Naomi Hirahara weaves a murder mystery into a 1940s historical novel and it's swell

Just when I think I’ve read every World War Two-era novel….

“Clark and Division” by Naomi Hirahara brings us into the life of Aki Ito. She’s a spirited young woman, smart and attractive and a bit self-conscious living in her talented older sister’s shadow. She yearns for just the right job and boyfriend, likes to hang around with friends, and knows how to dance the Lindy Hop.

So, she’s just like any other Southern California teen. But you add in the setting conjured by Hirahara and things get serious. Aki is Nisei, born in the U.S. of Japan-born parents. In 1942, her entire family is shipped to Manzanar internment camp, leaving behind their home and property and all-American dreams. Aki spends two years at Manzanar and, at 20, lucks out when selected for the government resettlement program which allows Nisei to move to middle America away from the coasts and start new lives. Aki chooses Chicago because that’s where her sister Rose has resettled. Before Aki and her parents can get off the train, her sister is dead, ostensibly by suicide. She allegedly jumped head-on into an El train and is killed instantly. Nobody knows why. Aki is crushed.

A great set-up for a mystery. Aki is still in shock when she discovers the secret behind Rose’s death and realizes she seems to be the only one interested in figuring out what really happened. She plods along at first but then discovers the strength to take the risks that will solve the case. Along the way, we meet the Nisei of the Clark and Division neighborhood. She has to hide her quest from her very traditional Issei parents. Along the way, we learn about Japanese-American lives, the foods they eat, their jobs, their dreams and fears. The most charming thing about this book are life’s daily details. Hirahara writes the Japanese terms for food, clothes, and many other things. I felt the crushing heat of a Chicago summer. I know how people got around in the city. Some especially good details about riding the El or Elevated Train. I got to see the workings of the famous Newberry Library. I know, the details of a library aren’t exactly high drama. But maybe they are. All this makes the book so down-to-earth and thrilling.

The ending is heartbreaking but also guides Aki into the future. And into the just-published sequel, “Evergreen.” In it, Aki has become a nurse’s aide and returns to southern California where she and other Japanese-Americans have to start from scratch – again. There’s also a murder, of course. While the book is listed under mystery, I’m sure it’s filled with the cultural and location detail that also makes for great historical fiction. Hirahara now has a series on her hands which she’s done before with her earlier books: Mas Arai and Leila Santiago. "Evergreen" is now the second book in the Japantown Series. I’ve ordered a copy. You should too.

Discovery of World War II internment camp letters brings back post-war Denver memories

"V" is for victory. Alissa Williams holds up a T.K. Pharmacy newspaper ad that was found in a stash of World War II internment camp letters and documents in Denver. AP Photo/Ed Andrieski.

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A young couple renovating an abandoned pharmacy in Denver's Five Points neighborhood found a hidden stash of letters and documents from World War II Japanese-American internment camps.

I missed the AP story about the find when it appeared on Thanksgiving. But saw it today at MSNBC Online. I noticed that the name of the building was T.K. Pharmacy and it was owned by Colorado native Thomas "T.K." Kobayashi. T.K. Kobayashi was my childhood doctor. My mother was a nurse who knew the doctor from her work at Denver's Mercy Hospital. I was born at Mercy, as were five of my brothers and sisters. My mother liked Dr. Kobayashi so much that she hauled us from southeast Denver to his Five Points office upstairs from the pharmacy for check-ups and immunizations and the usual assortment of maladies. If I remember correctly, Dr. Kobayashi was in the U.S. Army during the war, possibly with the famous Nisei 442 Regimental Combat Team. At least one of his partners was also a veteran, a Dr. Momei, who walked with a limp and could be gruff.

Five Points was predominately black at this time, home to the Rossonian Hotel that housed the most famous jazz club between St. Louis and L.A. Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Dinah Washington and Nat King Cole all performed there from the 1930s to 1960s. They also stayed at the Rossonian, since they weren't welcomed at other Denver establishments.

