Heart Mountain internees recall life in camp
W. DALE NELSON Star-Tribune correspondent | Posted: Monday, February 2, 2004 12:00 am
LARAMIE - On Sept. 2, 1945, the evening dinner bell rang early at the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp and "we all wondered why," said Reiko Kasama.
Kasama, then called Reiko Ohara, and other young people at the camp would soon find out. Sept 2 was V-J Day. Their ancestral country, Japan, had surrendered to the Allies, and World War II was over.
"We wanted to find out what our fate would be after that day," Kasama told University of Wyoming researcher Evelyn Haskell.
Haskell, a second-year graduate student in American studies, is completing - with the aid of a grant from the Wyoming Council for the Humanities - a thesis on one of the lesser known aspects of the notorious camp: There were Girl Scouts there.
She outlined her research in a talk at the American Heritage Center on Friday.
Young Kasama had been a scout in Los Angeles before she and her family were taken to an assembly center at Santa Anita Race Track and later to Heart Mountain. After the war, she became a scout leader. Now a 78-year-old retired schoolteacher in Monterey Park, Calif., she teaches English as a second language one day a week.
Girl scouting is her good memory of the camp, she said. The barbed wire fences surrounding them and the armed guards in the towers are the bad memories.
"I don't think anyone truly believed they were not prisoners," Haskell said.
Still, she said, the former Girl Scouts she interviewed "have no bitterness and hold no animosity of any kind. They made the best of anything, no matter what it was, and they had lots of good times. Lots of the teenage kids had a lot less supervision and got to do things they would not have gotten to do at home."
Kasama, then 16, the Roman Catholic daughter of a Buddhist mother, and her two younger brothers, rode a city bus in Los Angeles to attend parochial school. At Heart Mountain, there was no parochial school.
"One day life was good, happy and secure," Haskell said. "Suddenly, life changed dramatically. It was a frightening and confusing time for many young women and girls."
"We were very frightened when we arrived at Santa Anita, but we did our best to conform and not let anyone know we were scared," Kasama told Haskell. Her father, a Japanese-American community leader, had been arrested by the FBI as a security risk and the family "did not know if he was well, or even alive," Haskell said. "They did not see him again for two and a half years."
Kasama had to be the spokesperson for the family, as she was the oldest child and her mother did not speak English.
They lived in the assembly center for four months, and then were moved by train to the camp.
"When we got to Heart Mountain, we were in culture shock," Kasama told Haskell. The land was barren, and they lived in barracks with no insulation and pot-bellied stoves for heat. "Since that time, I have learned that our housing was better than in some of the other camps because of the harsh weather in Wyoming."
There is some dispute over the beginnings of scouting at the camp. Haskell was told that an internee couple started both the Boy and Girl Scout troops "for the purpose of proving their loyalty." Another version is that a group of Cody women wanted to start scouting and found 40 Japanese-American women waiting to assist them when they arrived at Heart Mountain.
"I was young and energetic, and I quickly became involved in camp life as a high school student," Kasama said. Among other things, she organized a Girl Scout drill team. One of her brothers, who was musical, was assigned to play reveille when the American flag was raised in the morning and taps when it was lowered.
The Girl Scout program "gave these young Japanese-American women and girls, who had undergone such a traumatic change in their lives, an opportunity for fun and exciting activities outside the family," Haskell said.
"The Girl Scout movement, with its emphasis on patriotism, provided a tool to prove the Japanese were loyal American citizens," she said. "Did they understand the contradiction of being held behind barbed wire fences and guarded by armed guards? Yes, they did, and I argue that their form of resistance was to become the best American citizens they could, and that included participation in the Girl Scout program."
"We proved we were good people," Kasama told Haskell.
The scouts also got some special privileges. Girl and Boy Scouts were allowed to travel by Army truck for a camping trip in Yellowstone National Park each summer. Haskell said half of the estimated 300 Girl Scouts at the camp would go one week and the other half the next week.
The women she interviewed ranged in age from 70 to 78. The younger ones remembered having more playmates and more free time than they had ever had before. The older women "spoke of discrimination they had suffered before Pearl Harbor, and I believe this made them more wary."
Haskell said most of the women interviewed had at least some college education. Since the war, all of them worked outside the home after marriage and traveled widely. Most had been to Japan at least once.
One woman said, "I remember the part of the Girl Scout oath that says to always be prepared, and I have tried to live my life by always being prepared."