Merry Christmas from Prison Camp

Given the Wonderful World of Clutter has been in form of self-imposed exile for a period of time, I decided to pull out the most appropriate holiday card from my collection that I could find.

The tattered image bellow is of the water tower at the War Relocation Authority's Camp Granada, affectionately known as Amache. As mentioned numerous time on this blog, Amache was the home of close to ten-thousand Japanese Americans illegally detained during World War II. Here they spent a number of harsh winter, Christmases and New Years, birthdays and other landmarks of their lives.

My father was born here.

The card itself comes from my Grandparents' collection of ephemera from the camp--loose items and stray contraband photographs of their life in exile.

As much as I bitch about the state of things these days, I always have to reflect to my family's time during this era. Amache was a time of struggle. The same can be said for those who lived at any of the other camps dotted across of America. And yet, they tried to maintain some sense of normalcy. A holiday card showing the tallest landmark of the region, for hundreds of miles around, was the best Christmas symbol they could present.

 

Merry Christmas everybody…

It doesn't necessarily get better. It just get's different.

Seasons Greatings: Pearl Harbor Edition

Before everyone writes this post off as another crass, tongue and cheek take on this day in history, I want to share a piece of ephemera that comes from my Grandparent's personal collection from their time in the internment camps during World War II.

Given this is the holiday season, it is only appropriate that I share this now. The tattered image is a handmade card from the Granada Christian Church and it features the water tower which was the tallest structure at Camp Amache which held over 7000 Japanese American citizens uprooted from their homes after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the start of World War II.

In my collection of images from camp, I have one other Christmas card, a hand-tinted photograph with the words "Season's Greetings" and small holly leaves marked over an arial view of the barracks. These two images tried to present a normal view of what the camps were like. However, these forced segregated communities were far from normal. Normal towns and don't have guard towers with armed soldiers...

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So today, as I do every year, I celebrate Pearl Harbor day. People don't get it. When I invited my classmates out, mixed replies about dead soldiers and war memories from the attack that day. Of course, not knowing the personal history with internment, the loss of property, dignity, civil rights, and being forced to pledge loyalty to a country that took away all of your rights is foreign. The forced irony, forced satire, is lost.  I will be the first to say that I make my own merriment/mockery of a solemn day. But I think of it as a wake. I embrace my contradictions of being the grandson of a World War II vet who served in the Pacific Theater and a Yonsei (fourth generation Japanese). It's the same contradictory concept that loves serving and working with the Veteran population but despises war. 

While it is a few more weeks until Christmas, I wish you holiday greetings once more…Not a "White Christmas" as in the last card I posted--This time from a government run prison camp where the Constitution does not truly exist. 

Things that Don't Exist Anymore...

I found this image a few years ago while combing through my parents' old photographs.

I left Washington DC two days before everything happened, was in New York the prior week, traveling through subway tunnels that no longer exist. It's odd to think about. And to be honest, I don't think about it...

A Nissei, second generation Japanese American, designed the World Trade Center. But because he lived on the East Coast, he avoided the internment experience of the Japanese of Washington, Oregon, and California. We lose sight of these aspects of history.

The collective consciousness of America has also forgotten how much New Yorkers hated the buildings when they were originally erected. But that doesn't matter any more. Much like the polyester pants and flip hairdos of the people in the photo, such thoughts seem like idle folly of an irresponsible era.

From Oregon with Bad Japanese Acting

In the days before cable, Hulu, or youtube, the was finding foreign television broadcast locally was an unusual sight. This was especially true in Oregon, where to this day we find one of the most homogenous populations in the country. That said, there was a strange show that seemed to break the cultural barrier during this time in the early 80s and I watched it every weekend with my folks.

From Oregon With Love was  Japanese drama subtitled into English that played on one of the local channels. If I recall, it was on KOIN, but my memory could be off given this was twenty years ago. The story was simple, an orphaned boy is sent from his home in Tokyo to live with his aunt and uncle who have immigrated to the US and live as farmers in Central Oregon. We watch as he struggles to a new culture, new family, new life, blah blah blah.

I remember that the show aired for a few years. Azumano Travel, one of the local, prolific, Japanese-American businesses in the city of Portland, was the primary sponsor for the show airing commercials during the station breaks. However, I have to wonder how many people outside of the Japanese community watched the show? Ninety percent was in Japanese with English subtitles. Did this soap opera really appeal to the masses of this city? Apparently it made enough of an impact that I remember watching the the young child actor, his name lost to obscurity,  driven in a convertible through downtown Portland during the Starlight Parade as he waved to his handful of local fans.

