Sonoma State University exhibit showcases life in a WWII internment camp

Many of the Japanese Americans who were sent off in trains to internment camps during World War II were not artists or even artisans. They were farmers or domestics with little time to carve or paint or do fine handcrafts.

But within the barbed wire communities they were forced to inhabit between 1942 and 1945, a creative force was unleashed. With a lot of time but few materials, many taught themselves and each other how to make arts and crafts, paintings, carvings and decorative household objects, anything to keep them occupied and to beautify the bleak makeshift barracks that were their homes.

After the war, most of that art went into the backs of closets, hidden away in some cases out of shame or embarrassment. But a new exhibit in the University Library Gallery at Sonoma State University brings into the light some forgotten works that are both artistic pieces and historical artifacts.

They represent the unbreakable spirit of the nearly 120,000 Americans removed from their homes and farms and forced to live as prisoners in their own country, without ever having committed a crime.

“It is not just about the art, but the story behind the art,” said Dana Ogo Shew, an oral historian and archaeologist at SSU who is curating the exhibit. It includes woodcarvings from fruit and vegetable crates, a lamp stand from a yucca root, skilled silkscreen prints and Mizuhiki, an ancient Japanese art of knotting cord into decorative objects.

Internees were forced to work with whatever materials they could find, she said.

All of the objects were culled from families and private collections, and made by prisoners at Amache, a relocation camp in the dusty, dry plains of southeastern Colorado near the Kansas border, where many Japanese Americans from Northern California were sent.

Shew, a fifth-generation Japanese American whose family was interned at Topaz, in Utah, did her graduate research at Amache. Now, with a $12,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is overseeing the digitization of images of art and artifacts from Amache and archiving them in the Camp Amache Digital Collection at SSU.

Several months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the secretary of war to designate military zones in the U.S. from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” That set the stage for the forced relocation and internment of some 120,000 people, two-thirds of them American citizens. By early 1944, the Supreme Court halted the forced detention of U.S. citizens without cause.

But during the war years, thousands of families were forced to report to civilian assembly centers.

From there, they were sent to one of 10 hastily built internment camps in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado and Arkansas. California had two camps: Manzanar, east of the Sierra in Inyo County, and Tulelake in Siskiyou County.

Shew's grandmother, who is still alive, was sent to an Assembly Center at the Tanforan Racetrack in San Bruno before being sent with her parents and three sisters to Utah.

Sonoma State University President Judy Sakaki said the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II, including many families from Sonoma County and her own family in Oakland, “marked an epic injustice that we must reflect upon and learn from.”

“The lives of Japanese Americans on the west coast were completely uprooted, and they were forced to leave their homes, jobs, farms and businesses,” she said in a statement. “In justifying internment in 1942, the war secretary once said that the U.S. Constitution was ‘just a scrap of paper.' But our Constitution and commitment to civil liberties reflect the enduring hopes and values of the American people.

“By the same token, for the Japanese Americans interned at the Amache camp, even small scraps of wood and paper were transformed into beautiful works of folk art reflecting the hopes and dreams of ordinary people during extraordinary times. This new gallery exhibit at the SSU Library, as well as the CSU digitization project, offer our students and the broader community an important opportunity to learn about and reflect upon these linkages between art, history and civil liberties.”

In 2009, Sakaki, as vice president of student affairs in the University of California Office of the President, co-chaired a task force to award honorary degrees to approximately 700 Japanese-American UC students who were unable to complete their degrees due to their internment during World War II.

Dust storms, heat

Amache was not a hospitable environment to the many Californians who were forced to endure dust storms, summer heat and freezing snow for which many had no appropriate clothing. It was a flatland of yucca, sage and prickly ground cover. The 10,500-acre camp was divided into blocks, each with 12 tar paper-covered barracks made of thin walls, brick floors set in dirt and without plumbing or cooking facilities.

