Uncovering the hidden history of Louisiana’s Japanese internment camps during WWII

Exterior of a Japanese internment camp in Alexandria Louisiana featuring buildings and a watch towerDid you know that over 1,000 Japanese men were interned in Louisiana during World War II? Hayley Johnson and Sarah Simms, passionate librarians from LSU Libraries, explore this buried history in our own backyard. We discuss who these Japanese men and their families were, the conditions at the Louisiana internment camps, and the crucial lessons we need to remember in order to fight against the discrimination of those who are different. (Full transcript below.)

Photo credit: Camp Livingston - 4; Construction Completion Reports, 1917–1944; Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, 1789—1999, Record Group 77; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD. 

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LSU Experimental is a podcast series that shares the research and the “behind the scenes” stories of LSU faculty, student, and alumni investigators across the disciplines. Listen and learn about the exciting topics of study and the individuals posing the questions. Each episode is recorded and produced in CxC Studio 151 on the campus of Louisiana State University, and is supported by LSU Communication across the Curriculum and LSU College of Science. LSU Experimental is hosted by Dr. Becky Carmichael and edited by Kyle Sirovy.

 

Transcript

This is LSU Experimental, where we explore exciting research occurring at Louisiana State University and learn about the individuals posing the questions. I’m Becky Carmichael.

During World War II, hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans were forced to relocate to internment camps across the United States. One internment camp, Camp Livingston, was located here in Louisiana. Who were the men incarcerated in the camp? What were their stories?

LSU librarians Hayley Johnson and Sarah Simms have work to uncover historical documents and personal narratives of these forgotten but important stories. Kyle Sirovy and I met with Hayley and Sarah prior to their TEDxLSU talk to learn how their collective research has shed light on what occurred here in Louisiana to Japanese Americans and why we should reflect on the past to prevent similar events in the future.

...

HAYLEY JOHNSON

[1:07] Did you know that over 1,000 Japanese men were interned in Louisiana during World War II? Through our research we have been able to tell the story of Camp Livingston, located outside of Alexandria, Louisiana, as an internment camp for enemy alien Japanese men during World War II. This is not a well-known history by any means so we are having to use primary documents and oral histories to piece this together.


SARAH SIMMS

Through natural curiosity and a passion to do what's right, Hayley and I have been compiling the stories of these Japanese men who were falsely assumed to be enemies of the United States because they were Japanese. Because of anti-Asian immigration laws that were actually on the books until the 1950s, Japanese-born people were not allowed to become US citizens. That is why these men are referred to as enemy aliens.

There has been rhetoric in the past few years that has mimicked and mirrored the same language that was used in the 1930s and 1940s to cast judgment on Japanese and other Asian immigrants. By finding journals, photographs, and oral histories, we've been able to tell the stories of these men in a way that shows that they were just men, many with families, that had to endure imprisonment because of their ethnicity.  


HAYLEY

[2:14] In order to do this type of research, we had to dig deep into what we call Hidden Histories: oral histories, journals, and other primary documents that either exist in personal collections, like your grandfather's closet, or at archives across the United States. It's taken a lot of tenacity to find these documents and people, including writing letters and lots of Googling.


SARAH

Through our research, we have found that many people believe that this just happened on the West Coast with large family camps like Manzanar but we hope that through our discoveries around Camp Livingston we will enlighten people to other internment and incarceration programs that happened in their own backyard.


HAYLEY

In the past year we have seen internment-type camps spring up across the United States as an anti-immigration policy. Inflammatory rhetoric was used during the 2016 presidential election, threatening to put people of the Muslim faith in camps. History has shown us as a nation that this type of fear-fueled singling out of a group of people is atrocious and unwarranted, and by telling the story of Camp Livingston as a place where this happened, right in our backyard in Louisiana no less, is to remind the public that we must be aware of our past mistakes we must fight against this from happening again.


SARAH

Haley and I are not historians by training. We are however librarians who have been trained to do research and help people with their own research. By using our skills we are hoping to tell this story as part of a larger social justice movement that fights against the quote “othering” of those that are different. We hope that by sharing the story of the men interned in Camp Livingston, as well as our story about how we have found and compiled this information, we will inspire others to do the same.

...