The T.K. Pharmacy also wasn't far away from the small Japanese-American community located in the area where Sakura Square is now situated. During the war, Colorado's Japanese-Americans were not relocated to the camps, even though there was one, Camp Amache, in the southern part of the state.

According to the AP story, Tak Terasaki, T.K.'s brother-in-law, ran the pharmacy during the war. He was reputed to be involved with group that advocated for internees' civil rights. His wife was secretary to Gov. Ralph Carr, the gutsy Republican who openly invited Japanese-Americans to Colorado during the war. That cost him his political career, but he remains a Colorado hero.

Red-lining kept people of color out of white Denver neighborhoods until the late 1960s. That was the case for both housing and businesses, which is why the T.K. Pharmacy was located in Five Points. It was a thriving business -- the waiting room was always filled. In 1960, our family moved from Denver to Moses Lake, Washington, where my father built ICBM silos. Dr. Kobayashi and his colleagues eventually bought an office building across from Mercy Hospital in City Park South. They were only happy to take the rent money of white folks, many of them physicians.

So it goes.

Dr. Kobayashi made house calls. Not unusual in the 1950s. One night in the dead of winter, I awoke in agony with a pain in my groin. My mother was a nurse but this was beyond her skills. She called Dr. Kobayashi and he came to the house. My father was not pleased, as he was a World War II veteran and, well, "Japs" had been the enemy during the recent worldwide conflagration. To his credit, he didn't interfere when the doctor came to call. I had an strangulated inguinal hernia. Not sure what the Doc did, but whatever it was, the pain stopped. A few weeks later, I went under the knife and he visited me as he made his rounds at Mercy Hospital. My mother was on duty, too, along with one of the nursing nuns. I got ice cream, I remember that. Not sure of the Doc prescribed that or if my mother gets the credit.

That wasn't the last time I was attended by Dr. Kobayashi. I had two more operations and was in the hospital twice with pneumonia before I turned 10. I was a sickly kid, but haven't spent a night in a hospital since.

What's going to happen to the letters, documents, newspapers and catalogs unearthed at the T.K. Pharmacy? Alissa Williams and her husband offered them to the Japanese American National Museum in L.A. Seems like they should stay in Colorado where they've resided the past 80 years or so. A testament to the good doctors. That's the name of one of the stories in my first collection. "The Good Doctors." It was based on the three Nisei doctors with the busy walk-up office in Five Points.

Read the AP story by Colleen Slevin here.

