History on the Move : Internment Camp Barracks May Go on Display in Little Tokyo

A flood of emotion poured over Bacon Sakatani as he wandered into the wooden barracks, one of hundreds that had housed him and 10,700 other Japanese-Americans at Wyoming’s Heart Mountain Relocation Center during World War II.

“This room is powerful,” he said during a September visit to Heart Mountain, documenting his reactions on a tape recorder. “You just look around and it really brings back memories of what we went through. Right now I’m laughing about the experience that we went through here. Yet this morning . . . it made me cry.”

Sakatani, 62, a retired computer programmer living in West Covina, wants to offer other former internees a similar opportunity to confront a painful but significant part of their past. He has launched a campaign to bring the barracks to Los Angeles and place it on temporary display.

Officials at the soon-to-be-opened Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles are lending their support to the project. They have asked city officials for permission to use a lot in Little Tokyo, said Chris Komai, a spokesman for the museum.

The owner of the barracks, farmer Tak Ogawa, has agreed to donate it. Ogawa, a World War II veteran who was not interned, purchased the barracks from the U.S. government for $1. Upon his return to Wyoming from the war, Ogawa was one of many veterans who were given government land to farm in the Heart Mountain area. They were offered the internment camp barracks to use as storage sheds.

The exhibit, which museum officials hope can be in place by July, would come 50 years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced evacuation of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast and their relocation to 10 internment centers.

There are many details to iron out before Sakatani’s dream comes true. It will be costly to move the 20-by-40-foot barracks, which would have to be dismantled and reassembled. Komai said the museum will need to raise funds for the project, which may also include a backdrop painting of the camp and a railroad car similar to the ones used for evacuating internees.

An official with the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency said the site proposed by the museum at 2nd Street and Central Avenue is “ideal” for the exhibit, but final approval has not been given.

“It’s certainly something we support because it’s something we all should experience,” said Gloria Uchida, the CRA’s Little Tokyo project manager.

Meanwhile, Sakatani is trying to track down members of two families who were interned in the barracks. A Newcastle, Calif., resident named Fujimi Yamamoto headed one family and Naoichi Tanabe of Los Angeles headed the other. So far, Sakatani has not found anyone who remembers them.

The crudely constructed barracks housed up to seven family members in each of two rooms, with only thin walls separating them. There was no running water. To keep warm, internees burned coal in potbellied stoves, Sakatani said.

The project caps a 10-year quest by Sakatani to memorialize the internment experience.

The child of a farmer, Sakatani was 13 and a student at the racially segregated Lexington Grammar School in El Monte when the government told his family they had two weeks to sell their farm and pack their belongings.

For years, Sakatani remembered only the positive things about “camp”--roasting hot dogs on the banks of the Shoshone River, joining a Heart Mountain Boy Scout troop, and building makeshift tents out of army blankets. It was only recently that he recognized the injustices.

“It really made me angry to find out we were really deceived by the U.S. government,” he said. “They told us this whole thing was for military reasons, but it ended up being due to racism--nothing else.”

In 1984, Sakatani returned to Heart Mountain for the first time. The next year, he went back with members of the Heart Mountain High School Class of 1947 and erected a monument to honor the more than 600 Japanese-Americans who left the internment camp to serve in the U.S. armed forces, and the 22 who were killed in combat.

In 1988, Sakatani was a key adviser to filmmaker Steven Okazaki, whose documentary, “Days of Waiting,” won an Oscar for its portrayal of the life of Estelle Peck Ishigo, one of the few whites to be incarcerated with Japanese-Americans during the war. Ishigo was married to Arthur Ishigo, a Japanese-American. She died in 1990.

But neither of those projects, Sakatani said, had the same effect on him as the historical relic nearly identical to the place he had called home for three years.

When Sakatani looked inside the barracks, the dark color of the wood floor triggered a memory. While in camp, he had been assigned the chore of sweeping and mopping the floor each morning.

Sakatani also noticed the wide gaps between the wooden planks the formed the wall, and recalled how the tar paper provided little protection against the icy winter winds.

For graphic artist John Miyauchi, a former Heart Mountain internee who is designing the proposed exhibit for the Japanese American National Museum, the barrack symbolizes a mixture of seemingly incongruous feelings. On the one hand, it brings back memories of the anti-Japanese war hysteria he heard over the airwaves and read in the newspapers while in camp.

But, ironically, internment also was the one time the young Miyauchi felt accepted in a close-knit community.

“We lived out kind of a strange fantasy,” said Miyauchi, 62. “It was an egalitarian society. We were all the same. We ate together, ordered the same clothes, all from Montgomery Ward. And there was no racism. In a funny way we got to play American boys and girls, and so we did.”