WWII Internment Camps Summit
LOS ANGELES — A group of Japanese-Americans seeking to preserve World War II internment camp sites concluded a three-day summit Sunday, saying there is an urgent need to gather information from survivors who are now mostly in their 70s and older.
Just one of the camps where 120,000 Japanese-Americans were held has come under a National Park Service program. At the three-day All Camps Summit, the group outlined its plans to seek preservation status for what remains at nine others.
One of their priorities is recording the stories of those who experienced the camps, organizers said.
“We’ve been losing so many members,” Daisy Used Satoda, who spent her high school years at the Topaz camp in Utah, told the Los Angeles Times. “That’s why we want to get things into print.”
The series of workshops included participation by at least 400 Japanese-Americans who were forced to live and work behind barbed-wire and guard towers between 1942 and 1945 while considered possible security risks.
“Hopefully the sansei (third-generation Japanese Americans) and the yonsei (fourth-generation) will continue to tell the story,” said Eddy Kurushima, who spent time at the Jerome internment camp in Arkansas before entering U.S. military service. “But after that, I don’t know what will happen.”
Efforts to preserve and in some cases reconstruct the Manzanar Camp, 200 miles north of Los Angeles, have been the most successful so far. Fifty buildings are still standing from the 1,300 built to house entire families.
“It’s probably one of the most important parks in the national system (because) … it tells a different story, one of social justice,” said Frank Hayes, the National Park Service superintendent at the Manzanar National Historic Site.
Other preservation efforts are at work for other internment camps in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and Arkansas.
The effort to get state and national designations and funding for preservation of Tule Lake camp in Northern California has made some progress, organizers said.
Jimi Yamaichi, 80, helped build many of the structures at the camp that housed 19,000 people. He said a jail — the only one in the internment system — is falling apart.
But its walls still bear poetry and cries for help written by prisoners held there, said Tule Lake Committee president Pat Shiono.
October 24th, 2003 at 8:15 am
I would like to know some people’s opinion on how the U.S. put Japanese americans in internment camps. Was it right to do so? Do you think this has ane affect on why most of the people of hawaiian are asian?