Alissa Williams holds up a an advertising flyer from T.K. Pharmacy at her home in Denver. The flyer from the early 1940s was found with other documents and letters during renovations at a former Denver pharmacy owned by Japanese-Americans. Some letters arriving from Japanese-American internment camps during World War II were very specific, asking for a certain brand of bath powder, cold cream or cough drops. Others were just desperate for anything from the outside world. AP Photo/Ed Andrieski. By: Colleen Slevin, Associated Press DENVER (AP).- Some letters arriving from Japanese-American internment camps during World War II were very specific, asking for a certain brand of bath powder, cold cream or cough drops — but only the red ones. Others were just desperate for anything from the outside world. "Please don't send back my check. Send me anything," one letter said from a California camp on April 19, 1943. The letters, discovered recently during renovations at a former Denver pharmacy owned by Japanese-Americans, provide a glimpse into life in some of the 10 camps where 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens, from the West Coast were forced to live during the war. They were written in English and in Japanese, expressing the kinds of mundane needs and wants of everyday life, such as medicine as well as condoms, cosmetics and candy. About 250 letters and postcards, along with war-time advertisements and catalogs, came tumbling out of the wall at a historic brick building on the outskirts of downtown. The reason they were in the wall and how they got there are a mystery, particularly because other documents were out in the open. The letters haven't been reviewed by experts, though the couple that found them has contacted the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to gauge interest in the missives. It wasn't unusual for internees to order items from mail order catalogs or from the many companies that placed ads in camp newspapers, selling everything from T-shirts to soy sauce, said Alisa Lynch, chief of interpretation at the Manzanar National Historic Site, which was the location of a camp south of Independence, Calif. They earned up to $19 a month doing jobs at camps and some were able to bring money with them before they were interned, Lynch said. The building where the documents were discovered had been vacant for seven years when Alissa and Mitch Williams bought it in 2010. The T.K. Pharmacy was originally owned by Thomas Kobayashi, a native Coloradan of Japanese descent, but during the war it was run by his brother-in-law, Yutaka "Tak" Terasaki, who died in 2004, according to his younger brother, Sam Terasaki of Denver. Sam Terasaki was in the service then and doesn't remember his brother talking about taking orders from internment camps. He said his brother may have gotten involved because of his longtime participation in the Japanese American Citizens' League, a national group dedicated to protecting Japanese-Americans' civil rights. He said his brother's wife worked as a secretary to Gov. Ralph Carr, who took the politically unpopular stand of welcoming Japanese-Americans to the state. Some writers noted seeing ads for the pharmacy. One letter from a man who said he arrived at the Poston, Ariz., camp "half dead" addressed his letter directly to "Tak" and asked for chocolate. "I had to wait twenty hours in the middle of the desert at (illegible) Junction, no place to go, just wait," he wrote. The other camps the letters came from included Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Gila River in Arizona, and others in McGehee, Ark., Topaz, Utah and Granada in southern Colorado. Japanese-Americans who lived in Colorado and elsewhere in the interior West weren't interned. The relatively small but stable Japanese-American community that began taking hold in Colorado in the 1880s provided a support network for those forcibly moved from California to the state camp, state historian Bill Convery said. Internees at that camp were able to leave with permission and could visit Denver as well as a fish market near the camp opened by two men of Japanese ancestry. It was relocated to Denver after the war. Convery said the pharmacy could have been one of the few Japanese-American owned pharmacies in the West, since business owners on the coast were interned. It could offer products favored by internees — who had one week to pack up two suitcases and sell any assets — and they might have felt more comfortable dealing with a Japanese-American-owned company, given tensions during the war. Internees couldn't bring much to camp and they didn't know where they were headed or how long they'd be gone. "So as much as anything could soften the blow of that unimaginable situation, those businesses did what they could," Convery said. Alissa Williams has been poring over the letters and wondering about the stories behind the polite orders, including one for diabetes medicine. Her grandmother, aunt and uncle suffer from the disease and she wondered what they would do without medicine. The mother of a 2-year-old, she also thought about how she would cope in such a camp. "I can put myself in their place, they're having kids, they're sick and they can't get what they need," she said. "... But no one is complaining."

