Bringing Lonely Internees Back to Life

The gravestone lies flat in a wasteland of Colorado once known as Amache. The words carved into its surface are in Japanese:

“When the war is over, and after we are gone, who will visit this lonely grave in the wild where my friend lies buried?”

A black-and-white photograph of that grave is part of an exhibit on World War II Japanese internment that lines the winding foyer at Irvine High School’s Science Hall. On loan from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, it’s so compelling the school has decided to open it to the public for the next two weeks. It’s called “Whispered Silences.”

The pictures are the work of photojournalist Joan Myers, who made it her mission and passion to record the images of artifacts that date back to that war.

In 1982, Myers was driving from Los Angeles to Death Valley when she spotted two small, abandoned buildings with pagoda roofs. She learned this stretch of desert had been Manzanar, one of the camps where 110,000 Japanese Americans had been sent in the spring of 1942. They were uprooted from their homes following Executive Order 9066, the government’s response to public fears about security risks during our war with Japan. Myers came back the next year for a longer look with her cameras, and stumbled across a crusted, rubber toy car.

“Who held this toy so long ago?” she later wrote. “Did that child have memories of this place?”

That discovery led Myers to explore with her cameras the abandoned sites of all 10 World War II Japanese internment camps--two each in California, Arizona and Arkansas, one each in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Idaho. She came away with photographs of items that might not seem like much, until you know the story behind them.

Like the photograph of makeshift gardening tools from Manzanar. They gain meaning when you read that during one dust storm, the camp residents decided to build an 80-foot-long pond and surround it with a traditional Japanese garden.

There are pieces of a monument that camp residents erected in Gila River, Ariz., to honor Japanese American war dead.

There’s a latrine foundation still left in Amache, and a pile of old stovepipes from Manzanar. Part of a bleak-looking barracks in Poston, Ariz., still stands. Smithsonian research shows that Japanese American families were given 20-by-25-foot sections of the barracks for their own apartments.

On the flatlands of the campsite at Topaz, Utah, Myers had found a lieutenant’s badge with the initials “WRA”--”War Relocation Authority.” Also included in the exhibit are pictures of guard towers or tower bases, a grim reminder that these camps were cities behind barbed wires. Armed guards prevented anyone from leaving.

Next to one such tower picture, the Smithsonian has included a quote from one internee: “I felt like a prisoner because they had four watch towers, and the soldiers with their guns were watching from on top of the towers. Anybody tries to go out, they shoot you.”

Next to one picture showing the barrenness of the land was this internee’s quote: “When we got into camp, it was a feeling of being lost, like some guy just opened the door on a bus and put you out on a desert highway and said, ‘Here it is, this is where you’re going to live.’ ”

For James Ngo, 18, an Irvine High senior and one of the exhibit tour docents, the most dramatic photograph shows an old makeshift fly swatter. To him, it highlights how primitive living conditions were in these camps.

For senior Melissa Iseri, 18, the most poignant is one of a child’s drawing that depicts Mickey Mouse with a girl in a kimono. She explained:

“That photograph drives home to me that these weren’t just camps of adults, but families. Those children weren’t any security threat to the government. They were Americans just like us.”

Iseri has a special interest in the exhibit. Her grandmother, Sue Iseri of Irvine, had been interned at the Jerome, Ark., camp with her husband, now deceased.

“My grandmother would never talk much about it, except to tell us some of the things she made there,” Melissa Iseri said. “But I see these photographs; I know the camps were a lot different from what I had imagined. There was much more sadness.”

She now wonders whether she should even tell her grandmother that the exhibit is open to the public. She fears it may bring the older woman unhappy memories.

After checking in with school authorities, you can tour the exhibit weekdays through June 10. The tours begin at 8 a.m. and run during school hours about every 45 minutes. Besides the photographs and historical background, there’s a short, silent video with footage from some of the camps.

I took a tour with a class led by American literature student teacher Becky Yamano. The photographs had private meaning for her too. Her husband’s father was born in the camp in Heart Bend, Wyo.

“It’s not something his father ever wants to talk about,” she said.

While some students seemed more interested than others, school officials believe they will all get something out of it. Amon Kane, who heads the English department and helped bring the exhibit to campus, considers it important to spend time learning outside the confines of the classroom. Previous exhibits he’s brought in have been on the Holocaust and black history.

“We want to show students that diversity is not a threat; it’s an essential quality of who we are,” he said.

By the way, included in the photographs is the first artifact Myers came across, that rubber toy car from Manzanar.

She wrote for the exhibit: “In these remains I read a history that today is hard to imagine, and a past that should never be forgotten.”

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com