BECKY

[3:50] Hayley and Sarah, I am so excited that you found some time to sit down with myself and Kyle Sirovy today. We're really excited to hear a little bit more about the research that you’ve been doing. To get us started, would you tell us a little bit about who you are and what drew you into this particular issue of our recent history?


SARAH

I’ll go first. This is Sarah. Our voices sound very similar so we will have to say that throughout. I am the undergraduate and student success librarian here at LSU. Hayley and I have actually been working together for about five years so we have a tendency to have our regular day jobs. I'm very invested in student success; I teach, I liaise across campus. And then in our free time we do a lot of research into social justice issues.


HAYLEY

And this is Hayley. I’m the head of government documents here at LSU Libraries. As Sarah said, we’ve worked together for quite a while now. This research came about kind of by chance. By reading a newspaper article, it spurred us to get started and so ever since then it's been a couple years.


SARAH

We’ve been working on this for about three years.


HAYLEY

Yeah.


BECKY

So what was the article?


HAYLEY

It was an article in the Los Angeles Times. They had Muslim children reading aloud the letters written by Japanese-American children in internment camps. They were drawing those parallels of rhetoric that might have been said back in the ‘40s and today. I just found it very impactful. It got us to ask the question.

We knew they had POW camps here in Louisiana, kind of everyone knows about that history for the most part, but we were curious: were there internment camps here as well? So we just decided to ask the question. We reached out to some museums and archives in Alexandria where the camp was, to find out, and no one knew about this history. We were kind of taken aback by that, I would say.


SARAH

And Hayley’s pretty tenacious with asking. So she asked, she knocked on doors, she sent a lot of emails, and she was actually given the name of a Japanese family who had lived in Alexandria during World War II. They were the Kohara Family and we were lucky enough to find and interview Ms. Marion Couvillion Kohara, who would have been a teenager during World War II in the town of Alexandria. Through her, we got her experiences. She told us about Camp Livingston and how her family reacted to WWII and the internment camps that were close. And then told us about her cousin, who was from Hawaii, who had been interned in Camp Livingston as an enemy alien.


HAYLEY

We couldn't believe that that connection existed. That they had one sole Japanese family living in Alexandria during that time and they were not put into camps, but then to have her cousin who was all the way in Hawaii end up 12 miles away from them interned in Camp Livingston seemed to be something that we just couldn't ignore. From then on, we decided to pursue grant funding to do the research, because we had to travel to archives, and the project has steadily grown since then.


KYLE SIROVY

[7:13] It sounds like a very unique process to look into Japanese internment camps specifically. Would you mind walking the listeners a little bit through the process of how you actually go about conducting this research? What does that really look like?


SARAH

This particular type of internment, I feel like we should clarify. This information existed at the National Archives in DC. What we were looking for were records produced by the Department of Justice and the Army because that's where these camps were located. These are not your usual WRA camps that you see photographed with the families being made to move because of Executive Order 9066. These were men who could not be American citizens because that was the law on the books, so they were just picked up. They were leaders in their communities.

So having to go to the Archives to then go through these very huge files and huge collections to try to find names, to try to find evidence of this. It took us about a week to go through everything and it wasn't until we found a book that was the fourth book in a series about the building of an alien enemy internment camp at Camp Livingston that we were actually able to find the first photograph of the men. So, it's a lot of happenstance and a lot of tenacity and just digging through this kind of information because the files are not how you would think. You’d think it would say, ‘oh here’s the Department of Justice and here’s all of our information on internment camps.’ It was filed...


HAYLEY

It was all under, basically, Camp Livingston itself and the completion report that we found was for the whole entire camp. We had all of these buildings that really have nothing to do with internment camp and volume four was the volume that... at first we didn't think was going to be that useful to us because it was basically schematics of a mess hall and different things and then eventually like one random page in there had a photograph of the men planting around the buildings. So, it was a lot of chance involved in some way, shape, or form.