Families were crowded into 20- by 24-foot rooms and issued pot-bellied stoves, but coal was scarce. Internees huddled under whatever blankets they were issued and shared bath and shower facilities. Food was rationed and served mess style in halls crowded with 250 to 300 people. Six guard towers equipped with machine guns dissuaded escapees.

While there were schools and jobs, including a silk screen plant commissioned to do work for the Navy, not all were employed. Some found themselves with spare time.

“All of a sudden,” Shew said, “they find they have hidden talents.”

To gather items for the exhibit and for digitization, Shew put out a call through the Sonoma County Japanese American Citizens League, social media and other sources. An April day at the Enmanji Buddhist Temple in Sebastopol gleaned several hundred items. From those Shew selected three-dimensional objects and digital reproductions for the exhibit of arts and crafts.

Marie Sugiyama of Santa Rosa helped organize the gathering of keepsakes from Amache. She was 6 when her family, who leased orchards in Sebastopol, was rounded up and sent to Amache.

She has no family objects in the exhibit, but she found a piece of embroidery that had been kept in a her mother's trunk. It was done by her sister, who was in her 20s at the time, and featured the names of other people at the camp, along with the words, “Liberty and Justice for All.”

Raise awareness

She's hoping the exhibit will raise awareness of the injustice of the camps and realize it must never be allowed to happen again.

“Hopefully the artifacts will tell the story abut the conditions and how it was a violation of our civil rights,” Sugiyama said.

Among those who contributed objects for the exhibit is Sonoma County resident Henry Kaku, 68, a retired human resources specialist. His family wound up in Poston, a camp in Arizona. But for more than 20 years he has been collecting and exhibiting artifacts from Japanese internment camps. Initially, they were objects from his own family, like a flower vase made of burl wood by his grandfather. But he expanded his range and now has several dozen artifacts that he makes available for public exhibitions.

“It began in the early '80s,” he said. “I was living in San Francisco and was at a garage sale of an elderly woman who had just passed away. She had pieces I recognized as something that came from internment camps. I picked them up. One thing led to another.”

Among Kaku's items on exhibit is a relief carving of a vase of roses done on the inside of a wooden crate by a friend of his mother's. “If you look at the back you'll see part of the label that was on there when it was delivered,” he said. Kaku also contributed several handmade tools.

While his own parents talked about their wartime experience, Kaku said, many families were silent, and camp-made items were rarely displayed.

“It was mostly embarrassment,” he said. “If they did have a display in the living room, it was in a corner and no one talked about it. They didn't talk about it because it brought back years of negative feelings.”

Silk screen shop

The silk screen shop at Amache gave some internees an opportunity to learn the art. Original prints and digital reproductions show the artistic skill of shop workers, provide a visual record of camp life and serve as a testament to the tenacity of prisoners determined to carve out as normal a life as possible amid the deprivation.

“It operated like a functioning city behind barbed wire,” Shew said. “There was a lot of agency within. They started a cooperative store. They had a beauty shop and a shoe repair and a dry goods store. They called it downtown Amache.”

Among the ephemera included in the exhibit are a fire prevention poster, event programs and a 1945 calendar featuring a silkscreened print of the camp, with the distinctive tower reaching up into a sky of puffy clouds.

The exhibit also includes examples of Japanese cord tying, done with whatever they could find, even pine needles. April Kamp-Whittaker, a doctoral student at Arizona State University, worked with Shew at Amache and assisted in the exhibit. She said Mizuhiki was a way people could create gifts for special occasions.

“There wasn't a lot of income, and it was a lovely way of keeping traditions alive while giving a lovely present,” she said.

People made decorations with whatever they had, including one family that brought a jar of shells, which they strung and painted.

Shew said the exhibit tries to strike a balance between the harsh realities and the people's creative resiliency and ability to make do.

Shikata ga nai is a Japanese saying of resignation, she said, which essentially means, “It cannot be helped.”

“You don't want to make it sound like summer camp. But we should feel proud that as a community we could say, ‘We're going to make the best of what we have.' They didn't lie down and become victims. That is an important aspect to remember.”