Excavating the Legacy of the Internment Camps

Early in the morning of May 30, 1942, four-year-old Marielle Tsukamoto found her grandmother standing in the garden, looking at her rose bushes and crying. Tsukamoto’s family would soon be forcibly relocated from their home in California to barracks in Jerome, Arkansas. Recalling that scene nearly 75 years later, Tsukamoto remembered her grandmother saying, in Japanese, “I don’t think I’m ever going to see this again.”

Throughout World War II, tens of thousands of families like Tsukamoto’s were victims of federal relocation programs across the U.S. and Canada. I recently wrote about how a thread of this painful past was hiding in plain sight in the Canadian farming town where I grew up. The buckling building on the side of the road—the site of a former work camp—was often overlooked. That its history went largely unrecognized is a testament to how precarious national memory can be. It’s startlingly easy for shared histories to go blurry around the edges until they’re hardly legible at all.