Photograph courtesy of Enid Hicks

Locals of Japanese ancestry, joined by friends, wait on Front Street in Los Gatos--now Montebello Way--for a bus to take them to a train depot. The train will eventually take them to Heart Mountain, Wyo.

Exhibit depicts Heart Mountain internment

By Shari Kaplan

Heart Mountain, by its name, sounds like a scenic, romantic peak overlooking an equally scenic valley that people visited because they wanted to--but it wasn't. The people who went there in the 1940s were visitors of a different sort--residents of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, which name was also an incomplete reflection of what it really was.

The center was actually one of 10 government-sponsored Japanese internment camps erected on the West Coast and Midwest for the relocation of U.S. citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry during World War II. This is the topic of The Heart Mountain Story, a multimedia exhibit up through Feb. 28, 2001, at the Forbes Mill Museum of Regional History, at 75 Church St. in Los Gatos.

Lifelong Los Gatan and guest curator Mamoru Inouye, a retired aerospace engineer, arranged for the display of more than 30 black-and-white photographs by Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel, a wife-and-husband photographic team. In 1943, Life magazine sent the couple to Heart Mountain to document life at the internment camp, where nearly 11,000 men, women and children spent their war years.

The photographs were not published during the war; in fact, the majority did not come into the public realm until September 1997, when Inouye arranged with Mieth--Hagel predeceased her in 1973--to have them exhibited at the De Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University.

The couples' photos cover many facets of camp life, many of which were a microcosm of life "on the outside." These include classes and dances for school-age youth, mothers feeding babies, a communal flag salute and people engaged in activities such as game playing, ceramics work and flower arranging. There are also more somber images, such as an armed soldier checking internees in, doctors caring for the sick, a funeral, internees looking through a barbed-wire fence and plumbers working at 28 degrees below zero to repair a critical water pipe.

"We endured whatever hardships were forced on us," Inouye recalls of his Heart Mountain experience that spanned his seventh- through ninth-grade school years. "The majority of the people felt we should obey orders and do the best we could under the circumstances.

"The worst part was for people of my parents' generation--people who had to give up their jobs and essentially were put in a prison for not doing anything wrong," he adds. "I hope this exhibit shows people that such a thing should never happen to any American. It's an injustice to assume something that can't be proven, simply based on a person's race, color or ethnic background."

Inouye also scouted out histories and photographs of 12 Japanese-American families in Los Gatos interned during the war: the Hiroses (owners of Green Thumb Nursery from 1957 to 1992), Okas (for whom Oka Road is names), Itayas (workers on the Hume Ranch, under J.D. Farwell), Idemotos, Otanis, Tanouyes, Akigamas (owners of two local orchards), Onishis, Nishimuras and his own family, the Inouyes, who also worked on the Hume Ranch for a time, where they grew prunes, apricots and raspberries.

Additional pages in The Heart Mountain Story include a variety of artifacts on loan from various local and Bay Area internees or their relatives, such as copies of camp-published newspapers; wood carved by internees into a cane, ironing board, Buddhist altar, tools and other items; watercolors by Estelle Peck Ishigo, who was hired by the War Relocation Authority to paint camp images where her husband was interned; embroidery by Inouye's mother Asa; and a bedspread crocheted by Bess Kawachi Chin, who added circles to the project to relieve boredom while waiting in line for everything--from picking up mail to taking a shower.

The largest souvenir of the internment experience is, in fact, very recent: a quilt titled Piecing Memories, made by members of the Japanese American Services of the East Bay, under the direction of Chin. Its 12 colorful panels depict feelings, memories and symbols close to the hearts of quilters, two-thirds of whom were interned during the war.

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Forbes Mill hours are noon to 4 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday. For more information, call 408.395.7375.

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