I guess, it's kind--
I'm not going to do this as a formal presentation.
It's more of a talk and a sort of a chat and run through.
It's coming to me that people find it quite odd
that I write from a lot of history as a poet, you know,
that I write from information, and facts, and things.
And I'm trying to sort of grasp that just a bit.
But if this strikes you is too exotic,
just let me know and I'll try to sort of camp it up.
OK, no pun intended.
This is just a slide presentation
to sort of create more of a background
for a general audience about a cycle of poems I recently
written concerning the incarceration of a figure
I call Kubota, who's been imprisoned in the loop citizen
detention center on the Navajo Nation
at the loop trading post, a place near Flagstaff, Arizona,
actually.
It just so happens my grandfather,
my maternal grandfather, was in prison this way for some months
during World War II.
His name, of course, is Kubota.
The background has to do with the perception of who
Japanese-Americans were in the years between the gentleman's
agreement, in the early part of the 20th century,
between Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt,
and the Japanese government and the attack on Pearl Harbor,
and the hysteria that blossom like a malignancy
among the general populace in the aftermath of the strike.
What I'm trying to do is to give you
a bit of a cavalcade of that past
and situate the context of the Kubota cycle, the poems.
So this just is going to recap some history that most of you
probably already know.
But after the attack on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor,
that's the USS Arizona going down.
These are the kinds of headlines that people
were reading across the country about the Japanese
and Japanese-Americans.
These are headlines that are garnered from various sources,
leading to the--
the call for evacuation of all Japanese-Americans
in the West Coast.
This says, FBI Raids Jap Terrorists.
New FBI Raids on Enemy Aliens.
FBI Rounds up Black Dragon Society Members.
Japs Register for Evacuation and The Decision to Evacuate.
This photograph that was taken in San Francisco, so
happens in 1942, in the spring, as Japanese-Americans
were registering for the evacuation in compliance
with the civilian exclusion order ordered by President
Roosevelt of the FDR.
This happens to be a photograph taken
by Dorothea Lange, who many of you
know as a photographer of the Dust Bowl.
She also, along with Ansel Adams,
documented the evacuation and internment
of Japanese-Americans.
These are photographs from San Francisco.
In the left, you see the instructions to all Japanese,
to all persons of Japanese ancestry,
this was the evacuation order itself.
People were given 36 hours to pack up and leave their homes
and take only what they could carry.
120,000 Japanese-Americans were thus removed from their homes,
mostly west of Highway 99, on the Western-- three
Western States.
These are some of the headlines Ouster
of All Japs in California Near.
And of course, the point that these headlines are making,
or I'm making with these headlines,
is that there was no distinction between the Japanese-Americans
and the Japanese who attacked at Pearl Harbor.
I was in the floor of the Senate one day
when a HR442 the bill for redress for Japanese-Americans
was being debated.
And there was a debate between Senator Spark Matsunaga
from Hawaii and Senator Jesse Helms.
And Jesse Helms said, we shouldn't issue an apology
to any Japanese-Americans until the Japanese government
apologizes for Pearl Harbor.
And so you can see that the sort conflation of identity
still existed and persisted up until 1987,
when this conversation occurred on the floor of the Senate.
So here's two other photographs.
At the moment of evacuation, you can see the baggage tags
that people were issued with their citizen detention numbers
here.
This happens to be a man who grew up to sponsor
the first thoughts of redress.
His name was Edison Uno from San Francisco, actually, Oakland.
And here's a couple ready to board a train
to Poston, actually, Arizona.
The sign there says, we don't want any Japs back here ever.
This happens after the evacuation of Japanese.
And there's a young child in Marysville, California,
awaiting evacuation.
This is a map of the War Relocation Authority Internment
Centers augmented with the sites of the Department of Justice
Detention Centers and also the federal prisons,
which were used to detain the most incorrigible
of Japanese-American citizens.
There were several kinds of roundups.
And it's not generally known that there were.
The first round up took place on December, 8, 1941.
The Department of Justice, through the FBI,
arrested Japanese-Americans suspected
of fifth column activity in sabotage
and who were perceived as dangerous to security.
These tend to be community leaders, the wealthy,
the intellectual, the well educated doctors,
dentists, Buddhist priests, Shinto priests,
and Japanese language teachers.
A lot of Japanese-American shopkeepers in Hawaii
also were incarcerated, or detained and then incarcerated.
The mass evacuations took place around March
through May of 1942.
The first evacuation took place on Bainbridge Island,
and we saw that dramatized in the film Snow Falling
on Cedars.
And then down the West Coast, once the evacuation technique
was perfected, it was applied down the coast
to San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Generally, you would be sent to a assembly center, which
would be a racetrack, like Santa Anita in California,
or Tanforan in San Francisco, or the county
fairgrounds in Puyallup, Washington,
and then shipped to an internment center.
So there are ten internment centers, major ones.
Tule Lake in California, Minidoka, Idaho, Manzanar
in California, photographed by Ansel Adams.
Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Granada
in Colorado, Topaz, Utah, Heart Mountain, Wyoming, Rohwer
and Jerome in Arkansas.
The DOJ centers, major ones, Santa Fe, New Mexico,
Lordsburg, New Mexico, and the largest one,
Crystal City, Texas.
There were about 3,000 detained citizens in the DOJ camps,
or detention centers, and 120,000 Japanese
in the Relocation Authority where they
were called internment camps.
There are also some various federal prisons used.
Lordsburg, Fort Lincoln.
Leavenworth, of course, we have all heard of.
Also, Fort Missoula in Montana.
From Hawaii, the detainees were shipped
to first to Sand Island in the Honolulu harbor
and then usually to Oakland, California.
