Tule Lake Pilgrimage Experiences
Yet despite the absence of luxuries, complaints are few, and many return. The 2009 pilgrimage had record attendance with over 400 participants, who took part in celebrating Tule Lake’s official status as a national monument.
The success of the Tule Lake pilgrimages lies with the hardworking, all-volunteer Tule Lake Committee (TLC), which start their work about a year before the actual pilgrimage.
In addition to considering the positive experiences of the pilgrimage participants, the TLC also makes sure that the local region gets an economic boost. One of the biggest monetary contributions goes to the region’s volunteer fire department when the TLC purchases hundreds of meals and uses the fire department facilities.
EARLY PILGRIMAGES
Stan Shikuma is the longest serving TLC volunteer. He has participated in 15 of the 17 pilgrimages and became involved in 1978 as an Asian Student Union member from the University of California, Berkeley. That same year, the TLC became a non-profit organization through the efforts of the Committee Against Nihonmachi Eviction of San Francisco, the Northern California Region of the Asian Pacific Student Union and concerned individuals.
Shikuma, whose family had been incarcerated at Tule Lake, said today’s pilgrimage is a far cry from the1970s when they camped out on the county fair grounds and cooked their meals.
“I remember the early years, taking my down jacket because it got so cold,” said Shikuma. “And we did security patrol because we weren’t sure how the reception would be from the local community. We had people patrolling around the exhibition halls where everyone was sleeping, so we’re walking around in our down jackets with flash lights, making sure no one was going to come by.”
While the bare bone accommodations suited the students, organizers changed the format as more former Tuleans started to attend.
“When I went to my first pilgrimage in 1978, we had about 250 people,” said Shikuma. “I would guess, of that, there were maybe three Nisei. That changed as we went through the 1980s. More Nisei started coming out. Actually, in the 1980s, there were still some Issei, who were still alive, that were coming. That kind of forced us to change some of the things we were doing.”
Richard Katsuda also participated in the early Tule Lake pilgrimages. He became involved after taking a Stanford Workshops on Political and Social Issues (SWOPSI) course with Edison Uno in the early1970s.
“That was my introduction to the idea of looking critically at the camp experience and calling upon the U.S. government to take responsibility to redress its actions against the Japanese American community during World War II,” said Katsuda. “I became active with AASA (Asian American Student Association) around 1977, and I think some Tule Lake Committee folks made a presentation at an AASA meeting in 1978. I believe my first pilgrimage was in 1978.”
Katsuda described those early pilgrimages as “amazing.”
“It was during the pilgrimages that I first heard Issei and Nisei talk about their camp experiences, and those talks were certainly the emotional, seminal moment that inspired me to help launch the redress movement,” said Katsuda. “Spending an entire weekend with pilgrimage participants in such close quarters with free and open discussions was an incredibly liberating and soul-searching experience for all involved. The bonding that went on was palpable. The Saturday evening program was always the climax to the pilgrimage, with the participants creating or providing the entertainment and sharing.”
Although cooking for so many participants was “always a major undertaking,” Katsuda recalled a touching moment.
“I especially remember one year when some of us stayed up all night doing security, and then we had to cook breakfast,” said Katsuda. “Amy Uno Ishii, who was supposed to take it easy because of heart problems, nevertheless joined us early in the morning to cook breakfast. I vividly remember her blithe spirit as we were busily peeling potatoes and talking.”
One of the more funny memories Katsuda remembered was listening to everyone snoring. “While doing security and playing cards as participants were sleeping in the gym, we listened to the ‘symphony of snoring.’ It really was like an orchestra, with snoring of various rhythms and tonal qualities coming from different parts of the gym. Then, every once in a while, there would be a big crescendo as the rhythms from several quarters seemed to become synchronized.”
During the 1980s, pilgrimages became infrequent because the student pilgrimage organizers became involved in the redress movement.
“In the 1980s, it was kind of sporadic,” said Shikuma. “I think we had one in 1982 and 1984. Then there was a big break because everyone was working on redress. I think 1989 was the next pilgrimage.”
