Moments in Time: Stories of New Mexico's History; Remembering the Santa Fe Japanese Internment Camp

You May 12, 1944 Santa Fe Detention Station, Santa Fe, New Mexico. My dear Sumi, gale holding the head of the wooden horse with her tiny hand and grasping some candy in her left hand and looking towards the side as a great picture. Here in Santa Fe there is snow on the high mountains, but it feels as though summer is near. The naked trees have begun to dress themselves in green.

But I miss Hawaii, which is always lush in green and the flowers bloom ceaselessly. From your father, Tamasaku Watanabe. Very little talk about the interim account, even among adults, very few stories told. As a general pattern, people didn't talk much about those things. And even then, the Santa Feans basically wanted to forget that there was even such a thing. We never heard anything about those days.

Part of this had to do with not wanting to remember perhaps some of it may have had to do with embarrassment or shame. I think it's in the Japanese culture as well, not to dwell on your own personal sadness and aspects. Certainly it is with a man. Rather than anger, they felt shame. And so within the culture, you don't talk about that. During the war, we had almost no connection going out in that part of Santa Fe. I remember at one point my older brother and I were up above the camp. Up in the foothills, they're kind of honey and rabbit and kind of looking down at the camp. They didn't encourage people coming around there.

My grandfather, Tomasaka Watanabe, was a minister of the Japanese Christian Church. He basically worked for 30-something years until December 7, 1941, which is when he was picked up. It was two days after Pearl Harbor when my mom told me the story of how a couple of suits came up to the door. They took my grandfather away within 10 minutes and the kids were left in the house, not knowing what was going on. Being taken from his family, it broke them.

My grandfather lost his family business. He lost his family and he kind of lost his own history. He was a war veteran and he would celebrate the most distinguished thing in his life being a war hero in the Japanese-Russian war. And finally, he lost his belief in the United States and what he felt it should be and what he could do and went back to Japan after the war. So I do feel that there were clearly different forms of injustice that these men had to experience. That makes me angry. It makes me realize that our constitution is not infallible. And then the reason they were chosen, of course, is because they were leaders of our communities, their teachers, Buddhist priests, Presbyterian ministers, very fine farmers and businessmen. And the government felt that this was a preemptive thing. They felt that an educated person who could speak two languages and had connections with the Japanese people that they were dangerous.

Literacy was one of the ways in which they resisted what was called barbed wire disease. That malaise that could come over them, this depression and that feeling of loss of control. They were very gentle men, so by Father Howe West. He always saw the irony and you know these guys were weapons and big guns that they would take up into the towers and kind of the disconnect between that and the gentle quality of the men who were in the camp. Later on I saw some of his sketches because he was an artist who did a lot of sketching in those years from the tower.

He drew a number of these guards in very relaxed positions, you know, like a guard on the phone or about to go to sleep and say you know all is well at post number six. And he's sleeping there with a magazine over his face. I think the predominant feeling for many of them was helplessness. What was interesting to me is that they tried so hard to cope with that, you know, to resist it, to not succumb to really what imprisonment can do to a person. A lot of them denied what was going on and the way you survive is to go inward and disregard what's out there. And there were all kinds of examples of this that I found among them artistic creations where they painted either in a Japanese style, where they used their calligraphy or more western style.

They also had theater productions. They made their own wigs, they made their own costumes. One of their practices was to chant using the Noah librettos. All of the men who were in this club would pass these librettos around and would copy them in their own hand and then they would sit there and chant. In all of these different forms, they were able to survive the experience and they were able to continue their lives, which I think is the ultimate form of resistance and survival. Whether we learned or not, I guess remains to be seen, but I do feel that we have at least something in our history that we can look back on and we can learn from it.

In justices can happen again, they're happening today, and I think it's important to have compassion and understanding for people who are different, whether it be religious, color, brown skin, yellow skin, and understand that. Not only just in this country, but on a worldwide basis. Wouldn't that be wonderful? You