And from there they were sent around
to different kinds of detention centers.
Panama was near Bakersfield, and then a lot of them
were sent on to Fort Missoula.
From Fort Missoula, they were sent either to Crystal City,
Santa Fe, or Lordsburg.
A special prison was Catalina here in Arizona.
The conscientious objectors were concentrated there.
The people who didn't want to obey the internment order.
People who had federal trials.
People who refused during the internment itself
to sign a loyalty oath to serve in the United States Armed
forces.
So there are a lot of kinds of detention and internment
is the point here.
And then we, the United States government,
had no lack of facilities, as you can see.
This is just a chart breakdown of what they were.
The first 10 are the 10 internment centers.
You could see the largest one was Tule Lake, 18,000 at peak.
The second largest was Poston, Arizona.
A little known fact, Poston, Arizona,
was the third largest city in Arizona
during World War II in terms of population.
You see the 3,000 in the DOJ camps and about 2,300
in the military facilities.
These are photographs of the evacuation
and initial detention.
You can see people being put in a place that
was meant for animals, here up on the right.
It's a kind of fairgrounds in Puyallup.
And here is an assembly center near Oakland, California.
Here's an actual postcard that survives from World War
II with the jaunty caption stuck in the sand on the way
to the internment camps.
These were made by people who are going to Poston, Arizona.
There's a photograph from Poston.
You can see that the barracks were still being built.
This is early in 1942.
Here's a map of the region.
What is it Michael found for me?
It was 164.3 miles northwest of Phoenix.
Some more pictures of Poston.
Here's the barracks being built on the right.
Here, this is a golf club, Japanese chess, and also
The City, the Poston paper, the camp paper.
These are larger general pictures of different camps.
Gila River, Heart Mountain, and Manzanar in the winter.
You can see that the accommodations were superb.
Manzanar, and here's a photograph
of a demonstration at Tule Lake protesting treatment.
And here's some photographs of welcoming.
Tule Lake was the hard cases, where all the families were
set whose men refused to sign the loyalty oath,
questions 27 and 28 of a large--
There was a plan to get the Japanese-Americans repatriated
back to life.
But before that could happen, because of the different issues
socially and politically, the War Relocation Authority
and the Department of Defense, actually
the Department of army, wanted Japanese-Americans
who would be released from these internment centers
to sign a loyalty oath, and most did.
It was quite a bitter and controversial topic
in the camps at the time.
Some Japanese didn't want to do it
because they didn't want to be loyal to a country that
put them all in prison, essentially.
They didn't think they should sign it.
But this was perceived by other Japanese-Americans who
wanted to be released as a way to perpetuate
the prejudice that Japanese-Americans
were disloyal.
So it broke out in a lot of bitter strife.
There was a lot of fights, a lot of backbiting,
and physical attacks.
This is portrayed very well in the film Farewell
to Manzanar, from the book by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.
Here are some of detainee photographs
of detention centers.
Bottom two are Crystal City Texas.
Families were kept there.
The fellows who were rounded up initially
were subsequently allowed to bring their families to where
they were incarcerated.
Crystal City was the largest center for that in Texas.
The above photograph is actually of Angel Island.
The center, the barracks where a lot of Chinese-Americans
were held as they were immigrating to the United
States.
One of the ironies is that was one
of the facilities which was used for the first round
of Japanese-Americans.
These are going to be photographs of the detention
centers.
These are not the internment camps.
These are the DOJ and the federal prisons,
the DOJ detention centers.
They were called Citizen Detention Centers.
Notice, Kooskia was a work camp for construction of roads.
Here, it's Fort Lincoln, Nebraska.
And up there as a photograph of from Lupe, Arizona.
Here's some photographs of Fort Missoula in Montana.
And you notice that there's a group
from Hawaii in Fort Missoula.
Those were shopkeepers, storekeepers,
and schoolteachers usually.
A lot of them were sent on to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
You can see they kept up their Hawai'i no ka 'oi spirit, even
in detention.
Now, I want to talk about the citizen isolation centers.
These were two special camps created
after different kinds of trouble in the other internment
and detention centers.
Where the War Relocation Authority thought
they should separate some of the troublemakers,
the rabble-rousers in camps.
Also, some of the detainees who were
truculent during interrogation by the FBI right
after December 7, in the first roundup.
So these were for the so-called hard cases.
And they ranged in their crimes from talking back
to authorities, to work stoppage, strikers
in their jobs and the internment camps,
to people who are unresponsive in interrogation and people who
refused to sign the loyalty oath and may have--
also a couple of guys who were in opposing factions
in Heart Mountain, California, Heart Mountain in Wyoming.
Guys who wanted to sign a loyalty oath and guys
who didn't got to do a fight and they
were sent to the same detention center, isolation center.
So this is basically the principal's office
of all these kinds of things.
Here's a photograph of the time from the loop trading
post near Flagstaff, Arizona.
It's on the Mongolian plateau.
Again, a very similar WRA construction of barracks.
And then here's a picture right out
of the outside of the trading post of the loop isolation
center.
The full name is citizen isolation center.
And this is, you can see where it
was, just northwest of Flagstaff on the way towards Winslow,
right on the Navajo Nation.
There's some photographs.
This is the trading post soon after the war.
And this is what it looks like now on the highway.
And those are two photographs at the time where
the superintendent stayed and the great view
from the stockade and loop.
There were 29 Japanese-Americans detained at Lupe at the peak.
They were sent there from Moab, Utah,
where they were first sent.
And so these were supposedly thought
of as the most incorrigible Japanese-Americans.
There 29 Japanese-Americans, you know, about 500 Navajos and 150
American soldiers at Lupe.