After the redress bill passed in 1988, there was a huge psychological shift in the Nikkei community. Talking about camp was no longer taboo, although the history of the Tule Lake Segregation Center continued to be downplayed.
“By 1989, more Nisei started coming around,” said Shikuma. “There’s been changes in the committee also. Initially, it was all student and community activists — the more radical wing of the community, you could say. Then it became more acceptable, especially after redress. But, of course, some people will still say we’re the radicals in the community.”
After 1992, pilgrimages were organized every other year on a regular basis, and the TLC located OIT, which allowed participants to use the dorms during the university’s Fourth of July break.
Despite the hard work, Shikuma volunteers because the lessons he’s learned are priceless. “A lot of people ask me ‘What do you do for four days? What am I going to see?’ People think about seeing Castlerock or Abalone Mountain or the jail or they think of concrete artifacts that you can touch and feel. All of that is important and helpful in stimulating memories and discussions, but I think that’s all a launching point for the real core of it, which is what are the stories, what did people go through? You’re not going to find that kind of personal detail from looking at a map or standing on top of Castlerock. You have to actually talk to the people, listen to their stories, ask the questions that haven’t been asked before. That’s the core of the pilgrimage. When we do that, there’s always something new that comes up. That’s what keeps drawing me back.”
Molly Enta Kitajima, 84, a Japanese Canadian, has been a TLC volunteer for 12 years. She is most recognizable as the elder taiko drummer during the pilgrimages’ performance night.
Kitajima became involved when she was asked to introduce taiko at one of the pilgrimages. There, she hooked up with Shikuma, also a taiko teacher. The result was the Tule Lake Taiko a loose-knit group that includes various drummers attending the pilgrimages.
Kitajima relates to the Tule Lake story because of her father, Yamazo Enta, who ran the Shota Transfer Company and had been a pre-World War II leader in the Japanese Canadian community. Her father became known as a “troublemaking resister” when, early in the war, he started advising Japanese Canadians not to invest in new homes or farm structures because they might be removed from Vancouver and the West Coast. Someone informed the authorities about Enta, and he was arrested.
While jailed, the father was asked to sign papers denying what he had said, but the father steadfastly refused. He was released only after demanding continuously and loudly to be freed.
As Enta had predicted, the Japanese Canadian community, like Japanese Americans in the United States, were forced to leave the West Coast.
Shortly after the end of the war, Kitajima married a Japanese American Military Intelligence Service veteran and moved to the U.S., where she learned about the U.S. concentration camps.
One of Kitajima’s biggest surprise was learning why many of her Northern California Buddhist church members were reluctant to admit they were at Tule Lake.
“I’d say to them, ‘I saw your name on the (Tule Lake camp) roster. Why don’t you come to the pilgrimage and tell your story?’” Kitajima said. “They’d tell me, ‘I wouldn’t go down there.’ And I found out the reason why is because their fellow Nisei were blackballing them too. So then I thought ‘Wow, they’re staying in the closet!’”
This motivated Kitajima to become active in the TLC. “I stayed in this pilgrimage because of the cause,” said Kitajima. “Every pilgrimage, we’d say, ‘Okay, this is the topic. We’re going to work on this.’ We worked on the ‘no no’ issue. We worked on the resisters, the Hoshidan. Our pilgrimage has meat. Then we have these discussion sessions, and it has meaning. Otherwise, it’d just be another reunion. That is the reason why I work on this. I feel our group is sincere in finding out the root of why people were resisters, why everybody had a different answer. That was important to me, and so I volunteer to help.”
Kitajima credits her father for her social justice activism. “My father was a very, very progressive, thinking man,” said Kitajima, who adheres to the philosophy that when you better the conditions of the downtrodden, all are lifted and benefit.
Among TLC volunteers, Jimi Yamaichi is the only former Tulean who had been an adult when the war broke out. He started volunteering in 1992 after he participated in his first pilgrimage in 1991.
“That year, I came as a visitor, and it was so moving,” said Yamaichi. “It just brought tears to my eyes. It was my first time back. Before that, we were so busy trying to restart our lives, but that year, my wife Eiko said, ‘Let’s go.’”