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Alissa Williams holds up a an advertising flyer from T.K. Pharmacy at her home in Denver. The flyer from the early 1940s was found with other documents and letters during renovations at a former Denver pharmacy owned by Japanese-Americans. Some letters arriving from Japanese-American internment camps during World War II were very specific, asking for a certain brand of bath powder, cold cream or cough drops. Others were just desperate for anything from the outside world. AP Photo/Ed Andrieski. By: Colleen Slevin, Associated Press DENVER (AP).- Some letters arriving from Japanese-American internment camps during World War II were very specific, asking for a certain brand of bath powder, cold cream or cough drops — but only the red ones. Others were just desperate for anything from the outside world. "Please don't send back my check. Send me anything," one letter said from a California camp on April 19, 1943. The letters, discovered recently during renovations at a former Denver pharmacy owned by Japanese-Americans, provide a glimpse into life in some of the 10 camps where 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens, from the West Coast were forced to live during the war. They were written in English and in Japanese, expressing the kinds of mundane needs and wants of everyday life, such as medicine as well as condoms, cosmetics and candy. About 250 letters and postcards, along with war-time advertisements and catalogs, came tumbling out of the wall at a historic brick building on the outskirts of downtown. The reason they were in the wall and how they got there are a mystery, particularly because other documents were out in the open. The letters haven't been reviewed by experts, though the couple that found them has contacted the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to gauge interest in the missives. It wasn't unusual for internees to order items from mail order catalogs or from the many companies that placed ads in camp newspapers, selling everything from T-shirts to soy sauce, said Alisa Lynch, chief of interpretation at the Manzanar National Historic Site, which was the location of a camp south of Independence, Calif. They earned up to $19 a month doing jobs at camps and some were able to bring money with them before they were interned, Lynch said. The building where the documents were discovered had been vacant for seven years when Alissa and Mitch Williams bought it in 2010. The T.K. Pharmacy was originally owned by Thomas Kobayashi, a native Coloradan of Japanese descent, but during the war it was run by his brother-in-law, Yutaka "Tak" Terasaki, who died in 2004, according to his younger brother, Sam Terasaki of Denver. Sam Terasaki was in the service then and doesn't remember his brother talking about taking orders from internment camps. He said his brother may have gotten involved because of his longtime participation in the Japanese American Citizens' League, a national group dedicated to protecting Japanese-Americans' civil rights. He said his brother's wife worked as a secretary to Gov. Ralph Carr, who took the politically unpopular stand of welcoming Japanese-Americans to the state. Some writers noted seeing ads for the pharmacy. One letter from a man who said he arrived at the Poston, Ariz., camp "half dead" addressed his letter directly to "Tak" and asked for chocolate. "I had to wait twenty hours in the middle of the desert at (illegible) Junction, no place to go, just wait," he wrote. The other camps the letters came from included Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Gila River in Arizona, and others in McGehee, Ark., Topaz, Utah and Granada in southern Colorado. Japanese-Americans who lived in Colorado and elsewhere in the interior West weren't interned. The relatively small but stable Japanese-American community that began taking hold in Colorado in the 1880s provided a support network for those forcibly moved from California to the state camp, state historian Bill Convery said. Internees at that camp were able to leave with permission and could visit Denver as well as a fish market near the camp opened by two men of Japanese ancestry. It was relocated to Denver after the war. Convery said the pharmacy could have been one of the few Japanese-American owned pharmacies in the West, since business owners on the coast were interned. It could offer products favored by internees — who had one week to pack up two suitcases and sell any assets — and they might have felt more comfortable dealing with a Japanese-American-owned company, given tensions during the war. Internees couldn't bring much to camp and they didn't know where they were headed or how long they'd be gone. "So as much as anything could soften the blow of that unimaginable situation, those businesses did what they could," Convery said. Alissa Williams has been poring over the letters and wondering about the stories behind the polite orders, including one for diabetes medicine. Her grandmother, aunt and uncle suffer from the disease and she wondered what they would do without medicine. The mother of a 2-year-old, she also thought about how she would cope in such a camp. "I can put myself in their place, they're having kids, they're sick and they can't get what they need," she said. "... But no one is complaining."

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"Muslim Self Portraits" exhibit at Heart Mountain Interpretive Center comes under fire

From the Heart Mountain Foundation web site:

The Heart Mountain Interpretive Center at the site of a World War II Japanese-American internment camp outside of Cody, Wyo. will present a new exhibit featuring self-portraits that reveal Muslim Americans in everyday life. The exhibit is intended to counteract stereotypes and preconceived notions about Muslims in America at this time in history. Esse Quam Videri: Muslim Self-Portraits will be exhibited in the Ford Foundation Special Exhibition Area through Sept. 18, 2012.

"This exhibit is the first in a series of exhibits at the Interpretive Center that will encourage visitors to think about prejudice, stereotyping and religious, racial and ethnic profiling," said Stevan Leger executive director.

"Esse Quam Videri" means "to be rather than to seem." The exhibit includes photographs, collaged images and self-drawn portraits of and by Muslim Americans are presented with short essays to add context.

