Standing in front of a small concrete jail, one of the few remaining buildings at the former Tule Lake Segregation Center, Buddhist priest Duncan Williams led a prayer meant to alleviate suffering caused by hatred and ignorance.
The memorial service was part of a pilgrimage that brought about 400 people to the site over the Fourth of July weekend to remember the 331 people who died at the camp between 1942 and 1946.
The biannual pilgrimage brings together survivors, descendants and supporters to remember those incarcerated at Tule Lake and preserve a history many fear is fading from public memory. This year, many participants also drew connections between the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans and today's immigration enforcement policies.
Williams quoted Shinjo Nagatomi, a priest inside the Manzanar camp.
“He wrote in his wartime diary that the purpose of memorial services and building monuments was not only to console the spirits of those who had died in camp, but to console the spirits of those who remained,” Williams said.
For many families, that loss extended beyond the death of loved ones. They also lost their homes, businesses and freedom.
A harsh camp
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government forcibly removed more than 100,000 Japanese Americans from their homes, incarcerating them in 10 camps across the country.
Tule Lake, eight miles south of the Oregon border, became one of the largest camps with a peak population of almost 19,000 people.
It was also known as one of the harshest.
A year after opening, Tule Lake was converted into a high-security ‘segregation center,’ meant to house those the government labeled as disloyal. A barbed wire fence and guard towers created an imposing atmosphere within the camp.
Basic necessities, include medical supplies and school materials, were often scarce. After growing discontent, the U.S. Army took over Tule Lake Camp in late 1943.
Actor George Takei, one of Tule Lake’s most famous survivors, described the oppressive atmosphere in the 1982 congressional report on internment.
“I was too young to understand, but I do remember the barbed wire fence from which my parents warned me to stay away,” he said. “I remember the sight of high guard towers. I remember soldiers carrying rifles, and I remember being afraid.”
That report eventually led to an official apology by the U.S. government in 1988, acknowledging the injustices that were motivated by racial prejudice. The government also paid $20,000 to each surviving U.S. citizen or legal resident of Japanese ancestry who had been incarcerated.
Returning to the camp
Everyone who came on this biannual pilgrimage is here for their own reason.
Phyllis Iwasaki has a direct connection with Tule Lake.
“I want to pay tribute to my family,” she said. “My grandparents, my parents, older brother – who was just a toddler at the time – and my sister, who was born in Newell at the camp.”
For Sharon Kuroda of Longview, Washington, the journey is about honoring others. Originally from Hawaii, where most Japanese Americans were not sent to camps because they made up a major part of the workforce, Kuroda has previously attended pilgrimages to the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho.
“I just feel compelled to honor their struggles,” she said. “And then to learn from it, and just hope that it will not happen again.”
Hiroshi Shimizu, president of the Tule Lake Committee, which organizes the pilgrimages, was just 6 months old when he arrived at the camp in September 1943.
“I was born in March and went on what I call the grand tour of incarceration sites,” he said.
His parents had renounced their U.S. citizenship and planned to return to Japan. They were placed on a waiting list for a ship, but no space opened up, so the family stayed in the United States. They were then sent to Tule Lake after being labeled disloyal.
Shimizu said people still wrongly view Tule Lake as a camp for troublemakers. Instead, he said they were unfairly portrayed as disloyal or immoral for protesting incarceration without a trial.
“Our entire effort has been to establish the idea that protest in America is not un-American, that it's totally constitutional,” said Shimizu.
Speaking during the memorial ceremony, Shimizu said the Constitution should have protected Japanese Americans.
"Yet, during World War II, those constitutional guarantees were abandoned by men in power who chose fear over principle," he said.
The trauma of silence
Satsuki Ina was born at Tule Lake. She said she knows firsthand the brutality faced by those who protested the camps.
Her father was charged with sedition and taken from his family for speaking out against efforts to draft young men from the camps to fight in the war.
“He was held here for several days,” Ina said. “The mug shot that I found of him from his FBI files shows that he had been beaten — bruises and contusions all over his face.”
Ina, a psychologist specializing in trauma and one of the co-founders of the activist group Tsuru for Solidarity, said many adult survivors avoided speaking about their experiences because they did not want to burden the next generation.
“My mother shared some stories,” she said. “My father never spoke one word about the experience.”
Other survivors said the silence came from within the Japanese-American community, where some discouraged discussion about the camps.
Sadako Kashiwagi, now 94, said she went on a journey to learn more about her identity after the war.
“I could understand if the non-Japanese community felt hostile to us,” she said. “But when your own community – who should know better – snubs you, that is really hurtful, and that exists even today.”
Ina said preserving that history also means accurately describing what happened. The camps are often referred to as “internment camps,” but Ina said that term is inaccurate because internment is a legal term describing the imprisonment of enemy nationals. Most people in the camps were American citizens.
She said the more accurate term is “concentration camp,” a term describing the mass detention of civilians based on their ethnicity or other group identity, typically without criminal charges or a trial.
“The euphemistic language was used to suppress the truth to minimize what [the U.S. government] actually did,” Ina said. “We're working fervently, really, to correct the language.”
'Never again is now'
Ina said it’s difficult to watch conditions at Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities without thinking about her own experience.
“Because of what happened to us, it’s really important for us to show up in ways that people didn't show up for us back in 1942,” she said.
Chizu Omori, another camp survivor, said she worries about people once again being singled out based on their race or ethnicity.
“We're going backwards,” she said. “And that's a hard thing to accept, because do we learn our lessons? Apparently not.”
"It’s really important for us to show up in ways that people didn't show up for us back in 1942."
After the war, she attended the University of California, Berkeley, and became active in the civil rights movement.
Omori, 96, still participates in protests today.
“The legacy is that democracy in our country, as it is exercised, is something that needs to be fought for, ongoing, particularly now,” Omori said.
That’s why this pilgrimage feels more poignant than ever.
After the memorial ceremony, most of the pilgrims gathered with signs and banners drawing connections between the historical events of Japanese-American incarceration and modern-day immigration enforcement.
Historic photographs from Tule Lake and other camps were shown next to images of ICE agents detaining immigrants. A large banner, signed by participants in the pilgrimage, carried a simple message: “Never again is now.”
