Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by Charles Barry

Los Gatan Mamoru Inouye is the guest curator of 'The Heart Mountain Story,' the exhibit opening Sept. 19 at the de Saisset Museum.

Speaking Volumes

Photographs of internment camp fill a gap in local history

By Clarence Cromwell

Mamoru Inouye has taken hundreds of photographs of Heart Mountain, a flat-topped peak in northwest Wyoming, between the cities of Cody and Powell.

His interest in the mountain extended to photography about five years ago, when he returned "just to see what it looks like," Inouye said. But it started in 1942, when the United States government imprisoned more than 10,000 residents for being Japanese and living near the West Coast. One of the internees was 11-year-old Inouye, who has lived all his life in Los Gatos, except for the 3 1/2 years he spent at Heart Mountain.

Ten camps opened, but Heart Mountain housed all 3,000 internees from Santa Clara County as well as 6,000 from the Los Angeles area, 1,000 from Washington state and 1,000 from San Francisco.

Inouye's photographs capture irrigated farmland, the distant mountain and the sky. The photos don't reveal even a hint of the tarpaper shacks that housed Japanese internees for 3 1/2 years, or the barbed wire, or the guards with machine guns. They're all gone.

On his photography trips, Inouye circles Heart Mountain on less-traveled back roads and trails, alone, trying to photograph the rock formation from every possible angle.

In January 1943, German-born photographers Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel photographed the same mountain. On assignment for Life Magazine, Hagel and Mieth captured the rhythms of daily life at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center. It was the third-largest city in Wyoming at the time. Children went to school. Parents worked in the mess halls, laundries and school. Sons and brothers were drafted from the camp. It all happened inside the barbed-wire fence.

As the war raged in Europe and the Pacific, Life decided not to run the powerful photographs of imprisoned Japanese-Americans. Some of them later appeared in Time-Life books, and one--a photo of Nisei schoolchildren saluting the American flag--eventually earned a great deal of attention.

Now, more than half a century later, 35 of the photographs shot by Hagel and Mieth hang in Santa Clara University's de Saisset Museum in an exhibit called "The Heart Mountain Story." It opens Sept. 19 and runs until March 15.

Inouye is guest curator of the show. He came to know Mieth 18 months ago when he sought out her photographs. When Mieth, now 88 and a resident of Sonoma County, told him she'd like the photos to be seen, Inouye arranged for a show at the de Saisset.

The show gives a look back at Heart Mountain Relocation Center. A new PBS documentary, Heart Mountain: Three Years in an Internment Camp, will be shown in conjunction with the exhibit. Made at KCSM-TV in San Mateo, the documentary will air Nov. 2 at 7 p.m.

Before the war, the husband-and-wife photography team worked for Time and Life magazines. In the early 1930s they snapped photos of field workers up and down the West Coast and of longshoremen in San Francisco, among other things.

At Heart Mountain they met people like Inouye and Ernest Handa.

Saratogan remembers

Handa, now 70 years old and a resident of Saratoga, farmed strawberries with his family on a piece of rented Santa Clara land before Gen. John L. DeWitt ordered Japanese-Americans evacuated from the West Coast in the spring of 1942. The Handas left most of their possessions in their small house and reported to a Greyhound depot in San Jose. They were taken to a temporary internment camp at Pomona Raceway, where they got used to living behind a fence and with armed guards, rather than on open strawberry fields.

"They gathered us in there like a herd of animals," Handa said. "The biggest problem [at Pomona] was with the older people. You had a few alcoholics. They went crazy and tried to jump over the barbed wire. They got shot down."

After three months, the Handas boarded a train to Heart Mountain, where they arrived in three days. A federal irrigation project was under way, but the area was still a sagebrush desert then.

The families lived in 468 hastily built tar-paper barracks that allowed one tiny room for each of six families. The largest rooms were 20-by-20, the smallest about 16-by-20.

There was no plumbing. Cooking took place in mess halls, and the bathrooms required a half-block walk, even when snow was on the ground.

In winter, the temperature plunged to 26 degrees below zero, breaking water pipes at least once. The only heat was from a potbellied stove in each family's quarters.

"A dump truck brought coal, and you had to be lucky to get some," Handa said. "There wasn't enough to go around."