And even though the show first aired in the early 80s, it was also popular enough to have a sequel show, also filmed in Oregon, set a few years later in 1992. Here is a clip.

Every Once In a While...

Ideas run flat...And while posts like this are better suited for the microblog world of Twitter, the figurative plate of life has suddenly become full.

Funny how that works. As the year comes to an end and winter officially drears in, I figure context and perspective is always needed.

So I leave you with a few random images from the Tulean Dispatch, the newspaper published from the interior of the former Japanese American prison camp, Tule Lake.

These pieces of poetry and images are from the Holiday edition of the Dispatch and can only reflect was Christmas and the New Year must have been like behind barbed wire on American soil.

Uncle Sam Fights at Pearl Harbor

A month before the actual attack on Pearl Harbor a coincidental comic was published by the long defunct publisher Quality Comics.

Comic Book Urban Legends posted about this story a while back on Comic Book Resources outlining the story and the odd happenstance of the tale. While the facts of the real event a month later diverge from the fancies of comic writers at the time, it is interesting to see how even then an ominous foresight was at hand. Of course it was the Japanese who attacked Pearl Harbor and the Spirit of America didn't stave off the attack.

Funny how these things work out.

Repeating Images: Prisons within Prisons

Today's repeating image is of the jail within the Amache Internment camp. This concrete structure is one of the only remaining intact buildings from the internment era. It actually served as a dual purpose structure as a cold storage locker for the general store and a small time lock-up for odd incidents when residents of the camp became unruly, typically of evenings when men would become intoxicated on contraband sake or other alcohol.

At the site of the Tule Lake internment camp, one lone, concrete structure still stands in the barren land. This too was a jail for the camp. However, it held more serious "criminals;" dissidents who eventually were taken to the county jail in Alturas, California, before facing more serious charges for being unwilling to pledge allegiance to America and fight in its military and to disavow any loyalty to Japan.

Imprisonment within imprisonment. Kind of funny to think about. 

California Before the War

In my collection of photographs taken by Ochan are a series of photographs taken in San Francisco before the evacuation occur. It is hard to determine the date of these pictures, but from the crowds, I believe this may be the opening of the Golden Gate or an image of some of the late phase of construction. The rigging to the side seems to indicate some sort of construction occurring.

Here we have a photograph taken of Alcatraz when it was still used as a penitentiary. This was more than likely taken from one of the ferries across the bay.

And here is one of the passenger ferries taking groups to one side of the bay to the other. 

While it would seem likely that more pre-war pictures would exist, but unfortunately, I only have a handful of images of the kind. According to family legend, on December 8th, 1941, men from the FBI went to all of the Japanese households and took away the men. As word of this travelled from family to family, and word reached my grandmother, she did what she could to keep the family safe. She burned any photograph that could be thought of as suspicious.  Now these images are some of the few that remain.

While People Remember Other Things...

What makes a day poignant? The actions of the the immediate or the narrative of the past? Today, a great number of people are dwelling on recent history. I cannot fault them for it. Some dwell on this date to honor; others  focus myopically to plant seeds of hatred;  and others just wake up and think nothing of it, get dressed one pant leg at a time and head off to their daily activities.

When asked to remember things, I will always turn to the events that shaped my family's narrative, the same hatred and bias that people discuss now played out to illogical ends. That brings me to today's images.

A good friend helped develop these photographs from negatives stored away since the end of the Internment. My great uncle, we called him Ochan, somehow gained access to a contraband camera and took snapshots of the daily lives of my family and numerous strangers around the desolate southeastern corner of Colorado that became my family's home during the duration of the war. 

Grandma with her children in the internment camp

Here, my grandmother holds her fourth child, beginning to show signs pregnancy with my father, as her other children play outside the barrack that was their home. About seven years ago, I stood on the foundation, a barren concrete slab where this photo was taken. Home, away from home, I guess.

Grandma, Obachan, Ochan, and neighbors outside of barracks at Amache

Another photograph with family and some random strangers. My great aunt holds one of my aunts, still an infant, near the door. Her husband, Ochan, smokes a cigarette. This is one of the few shots where the normal photographer is captures in these images.

Winter at Amache

This image may be of the eldest of my uncles, but it is a little hard to say. The winters at Amache were brutal from all the stories that I have heard. But for kids growing up in the central valley of California or from LA, this was some of the only times they had to experience snow. However, plywood and tar paper barracks aren't much for insulation. Even with a coal stove, the conditions would be miserable.

