<Begin Segment 13>

[Ed. note: This transcript has been extensively edited by the narrator]

MN: Now, you mentioned that you were surprised that Leupp and Moab haven't received a lot more attention, and you've done this paper on Frederick. And I'm actually surprised, too, but do you think it's because Leupp was such a small detention facility, where they only had maybe at the most eighty men there? That therefore people don't care about it no matter how illegal it may have been?

AH: Yeah, to give you an example of how people don't care about it, just at the detention sites conference the other day at JANM, one of the speakers started to talk about Leupp being run by the Department of Justice. Well, it wasn't. It's a WRA camp, it was just, for instance, like a facility that they had for "bad people." But it's still under WRA jurisdiction, and the same policy prevailed. If they'd gone to a Department of Justice camp, they would have operated under the rules of the Geneva Convention and those detained there would at least had a hearing. They didn't have a hearing when they were at Moab or Leupp. I just thought it was such an anomaly, that particular institution, and people couldn't get a real handle on it. You know, it's sort of funny. It's like looking at the Japanese American experience in the stylized way that we talked about it earlier. When people say "the camps," they're comfortable with the idea that there were ten camps. Tetsuden Kashima writes this book in 2003, Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II, in getting at this whole proliferation of camps, and as Lloyd Inui has said, there was some kind of facility in every state in the United States during the war that dealt with the Japanese Americans. And a lot of these detention facilities are not in the public consciousness because the symmetry is not right for them. But this decalogue of the ten camps is something that people seem to understand. "Ten camps in these godforsaken places." You start hearing the stereotypical thing, and the images become stereotypical. It's so great to see a fresh photograph, something that hasn't been shown in fifteen books and thirty documentary films. But it doesn't fit right now.

Now what's happening, too, is as they understand Tule Lake and the segregation center better, before, the Japanese Americans didn't want to go there, so to speak -- only if they held their nose. Because again, people who had renounced their citizenship, they didn't want them to be associated with them. Even though, on the one hand, they're saying, "We don't like this model minority," they're maintaining the boundaries for a model minority definition of the community by creating their own boundaries. And certain things were deemed to be outside the pale. Now, finally, with all these years of these Tule Lake pilgrimages, their organizers have finally battered down that door, and people are starting to look searchingly at the Tule Lake experience and Michi Weglyn spotted that a long time ago. She said, "People somehow or other, what they need to do is to read the second half of my 1976 book, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps, before they read the first half, because the second half is all about Tule Lake." And she said, "When I was researching that aspect of renunciation, I was so proud of the people, whole blocks of people who were renouncing their citizenship. This is what Americanism is about. This is what dissent is about. But to just see the renunciants as troublemakers or to see them as 'pro-Japanese' misses the whole point." And that statement written by her which was read at a Tule Lake pilgrimage in her absence when she couldn't come, it's become emblematic for me of really what's important about that Tule Lake experience. Which is something that I said a month or so ago when we had this public program at the museum for Michi Weglyn, that this really is the heritage that you want to remember. I think it's too easy for people to turn Michi Weglyn into this toy doll that was on Perry Como's show that dealt with the clothing of the show's cast. But no, this is a warrior, and you've got to see that aspect of Michi Weglyn. She was just starting out on her journey when she did that book. But where was she going? You've got to take a look at that, too. So I think it's extremely important.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.