With immigration and citizenship under scrutiny now in the U.S., a Japanese-American artist is drawing attention to a time when citizens were imprisoned because of their ancestry. Hawai’i’s Honouliuli internment camp was the final stop in Setsuko Winchester’s Yellow Bowl Project, an odyssey linking these sites of infamy.
The Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i sponsors a tour of Honouliuli Camp monthly. Hear what that is like Friday at 11 a.m. on The Conversation. Find information about Honouliuli on the JCCH website, where there is also more on the Yellow Bowl Project.
“I really appreciate the Park Service because the local people are sometimes hostile, like by Tule Lake, the locals are hostile.”
Hostile locals? Not at Honouliuli Internment Camp, where ceramist Setsuko Sato Winchester was welcomed with open arms. The Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i (JCCH) has been stewarding this site since members uncovered it in 2002. On this somewhat overcast morning, two guides, Jane Kurahara and Betsy Fujii Young, provided pithy and colorful commentary as we bumped along on former cane roads, deep in formerly Monsanto/now Bayer country.
Winchester chose the tea bowl form for this series because of its resonance in Japanese culture, and with the idea that sharing a moment of tea might contribute to better understanding.
Winchester has visited all ten major U.S. WWII camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated. Honouliuli is the second internment camp that Winchester has visited with her Yellow Bowl Project. She installs her hand-pinched yellow tea bowls to encourage dialog about being American. Winchester has also installed her pieces in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and other sites, revisiting, each time, the fear Japanese-Americans felt leading up to WWII.
“It all happened in the newspapers first. Miller Freeman was a publisher he started the Anti-Japanese League. Hearst newspapers went after them. As a former journalist, I’m trying to show that what’s happening today, actually mimics what happened before,” says Winchester.
Winchester has a degree in journalism and worked for NPR in Washington, DC.
According to Winchester, “Japanese and Chinese originally came in like any other European, and slowly lost all their rights, while other groups have slowly integrated and become American. Germans were not considered American. Italians weren’t considered American, Irish were not. But there was never any federal law that excludes white people. There were laws against black people. There were laws against Asian people. When it is the law of the land, it’s the government that has to go after you. The government can’t protect you.”
Ultimately, 117 thousand people of Japanese ancestry were banished from their homes on the West Coast and elsewhere, two-thirds of them were citizens by birth. In Hawai‘i, 343 people of Japanese ancestry were picked up within a couple of days of the Pearl Harbor bombing in 1941. Efficiency was enhanced by a custodial detention list created in 1937. By 1946, 2,000 plus people of Japanese ancestry from Hawai'i were interned.
It was, essentially, as if an order were placed today, telling people of Japanese ancestry to walk away from their homes, lives and businesses into a detention camp. With 48 hours, how many would post everything on Craigslist and walk into incarceration? How many people of any ancestry would say, "This is wrong?"
“People say, 'Why don’t Asian people speak up?'” says Winchester. “What I found out is that 8,500 ended up at Tule Lake because they said, 'No.' They challenged the internment, they questioned it.”
Just as so many questioned presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 when he hailed Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a great president and defended a proposed Muslim ban by comparing it to FDR’s incarceration of Japanese-Americans.
Standing on a cracked concrete slab, her yellow bowls in procession down to Honouliuli Stream, Winchester remarked, “That spring, by the time I got to Tule Lake, I asked Kenneth Dowd, with the National Park Service, 'Do you ever see any trouble?' He said, 'I can tell you one thing, since Mr. Trump invoked internment for the Japanese people,' he said, 'there’s been a lot of people coming specifically to find out how internment worked, because they heard it was a solution to the Muslim problem.'”
Winchester’s Yellow Bowl Project is subtitled, Freedom from Fear.
Winchester notes about those incarcerated, "In the end, evidence shows that they were Americans, they were loyal. Nobody had every committed an act of espionage or treason. Ironically, there were 18 people who were tried for spying for the Japanese government. They were all Caucasian."
Official designation as the Honouliuli National Monument assures the preservation of Hawai‘i’s largest and longest operating incarceration camp site. Preparations and planning continue toward more public access.
Currently, once a month, JCCH guides bring the hardships of imprisonment to life with stories, poems, pictures, even a song. In addition, JCCH has prepared a curriculum guide for high school students. Check the JCCH education center for more on that.