My uncle with other interment camp children

Children often never know when they are deprived. My uncle told me that when I asked him what he thought about the Internment Camp. If you're three, you don't notice barbed wire, men in guard towers with guns pointed at you, or have a concept of prison camp. At that age, you're three years old and enjoying life as a child. But for the parents unable to provide an American dream while confined, this had to be one of the most disheartening feelings imaginable. My uncle is about six-years-old in this photograph.

So this is what I have to remember on days like today, tomorrow, and many days to follow. I have to remember than no matter how much I complain about things, my grandmother managed to raise six children while segregated from society in a prison camp. She gave birth to four children during these years. And afterward had to endure years of hatred from the masses for the color of her skin and her heritage. Her children experienced the same hatred growing up, but they never knew why.

Yes, the events of recent history are tragic. And perhaps I contradict when I say "Move on." But if anything, perhaps move beyond or above what the events were. Perhaps we should look for the beauty in all of our histories. These pictures sting, but there is a haunting quality that makes me realize what I came from and which path I should follow. 

Obachan knitting outside barrack at Amache

Unknown individuals outside barracks at Amache

Amache during winter

Obachan at Amache

Things that No Longer Exist

Each internment camp had their own newspaper. The Tulean Dispatch was published out of the Tule Lake Relocation Center in Newell, California. While most papers published various reports of events during the weeks at camp, a few oddities appear from time to time. Notably, Chris Ishii's "Lil' Neebo" comic strip arose from the Merced and Granada papers, but Tule Lake took a more introspective look by publishing a literary magazine by the imprisoned Japanese American citizens.

Presented here are images from the Valentine's Day issue of the Dispatch Magazine Edition. The comics are not nearly as playful or biting in satire as Lil' Neebo was. Instead, they fall more into the realm of scratches on a cell wall. There is a graffitti like quality to these images in that they are more raw. The normality of miserable situations stands out more than anything else.

Tule Lake was probably the best suited place for such artistic expressions to born. It was the largest camp and also the camp filled with the most unrest. Riots, arrests, and "repatriations" back to Japan all occured at this site. The magazine was a sounding board beyond the news of births, deaths, and government announcements that typically dotted the newspaper.

Ten-hundred-million Paper Cranes

Sixty-five-years ago the Enola Gay flew over a city in Japan and dropped the first of two the only two nuclear weapons to be actively used during war.

Ten days later, Japan surrendered. The Emperor gave up his status as a deity--no longer were the Japanese descendants of the sun. They were human just like everyone else. Welcome to the Atomic Age.

Somewhere in a desolated prison camp in Colorado, my grandmother found another woman to nurse my infant aunt because my father had just been born a month-and-a-half and he was crying to be fed.

Grandpa went west looking for work as did many of the other men who were slowly gaining back their lost freedom. The farm was gone. The house was gone.

It all seems so long ago. Grandma, Grandpa, Obachan, they've passed on. All I have are yellowing pictures, fables, and artifacts. And half-truths that I try to piece together into logical narratives.

I remember as a child being told that a thousand paper cranes would cure a sick person. Sixty-five-years on there is still a sickness and fingers are getting to calloused to make fine creases.

In Honor of Explosions

Independence Day has really lost much of its meaning over the years. Now we celebrate our country's birth with mattress sales and lighting off explosives. Since I already purchased a mattress, I might as well remember one of the greatest firework our country has ever let off for freedom.

I am not certain where this newspaper clipping came from, but it has been floating around in my collection of ephemera for years. The fact that it isn't an actual photograph of Hiroshima makes it even more ominous in my mind; Instead we are presented with an artist rendering of the aftermath further removing the American citizenry from the destruction unleashed that August day.

I wish I had the entire article. But unfortunately, I only have this clipping and the gleanings I can get from the tops of columns. 

As I sit listening to my neighbors and numerous others let off fireworks through the city at this late hour, making it sound like a small war zone of drunken revelry, I have to think about some of the losses. What was the 4th of July like for my grandparents when they were locked away in what was essentially a prison camp for American citizens who committed no crimes? I have no real idea, nor are they around to ask.

Happy Independence Day.

Picture Postcard Japanese American History

My grandparents were avid collectors of postcards. Most of the cards they acquired are the typical tourist fair, but on occasion, an odd historical oddity appears. The one posted below definitely caught my attention.

The image is of, according to the caption at the bottom corner, is of a Pioneer Japanese Woman's Grave. That is pretty much an accurate description of the image, but a few things catch me off guard with this image and its purpose. The card is an example of a "real photograph postcard." These were non-mass produced images usually taken by individuals and then processed at a local shop which would print their photograph onto the standard postcard size and paper of the era. This style of card was popular from around 1903 to the early thirties.