SARAH

And the way we've gone about this is we started with the name of one man, the cousin, and following his story and then through that, we've been able to broaden that search because while we're in those files, we're getting these camp rosters. So, lists of men that were being held in this camp and there's four that we found so far that have listed just names of men. Then Hayley's gone back through…


HAYLEY

[10:10] What we’ve done is almost like a mini genealogy-type search on these guys. We have a name, we have a date of birth that is often times not exactly accurate, so I go in through processes like straight up Google and just Googling these guys or through like familysearch.org, putting in their name, finding Census records that match these men, finding out where they were living at the time, what their occupation was, so we can create a clearer picture of what type of man was put into Camp Livingston. So, location, age, occupation, so that we can see that the general makeup of the camp was a lot of older men, a lot of religious figures, placed in the camp. And the only way we would know that is through isolating them individually through these rosters. It’s really time consuming but it’s also extremely important to get that clearer picture of who was placed in this camp. And then we can go forward and make our own assumptions as to why based on other documentation that exists.


SARAH

Searching other archives for these men, searching collections with these men's names in it. That’s why you pull in a government documents librarian to go through Census records to help you find this kind of information.


BECKY

The information that you've been collecting has been very personal, very sensitive data that you’ve been finding, and then buried deep within these government documents. How do you handle collecting and uncovering these stories from people and their families that have had this first-hand experience of being interned in these places?


HAYLEY

I think we've been extremely lucky with the families that we have built relationships with. They've all been extremely willing to share the information that they have, sharing personal journals from great-grandfathers with us that gave us an accounting of daily life within the camp. I don’t think we’ve ever come across anyone who’s been unwilling to share their information.


BECKY

How do you keep in check or accommodate for your own cultural lens on this event?


SARAH

[12:36] Interestingly, I don’t know that we had a lens because we started not knowing anything about this.


HAYLEY

We didn't even know what enemy alien internment was until we interviewed Ms. Marion and she told us ‘he is not a citizen, he's someone who wasn't allowed to become a citizen.’ We thought it was all WRA family camps.


SARAH

So a blank slate on on that level. And just having to learn. We're learning as we go through the primary documentation, but then having to go to secondary sources to understand what the actual history and story is that was going on that we just didn't know.


KYLE

Why were these camps instituted in the first place? What led to these being used?


SARAH

Starting in the ‘20s…


HAYLEY

...yeah, there was something called the Office of Naval Intelligence, or the ONI. There was a rising sense of nationalism within Japan and that made America very nervous so we decided to start doing surveillance on various individuals. That surveillance led to custodial detention lists, or ABC lists, where they had an account of all of the Japanese individuals living in Hawaii and the United States and they classified them according to ABC. So you had ‘if war were to break out, this individual should automatically be picked up and interned for the duration of the war,’ and you had another level of ‘this individual should be monitored throughout the war’ and then the third level was least dangerous, ‘they should be allowed to live freely and go uninterned.’


SARAH

...until 9066 comes into play. But Hawaii is not necessarily affected too much by that.


HAYLEY

Hawaii’s not...


KYLE

What is 9066?


SARAH

Executive Order 9066 was FDR's executive order that...


HAYLEY

...evacuated all Japanese Americans from the West Coast inland. They had an exclusionary zone set up and so they all had to be evacuated inside that zone...


SARAH

...from Washington down to California and they brought them inland. So these camps went as far in as Arkansas. Washington down. There were two in Arkansas, Rohwer and Jerome. A lot of them were, kind of, westerly.


HAYLEY

Yeah, most of them were westerly but the enemy alien camps, interestingly enough we had one in Louisiana. There was one in Tennessee. Montana. So those were spread around. Sante Fe, New Mexico had one as well.


SARAH

Texas.


HAYLEY

Crystal City, Seagoville, yeah. So they were in Texas as well.


KYLE
[15:32] How many individuals are we talking about here?


HAYLEY

They estimate that the total enemy alien—and this is not solely Japanese; there were Italian and German aliens as well. About 31,000 is the estimate.


BECKY

Just to clarify, it seems like there’s two types of camps we’re talking about, right? So were they divided just based on citizenship of the individuals, and then having a particular heritage?


HAYLEY

Yes. 9066 was that all Japanese Americans living in that zone on the West Coast had to be evacuated into the WRA, or War Relocation Authority, family camps. The camps that we’re talking about, the Department of Justice Army-run camps, were mostly all men who were aliens who could not become naturalized citizens. They did have one female-only camp in Texas, as well as the family camp for the the wives and children of those men in Texas. So it's basically distinguished by citizenship.


