.

They had housing, they had meals."

The loss, the uncertainty, the betrayal, the sense of betrayal, of this country that they loved and of the people, you know, that they--some of the people that they had viewed as friends, you know, that would--that had turned just because of their race and because of the situation.

And so, whenever I see those pictures, it's, like, I tend to discount them.

Marge: My father worked as a fireman in the camp, and there's a photo of him lined up with all of the other firemen in their uniforms.

You can see the pumper trucks in the background and the fire station has a large sign that says Manzanar Fire Department.

In that same photo, you can actually see the barracks that I lived in.

He would go to the canteen with his very small salary, $16 a month, and buy evaporated milk to give us because milk was only given to the children in camp up to the age of two.

So, my father would buy the evaporated milk and he would dilute it and he would give it to me and my older brother and sister to try and supplement our diet.

Rosie: So, a lot of these are Ruby's pictures.

Diana: That she was collecting, so-- Rosie: She was the only one that cared enough to put it into a book, you know, the black with the corners, little black corners.

Yeah.

So, Ruby did all that and she did all the writing.

Diana: And Ruby-- Rosie: Mostly Ruby's.

Diana: Okay.

Mostly Ruby.

Rosie: And this was her graduation's.

Diana: Oh, wow.

Very elegant, huh?

Rosie: Yeah, that's my sister that passed away giving birth to twins because of the inadequate hospital, because any specialist would have known to give her a Cesarean section to remove the babies to save the mother, but the doctor said, "As long as I'm the head, no one comes into the hospital."

And so, my mother, who is very quiet, told him when she died, she said, "If you had called the specialist and she died," she says, "I would have accepted it, but because you did not, I blame you."

And she never spoken before like that, but she was so angry with him.

But, yeah, I guess your firstborn means a lot to you.

Diana: Were you close to your sister, Ruby?

Rosie: Because she was the oldest, we looked up to her, she was the leader.

And so, even my sister Grace, who was two years younger, respected her and just whatever she said is true.

So, she was kind of, not bossy, but was a leader of four of us.

Diana: How did this affect your parents?

Rosie: Oh, my mother, it just really broke her heart.

Yeah.

As I say, probably the oldest is the most precious because they went through the most difficult, yeah.

Diana: Yeah, but all of this really preserves her memory.

♪♪♪ Rose: It was tough on our parents's generation because they came from a foreign country to raise their families, and all of a sudden all these people had to lose their homes and the possessions and had to go into a camp and start turning their whole lives around, reestablish themselves with their neighbors, and try to keep their allegiance to this country, which brings me to think about my brothers who served in the military.

That's my brother Henry, and he was the youngest of the boys in my family.

I had a brother-in-law who was killed in action in Europe.

It's--the 100th battalion was well known for their bravery in Europe, and they had to go out and risk their lives to prove that they were able to fight for this country despite what happened.

Bob Akaki: One of the stories that my dad never told us is his unit at the end of the war, the 522nd field artillery, is one of the units that liberates Dachau.

He said at dinner time, "We were told not to share our food with them."

You know, because they might get sick, being presented with actual, real food after being starved for so long.

But like most of the men in his unit, he walked to the fence and handed his tray through the fence, to an internee, to, you know, one of the prisoners in the concentration camp.

And--I'm sorry, he started sobbing because he felt bad that he dropped his piece of bread on the ground.

And he said, "And I couldn't give that to him."

You know, he felt after all those years, he felt so bad that he deprived somebody of a piece of bread because of what he said, "My clumsiness."

For 50 years, he wouldn't tell that story.

My brother and sister and I had no idea.

♪♪♪ Diana: Topaz is where things start to turn a bit with my grandpa.

At some point during his time there, a bit of a division begins to form within the community, between the Kibei community and the Nisei community, which is the second generation American citizens as well, but they had never been educated in Japan.

The Nisei group aligned a lot more with being American.

So, my grandpa starts to get into some arguments with some of the Nisei and other folks who are debating about whether or not they should volunteer for the U.S. military.

And my grandpa feels that it's wrong for them to ask the imprisoned community to volunteer if you're not gonna be let out.

He was outspoken and he starts to attract the attention of the administration.

He wrote an essay that he wanted published in the Topaz newspaper to respond to somebody in camp that was calling the Kibei cowardly.

♪♪♪ Diana: And they didn't want to let him publish it.

He got into a couple of physical altercations, or at least one, that was enough to get him arrested and to actually be made an example out of.

They came and arrested my grandpa from the barracks, and he was just taken out of camp, and he's gone.

His family was not told anything.

And so, my grandpa is driven to Leupp, Arizona, one of the citizen isolation centers, and they had to call it that because you were incarcerating a U.S. citizen.