For more information, please contact Steve Leger at 307-754-8000 or by email at sleger@heartmountain.org.

Interesting to note that the exhibit has drawn a fair number of critics. This was in an excellent July 30 editorial in the Casper Star-Tribune:

Leslie Maslak of Cody recently questioned the new exhibit in a letter published in The Billings Gazette. “What in the world does a Muslim exhibit have to do with the Japanese-Americans’ internment?” she asked.

Maslak added, “Is this a ‘comparison’ to how we mistreat the ‘peace-loving’ Muslims? Whatever the reason, this exhibit does not belong at the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp.”

Many other area residents apparently agree. An online poll by The Powell Tribune showed that through July 27, 55.9 percent of 1,101 respondents agreed with the center’s decision to host the exhibit, while 44.1 percent disagreed.

--clip--

Shirley Ann Higuchi, chairwoman of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation’s board of directors and the daughter of Heart Mountain internees, explained why the exhibit is perfectly in keeping with the story told by the center.

Higuchi said even 70 years after the internment camps were opened, “We are still sometimes misled by the power of false stereotypes to express mistrust and intolerance toward fellow Americans simply because they resemble an enemy.”

“This exhibit takes a thoughtful look at the diversity and challenges of real Muslim-Americans today, and we hope it will prompt visitors to reflect on possible parallels between perceptions of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor then and Muslim-Americans now,” Higuchi said.

It's tempting to label the exhibit's critics as narrow-minded rubes. We are at war (and have been for more than ten years) with people who resemble those in the exhibit. Stereotypes are hard to counter, especially when they are reinforced so readily and so often.

But look at the mission of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center and tell me that this exhibit doesn't belong there or somehow defames the place. Thanks to the Casper Star-Trib for standing up for something that is so obviously righteous and, judging by the criticism, so necessary.

Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center opens Aug. 20

The Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center opens the weekend of Aug. 19-21 at the Park County site of the former World War II Internment Camp. I was at the site most recently in June 2010. The center's building was finished but the interior was still bare. While built of modern materials, the structure duplicates the look of the tar-paper barracks than once housed more than 10,000 Japanese-Americans, most of them U.S. citizens. Reporter Don Amend wrote about his tour of the almost-complete center in the Aug. 9 Powell Tribune.

The center will open officially with a dedication ceremony at 10 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 20, and the foundation is preparing for nearly 1,000 former internees, their families, friends and supporters of the center.

Longtime U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), a decorated World War II, veteran, will present the keynote address. Inouye will be introduced by former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson and former Congressman Norman Mineta, who became lifelong friends as Boy Scouts while Mineta’s family was interned at the camp.

Others who will participate in the grand opening are Tom Brokaw, former news anchor and current special correspondent for NBC; Los Angeles County Superior Judge Judge Lance Ito; Irene Hirano Inouye, president of the US-Japan Council; and Dr. Melba Vasquez, president of the American Psychological Association.

Brokaw, whose book “The Greatest Generation” describes the experiences of those who fought World War II, will speak at a Pilgrimage Dinner at 6 p.m. Friday, Aug. 19.

Mineta, Ito, Hirano Inouye and Vasquez will participate in a panel discussion on various perspectives of the Japanese-American experience and its lessons for civil rights issues today during a grand opening banquet at 6 p.m. Saturday.

Go to http://www.powelltribune.com/news/item/8608-heart-mountain-relocation-center-final-preparations

Acting U.S. Solicitor General acknowledges office's lack of candor led to WWII Japanese-American internment

Neal Katyal, acting solicitor general of the United States, wrote an official post Friday acknowledging that evidence was deliberately hidden about alleged anti-American activities by Japanese-Americans at the outbreak of World War II. 

Most Americans acknowledge the fact that the internment of Japanese-Americans was a terrible and unnecessary act. Official apologies have been issued, but it's somewhat gratifying to see that the entire exercise was a paranoid miscarriage of justice.