SARAH

And how they were treated as well. The men that were picked up that we're looking at, these enemy aliens, they were actually put through a trial. They would go before a board and it would be decided whether they should go into the camp or not.

The issue with 9066 is a gross misuse of fear to take American citizens and put them into incarceration camps and that is another large... it’s that due process that happened or did not happen.


KYLE

So they’re taking these people and just putting them into these camps. What were the conditions that they were experiencing when they got to these camps?


HAYLEY

[17:33] Actually, according to people that we’ve spoken to, the men in the enemy alien camps were governed by the Geneva Convention. So their treatment was monitored by various organizations. And according to people that we’ve spoken to who were in the family camps, those men were treated better.


SARAH

Whereas with the family camps you were put into these paper-thin shacks and the food wasn't great and they're putting them in the middle of a desert with desert conditions and, you know, there’s young children, there’s older people; it’s just, it’s a mess. And then because again…


HAYLEY

There’s no International Red Cross coming and doing visits and checking on the status of those people in those camps.


SARAH

And incarceration across-the-board, terrible, but as far as food, freedom, movement,  there are some differences that we've been able to see. Or hear about.


BECKY

So you mentioned some of these different organizations that would oversee. I imagine that they are were also guards that were within these camps. Did you find any evidence or any information about what the guards’ frame of mind at these camps were?


SARAH

Honestly no. We have focused so much on just these men in this experience. We have actually reached out to the Alexandria Town Talk, which is the the newspaper, and have gotten no interest. Because we would like to know that but we have not had a chance yet to get that perspective. And we have, there, I feel like, we read a newspaper article that talks about them bringing the Japanese enemy aliens in, and that was... People were hyped about it, a little afraid, but that's as far as we've gotten as far as how people in the community felt.


HAYLEY

And I think it's a whole other issue of having to make another trip basically to the archives and hoping that the Army has kept some of those records of who these men would have been who had internment camp duty. That's not something we had enough time to go through on our first visit because we were so hyper-focused on the camp and the men that that would be a whole other facet that we could explore.


SARAH

We didn’t know this project was going to be as big as it was.


HAYLEY

And we didn’t realize what we were getting into the first time we went to the Archives and how time-intensive and difficult it would be to locate some of that information.


BECKY

So do you think that the reaction or the response from say Alexandria, I know I’m putting that on the spot, but do you think that that speaks towards the type of information you may be able to find about the community’s response to these camps and perceptions of the residents of these camps?


SARAH

[20:40] Possibly. We are going to, one of us is taking, me, Sarah, is taking a trip, hopefully, in the near future to go up to the NYPL, that’s the New York Public Library. They have a collection of the Army's newspaper from that time and from Camp Livingston itself. And we're hoping that we could find some information possibly in those records to get an idea of the camp feeling itself. I'm wondering also, there doesn't seem, no one seems to know that this happened. This might be something that the community may not have been that aware of, might have heard it in whisperings…


HAYLEY

There was one newspaper article in the Town Talk, as you mentioned, saying that they were coming, but it wasn't something that was going to be widely advertised to the community of Alexandria. Now they would have maybe noticed that the Kohara Family was getting a lot of visitors who were Japanese American because the Kohara Family did kind of act as a USO stop for those people who were going into Camp Livingston to visit their relatives, so that might have piqued the interest of the community. But I think finding their reaction to that would be very, very difficult.


KYLE

That’s interesting. So there was no country-wide propaganda that was very obvious that most of the citizens in the US were being fed to believe certain things about the conditions in the camps, or why we were doing this?


SARAH

Not these camps.


HAYLEY

Not these.


SARAH

These are… What we’re finding, and we might find exactly what you're saying. Maybe we will find that. But these camps just don't seem to be that well known. But the rhetoric that was surrounding the WRA camps, those family camps, the rhetoric there would have been, you know maybe, ‘don't trust your neighbor’ or ‘these communities, they attacked us.’


HAYLEY

Also, ‘they attacked us.’ And it was in some instances saying that it was for the safety of the Japanese-American citizens that they were being put into the camp. Because feelings are heightened, there might be anger, so in order to protect everyone we're going to move them into this camp. So it's not just about protecting the United States’ interests, it’s about protecting the citizen as well.


