SATSUKI INA: This is a photo of my mother, Shizuko Ina.
She was called to report to this center in San Francisco Japantown.
So, she's standing in line waiting to get her family number on a card.
By which they would be identified for the rest of the time that they were incarcerated.
She's pregnant with my older brother in that photo.
My name is Satsuki Ina.
I was born in the Tule Lake concentration camp during World War Two.
Satsuki Ina’s mother, Shizuko, was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in
concentration camps during World War II.
Satsuki told me over the phone that when this photo was taken in April 1942, her mother
was living in San Francisco.
That sign on the wall behind her is a notice posted by the US Army.
Instructing all people of Japanese descent living in the area to register themselves,
and their families, for “evacuation” – or face criminal penalties.
SATSUKI INA: But addressed it to “aliens and non-aliens.”
And non-alien is, of course, a citizen.
This photo was taken by Dorothea Lange.
One of the great American photographers of the 20th century.
Lange took hundreds of photos of Japanese Americans in 1942.
But her images remained mostly unseen until decades later.
SATSUKI INA: The government was so effective at distorting the true narrative of what they
did, why they did it, and what happened to the people.
Japanese Americans had been segregated from white American culture going back to the first
arrival of Japanese immigrants in the late 1800s.
And faced a wave of anti-Japanese legislation starting in the 1920s.
But after Japan’s bombing of the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor,
a surprise attack that left over 2,000 Americans dead,
Japanese Americans became targets of violence and increased suspicion.
SATSUKI INA: Within hours of the attack, FBI agents showed up in the Japanese American
communities and removed the Issei first-generation men.
Who had been already listed as potential threats before the war broke out.
They were labeled “enemy aliens,” along with some German and Italian nationals, and
were to be interned for the duration of the war.
GARY OKIHIRO: They felt that that would remove the leadership.
And so that masses of Japanese could not act in concert against US interests.
Gary Okihiro is a scholar and author whose work, going back to the 1970s, helped pioneer
the academic field of Asian American Studies.
GARY OKIHIRO: They were satisfied with the removal of just the leaders of the Japanese
American community and their detention.
Not a mass removal.
But the politicians intervened.
Even though the Japanese American leadership was already interned, newspapers and politicians
started stoking the fear of a new threat:
the “fifth column.”
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: The Trojan Horse.
The fifth column.
A “fifth column” is a generic term that refers to a group within a wartime country
secretly loyal to the enemy.
A hypothetical Japanese fifth column was invented in newspapers,
and was used by politicians to justify anti-Japanese rhetoric.
SATSUKI INA: Japanese Americans living in certain areas were identified as “fifth
columnists.”
GARY OKIHIRO: They were depicted as insidious and as threats to the government.
So there was a kind of shift in public opinion.
Even though the “fifth column” didn’t exist,
the idea of it was powerful enough for the American public to demand the government do
something drastic.
And, in February 1942, the Roosevelt administration did, by passing Executive Order 9066.
Which empowered the army to forcibly remove anyone it deemed a threat from “strategic
military areas.”
In this case, the entire West Coast of the United States.
The order didn’t explicitly mention Japanese Americans, but there was no question they
were the target.
SATSUKI INA: Executive Order 9066 ripped people from their homes, their jobs, their education,
their farms.
And most people were never able to recover the loss that they suffered.
My parents were incarcerated for four and a half years.
Two-thirds of the 120,000 Japanese Americans removed from their homes and forced into concentration
camps, including Satsuki’s parents, were American citizens by birth.
Which, in a war supposedly being fought in the name of “freedom,” presented an image
problem for the US government.
GARY OKIHIRO: The government was well aware that the whole experience was a problem.
The Roosevelt administration wanted to frame the removal as orderly, humane, and, above
all, necessary.
The government created a new department, the War Relocation Authority, or WRA, to handle
the removal.
And more importantly, document it — through propaganda films, pamphlets, and news photographs.
GARY OKIHIRO: They thought that documenting it would demonstrate the government's goodwill
and service.
One of the WRA's high-profile hires was Dorothea Lange.
GARY OKIHIRO: And of course, Lange was really made famous by her 1930s Great Depression
photographs for the Farm Security Administration.
In 1942, the WRA tasked her with photographing the Japanese American removal process in California.
Lange photographed the rapid changes happening in Japanese American communities.
Including Japanese-owned farms and businesses shutting down.
She photographed families in front of the homes they owned.
Children attending school for only a few more weeks.
This final game between friends.
And a last minute barbecue.
Her captions often noted how close in time they were taken prior to evacuation.
Weeks, then days, then hours before removal to the camps.
And the baggage piled up on the day of removal.
SATSUKI INA: She captured the anxiety, the distress.
But also captured kind of the dignity of how nicely dressed people were.
You know, they’ve got their hats and coats and ties on, and their high heels on.
Photos like this one weren’t approved for circulation by the WRA.
SATSUKI INA: They weren't very friendly to her once they saw how she was narrating, visually,
the story.
This photo, along with many prints of Lange’s, have one word written across them in cursive:
“impounded.”
Internal WRA memos from 1942 revealed that the army was “deeply concerned” about
Lange’s photos.
They described her as “highly emotional.”
And her negatives were surrendered and the prints “impounded.”
By order of the press relations officer for the WRA, Major Norman Beasley.
Of the approximately 700 photos Lange took for the WRA, around 80 are singled out as
“impounded.”
Since the WRA owned the rights to all of Lange’s photos,
and army permission was necessary to publish any of them,
it’s unclear what exactly the distinction was.
But the “impounded” images seem to fall into a couple of categories.
One was photos of the removal process that included armed US soldiers.