During the war, Yamaichi was one of 26 draft resisters at Tule Lake. Yamaichi protested the draft after learning from his soldier brother that the Nisei at Fort Riley, on Easter Sunday 1943, had had their weapons taken away and marched into a hangar. The Nisei soldiers were guarded by their Caucasian peers and ordered to sit on hard, wooden bleachers with no back rests for four hours to allow President Roosevelt to tour Fort Riley.
“My brother at Fort Riley wrote back about how they took their guns away when President Roosevelt came, and we heard about Heart Mountain (draft resistance), so I said okay, I’m not going to go. I’ll go to jail,” said Yamaichi.
As it turned out, the Tule Lake draft resisters were the only draft resisters from the 10 WRA camps not to be fined or jailed. U.S. District Judge Louis E. Goodman dismissed all charges, saying “It is shocking to the conscience that an American citizen be confined on the ground of disloyalty and then, while under duress and restraint, be compelled to serve in the Armed Forces or prosecuted for not yielding to such compulsion.”
Yamaichi also has the distinction of being the construction manager for the Tule Lake jail, which still stands today.
Hiroshi Shimizu is currently TLC chair. He was born at the Central Utah (Topaz) WRA camp but he and his family were transferred to the Tule Lake Segregation Center after the government administered the controversial loyalty questionnaire.
Shimizu joked that he became active with the committee 13 years ago when he “accidentally” attended a committee meeting.
In coordinating a multi-day pilgrimage, Shimizu said, “We meet once a month, and we send tons of emails with a few phone conferences,” said Shimizu. “It takes the effort of about 20 hardcore members, which is a lot for a volunteer organization. Each of the 20 put in countless hours of effort to make this happen. That’s one of the things that makes working on this rewarding — we work with so many really good, dedicated people.”
Dr. Satsuki Ina was born at Tule Lake. Her parents had answered “no no” to questions 27 and 28 on the government’s poorly-worded loyalty questionnaire.
Ina, an award-winning filmmaker who produced “Children of the Camp” and “From a Silk Cocoon,” attended her first Tule Lake pilgrimage 15 years ago, on her 50th birthday.
“I was so moved by the experience that I have continued ever since,” said Ina. “I was honored when asked to be part of the effort to preserve and memorialize the Tule Lake site.”
Ina credits committee members Roy Ikeda, Hiroshi Shimizu and Barbara Takei for keeping her involved. “It’s a privilege to be a part of their team,” Ina said. “From a personal point of view, my father was unjustly held and beaten inside the stockade. People like my parents, held at Tule Lake during the segregation period, suffered the humiliation and betrayal not only at the hands of the United State government, but also by many of their fellow Japanese Americans. Preservation of the physical site will not only serve as an invaluable educational experience, but also a lasting testament to the courage of those dissidents who protested in the name of their Constitutional rights.”
Like Ina, Roy Ikeda was born at Tule Lake after his parents and older sister were sent to Tule Lake as “no nos” from Topaz. Ikeda became involved with TLC after attending the 2006 pilgrimage and “was so moved by the experience.”
The TLC has two components: the pilgrimage committee and the preservation committee. Ikeda is the TLC’s preservation committee chair.
“Maybe it was because I was comfortable in looking over some of the preservation-related documents,” said Ikeda, referring to how he became preservation committee chair. “I was a lawyer before I retired in 2007. And most of the people on the Tule Lake Committee were focusing on the pilgrimage, so there was a need for help on the preservation side. As the ‘new kid on the block,’ I wasn’t as burdened by pilgrimage tasks as the others, who were also involved in preservation, so I guess I wound up in that role by default.”
For Ikeda, the 2009 pilgrimage will always stand out since the Tule Lake site, at the time, was officially designated as part of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument. “If it weren’t for that designation, we would have had to lobby Congress over the course of probably the next five to seven years in order to get the required legislation enacted,” said Ikeda.
Barbara Takei became involved with the committee in 1999. At that time, she and Judy Tachibana had just received a California Civil Liberties Public Education Program grant to do a guide on the Tule Lake campsite.