♪♪♪ Diana: That's where he was for about six months.

The national archives had about 120 pages on him that they kept about his records and what trouble he got into.

So, that was another way that I got to understand his story and just, really, what he experienced.

My grandfather was a no-no to the loyalty questionnaire.

In February 1943 the WRA sent out a so-called loyalty questionnaire that was meant to be, sort of, a way to determine who could they really trust within the camps.

This questionnaire was given to every adult in camp, every person over 18.

Three fourths of it is general information, but the couple of last questions held, really, what I think set the tone for so much future division within the Japanese American community that, kind of, reverberates still.

There are two questions that were really divisive.

So, the first one, 27, is, "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?"

And 28, "Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?"

Will you forswear all allegiance to the emperor of Japan?

That's a really loaded question.

For somebody who's like my grandparents and who's Kibei, or even Issei, and they're first generation from Japan, perhaps you don't agree with what the imperial army of Japan is doing, but perhaps Japan was really your home.

It's where you were born and it's where you have family.

The emperor was all divine, almost like a god, revered, more than human figure, and, of course, the U.S. government knew that that's what it meant to the Japanese people.

So, to write that in there and to say it that way was also pretty cruel because you wanted to trick people.

My grandfather knew that there'd be such consequences to saying no, but I just think he couldn't lie and he couldn't pretend.

Marge: My father did answer, "yes, yes."

Although, there were huge discussions as there were in all families.

For my father was particularly difficult because he was born in Miyagi Prefecture in 1903, and until 1952 he could not even apply for U.S. citizenship.

So, my father to answer, "yes, yes," meant that he was stateless because he had to forswear allegiance to the emperor of Japan.

And because he could not even apply for citizenship until 1952, that left him stateless.

So, it was probably a hard decision for him.

Derek: The "no, no," situation wouldn't have happened without the imprisonment in our own family.

We saw that division happen.

We had the "no, no" perspective and the patriotic perspective too and it was very divisive within our family.

I think there was some confusion.

There was a lot of--some folks didn't understand it, especially if English wasn't their first language.

With my uncle, he, you know, it was just basically no and no, and very strongly.

For other side of the family, it was, you know, yes and yes.

Those that said no and no were then removed and sent to Tulelake.

My uncle, he was viewed as unpatriotic, the black sheep.

So, it was just this tension that was always there, even though it wasn't always spoken about.

Diana: The loyalty questionnaire really created a rift between Japanese people.

If people knew young Nisei men that died as part of the 442nd or were killed in action, those veterans supporters really looked down upon the resistors and the people who found themselves in Tulelake because they thought they were cowards for refusing to serve.

And they saw the "no, nos" as people who let these other young men die.

They weren't part of that sacrifice.

With my generation, and descendants of people who protested, that stigma is starting to fade and more literature and discussions are coming out about how the protesting in camp was probably--just as much as serving--it was one of the most American things you could have done, to use your voice and to protest your government and to protest this unlawful incarceration.

One of the really powerful photos that my grandparents kept from camp was a picture in Tulelake.

My dad is standing with a friend and they're watching a fire burn the tri-state high school down.

My dad remembers that people weren't sending their kids to that school.

Most high school students were being taught by the Kibei teachers who set up their own schools and were running these schools as if they were all in Japan.

So, that meant that they were learning Kanji, it meant that the classes were all in Japanese, and that they were preparing them for a life back in Japan.

They never discovered who did it, but this fire was set in December of 1945.

The war had already ended, the camps were winding down, so my dad believes that it was set intentionally by somebody in the community.

And it makes sense that that was an act of protest.

Bob: Many of our parents didn't want to talk about their camp experience.

There was a certain amount of shame.

They weren't very proud of the fact that they had been interned.

You know, it wasn't a pleasant experience for them.

They didn't really wanna remember much about it.

But what really surprised me is my children would ask questions and my parents would tell them stories that I had never heard.

Rose: Post-traumatic stress was something that we never really admitted to ourselves was happening.

That's something that we denied for a very long time.

We didn't even have a name for it.

Bonnie: Think about the scariest horror movie you ever saw, you probably didn't see the monster or you only saw little glimpses of it, right?

And so, especially in families that didn't talk about it, to be able to come back and to replace that sort of--it's like a black hole, right?

It bends around it and to be able to go back and to say, "This is real.

It happened and it happened here, and a lot of it was terrible, but also, here's the tree that my auntie planted and here is a little piece of a ceramic that maybe she had tea out of."

You start to see those routines of daily life.

And so, sharing those stories, I do think it helps people heal.

Derek: I remember talking with my grandma and I asked her, "What can you tell me about the camps?"

And you know how grandmas are, they're really sweet.

They pinch your cheeks.

