Shirley Ann Higuchi - Setsukos Secret: Heart Mountain and the Legacy of the Japanese American Incarceration
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- Book:Setsukos Secret: Heart Mountain and the Legacy of the Japanese American Incarceration
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As children, Shirley Ann Higuchi and her brothers knew Heart Mountain only as the place their parents met, imagining it as a great Stardust Ballroom in rural Wyoming. As they grew older, they would come to recognize the name as a source of great sadness and shame for their older family members, part of the generation of Japanese Americans forced into the hastily built concentration camp in the aftermath of Executive Order 9066.
Only after a serious cancer diagnosis did Shirleys mother, Setsuko, share her vision for a museum at the site of the former camp, where she had been donating funds and volunteering in secret for many years. After Setsukos death, Shirley skeptically accepted an invitation to visit the site, a journey that would forever change her life and introduce her to a part of her mother she never knew.
Navigating the complicated terrain of the Japanese American experience, Shirley patched together Setsukos story and came to understand the forces and generational trauma that shaped her own life. Moving seamlessly between family and communal history, Setsukos Secret offers a clear window into the camp life that was rarely revealed to the children of the incarcerated. This volume powerfully insists that we reckon with the pain in our collective American past.
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The University of Wisconsin Press
728 State Street, Suite 443
Madison, Wisconsin 53706
uwpress.wisc.edu
Grays Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road
London EC1R 5DB, United Kingdom
eurospanbookstore.com
Copyright 2020 by Shirley Ann Higuchi
Foreword and afterword copyright 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any meansdigital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwiseor conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to .
Printed in the United States of America
This book may be available in a digital edition.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Higuchi, Shirley Ann, author.
Title: Setsukos secret: Heart Mountain and the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration / Shirley Ann Higuchi.
Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019055415 | ISBN 9780299327804 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Higuchi, Shirley AnnFamily. | Heart Mountain Relocation Center (Wyo.) | Japanese AmericansHistory. | Japanese AmericansEvacuation and relocation, 19421945Biography.
Classification: LCC D769.8.A6 H54 2020 | DDC 973/.04956dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055415
ISBN-13: 978-0-299-32783-5 (electronic)
To
Amelia
and
little William
Remember the past to help you shine brightly in the future.
Tom Brokaw
On the barren windswept corner of northwestern Wyoming there is a rocky outcropping called Heart Mountain, a bleak formation made up of limestone and ancient dolomite. It has little scenic or geologic appeal, but it is a sentinel for a profoundly shameful time in American history.
Heart Mountain overlooks the site of what can only be described as an American concentration camp.
On the barren prairie leading up to it, the US government in 1942 hastily constructed a prison for Japanese Americans who were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast because they were thought to be potential agents for Tokyos warlords during World War II.
More than ten thousand American citizens of Japanese lineage arrived here in 1942 with only what they could fit on the train that transported them.
Families of merchants, business owners, teachers, fishermenthe woof and warp of American lifewere assigned living quarters in rudimentary barracks barely heated by smoky coal-burning stoves. Each resident was given an army cot and two blankets.
A hospital was established with outside medical personnel. One of the prisonerseuphemistically called detaineeshad been a journalist, so he organized a weekly newspaper.
In a culture known for its enterprise, the Japanese prisoners on their own established schooling for the children and recreational opportunities. They organized schools, sports, Boy Scout troops, hobby clubs, and gardens.
Reflecting its warped sense of values, the US government decided that draft-age young men should report for military duty.
When sixty-three resisters refused to serve until their constitutional rights had been restored, they were put on trial and sentenced to three years in prison.
One young man jailed as a resister served his time, and when he was released, he joined the Army.
Who was the more authentic American? His jailers or this Nisei volunteer?
But in these deplorable conditions the Nisei maintained their dignity and their historic sense of family and community.
They found entertaining ways to beat the draconian rules and manage the primitive conditions.
When the war was over, they were released to go home, where many found their businesses taken over or so depleted it took years to restore their economic health.
The US Navy seized the entire tuna fleet of an enterprising Long Beach fisherman, and he was never compensated.
Now, in a new century, the descendants of those confined to Heart Mountain have brought the story to contemporary Americans and the world by establishing a study center and restoring some of the old buildings.
Most important, they are determined that the stories, the legal and physical abuse suffered, the heritage of American citizens subjected to such an outrage, shall always be a part of our history, however painful the acknowledgment.
Since my first trip to Heart Mountain it has been deeply imbedded in my consciousness.
Setsukos Secret
When my family asked my mother, Setsuko Saito Higuchi, where she wanted the koden, the traditional Japanese condolence money gift, sent when she died, we expected her to say Johns Hopkins University Hospital. That was where she was being treated for the pancreatic cancer that had ravaged her body.
Heart Mountain, she told us.
Why? My two remaining brothers and I knew of Heart Mountain, this mysterious place in my parents past, as where they had first met. Beyond that, we knew almost nothing.
My father, Bill, knew exactly what my mother wanted. Heart Mountain, Wyoming, was the camp to which my parents, their families, and about fourteen thousand other Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them US citizens, had been exiled by the federal government following the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. There my parents had first met in the seventh-grade classroom of the camps makeshift school. The photo from their ninth-grade class shows them together in the middle of the front row. My mother, a beautiful and unusually poised city girl from San Francisco, sits next to my father, the young and ruggedly handsome young man who had helped his parents and older brothers run the family truck farm in what is now Silicon Valley. They and their families endured the cold, snowy days on that flat, wind-scoured plain sixty miles east of Yellowstone National Park. Each day, they faced the barbed wire penning them inside the camp, where the guards machine guns faced inward, not out.
My mother maintained a reserve typical of her generation among the Nisei, as the first US-born generation of Japanese Americans is known.Despite being American citizens by birth, Nisei were rounded up and incarcerated in what the government euphemistically called relocation or internment camps. Many of those willing to accommodate camps for Japanese forced from their homes, such as the governors of Idaho and Wyoming, identified them for what they wereconcentration camps meant to isolate Japanese Americans from the rest of real Americans. Like at least 120,000 of her fellow people of Japanese ancestry, my mother spent almost four years as a prisoner in her own country.
Classmates Bill Higuchi and Setsuko Saito sit next to each other in the center of the front row in the photograph of their ninth-grade class at Heart Mountain High School. (Higuchi family collection)
My mother referred to the Nisei as the quiet Americans, a silence that masks a multitude of scars from the incarceration and its accompanying racism. This silence meant keeping up appearances to convince white America it had nothing to fear. For my mother, the silence meant turning Heart Mountain into little more than a speed bump on her upwardly mobile trajectory.
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