“Doing the research on Tule Lake was compelling,” said Takei. “I realized that there were all these stories that were not being told, especially the no no, the renunciants — all the stories connected to segregation.”
The more Takei delved into Tule Lake, the more the stories resonated with her. “I grew up in Michigan,” Takei said, whose mother had been at Tule Lake before segregation. “And I believed all of that stuff that the Japanese did not protest, and I thought there must’ve been something wrong with us as a race or as an ethnic group because we hadn’t fought back. I kind of figured that I must not be Japanese American because I was this angry, rebellious child and had a lot of problems with authority figures. I thought maybe I’m not Japanese American because I didn’t fit the model minority stereotype.
“But when I started doing research on Tule Lake, I realized there was this whole protest story that happened here and it just grabbed me. This tells me what it means to be Japanese American. It connects me with that history.”
Stephanie Miyashiro, whose family was at Tule Lake and Topaz, attended her first pilgrimage in 1991as a representative for NCRR (then known as National Coalition for Redress and Reparations, today as Nikkei for Civil Rights and Reparations). As a graduate psychology student, Miyashiro saw how the redress movement had empowered the Nikkei community and she saw potential at the Tule Lake pilgrimages for further healing, particularly at the inter-generational discussions where former inmates share stories in a safe environment.
At the 1991 inter-generational discussion group, Miyashiro witnessed a Nisei man turn to his Caucasian friend and tearfully tell him the hurt he held as a result of the incarceration and how racism prevents one human being from connecting with another.
“I thought, ‘Wow, what an amazing thing, an amazing possibility for people to be able to speak to each other, heart to heart like that,” said Miyashiro. “And I’ve seen it happen many more times. People tell me their parents are different after coming back from the pilgrimage.”
For Lorna Fong, this was her fifth pilgrimage as a bus monitor. Her mother had been incarcerated at Tule Lake and her maternal grandfather, Daisaburo Kawano, who had lived in Block 12, had died at Tule Lake in a construction accident.
“I understand from Jimi Yamaichi that he (grandfather) was the only casualty from a non-conflict, non civil unrest situation in the history of the camp,” said Fong. “Mother tells the story and it’s a powerful one. And I’ve always been curious about this history, and after attending the first pilgrimage, I realized I had some work to do personally, so I’ve been volunteering in an effort, partially, to give back. But really, it’s helped me in my personal growth and understanding as a hapa Sansei, with a mother who had been interned. If I can help by volunteering to be a bus monitor to help facilitate having the pilgrimage, I think it’s not a big commitment of my time.”
During the pilgrimage, bus monitors always pass out an endless variety of snacks and water. Fong credited the participants for the supplies.
“We’re not buying a lot of this,” said Fong. “A lot of this is pilgrims bringing stuff on the bus — the arare, the senbei, the homemade cookies. The committee provides the water. What we’re doing is we’re trying to make it a more comfortable ride, whether it’s giving people a cold towel when they come back from an all day visit at the camp site or helping to do introductions on the bus or getting people to understand more about others on the bus and hearing about the stories — the stories that need to be told.”
More recently, Soji Kashiwagi, head of Grateful Crane, became active as TLC’s Southern California contact.
“My involvement is a very personal matter,” said Kashiwagi. “It’s my family. Not only my dad and his family, but also my mother’s entire family had been at Tule Lake. They’re all from the Sacramento area, so they were there originally (pre-segregation), and they just stayed for the duration, so it’s a tribute to my family that I’m involved.”
Kashiwagi hopes that more Tuleans will be encouraged to tell their stories. He noted that even his father, award-winning writer Hiroshi Kashiwagi, is still reluctant to talk about his renunciation.
“Growing up, he talked about camp but he didn’t talk about being a ‘no no’ or being a renunciant,” said Kashiwagi. “A lot of that stuff I sort of discovered more recently when I read his book. And even now, he doesn’t like to talk about that. He will if he’s pushed, but he really doesn’t like to. And it shouldn’t be that way, but that’s the way he was made to feel by our community since the end of the war.”
