Steve Sasaki (second from left), a docent with the California Museum, places particpants in the Northern California pilgrimage to the Tule Lake Japanese concentration camp in the remnant of a women’s latrine at the places (right) where toilets would have been located, without partitions. Photo: Elias Higbie
[Episcopal News Service] On Sept. 12, 40 people from across the Sacramento-based Episcopal Diocese of Northern California made a pilgrimage to the National Park Service’s Tule Lake National Monument, which includes the nation’s largest World War II Japanese concentration camp. The area lies in the northeast corner of the diocese.
At one time Tule Lake housed 18,700 of the 110,000 people of Japanese descent – two-thirds of whom were American citizens – who the U.S. government’s War Relocation Authority placed in 10 camps in Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. They were forced to leave their homes and move to the camps without due process, hearings or trials, following the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by the Empire of Japan.
The Tule Lake Segregation Center opened on May 26, 1942, to house people from western Washington, Oregon and Northern California. Later, German and Italian prisoners of war were held at nearby Camp Tulelake, originally built for young men in the Great Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps.
Steve Saski, a docent with the California Museum in Sacramento, along with National Park Service rangers, described for those on the pilgrimage the camp’s history. While little from the original 1,700 buildings still stand, they saw the jail and the remains of latrines for men and for women, as well as reconstructions of a guard tower and barracks where Japanese families lived.
At the end of the day, the Very Rev. Cliff Haggenjos, rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Roseville, helped lead a service of lament that included the reading of the names of the 332 people who died at Tule Lake. He also was an organizer of the pilgrimage.
Also participating in that reading was the Rev. John Kitagawa, the interim chair of The Episcopal Coalition for Racial Equity and Justice who lives in Tucson, Arizona. Kitagawa’s father, the Rev. Daisuke Kitagawa, was incarcerated at Tule Lake while serving the Japanese community at St. Paul’s Church in Kent, Washington. He helped organize Sunday school classes and religious services for people in the camp.
The Rev. Julie Wakalee, the diocese’s canon to the ordinary, told Episcopal News Service in a written statement that she’d never learned anything about the camp during her years as a student in California public schools. She also joined in reciting the names of those who died, saying the visit to Tule Lake hit her at a deep level “not only because I know and care for people who were incarcerated, but also because of the chilling parallels to our current day.”
The Sept. 12 pilgrimage closed with a Service of Lament, in which the names of the 332 people who died at the Tule Lake concentration camp were read. Photo: Julie Wakelee
Learning anecdotes about people at Tule Lake was important to Madeleine Canavese, a student at the University of California, Davis and part of the Episcopal/Lutheran campus ministry there. She mentioned in a written statement to ENS “the carpenter who stalled the construction of the jail, the young man who was thrown in jail for a record player that also played radio, the group that exercised in front of the administration buildings at the crack of dawn as a form of protest,” as things she would share with fellow students and that would help her and others on the pilgrimage “to oppose discrimination in its modern forms.”
The Rev. Aidan Rontani is rector of All Saints in Redding, which is the closest Episcopal church to Tule Lake, 120 miles away. He told ENS that before the pilgrimage, he was only “dimly aware” that the largest Japanese incarceration camp was in the diocese’s borders.
But being at the site made him realize things that took place there “are not as remote, in time, space or to the temptations of our own time and our own hearts, as we might think.” He added, “It was good … to be reminded of the terrible costs that result whenever we succumb to our prejudice and to our fear.”
Sasaki of the California Museum told ENS that he was grateful to experience the day at Tule Lake with people “who not only wanted to learn about the incarceration but also had a heartfelt sadness and concern for what happened.”
The Tule Lake pilgrimage is part of the diocese’s larger efforts toward racial reconciliation, Jo Ann Williams, co-chair of the Commission on Intercultural Ministries and another of the pilgrimage planners, told ENS. A June 7 workshop introduced Episcopalians to Tule Lake, and it followed a 2024 racial justice audit by the Mission Institute that the diocese undertook.
Many people, including Williams, also have participated in Sacred Ground, a film- and readings-based dialogue series from The Episcopal Church on race that is grounded in faith.
Tule Lake was the last of the Japanese concentration camps to close, on May 5, 1946, seven months after the end of World War II.
Camp survivors and others soon began an effort for redress, calling for restitution of civil rights for those who had lost them, an apology and monetary compensation from the U.S. government.
In 1980, Congress created the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which in 1983 proposed a series of measures relating to the concentration camps, including an apology from the federal government and presidential pardons for those convicted of curfew and exclusion violations. It also recommended that the government establish a foundation for research and public education on World War II incarceration.
In 1988, Congress passed, and President Ronald Reagan signed, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which acknowledged the injustice of “internment,” apologized for it and provided a $20,000 cash payment to each person who was incarcerated.
National Archives online information about Japanese incarceration during the war noted, “One of the most stunning ironies in this episode of denied civil liberties was articulated by an internee who, when told that Japanese Americans were put in those camps for their own protection, countered, ‘If we were put there for our protection, why were the guns at the guard towers pointed inward, instead of outward?’”
— Melodie Woerman is an Episcopal News Service freelance reporter based in Kansas.