Handa remembers the winter everyone learned to skate, when internees diverted water from the canal to flood the football field and everyone ordered ice skates from gift catalogs.

Exclusion orders were lifted Dec. 17, 1944, , but many internees didn't return to the West Coast. Some were afraid of violence promised by angry whites. Others had nowhere to return. Heart Mountain and other internment camps were supposed to remain open six additional months, but they stayed for 11 months to let the Japanese residents filter back into the West.

After the U.S. rescinded exclusionary orders, Handa's family returned to Santa Clara, but he decided to go to Cleveland and find work. When the Handa family returned to Santa Clara, they had nothing. They'd left their belongings in a prefabricated house, the kind workers moved from farm to farm every four years or so, and hoped for the best.

"Of course when [they] came back, there was nothing left that was any good," Handa said. "We couldn't sell anything [before we left for Heart Mountain] because we had short notice."

In 1949, the Handa family decided to buy a prune ranch in the Willow Glen area, and Ernest Handa returned from the Midwest to help. He was drafted the same year they bought the ranch and served three years in the Korean War, then went to college under the G.I. Bill.

Now he's retired from Lockheed and lives with his wife, Sharon, in Saratoga. They have three sons: Brian, Dean and Jason.

Handa said he has no hard feelings about internment.

"We thought it was wrong, but we could understand their position with a war going on," Handa said. "We just learned to live with what was there. They told us to go, and that was it."

Leaving Los Gatos

Mamoru Inouye remembers the day his family reported to a lot near the train depot in downtown Los Gatos.

They gathered up what they could carry, as army instructions ordered, and got their ride downtown. Inouye's father, Hirokichi, would never see Los Gatos again. At the station, the five of them waited for the next step of their journey, an overnight train to Santa Anita race track in Arcadia. There were Inouye, his father, his mother, Asa, sister, Kikuye, and brother, Kaoru.

"The house was rented out to someone, so we had personal effects stored in the attic," Inouye said. "There was a lady nearby who gave us a ride.

"In a way, it was an adventure," he continued, "but not one you'd look forward to. I had never ridden on a train at the time."

Two guards watched the doors of each car on the train, and passengers weren't allowed to switch cars.

After living in a horse stall at Santa Anita a few months, where some of the internees rioted over repeated searches of their possessions, the Inouyes were transported by train to Heart Mountain.

Brother drafted

Inouye's brother, Kaoru, was drafted from the camp and joined the army. Of 800 called in for medical tests during 1944, 80 resisted the draft at Heart Mountain. They didn't think it fair for the government to jail Japanese-Americans and then require military service. The draft resisters were jailed at Leavenworth federal penitentiary--for months after the war ended, in some cases.

Inouye's brother, however, went to work for the military intelligence service. He was on his way to the Pacific when the war ended.

Inouye mostly studied and went to class at Heart Mountain, he recalls.

Inouye's father died April 30, 1945, seven months before his family returned to Los Gatos.

When it came time to close the camp, the Inouyes stayed in the camp until they were told to leave. They didn't have to go to a temporary trailer camp, as some Japanese from Los Angeles did. Nor did they lose their land or a business, as numerous Japanese did during the war.

"We didn't return until they nearly closed the camp," Inouye explained. "We were on the next to the last train to leave the camp in November 1945. In our case, we had property and a home, but there was no one to run the orchard."

Inouye said his brother's army salary and his mother's income as a housekeeper supported all three of them during the last half of his senior year at Los Gatos High School.

After graduating from Stanford University with a master's degree in mechanical engineering in 1953, Inouye worked for NASA Ames research center for 40 years. He's been married 16 years to his wife, Yasuko.

One of Inouye's modern photos hangs in the de Saisset gallery next to those by Hagel and Mieth. As is typical, it features a deceptively barren landscape.

"You really can't tell there were 10,000 people there at one time," Inouye said.

"The Heart Mountain Story: Photographs by Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel of the World War II Internment of Japanese Americans," at the de Saisset Museum, located in the center of the Santa Clara University campus adjacent to the Mission Church. Sept. 19-March 15, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission free. On Oct. 22 at 7 p.m. in the museum, writer-teacher Grace Schaub will present a slide-lecture program, "The Compassionate Eye: The Photography and Lives of Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel." The program is free.

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