Gil Asakawa
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This article was part of a package of articles that ran in the Denver Post on Sunday, Feb. 16, 2003. A sidebar was also included in the post, and I've added an extra story that the Post didn't room for.

Speaking out for the past

By Gil Asakawa
Special to The Denver Post

Sunday, February 16, 2003 - High school history books barely mention it. It's been the subject of only a couple of hit movies and novels, notably "Snow Falling on Cedars." And unfortunately, many of the people who lived through it have kept mum about it for decades.

So it came as a shock to many Japanese Americans when Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C.,recently told a talk-radio audience in North Carolina that he agreed with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

A caller had suggested that Arab Americans should be interned, but Coble disagreed. He went on to add, however, that he thought President Roosevelt did the right thing on Feb. 19, 1942, when he ordered the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry - more than two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens and more than half of which were children - during World War II.

His comments have become a unifying force among Japanese Americans working to honor those detainees and to preserve their memories and the camps in which they were held. As they prepare for a national Day of Remembrance on Feb. 19, Colorado's Japanese American community looks to the state's only internment camp, Amache in southeast Colorado, and to those who are dedicating their time and money to keep it from retreating into the prairie lands from which it was built.

***

For those who live in southeast Colorado, the wide-open scrub prairie and exposure to the elements is part of everyday life. But for a city dweller, the three-hour trek to Amache, 17 miles east of Lamar on U.S. 50, seems like a drive through the desolate dark side of the moon.

There's nothing left today but a small sign on U.S. 50 pointing to a dirt road that takes visitors into the camp. In the 1940s, it held 550 buildings clustered on 640 acres southwest of Granada, built at a cost of $4.2 million.

The memorial erected in 1983 to the internees who joined the Army and were killed in Europe.

More than 10,000 people lived there between spring, 1942 and January 1946, and at its peak, the camp was Colorado's 10th-largest city, with 7,597 residents. In contrast, the nearby town of Granada has just over 500 residents today.

The site was officially called Granada Relocation Center but quickly became Camp Amache, named after the daughter of a Cheyenne Indian chief.

Today it's hard to imagine the hustle and bustle of a "big" city while driving among the ghostly bare concrete foundations of barracks and other buildings. The only building from the internment years that still stands is a small brick enclosure in which the internees left a memorial stone for those who were imprisoned there. The building sits next to the cemetery, where the graves of 11 children who died in the camp stand watch over a war memorial erected there in 1983.

The cemetery is carefully tended and boasts the only patch of grass within sight. The area is surrounded by a chain-link fence to protect it from the cattle that trample over everything, leaving souvenirs of their passing.

All of the site's maintenance, including planting the grass, mowing it in the summertime, installing a new sprinkler system, building the fence and installing shiny new informational signs, is handled by a small but dedicated crew of students from nearby Granada High School.

The students are led by John Hopper, 38, a quiet, unpretentious teacher who teaches sociology, psychology and government to the high school's 82 students (Granada's elementary, junior high and high school are combined in one building).

Originally from Las Animas, Hopper grew up knowing about Amache because his mother worked with a former internee. The Granada High teacher has taken students to the site for 13 years. He now teaches a class called "Amache," in which students get credit for working at the camp site.

The group is currently restoring a koi (carp) pond in the camp, using an old photograph of the camp's block leaders posing next to the pond.

"Do you know how hard it is? We dig and dig and then overnight the wind blows all the dirt back," says Dawne Baca, a senior. "The next day we'll come back and we have to dig the same hole again."

The project "didn't really take hold until the second year, when some of my students decided to send out questionnaires to ex-internees," Hopper says. "A woman called from Denver and wanted to know what the questionnaires were for, and after we explained, before long we got a lot of them back."

The students are passionate about their cause - making sure that the internment experience, and Colorado's internment camp, aren't forgotten. Mark Grazmick, a junior, says, "I knew it was there, but growing up, I didn't know what it was. Now I know, and I don't think it was right."

***

In Denver, the man who worked the hardest at making sure people remembered internment was the late Hank Okubo, who was imprisoned as a teenager at Amache. In 1979, he founded the Denver Central Optimists Club, and they erected a monument at Amache to the second-generation soldiers who joined the U.S. Army from the camp and were killed in action in Europe.

By the early 1990s, the club had also become active in the preservation of the camp, but Okubo had done little public speaking about Amache or his experiences there.

Then Lorie Hirose, a Japanese American reporter for 9News, called in search of someone to interview for a story about the camp.

"Lorie had a list of people who were interned, but nobody else would do it," recalls Aiko Jane Okubo, Hank's widow. "I knew her parents from high school, and they finally called to ask if Hank would do it. Hank said 'OK' and that's how it began."

Once he made the TV appearance, other reporters were referred to Okubo, and until his death a year ago, he was often quoted in newspapers and on TV.

The entrance to Amache today.

"He thought it was important that people remember. When he started speaking out about Amache, there were so many people who didn't know about it," says Aiko Jane Okubo.

She had been interned at Minidoka, Idaho, and had been talking to groups about her experiences out of necessity.

"Our youngest boy, Craig, was in middle school, and his class was talking about World War II," explains Aiko Jane Okubo. "He spoke up and said his parents were in a camp during the war. The next day the kids in his class said, 'Craig, you're a liar - my mom and dad said there were no camps.' The teacher didn't even know about it.