They're always--spoil you rotten and happy.

I saw a look come over her face that I had never ever seen before.

And this look of disgust was something I had never even seen.

And she just shook her head and got up and left the table.

And her response told me more about the experience from her perspective than anything she could have said.

Bob: I remember another time, I showed my dad a picture.

It was a little boy, about four years old, boarding the buses to go to the Assembly Center.

So, the boy's dressed in a hat and a coat and he has a string around his neck with old cardboard tag.

That's how you identified the families.

That's what the army had to do.

He started crying again.

I guess I had a hat and a coat like that when I was about three or four years old.

And he said, "That could have been you."

He kind of broke down.

"We never should have allowed them to do that to us."

You know, first time I'd ever seen him do that, you know.

Here's my big, strong, hero dad, you know, sobbing like that.

It really got to me.

Bonnie: When it comes to the trauma around the camp, this was the story they didn't wanna tell.

And then, as more family members got involved and they were kind of cajoled into joining the conversation, that it's really helped them, sort of, put some stuff down and to deal with it.

Again, if--that's part of the way that intergenerational trauma passes, right, if it never gets dealt with.

Derek: My younger brother was in--we were in elementary school, and he mentioned the camps to his teacher in his classroom, and the teacher called him a liar because she didn't know.

And she said, "That never happened, you're lying."

And he came home and told my mom, and she just went through the roof, you know, and told my dad, and I remember the dinner conversation and my dad saying, "Well, I guess we're gonna have to talk about it."

And so, it was at that point where they did, and up to that point nobody in the JA community was really talking about it at the time.

Too painful.

So, my mom called the principal and--who was a really great guy, Mr. Finley, and he said, "Well, if you're willing, I'll call an in-service and have--if you would present to the students and to the teachers."

I'll never forget this.

I remember her typing the story, and it was like a whole week, and I'd be in bed and hear her on the manual typewriter, you know, just going.

I liked the sound, you know.

I remember the sound and I remember later thinking it's--something magical was happening, you know, with that tapping.

She was healing, you know, as she was writing that story, her own story.

There was this awakening that was happening within them.

Bonnie: Back in 2005, I came up with this idea, just as Amache was about to become a national landmark, that it would be a really great place to do some community archaeology.

I spent the next couple of years talking to people to make sure that it would be a welcome invitation for us to actually do that.

A site like Amache really gives us that opportunity where we can be constantly in conversation about, "What is this thing that I found?

Can you help me understand what it is?"

And we draw from our community experts.

Bonnie: I think you asked me if, like, some objects stay with me.

I'm sure that the people who made this would laugh at how carefully we take care of it.

This is a mess hall tin can that, with the addition of wire, was turned into a bucket and filled with tar, and then we have a stick in it.

The wind and grit were always blowing through these poorly constructed buildings, so this is one of the ways that people could weatherproof their barracks, was by adding in tar.

This is their ingenuity at work and speaks to the way that materials were being reused and modified and them taking charge and making their lives better in camp.

So, I love this tar bucket.

Bob: My cousin helped clean out my grandfather's house, and some of the things he found in there were interment related artifacts, and one of those was the photo album from my aunt Hatsume.

The kinds of photographs that were in there were mostly, kind of, just snapshots.

Snapshots of people standing in front of their barracks.

Maybe people that she worked with.

I think there were some snapshots of her working.

The importance of donating items like that to a museum is, I think it helps to document, you know, what happened.

It turns the people here into human beings.

You know, it shows how they tried to cope with the experience, how they tried to live a normal life, you know, behind barbed wire.

Bonnie: We were talking about, sort of, the road to this becoming a national park.

I knew I couldn't do it without the community.

And having spent those years in preparation of talking to people was so important in terms of like, "What's important to different people?

What are folks's memories?

How do you wanna be involved?"

And if you think about a community that had been fractured through multiple displacements, first, by getting sent to Amache, but then Amache disbanding, right?

There are people who were friends when they were little and have never seen each other again.

You know, they need some time to be able to reconnect and share.

This is a project where we could make the people be the heart.

One of the people who really made me think about this and the ways that this could be fraught was actually Marge Tanawaki.

We were all, kind of, gung-ho about that it looked like the park was gonna move forward, and she said, "I don't know that I necessarily trust the government who incarcerated me to tell that story."

And wow, you could have heard a pin drop in the room.

Marge: So many of the Nisei and Issei would never talk about it.

They wanted to put it behind them and just get on with their lives.

I had participated in the pilgrimages to Manzanar.

And in fact, my older sister went on the very first Manzanar pilgrimage.

It was a real struggle to go.

And I figured that if it was hard for me, how hard it would be for the Issei who are still living back then and what they might feel or get out of returning to the site of such a trauma in their lives.