If you are curious about this episode and its place in Wyoming history, you can attend the grand opening of the new Interpretive Center in August at the Heart Mountain Internment Center Historic Site neat Cody. I've visited the site often over the past 20 years. Until recently, all that remained was the brick power plant (seen in the distance in photo) and several tumbledown barracks. The Interpretive Center was modeled after the barracks that housed some 100,000 American citizens from 1942-1946. And I use the term "housing" loosely. 

Grand opening dates are Aug. 19-21. Go to www.heartmountain.org. Here's some info from the web site:

Registration is now being accepted for the three days of activities, including the Pilgrimage Dinner and All-Camp Get-Together, Dedication Ceremony, tours, mountain hike, and a Gala Banquet which are all part of the Grand Opening of the Heart Mountain Interpretive Learning Center Aug. 19, 20, and 21, announced event chair Kathleen Saito Yuille.  Registration deadline is June 20.The opening of the ILC’s doors on Aug. 20 will symbolize the beginning of a new era of understanding and help remind the nation about the importance of tolerance and the need to balance our concern for national security with a commitment to respect the basic civil rights of all our fellow citizens. 

Sen. Al knows his chickens and his grit

Our future, according to Big Al: Baby Boomers pick grit with the chickens. 

I'm accustomed to seeing Big Al all over the state.

He was at the grand reopening of the BBHC in Cody. He was featured in a juvenile justice documentary speaking about his own run-in with the law as a teen. He attended the 2010 Governor's Arts Awards in Cheyenne to support fellow arts patron Naoma Tate.

He's been very involved in the refurbishing of the Heart Mountain Internment Center near Cody. During World War II, a young Al Simpson and his Boy Scout troop joined forces with the Scout troop at Heart Mountain on some community projects. That's how he and former internee Norman Mineta, former U.S. Secretary of Transportation, became lifelong friends. They were both at the rededication of the historic monuments at Heart Mountain in several years ago. I anticipate that both will be attending the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center's grand opening Aug. 19-21.

Sen. Alan "Big Al" Simpson,a Republican from Cody, is one of the most visible politicians in the country. During the current Congressional fight over the budget, he may end up being one of the most recognizable moderates in the news. Seems funny when you consider that Sen. Al retired from elected office way back in the last century.

But he keeps popping up. He co-chaired with Erskine Bowles the president's deficit commission, nicknamed the "cat food commission" after a quip by the senator. The senator has a million of them and many are funny or, at least, catchy.

Sen. Al had a front row seat two weeks ago for Pres. Obama's budget speech. Talking to reporters after the speech, he uttered another quotable quote. Here's part of the story from The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire:

“Pray for the Gang of Six,” Mr. Simpson told two reporters after the speech, referring to a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the Senate who are working on a deficit-reduction plan. “They are six guys, three Republicans, three Democrats, that are committed to doing something.

The “Gang of Six,” are Democratic Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, and Richard Durbin of Illinois and Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and Mike Crapo of Idaho. 

“Just pray for the Gang of Six,” he said. “You guys your age, keep praying.”

What happens if the Gang of Six fails? Mr. Simpson was asked.

“Guys like you will be picking grit with the chickens when you are 65,” he replied. End of interview.

That's the fear of millions of Americans, that we will spend our retirement picking grit with the chickens. That's even worse than eating catfood. Nutritional value of grit=0. Nutritional value of catfood (especially the gourmet kind)=much more than zero (look on your catfood label).

This "Gang of Six" is not the answer to the budget battle. As far as I know, none of them has brought up raising revenue along with budget cuts.

The House version of the budget-cutting bill will go nowhere in the Senate. Those already on Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security will be rattled and may vote for more Democrats in 2012. Those about to retire are nervous due to the fact that I have no chickens and I don't like grit. If the Repubs get their way, I will have to follow in the footsteps of my locavore brethren and sistren and get a coop filled with Rhode Island Reds.