BECKY

So we’ve kind of talked about he people around this, we’ve talked about these citizens. I can only imagine the effects, the traumatic effects that the residents would have experienced. Did you find any information or any record about lasting psychological issues for the individuals that were interned?


HAYLEY

That’s actually something we're starting to look into now. We do have a little bit of information on that. But for the most part the men of that generation who were in camps, the mentality was that it was a little shameful so they would not speak about it with anyone.


SARAH

I have an article, I don’t have the citation in front of me, but we’ve been looking into this and the article says that this can be likened to the shame that happens with rape so it is something that you just don't speak of.


BECKY

Were any of the individuals compensated for their time when they served in this camps?


HAYLEY

[24:11] Yes, there were reparations made in the 1980s, I believe. It was President Reagan who signed the bill, or the law, to give money. I don't remember how much each person received.


SARAH

It wasn’t enough.


HAYLEY

It wasn’t enough.


SARAH

I’ll just state that. I don’t think it was enough.


HAYLEY

But what we did notice through speaking with people is a lot of the children who were in the camps received the money. A lot of the parents by that time had passed away so unfortunately they weren’t there to have that formal apology and reparations. But yes, they were given some monetary reparation and an apology.


KYLE

On the social side of things, how do they find themselves when they were finally released from these camps, were they allowed to integrate back into our society fairly seamlessly or was it one that they experienced a lot of hardship just to get maybe jobs that they had worked for or anything like that?


SARAH

One of the men that we have studied, he was a Buddhist priest and a Japanese language school teacher in Hawaii and he was held in Camp Livingston. While he was in Camp Livingston, his family went into dire straits. They elected to be put into Crystal City, Texas, which was the family camp, waiting, hopefully, that they would get reunited. He eventually meets them in Crystal City, Texas but is held there until 1944, 45…


HAYLEY

'45.


SARAH

'45. And so, when they get back to Hawaii they basically have to start from scratch because the mission where he was the priest had been used by the Army.


HAYLEY

The Army took it over as a base for them.


SARAH

So they have to rebuild from that.


HAYLEY

And I think that’s a common story. A lot of people when they went into the camps, the banks took their home, or the neighbors would take up the mortgage and take the house, so a lot of people lost businesses, homes, all of that and had to rebuild. You have places like Chicago where you get a large resettlement of Japanese Americans after the war. But then you also hear stories of neighbors saving the homes of people who went into camps. So you have both ends of that.


BECKY

[26:44] That’s just something I can’t even begin to imagine. That one, you’re being moved from Hawaii, so many miles back to continental United States, away from your family members, and then when you’re released, you can’t just start back up with where you were. You’re at the mercy of either a good samaritan or a good neighbor that has been trying to help out. But then, how often was that really the case?


SARAH

The interesting thing about Hawaii too that we’ve been starting to discover is where you have, I’ll bring it up again, 9066 evacuating that West Coast, Hawaii remains untouched with their Japanese and Japanese-American populations because they had sugar cane and they needed a workforce and that was their historic workforce. You see this cherry picking of community leaders from that community itself. Which has been something that’s blowing our minds and has a weird tie to Louisiana with our sugar cane. It’s odd, and we’re still diving deep into this. This is something that’s just…


HAYLEY

The idea that it could be economically motivated as well.


SARAH

A lot of weird motives going on.


BECKY

This has to be quite an emotional rollercoaster that the two of you are experiencing as you’re uncovering some of this.


SARAH

Yeah, it’s not been fun. It’s not been a fun project in that way. It’s been emotionally draining and heartbreaking and sad. It’s made us angry. But what we’ve been able to pull from this is become very close to… like the Kohara Family we’ve become very close to. Building these personal relationships from something as horrible as this has been a gift for us. To just become friends when we would have never known them to begin with.


HAYLEY

And now we also have this feeling of doing the story justice to make them proud that we’re telling it appropriately and really shining a light that needs to be put on this whole topic.


KYLE

I can only imagine how frustrating or how upsetting is must be when you’re seeing some of this. And I can only imagine in some of the recent events that have been going on. Maybe you can touch on some of the connections that you’re seeing between what happened back then and some of the events that we’re seeing now.


HAYLEY

Well, I think all you have to do is look at the headlines, the news headlines, from the past couple of years and the headlines themselves are making the correlation between internment and current events.