Bonnie: These sites of difficult history are places I think where we can also start difficult conversations about who belongs and who doesn't and how do we protect people who don't seem like they belong?

Bruce Embrey: Welcome to Manzanar.

How many of you are here for the first time?

Who's first--wow.

We know our history is one part of America's torturous path towards democracy.

The survivors of Manzanar knew from direct experience that white supremacy is woven into the fabric of America, but they also knew we can win justice.

We believe as Jim Matsuoka did that there is no better place than Manzanar to gather and demonstrate our common bonds.

James Matsuoka: I wish my father was here actually.

Sorry about that.

He started to see Manzanar as a place where people from all different walks could come together and affect change.

I'm almost certain, had he lived, he would have returned.

On behalf of my father and my family, it's truly an honor to be here with you today.

I'd like to leave you with a saying my father used to say.

"Integration over assimilation."

Derek: Becoming American meant giving up names or anything that made us more Japanese.

And my siblings and I, we don't have any Japanese middle names, you know.

We--it's--my--I'm Derek Paul Okubo.

For my parents, you could see some of the lingering trauma that being American meant this.

As they started talking more about it and started working more on the preservation of Amache, they awoke even more.

They felt strongly about how wrong it had been, what they had experienced, and that it could never ever happen again.

And they used their money, you know, the money that they got from the redress to go back and revisit their roots.

They went to Japan, this embracing of who they were.

Marge: We started the first formal pilgrimage to Amache in 1975.

I'm heartened that those who survived still want to go back and that they are accompanied by their relatives, their children, and grandchildren, sometimes great grandchildren, and that they can process it.

Derek: For me-- I get emotional here.

I think I'm lucky in that I was able to ask a lot of the questions and to really see that depth of the pain that they experienced, and my grandparents too.

I'm really thankful that they shared their histories.

I thank them for speaking up.

Might have they had to go through their own path to get there, but they did.

Takes a lot of courage to be willing to face pain and to feel things you don't want to feel, think about things you don't want to think about.

But when you do, you move through that and get to a different place, and they were willing to do that.

♪♪♪ Diana: A lot of these sites are being really erased.

Receiving National Park Service status and being part of that network of resources, funding, care, and preservation really brings the story to more people, and we know that next generation has access to these sites.

The government is recognizing it's wrong and trying to do something about it.

It might have taken a really long time, but through the efforts of the people here in the community, they made it happen, and that's what it takes.

The preservation effort happening at Amache is very collaborative with the descendants and the local community in particular.

On the other hand, you know, there's some sites that are going through some major growing pains in terms of who is really in charge of the site.

With Tulelake, there are several interests between the local people that live there, and it's very complex.

Everyone has a certain stake in that land.

So, you can't access every part of that site.

You either would have to know where you're going, but you also have to be aware you're entering private property, or you just don't go there and things are closed.

So Tulelake today it still is a work in resistance and trying to do right by the community and preserve it for the Japanese American people.

When I had see photos from camp life, I think it really illuminates to me that people had to live in the mundane.

These kids had to go to school, people still got married, people went to dances, people had to recreate their life in some way, in a different landscape, in a totally different state.

It just shows that people are so incredibly resilient no matter the circumstance.

At the same time, the photos don't show the agony that I think a lot of people felt day to day as well.

But the photos are this incredible proof that a thriving community was here.

And I think that those physical artifacts and the visuals are--they're really, really special, because they are really some of the only proof that the families went through this.

I've always said that my grandpa is definitely the reason why I am so interested in this history.

Whatever he went through changed him so greatly, and he just couldn't let it go, but I feel like my work in this is to, sort of, heal that and to make sense of his story and to give voice to that story because I don't think he felt anyone really listened.

I really didn't know my grandfather, but I have never felt closer to him than I do at this point in my life.

I've realized through this work that love and family connection and values do not need to coexist in the same physical space or time, but that there is a continuum of love that links the generations together.

Now that I'm expecting a daughter, I just hope that she grows up and is proud of her heritage, proud to be from people that suffered this tragedy, but came through it and rebuilt their lives against really great odds.

That's such a source of strength, to think about where you come from and what your family went through.

The incarceration was, really, this attempt to decimate the culture.

We lost language, we lost things from Japan, we lost cultural heritage and connection.

That was purposeful.

The power to reclaim that and to take pride in your history and your culture I think is one of the best ways to heal that and to not let that history define you either.

And I just hope that she is connected to who she is and that she knows that her grandparents worked really hard so that she could have a good life deciding what she wanted to do with it.

That's the legacy of the community.

So that's what I hope.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ announcer: Funding for this program is made possible in part by the State of California, a grant from the National Park Service Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program, and the University of Denver.