Wyoming, of course, has plenty of grit to pick. I'm staking out my claim now.

Heart Mtn. Museum receives NPS grant

The AP's Mead Gruver reports this:

The National Park Service has awarded nearly $1 million in grants to increase public awareness about and help preserve sites related to the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The largest of the 19 grants, $282,000, is going to an organization that is building a museum at the former Heart Mountain Relocation Center outside Powell in northern Wyoming.

Grant recipients must raise $1 on their own for every $2 in federal funding they receive. Congress now is considering awarding another $2.5 million through the program next year....

Heart Mountain, which held 11,000 Japanese-Americans at its peak in 1943. Had the camp been a city, it would have been fourth-largest in Wyoming at the time. The Heart Mountain, Wyoming, Foundation has been raising money to build a museum at the site, where all that remains of the relocation center are a brick smokestack and a couple of buildings. The $5.5 million museum has been designed to resemble the long, narrow barracks at the relocation center."Why would you build something that's got marble and looks fancy when it really wasn't that way? It was tarpaper barracks without insulation," said David Reetz, a member of the foundation board. The museum is about half finished and expected to open late next year or early in 2011. Exhibits will include many items that belonged to people who lived at the site, Reetz said.

I visited the Heart Mountain site in late June. The museum/education center is impressive. Up on the hill is a path featuring signs that overlook various aspects of the camp and explain the history. An eye-opening way to spend a quiet June afternoon, storm rolling in over Heart Mountain.

Earlier posts here and here.

Heart Mountain in the 21st century

The building that housed the Heart Mountain Relocation Center boiler plant and laundry stands almost alone on the prairie near Cody, Wyoming. In the foreground lies a concrete slab for a long-gone wing of the camp hospital, that was staffed by both Anglo and Nisei doctors and nurses. Two dilapidated buildings of the camp hospital (one is pictured below) still stand, windows boarded and warning signs posted to keep out vandals.



That and one wooden administration building are all that's left standing on the third-largest city in Wyoming from 1942-45, when 10,767 Japanese-Americans occupied some 400 barracks in the Big Horn Basin. They were surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.

During a visit last Saturday, I saw the new Interpretive Learning Center, built under the auspices of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation with donations from former camp residents, their descendants, and hundreds of others. The place is now a designated National Historic Landmark and by summer 2010, will be a stop for tourists interested in all aspects of U.S. history. The Big Horn Basin already has the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and its five museums in Cody, a new Washakie Museum in Worland (set to open in 2010), the Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis and more scenic vistas than you can see during a week's -- or possibly a month's -- vacation.

The last time I visited in summer, local birds (whip-poor-wills?) performed their "look I'm injured -- come get me" routine which they use to lure predators away from nests. I didn't fall for the ruse, as I wasn't interested in histrionic birds but was enjoying the prairie silence. I saw no similar birds this time. Was more intent on prowling the grounds and walking the history path that was dedicated in 2005. Walking the path, I finally understood the vastness of the site. It had a hospital, fire department, swimming hole, root cellars and hundreds of acres devoted to family farms. They may have used the term "Victory Garden" but it would have carried with it a load of irony.

Pres. Franklin Roosevelt may have led us through the Great Depression and World War II, but his Executive Order 9066 which led to the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans, was a black mark on U.S. history. You can be a great leader and make bonehead mistakes. You can also be a good person and make terrible decisions.

The first family physician I remember was Dr. T.K. Kobayashi in Denver. He was a staff physician at Mercy Hospital and worked with my mom, a registered nurse. His private practice was in downtown's Five Points neighborhood. He and his three Nisei partners had offices above a pharmacy owned by an African-American. Five Points was the city's black neighborhood. Those were pre-integration days when a practice called red-lining prevented people of color from living outside Five Points and a few other enclaves. Although Colorado Gov. Ralph Carr (Republican) had put his career on the line to welcome Japanese-Americans uprooted by E.O. 9066, the welcome mat did not extend to housing and schools and businesses. So my mom drove us down to the Nisei doctors in the middle of Five Points. My father, a World War II veteran, didn't go with us. He served his time in Europe, but for four years, most G.I.'s --wherever they were -- considered "Japs" their enemy.

