Tule Lake 30 Years Later

In February 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, a proclamation that ultimately consigned 110,000 Japanese Americans to ten internment camps. Though more than two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens, they were presumed to be security risks. The largest of the "relocation centers" was Tule Lake, a 26,000-acre dry lake bed 290 miles north of San Francisco. Last week a group of 200--wartime residents, their children and friends--visited the camp. TIME Correspondent Joe Boyce joined the pilgrimage. His report:

Tule Lake as the wartime internees knew it is gone. Only vestiges survive. To the west, there is Castle Rock, a jagged mountain of sand and stone upon whose crest is a cross, a more permanent version of the one Japanese Christians had placed there Easter morning 1943. But the barracks that were frigid in winter, broiling in summer, and crowded always are gone. What remains now are concrete foundations and a few scattered sections of chain-link fence topped with strands of barbed wire, forcing the visitors to search their hearts and memories to evoke what it once was.

Thirty years ago, the interned Japanese--most of them U.S.-born or relatively assimilated--tried to turn Tule Lake into an American small town. Boy Scout troops and English classes sprang up, as well as softball and basketball leagues. Christian and Buddhist churches were formed and young people danced the jitterbug and the foxtrot under the eyes of watchful parents.

Christmas and Thanksgiving were celebrated, marriage and funeral rites were performed, and cultural traditions were renewed. But it was a bleak existence for the prisoners, many of whom had previously enjoyed middle-class comfort. Professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, were paid $19 a month for serving fellow inmates; laborers received $12 to do menial work. Some residents took up sewing, flower arranging, making jewelry from sea shells--all to ward off the feeling of confinement. It was hardly a Nazi-style concentration camp, but armed guards and barbed wire were continual reminders of freedom denied.

Last week people in four buses and several private cars made the journey to Tule Lake. Motives were mixed. "It was something my parents didn't talk a lot about," said Kouji Nakutu, 30, who was born in Tule Lake and left as a toddler. For the first 25 years of his life, he "went around denying that I was a Japanese American." He returned to Tule Lake because "I want to trace my roots."

One woman on the pilgrimage grasped the chain-link fence and recalled with tears in her eyes how she had done the same thing as a girl 30 years before, wishing she were on the other side. Another woman, Nancy Shibata, 43, was a teen-ager at Tule Lake, where she met her future husband. "I was young enough so that I didn't feel bitter," she remembers. Today the barbed wire causes more wonder than woe. "To look at it after you're out--I said, 'Gee, we stayed in a place like that.' It's amazing that we lived that way."

A bitter residue of the experience remains for others. "I don't have a single good memory of Tule Lake," says Mas Kito, 59, who had been forced to abandon his dry-cleaning business. "I was mad then, and I'm still mad," adds Kiege Kaku, 59, of Palo Alto, Calif. He still cannot forget the War Relocation

Authority official who told him, after he pleaded for a few more weeks to harvest the family's crops before going to Tule Lake: "Unless you're stupid, crippled or sick--all you Japs get on that bus and go."

In all, the property the Japanese lost as a result of internment was estimated in 1942 to be worth $400 million. By the mid-'50s, the U.S. Government had repaid the propertied families or their descendants $38.5 million. Nothing has been paid to offset the wages, income and interest the prisoners lost during the war. In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that $10 million more was owed to 4,100 Japanese Americans whose dollar savings had been confiscated. Says one former resident in summation of the bitter heritage: "Inside me lies a ball of anger--a reserve of something. It's the strength of people who survived that kind of thing." But another voices quiet resignation: "I'm not mad. What's the use of getting mad now?"

Astonishingly enough, many were not angry even then. The U.S. Army kept recruiting briskly at Tule Lake. Many volunteers from this and other camps went into the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a Japanese-American fighting unit that served in Italy and France with extraordinary distinction. Indeed, the fear of the Japanese Americans' disloyalty ultimately proved groundless. During all of World War II, no Japanese American living within the U.S. was ever convicted of sabotage.

Whether they served in the Army or not, the overwhelming majority of Japanese Americans still called the U.S. home after the war, and most settled into lives of unassuming prosperity. Last week's sojourners included a college administrator, a landscape contractor, a newspaper editor and several housewives. Coming back to Tule Lake was visiting a place at once strange and familiar. Some clicked away with their Nikons, taking pictures of their past.

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