Pat Shiono, although no longer active with the TLC, was heavily involved in past pilgrimages and preservation efforts.
“I am deeply gratified that our work led to having Tule Lake Segregation center designated as a National Historic Landmark and that millions in federal funds are being allocated to preserve the former internment sites,” said Shiono through email. “I am grateful that the Tule Lake Committee continues to organize the four day pilgrimage to enable survivors and their families to come together for their remarkable healing process. I believe that volunteers have been organizing the pilgrimage for nearly 30 years, and by now, over 6,000 individuals have personally participated.”
Shiono felt that one of Tule Lake’s important lessons was to show that in a democracy, the people should not blindly follow leaders who were not upholding the Constitution.
“I got involved in the preservation of Tule Lake because I wanted to make sure that the difficult and tragic story of the internment and particularly the story of the resisters to internment is remembered,” said Shiono. “It was only in the 1990s that I found out that there was organized resistance to the internment and that individuals felt so strongly about their unjust imprisonment that they gave up their U.S. citizenship. Tule Lake Segregation Center is a historical reminder that there were thousands of heroes that stood up for their rights and took a strong stand against their country.”
On a personal level, Shiono said being involved helped her “heal personal wounds.”
“The unspoken agony and shame felt by my parents and grandparents was passed down to me in so many ways,” said Shiono. “Participating in the pilgrimage helped me to understand what my family went through and why they couldn’t talk about their imprisonment. I am grateful to survivors such as Jimi (Yamaichi) and Hiroshi (Shimizu) because they dared to break the silence about the camps.”
Volunteer Vicky Ono said her family was incarcerated at Colorado Rivers (Poston) during the war. “I have no idea where it (Poston) is,” said Ono. “Someone would have to take me and show me. And hopefully, someday I can visit it.”
Volunteer Wanda Heath, a Redding resident since 1948, was a child during the war, but she noted that the “attitudes towards the camps has changed more favorably.”
Volunteer Mary Burns hoped to learn more about the camps after viewing “The Cats of Mirikitani” in 2008. “I just loved that movie,” said Burns. “It was very inspirational.”
Volunteer Steven Provencher’s said his father served in the military during the war but held “no animosity towards Japanese Americans.”
Peter and Mary Lu are the owners of Tokyo Gardens, which catered the event. The couple emigrated from Taiwan and have been Redding residents for the past 15 years.
At one point, they owned a Chinese, Japanese, two Mexican restaurants and one sandwich shop.
“When we moved here, there weren’t many Japanese restaurants in this town, so we decided to open one,” said Mary.
The husband added, “In Taiwan, we eat lots of Japanese food, and my major in college was in hotel management so opening a Japanese restaurant was not that difficult.”
BUS DRIVERS
For over a decade, the Monarch (bus company??) based out of Pacific Grove, Calif., has driven participants to Tule Lake, the TLC makes a special request for senior driver Don Cox.
For Cox, 2009 was his fourth pilgrimage but his seventh drive up to Tule Lake. His other trips included teachers and JACL (Japanese American Citizens League) chapter members.
Cox, a Ohio native whose great-great grandfather was a Buffalo soldier, knew about the camps even before getting his first assignment to Tule Lake.
“I knew about the internment camps and knew they were nothing good,” said Cox. “I’m a hip pocket historian. I like history. And just in studying World War II, the camps were such a little footnote that you knew something else was going on. As I dug into it, dug into it, you find more and more, and then one day, the company says, ‘Hey, Don, you’re making this trip.’ That tied all the pieces together.
“I like to do this trip because what they’re doing here is important. If you don’t remember the past, you have a tendency to repeat it. As long as people know about what happened here, you won’t repeat the mistakes of the past.”
For driver James Franks, this was his second pilgrimage drive. “Don’s (Cox) been here since they started using our company, so he gave me the heads up on what happened here,” said Franks, who like Cox, is African American. “So I wasn’t ignorant to everything, but after going through the tour, it saddened me to know what had happened here. It’s just a shame how America does things some times.”