Dr. Kobayashi and his partners had been internees. All had volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army's 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit known for its motto "go for broke." There was a movie of the same name.

The Honor Wall at Heart Mountain lists 800 internees who served in the U.S. military. Fifteen were killed in action. Some 85 No-No Boys were imprisoned for failing to report to the draft board for military duty. This led to the largest mass trial in Wyoming history.

Heart Mountain is a sad spot. Beautiful and -- in some ways -- sacred.

In my collection "The Weight of a Body," I have a story entitled "The Good Doctors." It's based on the imagined lives of those brave and frustrated doctors from my youth. Go buy a copy of the book at Ghost Road Press. It's my salute to them. Also read an earlier Heart Mountain post on this site at
http://hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com/2009/01/heart-mountain-center-takes-shape.html

Heart Mountain Center takes shape

Whenever I'm in Park County, I try to stop at the site along Hwy. 14A of the Heart Mountain Internment Camp from World War II. Thousands of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast were interned here following FDR's presidential order. The best time to stop is on a windy and cold January day. You get the full picture that way, what it might have been like to arrive in northwest Wyoming after being forcibly removed from your home in balmy southern California. I don't have to imagine the cold. I do have to imagine the despair and sense of abandonment they felt. The camp held up to 11,000 people from 1942-45. I look up at the camp's namesake, Heart Mountain, and try to see the heart at its summit. A geologist told me that the mountain looked more like a heart until a landslide carried away part of the summit.

At long last, the Heart Mountain site is getting an interpretive center. Ruffin Prevost reports in the Billings Gazette that the center's first phase is nearing completion, "incorporating a design that evokes two barracks from the original camp (see artist's rendering above).

And with only a handful of original buildings and a lone chimney still standing on the site, backers of the new center hope to re-create for visitors the gritty details of camp life.

"This is history - it's a big deal. I'm just so proud and pumped about being part of it, and it's going to mean so much to a lot of people," said Allen Rapacz, president of Schutz Foss Architects, with offices in Billings and Gillette, Wyo. Construction began in August and should be complete sometime next month, he said, adding that initial funding has covered building the exterior of the center's main structure, with the interior and an additional adjacent section to be completed later.

"We're trying to replicate what it looked like then, but using modern materials," Rapacz said. Sections of the center's interior will re-create barracks rooms, showing the spartan and primitive conditions under which internees lived, he said. "We will actually re-create exactly what that was like, with wood siding on the inside, and just one single light bulb in the room," Rapacz said, adding that former internees and their families will provide some original furnishings.

Dave Reetz, head of the Heart Mountain Foundation, said that one section of the center will be named in honor of former internee and Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta and retired Sen. Alan K. Simpson, Reetz said.

"The Mineta/Simpson Friendship Hall will recognize their unique and long-standing relationship, which has come to symbolize the enduring bond between the former internees and their Wyoming friends," Reetz said. Simpson and Mineta met nearly 65 years ago during a Boy Scout gathering near Heart Mountain, and eventually served together in the U.S. Congress.

I've heard both Simpson and Mineta speak on the subject. It's fascinating that a white boy from Cody and a "Jap" kid from the internment camp could meet and become friends -- and then serve together in Congress. Simpson's a Wyoming Republican (and an outspoken one at that) and pretty much the party's senior statesman these days. His sense of moderation fell out of favor and was negated by other Wyoming Republicans who served recently in D.C. You know who I'm talking about.

The Gazette article didn't say when the center will be open to visitors. The exterior will be completed in February, with the interior to be finished when more money's available. Funding thus far has come from state and federal governments, along with corporate and foundation money and individual contributions.