SARAH

Recently, this is something that has really been sitting with me is this idea of citizenship and what makes you a citizen. And then, the idea of an Executive Order being able to be intrusive, in a way. This talk of maybe taking away birthright citizenship that I’ve been hearing about just really has made me think about this project in those terms.

We’ve seen this before where there’s anti-ethnicity based laws on the books that don’t allow people to become citizens, and then you turn into this community, the United States, that would put people into these camps based solely on that is just... the fact that we're starting to talk about this again. It's been 77 years since Pearl Harbor? This is not that far away that we should still remember this, and it seems that people are not remembering.

I find it terrifying and sad and we are trying our hardest to speak about this because at a certain point, sometimes you can feel very helpless and you don't know what to do. So if you just keep fighting the good fight maybe something awesome will come of this. Just to have people turning their neighbor and talk to them instead of just looking at them.


BECKY

It sounds like this particular project speaks volumes toward that because of the stories that were locked within a family, were locked within these journals, were locked within these government documents that really uncover and show that what we're seeing today is not so far removed from what was experienced and the trauma and the hardships that were bestowed on a particular group of individuals. I feel like this is one of the wake-up calls for us as a society, as a country, to pay attention to the past so we don't repeat this.


KYLE
This topic in general feels, at least for my generation, very covered up in some ways. It's glossed over within our history textbooks. Coming from a historian side of things, do you feel that you uncovered some things that were really hidden underneath, in the same sense maybe shine the spotlight on some even darker aspects of this than we realized or is it just about as dark as it seems?


SARAH

One thing that we’ve had to learn going through this... again, I need to state we are not historians by nature, we are librarians so we are coming at this with a different lens. We are so wonderful at finding research and doing research so now we are putting it together. We are weaving this tapestry, if you will.

One thing we’ve had to learn about was repatriation requests. So what would happen is these men would go through their trial, they would be scuttled around the United States. They didn’t just go straight to Camp Livingston. They would go to maybe three camps beforehand before they ended up in Livingston.


HAYLEY

About every year or so, they were moved. They were not static in one camp. And that was true for a majority of the men. They were constantly moved and cycled throughout these camps.


SARAH

When we were in DC, we kept seeing these things called repatriation requests and we had no idea what it was. Through so many years now of reading journal entries and memories and secondary sources, these repatriation requests were given to the men. They could ask to be repatriated back to Japan. And sometimes they would absolutely say yes and it would be used as a prisoner exchange.


HAYLEY

Many, many men wanted to be repatriated because they saw that as their only way out of the camp. Rather than stay here indefinitely because I don't know what my future is because no one is giving me any information, I'm going to ask to be repatriated so at least I can go and be free. So the families of these men would often go to Crystal City because they would be repatriated with them and that way they can all be reunited in Japan. That was something that we had to learn because we had no idea that was something that was happening, much less prisoner exchange of these men.


SARAH

And then the other thing that we have found out that we have not been able to explore in much depth is a program that was happening where it wasn't just Japanese men from Hawaii, the United States was also pulling Japanese from South America en masse. They were pulling groups of Japanese men, again, for this idea of a prisoner exchange.


HAYLEY

They went into Latin America and basically kidnapped these guys…


BECKY

That’s the word I was going to use: kidnapped.


HAYLEY

That’s basically what they did. And they would bring them to Algiers; they had an immigration station. They would drop them off at Algiers and then when they hit the dock, they were automatically arrested as illegal aliens and then put into that enemy alien internment camp system. A lot of these guys weren’t even allowed to go back after the war because their country said ‘no, you can't come back.’ So there was that whole other element going on as well. And we do know that in Camp Livingston the camp was divided into different areas. They had an area for a Panamanian Japanese so they were sectioned out that way as well. So we do know that a bunch of them went to Camp Livingston.


SARAH

And there are scholars currently, right now, looking into this in much more depth than we are able to. There is a woman at Tulane and a gentleman in Canada who looks into this. So we want to be very clear. This is something we came across in the rosters and didn’t understand and through speaking with some of these scholars who are working on this right now, we’ve been able to understand that better because it was a real mind bender.


HAYLEY

It’s layer after layer of these secret programs going on that we had no idea about, and I think most people would not know about today because you just know about those WRA family camps.