In an era when "Alien Exclusion Acts" prevented Asians from owning land in California, this image still strikes me as odd. Usually postcards of these types were of local buildings, parades, civic events, or other  historical occurrences, but a grave marker rarely falls into this. My only guess as to the original photographer is that he or she must have been another Japanese individual in the community and that my grandparents purchased the card while in their travels.

Comic Book History Lessons: G.I. Samurai

A number of months ago, while working on a comic book binding project, I came across this interesting 6-page story in an old issue of G.I. Combat. G.I. Combat was a long standing war publication from DC comics featuring a rotating cast of writers and artists, essentially an anthology book about various military conflicts and the heroic struggles of the soldiers in the trenches.

The Haunted Tank was a regular feature of this series which, for those who are unaware, highlights the exploits of the ghost of an honorable Confederate General who died during the Civil War but comes back to guide his ancestor who is one of the soldiers in a, I believe, Sherman Tank, during WWII. They fight the good fight against the Nazi's, all the while flying the Rebel flag from their tank. Funny when you think about it.

This particular story by classic comic writer, Arnold Drake, and art by Martha Barnes caught my attention for the use of a Japanese protagonist during a WWII tale. While some fact is present in the story, there was an all Japanese battalion during the war, most of those men were about as American as you could get at the time. The notion of a sage-soldier sitting in the snow seems silly, even if the soldier was a Buddhist, which would be somewhat of a contradiction in the philosophy. And the stereotype that all Japanese men know karate is still a pervasive one. However, the fact that the story addresses some of the inherent racism within the military at the time does show something, I am not certain whether it is a condemning view or just a nod of awareness, that something was amiss.

But without much further babbling on my part: "G.I. Samurai," written by Arnold Drake, art by Martha Barnes, Originally published in DC Comics, G.I. Combat #274, February 1985.

Exploring the Japanese American War Experience Through Comics, Part 3, Lil' Neebo and Chris Ishii's Other Works

I have been digging through archives again and came up with some more interesting works by Chris Ishii and his creation Lil' Neebo. The idea of creating a portraying this entire experience through the eyes of of a child is one of the most unique framing devices given the politically charged nature this strip could carry. I shall let the the strips speak for themselves.

Exploring the Japanese American War Experience Through Comics, Part 2

In the previous part of this entry, the history of the Japanese American internment experience was viewed through an external lens. Political cartoonists and the super hero strips of the day all showcased how the Japanese were not to be trusted. But what of the view from inside the barbed wire fence?

While the majority of America felt that all Japanese living in America must have been imperial spies, the reality of the situation was that most were children born on American soil. These children spoke only English, had never set foot on Japanese soil, and had little idea why they were being targeted and forced to be removed from their homes.

In Granada, Colorado, one of many a handful of relocation centers was established hold all people of Japanese decent through the duration of the war. The language of the executive orders uprooting the families was meant to be all-inclusive of those who could be associated with the Axis Powers. However, German and Italian families never faced the same types of blatant discrimination leading to forced exclusion from the rest of America.

However, the imprisoned Japanese tried to make the best of what they could during this time. Schools were established, gardens were planted, and people tried to carry on a "normal life" in very abnormal conditions. Part of normal daily life was getting the news from a newspaper. Published weekly, the Granada Pioneer, provided record of all the going-ons of the camp; births, deaths, bake-sale announcements, declarations from the government regarding their status in the interment camps, were all written up as part of the public record. And of course no reasonable newspaper can be complete without a comics section.

Pretty much weekly, until the Grenada Relocation Center, also known as Amache, closed in 1945 Lil' Neebo ran as the sole comic strip in this stark paper. The creator Chris Ishii prior to the internment worked for Walt Disney. As seen in this single clipping of his work, more of which can be found at the Amache Digital Collections Project which is a collaborative project of the Auraria Library and Colorado Historical Society, his art is very representative of the 40s era Disney work. While I am not certain if this is the case, it is highly likely that Mr. Ishii crossed paths with another famous Japanese American cartoonist, Iwao Takamoto, both during his time working for Disney and during the more unfortunate times interned at Amache. Mr. Takamoto, who I had the pleasure of meeting a few years before he passed away is most well known for creating Scooby-Doo.

Lil' Neebo, as I will present in future essays, presents a comic, yet bitter, view of the internment through the eyes of a prepubescent boy. If curios about the name "Neebo" it's a semi-slang term for "Nisei Boy," Nisei being the literal term for second generation Japanese Americans. In many of the of the strips, Neebo is left stranded as a victim of circumstance, not quite savvy enough to be angry but also not quite scarred to be resentful. If anything, the strips represent a good representation of the confusion of the camps.