Close to 200 former incarcerees and their families recently returned to a relocation camp in northwest Wyoming for the first time since World War II as part of an annual pilgrimage.
During the war, around 14,000 Japanese-Americans were forcibly relocated to the Heart Mountain Japanese American Confinement Site, near Cody, after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Today, it is one of the best preserved relocation sites among the 10 camps that are mostly found in the West. There is an original barracks, parts of a hospital as well as a root cellar.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Olivia Weitz joined a survivor as he and his wife revisited an area near the camp where some of the original structures were within view.
Editor's Note: This story has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Olivia Weitz: Okay, shall we go for a walk? Let's head over where we can see the railroad, and we'll talk about what you remember seeing when you first got here.
Weitz narration: Shuko Yoshikami, who's now 86, was just four years old when he, his parents and three siblings were sent by train from southern California to Heart Mountain.
He spent about three years there. Shuko, his wife, and I visited a restored barracks and some other sites near the camp.
Shuko Yoshikami: We arrived by train. What I do remember distinctly was looking out the window and seeing irrigation canals, water flowing. We're going one direction, so in the opposite direction, the water is flowing down. And I don't remember too much after that.
But I do remember being in our barracks and being very cold because we came from southern California, and so we had extra clothing on. Eventually, I think my mother had a peacoat, a navy peacoat, I remember. And my father had the Army gray coat.
The rest of us, we wore multiple clothing and since we came from Pomona, we were dressed for summer.
Heart Mountain was good for kids like me, but not good for people who are just graduating college or high school and beginning their careers and life. And especially people who knew more of the law of the land.
I'm thinking of an exhibition I saw at the Smithsonian American History Museum. This was probably in the late ’80s. It was a teacher from Florin, California, and she said when she was incarcerated, probably in one of the internment centers like Tanforan, she saw her friends on the other side of the fence, and then she says, “When the gates closed behind me, I knew I lost something. And I realized it was my constitutional rights as a U.S. citizen.”
That hit me. You don't think of those things as a kid. You're just living.
OW: Thanks for sharing that. Let's walk over to where this barrack is. We'll talk a little bit about life in the barracks and what you remember about living there.
SY: Sure. This sort of looks like it. Because this is tar paper and it had these battons nailed down. The door, well this is a bigger door, but looks like our door because it had this regular house door size.
I remember seeing searchlights. They used to have searchlights but that didn't last too long. It had to be ’44 because my brother was born in barrack number three and 17. We would lie out and look out, and you could see. It's daylight still at 9 o'clock [p.m.]. We're lying in bed, and we're supposed to be sleeping, [but we] can't sleep, so we told stories.
OW: Did you play any ball games or were there other kinds of outdoor games that you played?
SY: We played alley over. Oh yeah, alley over. You know, throwing a tennis ball – very precious, a ball. We'd throw the ball over the barrack and the team on the other side, if you catch it – that's the honor system – you catch it, then you [yell], “Alley alley over! Ball's not coming over!” And you come running around the other side, and you throw the ball or touch somebody with the ball, and now they're poisoned, so they're on your side. You gather and decide that ends up with everybody is the winning side. So everybody wins, I guess, in that game. That was lots of fun and lots of running around and yelling and screaming.
OW: Shuko, show me where the school was here on this map.
SY: Let me orient this map. Let's see. See this here, this is where we are. This is Heart Mountain over there. I think school was in block 25. I'm sure it was there, because here's this baseball park. Yeah it's a park, playground, I guess. We'd walk up this way and walk by the park, and then go to school. My classroom was further. Sometimes I would walk.
My kindergarten teachers were Miss Kamei and her brother was a classmate of mine. She was a kindergarten teacher. That was when I came back from the hospital from pneumonia because they had a Boy Scout parade in Block 17.
I was watching it and then my heart, my chest, was sore. So I went home and my mother says, “Oh, what are you doing home?” I said “My chest hurts.” Then the kids told her, she asked the kids, “What's wrong?” And then the kids, they make up stories. “Oh, he got hit in the chest by a baseball. Oh, that's terrible.”
Talked to the doctor later on.
He said, “No, if he [was] hit in [the] chest, he'd be dead. He wouldn’t be moaning about the pain now.” And so [an] Army car came and picked me up. I guess that's the ambulance. It's a four door sedan, put [me] in the hospital there. My mother comes in a couple of days later and nothing's happening to me. So she realized that she better get a real doctor in there.
OW: They weren't helping you or caring for you there?
SY: I don't know what they were doing. According to my mother, they weren't doing anything. She went to her family doctor from Los Angeles and she gave him $100. I don't know where she got the money from. According to her, she said, “Before you know it, they're taking X-rays.”
I had pneumonia. I was in the hospital there and she could visit me every day. I was there for about 10 days.
OW: How do you think that your experiences here at Heart Mountain, at school, the friendships you made, also some of the times that may have been more challenging, shape who you became as an adult? Anything you feel like you learned from the experience?
SY: Why do I remember so much? Because it was so different from the ordinary and we [were] always moving. The season, the time. That's why I think I remember all of these things because things were changing. When everything's the same, you don't remember things. We remember change. And there [were] very drastic changes going from my place in Los Angeles, going to Pomona and then coming to Heart Mountain.
How am I feeling inside? Oh, I just feel kind of happy. It may be strange, but what's nice is all the cruelty and all the other things could be forgotten.
As we're riding up here from Salt Lake [City], my brother who was born here, and my sister came as an infant, she remembers very little, so much so that she told her friend, “Oh yeah, we used to go up hiking up Heart Mountain all the time.” The friend said, “Heart Mountain's so far away.” Well, she was talking about the foothills that we went to.
But I hear they're chatting to each other, and I'm interjecting things that I remember. I thought, “Oh gee, I wonder if my parents would really be happy to be overhearing our conversation,” because it formed our family. It brought us closer together. We were always close together but it was the family I think that was important.
I think that's what Heart Mountain did, probably strengthen the family. These traumatic incidents in life shape us. It's like forging a sword. You’ve got to beat the sword and you’ve got to mix the metal and make it stronger. Otherwise, you'd be fragile and would break under any adversity.
