Misread, illegible, invisible: Searching for a vocabulary for Tule Lake
From our bus, we could see acres of sun-dried grasses in a hot and arid Northern California. On either side of the road: barbed-wire fences, like the ones our family members spent years behind, living in crowded tar paper barracks with little privacy.
“How many of you have been here before, or were here during World War II?” our tour guide asked. A few Japanese Americans—in their 70s and 80s, or older—raised their hands. Many of us were stunned by what the tour guide said next, almost in passing.
“Welcome back.”
Did the guide just welcome our elders back to the site of their wartime imprisonment? Dismayed murmurs arose among us.
I think what the guide—a park ranger partnering with the Tule Lake Committee for this community pilgrimage—meant was, we are honored you have returned. This is just one of the strange rhetorical situations I find myself in, as a direct descendant of a Japanese American concentration camp survivor.
As a society, we are still developing the right vocabulary for recognizing the damage of Japanese American wartime incarceration. Because we do not have the right descriptors or labels, community pilgrimages like the one I embarked on in 2014 are misread, illegible, or invisible. The wrong language can prevent survivors and descendants from visiting former sites of Japanese American incarceration to honor our history—and to heal.
My father and his family members were among the thousands of incarcerated people at Tule Lake during World War II. In total, the U.S. government imprisoned 125,384 “persons of Japanese descent” living on the West Coast during the war years, roughly half of them American citizens held without due process. The nonprofit Densho has mapped close to 100 sites of Japanese American incarceration across the country.
Today, most sites have faded into the landscape without visible historical markers; those that remain are at risk of closing off access.
One publicized battle is taking place at the Minidoka concentration camp site in Idaho. Most camp buildings are gone, but currently, the site is open to visitors daily, with guided tours on summer weekends. A proposed wind farm would put 12 720-foot-tall wind turbines there, forever disrupting the remote and desolate viewshed that Minidoka visitors experience now. Adding insult to injury, the Bureau of Land Management’s 2023 draft environmental impact statement listed Minidoka as a “tourist spot.” In response, Japanese American survivors, descendants, and allies mounted a powerful campaign against this terminology. “I am not a tourist,” read one poster by protester Paul Tomita. “I am a survivor.”
What’s happening in Minidoka is happening across the country. Six years ago, I joined other Japanese American activists organizing protests to stop the construction of a 3-mile long, 8-foot high, barbed wire-topped fence around the Tule Lake airfield that would have effectively closed public access to the site. “We lived near the fence all our lives,” wrote my uncle, Tule Lake survivor and poet Hiroshi Kashiwagi, in a 2017 poem protesting that construction.
At Tule Lake, the airfield fence is just one problem. Battles between different entities have occupied stewards of the site for nearly five years. Only 37 acres of the thousand-plus-acre site are protected as a national monument.
Language won’t solve this tangle but it can clarify the stakes. Tule Lake is perhaps the most infamous of the World War II concentration camps. Its population eventually swelled close to 18,000 after it was designated as a segregation center for “disloyals”—a label given to people based on their responses to a poorly worded government questionnaire to determine (supposed) loyalty. Because Tule became known as the camp for troublemakers, many survivors did not want to admit that they were incarcerated there. Even within the Japanese American community, those who resisted in any way—like those who intentionally answered no to both loyalty questions, “no-no’s,” including my uncle—were shunned and ostracized.
How we recognize these sites matters; how we name the site visitors matters. As Manzanar survivor and researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga once wrote, “Words can lie or clarify.” Let’s take that further: Words have lied about this history—so they should clarify how we remember it.
When I came to Tule Lake in 2014, I didn’t come in a traditional pilgrimage sense: to receive blessings, or to see where a miracle happened. But I can say the reasons for my journey was transcendent, spiritual. So much so that I’d use, hesitantly, a different word with religious overtones to describe my time there now: communion.
Tamiko Nimura is a creative nonfiction writer and public historian living in Tacoma, Washington, and is completing a book project entitled “A Place for What We Lose: A Daughter's Return to Tule Lake.”
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Misread, illegible, invisible: Searching for a vocabulary for Tule Lake
