Sometimes the story is more important than the scenery, and Ranger Danny told it well. In April 1942, US citizens of Japanese descent on the west coast were given 2 days to pack 2 suitcases and check in to temporary relocation centers, losing their freedom and property in violation of the 4th Amendment. They were not given due process in violation of the 5th Amendment. FDR’s order was popular—especially among those who planned to take their property—, and the wartime Supreme Court partly upheld it, in the infamous Korematsu decision, while simultaneously partly dismantling it, in Endo. Reagan apologized and offered survivors small compensation.

Many Americans grew up either not knowing much about this or believing it justified by war. The Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor without warning, after invading their neighbors, occupying Shanghai and committing atrocities in Nanjing. When FDR’s order went into effect, Japan had taken Hong Kong and Singapore, and they held several thousand American civilians as prisoners for the duration of the war, with insufficient food, forced labor and a high death rate. Americans did not want to prove themselves better; they wanted revenge.

And yet the Germans had acted similarly, with sneak attacks, invading neighbors and taking prisoners, but the US issued no similar order to imprison US citizens of German descent. Americans lost relatives in battle to both foes. Both aggressive countries employed spies. Japanese Americans do not appear different from other Asian Americans, so Japanese spies could still operate on the west coast. There is no justification for abrogating the rights of Japanese Americans, not expediency, not greed, and certainly not racism.

These ten American Concentration Camps were a failure of leadership, imagination, morality, of our government and of rational behavior. Having dispensed with our Constitution, the rules were arbitrarily made up on the fly. The US military defined a huge ‘exclusion zone’ from Washington state to New Mexico, fearing another naval assault in Arizona?!? Hawaii, despite being the location of Pearl Harbor, detained few Americans of Japanese descent. Japanese Americans who already lived in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado or Arkansas witnessed their fellow citizens arriving in their states and being imprisoned for having the same cultural background as they did.

The US military still wanted to draft soldiers from the citizens they detained, so they created a loyalty questionnaire to invite them to fight in Europe. The government then started using the questionnaire to divide the incarcerated into loyal or not. The questions were convoluted, rewritten in some camps and many were misadvised on how to respond. Since Tule Lake only used the original version, they had a higher ‘failure’ rate, so they got a reputation for disloyalty. Inmates exercised their 1st Amendment right to protest, and the military sent in tanks. Then they had the inmates build a concrete jail inside the barbed wire, machine gun manned watchtower prison. One man was interrogated for 12 days because his mother accidentally played a borrowed radio. Many inmates here were pressured into renouncing their US citizenship.

One reason that most Americans don’t know much about this history, or have mistaken views, is that the US government intentionally misled the public about conditions here. The press was invited in to see the one barracks in Tule Lake where everyone was happy and would receive steak for dinner in return for cooperating, while the remainder of the massive camp was suffering from basic food & water shortages. The image of the ‘happy Japanese interns’ was amplified as propaganda, which some visitors still repeat today.

The highly recommended ranger tour is given on summer weekends out in the field (above) and in the jail, complete with jail cell bars saved by a local to preserve the real story. The camp is 10 miles outside town, per military requirement, and there are a few original buildings, the top of a watchtower and a stone monument, besides the small visitor center. The site is in the far northeast corner of California, in the reclaimed lake bed, quite close to Lava Beds. It’s remote, but important to visit.