"So, you know, mother's ire and all, I gave him a book to take to the teacher."

"After the incident with my brother at school, they made the powerful decision to speak out," says son Derek Okubo, 42. And his father never stopped speaking out about the injustice.

Now Derek has picked up where his father left off.

"At my dad's funeral, a friend from the Optimists expressed concerns about whether this Amache thing would continue, with my dad's passing," he says. "I told him it will not die. His dying was the little push I needed to get involved, along with my siblings, Craig and Stacey."

Derek is working to interest younger Japanese Americans in their history and to get them involved in the preservation of Camp Amache so that people will continue to remember about internment.

"My father talked about it because of the education part, and because no one else would talk about it," he says. "Right after September 11, the first thing out of his mouth was, 'I'm worried about the Arab Americans."'

***

"I was always ashamed of what the government did to Japanese people. I didn't want to talk about it," says Jim Hada, 78, president of the Denver Central Optimists. Hada was never interned - he's a Colorado native born and raised in Fort Lupton, and he lived in Denver during the war - but he has been the point man in efforts to raise money for Amache's preservation.

At the February Optimists meeting, Hada had good news to announce. The group and the city of Granada, which owns the land that holds the Amache ruins, have been given a $72,851 State Historical Fund grant to fund a massive archeological site survey. Along with the grant will come almost $28,000 in matching grants, including $15,000 from the Optimists.

"The first thing we gotta do is an environmental study of the whole camp, an inventory of what's there," Hada says. "It'll take 18 months, but once you do this and get it done, the government knows you're serious, and they'll give you more grants. It's important because in these historical sites, you can't even pick up a shovel full of dirt unless you have an inventory of everything on the site."

The camp is already on the National Register of Historic Places, and was named to Colorado Preservation Inc.'s, 2001 Most Endangered List. Both were helpful when applying for the historical fund grant.

The group's initial contribution was the memorial, but after its dedication in 1983, the city of Granada asked them to be custodians of the nearby children's graves. Much of their subsequent work has revolved around the cemetery and memorial, although they also sponsor a bus pilgrimage to Amache every spring, the weekend before Memorial Day.

Their long-range plan is to clean up dead trees on the camp site and redo the fences and roads, then build a museum by the cemetery - the sole intact part of the original camp - and use it as a learning center.

"That involves quite a bit, because we have to put electricity and plumbing out there," Hada says. It also is a mammoth undertaking for a small group of detainees that is growing smaller with each passing year.

***

Immediately after the war, roughly 2,000 of Amache's residents stayed in Colorado, with most settling in Denver. Those numbers were fluid, says Lane Hirabayashi, a professor of Asian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, because the population was so transitory from 1942-'46, he explains.

The koi pond then (surrounded by the camp's block leaders) and now, as it's being rebuilt by the students at Granada High School.

"In the official census in 1940, there are only 350 (people of Japanese ancestry) in Denver. By 1944 there could have been anywhere between 4,000 to 7,000 in Denver alone, with similar amounts in the hinterlands."

The 2000 Census reported 2,846 people of Japanese heritage living in Denver County, with 12,314 in the metro area and 18,676 in Colorado.

True Yasui is one of those who came to Denver and stayed.

The widow of longtime Denver human rights activist Minoru Yasui, she volunteered as a teenager to be in the advance team that set up and staffed Amache. In 1940, her parents returned to Japan and she moved in with her aunt and uncle in Mill Valley, Calif.

When they were interned, she says, "I really lucked out - I was assigned to the housing and employment department, and each day as groups came in off the train, I assigned where they would live in the camp."

She admits being shocked when she first saw Amache. "The barracks were almost completed, but it was all just desert around it."

Like many Japanese Americans of the era, she adjusted to life and accepted the hardship. "I had no bad feelings about it at all," she says. "I figured it was just one of those things. We were at war."

Still, she agrees that the internment was wrong, and that it's important to remind people about it so that it won't happen again. "Isn't it incredible that people still don't know about internment? Even today, if you look different you have two strikes against you already."

Events

In Denver, the Day of Remembrance will be celebrated by the following:

• Feb. 13 to March 15 - EO 9066 Exhibit, photographs of internment camps sponsored by the Mile Hi JACL, on display at the Rotunda level (2nd floor) of the City and County Building, 14th and Bannock streets. Open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, free admission, 303-494-9476.
• 8-9 p.m. Feb. 19 - Discussion of internment with Bill Hosokawa (former Denver Post editorial page editor) and Marge Taniwaki on 'Drawing the Line with Reggie Rivers,' KBDI Channel 12.
• 9:30 p.m., Feb. 19 - Broadcast of 'Children of the Camps' documentary on KBDI Channel 12.
• 1-5 p.m. Feb. 22 - Day of Remembrance/Children of the Camps Workshop with Dr. Satsuki Ina, a therapist who studies the life-long trauma internment inflicted on the youngest internees and on the generations that have followed. Held at Tri State/Denver Buddhist Temple, 1947 Lawrence St., free admission, includes screening of 'Children of the Camps' documentary, 303-200-0031 or erin@empowerful.com.