So this photo showing Satsuki’s mom, Shizuko, was impounded.
This one, from another angle, wasn’t.
This photo shows soldiers boarding Japanese Americans onto buses to the so-called “assembly
centers.”
Temporary prisons used while the concentration camps were built, that included racetracks
in disuse.
Where Japanese Americans were housed in horse stalls.
A lot of these photos were labelled “impounded” too.
SATSUKI INA: My parents were in a racetrack just outside of San Francisco.
My mother’s pregnant, placed inside of these horse stables.
So she had to endure the horse stables while she was in this very fragile condition.
And, you know, it's a dehumanizing process
The other types of photos labelled “impounded” were images of incarcerated Japanese Americans
waiting in line for food at the assembly centers.
And Japanese Americans wearing US army uniforms.
Other impounded photos don’t fall into a clean category.
Like this one of a Buddhist priest locking the doors of his church before evacuation.
SATSUKI INA: She, I think, captured the fact that they're being victimized, but also held
on to the humanness of who they were.
GARY OKIHIRO: While she was working for the government, she was also working for the subjects
of her photographs.
And I think that's why it was obvious that the government had to impound those pictures
for the duration of the war.
In July 1942, the WRA released Lange from the program, just four months after she started.
They withheld most of her photos from the public for the rest of the war.
Both the ones marked impounded and the others.
With a few exceptions, like this WRA pamphlet, “Relocation of Japanese Americans” that
included a few Lange photos.
When asked in the early 1960s about her wartime experience, Lange said
“They had wanted a record, but not a public record.”
Lange wasn’t the only WRA photographer whose photos were “impounded.”
These images by press photographer Clem Albers, who also briefly worked for the WRA, were
given the same label.
The WRA did endorse other photos at the time.
Most notably from photographer Ansel Adams.
Whose photos from the Manzanar concentration camp depicted happy, smiling faces and grand
Western landscapes.
As opposed to the more candid approach in Lange’s images.
GARY OKIHIRO: Dorothea Lange, she understood that humanity was comprised not just of happy,
smiling faces.
But also those that are fearful, apprehensive.
Amidst a whole process that sought to dehumanize them, to take away their humanity.
By 1943, the government acknowledged that “no known acts of sabotage, espionage, or
fifth column activity were committed by the Japanese” before or after Pearl Harbor.
But the last camps weren’t closed until 1946, the year after Japan surrendered.
That year, Satsuki’s father, who had been held in a separate camp during the war, reunited
with them in a detention facility in Crystal City, Texas.
SATSUKI INA: So my earliest recollection is being on the train leaving Crystal City.
So it was 1946 when our family was reunited.
That same year, US President Harry Truman terminated the WRA, and all of its records,
including 10s of 1000s of negatives photos, were moved into the National Archives
in Washington, DC.
It would take another 25 years for Lange’s WRA photographs to be widely seen by the public.
When her former assistant requested they be pulled from the National Archives.
For a 1972 exhibit by the California Historical Society, Executive Order 9066.
The exhibit toured the country, and was featured in a 1972 NBC TV documentary, “Guilty by
Reason of Race.”
SATSUKI INA: I think the fact that it was Dorothea Lange that chronicled what happened
– her notoriety and the fact that the photos were released after they had been suppressed
brought a lot of validation.
The photos revealed, for many, the cruelty unleashed by Roosevelt’s Executive Order.
They were also published in a book of the same name.
The book, like the exhibit, showed photos of the removal process next to headlines and
quotes from the time.
Like this one from a Los Angeles Examiner article from 1943.
GARY OKIHIRO: EO9066, the exhibit, I learned of it through the publication of the images
and the text.
It helped to galvanize our generation, the third generation’s, efforts towards redress
and reparations.
That movement finally resulted in reparations for survivors of the camps.
When US President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
RONALD REAGAN: This action was taken without trial, without jury.
It was based solely on race.
Here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.
Nearly 50 years after the government had violated 120,000 individual people’s civil liberties,
the US admitted it had made a mistake.
SATSUKI INA: So I took a picture of my mom, she must have been in her seventies, standing
in front of that photograph taken by Dorothea Lange.
This is shortly after reparations.
She felt like it was concrete evidence about her history and what happened to her.
It gave her permission to talk more about her experience.
GARY OKIHIRO: She has a photograph of a grandfather and a grandson in Manzanar.
And she's shot it going upward, so the humans stand immense in front of the Sierra Nevadas,
the mountains.
She also shows the older people who suffered most in the camps.
And the children, the future generations.
Continuity, that we have a future here in this country.
Her photographs demonstrated the complexity of human relationships around oppression
and resistance.
Pretty much all of Lange’s photos of Japanese Americans in 1942 have their own whole story
behind them.
Like this one, of the Wanto Shokai grocery store in Oakland, CA.
Lange wrote in the caption that the owner, Tatsuro Masuda, hung this sign outside of
his family’s store the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Masuda was born in California.
His father had emigrated from Japan in the 1890s, and opened the family store in 1916.
When Lange took this photo in March, 1942, the Masudas had closed the store, following
Roosevelt’s Executive Order.
They were placed in a concentration camp in Arizona.
This photo, taken around 1945, shows Tatsuro with his family after they were released from
the camp.
Thanks so much to Gerry Naruo, Tatsuro’s nephew, for sharing these photos of the Masuda
family with us.
As always, there’s more in the description, including a link to the collection of Lange’s
WRA photos with the word “impounded” written on the prints, which are held at the UC Berkeley,
Bancroft Library.
And a link to Satsuki Ina’s award-winning documentary about her family’s incarceration
during World War II, “From A Silk Cocoon.”