KYLE

[36:52] As a layman, since I can’t necessarily hop on a plane and go look at the Archives in Los Angeles, is there a book or something that you would refer to people that they can learn more about this? Something you think is pretty respectable?


SARAH

One of the authors to look for would be Greg Robinson. He’s written extensively on this topic. And Jan Jarboe Russell wrote a book called The Train to Crystal City, Texas that I found unbelievably enlightening. I would start there. There are a lot of resources, not necessarily on Camp Livingston, per se… Wait for that one, it’s coming.


HAYLEY

Shameless plug.


SARAH

There is a bibliography still. We have a bibliography that we’ve actually created at extendedlens.org. We’ve put together a bunch of resources, both websites and books and government documents, if you’re interested in this.


BECKY
You’ve got this bibliography, this has got a wealth of information for someone who’s listening to go back and really explore even further in depth.

Through your research, I know we've talked a little bit about your travels to different conferences and different places to go and gather the documents but also you’ve been able to meet many surviving residents. Is it true that the actor George Takei was a resident in one of the camps here in Louisiana and have you been able to capture any of his thoughts on the topic?


SARAH

He was not a resident of the camp in Louisiana. He was actually a resident…


HAYLEY

He was in a family camp in Arkansas so he was a child at that time and his family was interned in Arkansas.


BECKY

[39:04] Have you been able to talk to him? Did he ever share any of his thoughts or give his perspective as a child in one of these camps?


SARAH

We have not been able to speak to him personally. We did have the opportunity to sit next to him once at the annual reunion that is held at Rohwer every year. Well, it's the Japanese American internment Museum in Arkansas run by woman named Susan Gallion, who is amazing.

He came this past year in April to their fifth reunion and spoke. But I do know that he wrote a musical, I believe called Allegiance, that's about this experience. I think that he's very much an advocate for the idea of ‘don't do it again,’ you know, ‘this is my experience, I was a child this was not wonderful, this was not great,’ so he's very much a loud voice.


HAYLEY

He’s very outspoken on the topic.


BECKY

I think that leads well into this aspect of the connections we’re seeing from these past events to what we’re seeing right now in 2018 regarding the “othering” of particular groups. I know we’ve touched on a little bit of the connections between this part of our dark history of the United States and potentially some of the elements we’re seeing now in the present. I want to basically ask about if we’ve learned the lessons or are we still seeing some of the same things in regard to immigration camps and then the children that are being detained now?


SARAH

I think the difference that we’re seeing… I mean, yes, the similarities are uncanny and horrifying. But what we are seeing is a rising voice from the Japanese American community that is basically screaming their memories towards this, their history. You see this, for example, the LA Times article with the Muslim children reading the letters of Japanese-American children who had been interned in the ‘40s. There are people who are aware so it’s just getting that voice out there, and hopefully that’s happening. But the similarities are not…


HAYLEY

I think we haven't fully learned from those past mistakes, given that you know some of these camps now today even existed in the first place but there is now at least a voice speaking out, pointing out that this is wrong and you know you're repeating those past mistakes.


SARAH
Hope springs eternal. We’re hoping, hoping, hoping that their voices are heard, that people wake up, that there's just more understanding and instead of this turning into yourself and this fear. It's as simple as turning to the person sitting next to you and just you know making that connection.


BECKY

[42:20] Are any of these camps still in existence? Are they still being used today? And when I say used, have they been used for any of the current detention camps we’re seeing, or are these pretty much even out of use as a military base?


SARAH

I honestly don't know. What I will say is Camp Livingston does not exist anymore so that is an interesting thing to have to research this historical place that literally went back to forest after the war. There are camps that have been, more the WRA camps, that are something that you can tour. They've become historic sites of memory.


BECKY

Hayley and Sarah, not only have you identified this particular topic, and as we've learned was just by this one moment, this one reading, you’ve been receiving some funding some really prestigious sources such as the American Library Association’s Carnegie Whitney Grant. Can you tell us how has the spending helped you on your research trajectory?


HAYLEY

This funding has been the reason that this project exists. We did as much as we could on our own prior to the funding but we would have never been able to get to the National Archives without it, we would have never been able to travel to California without it, so it's been the thing that has propelled this research forward.


SARAH

It has been amazing.


KYLE

What’s the ultimate hope for you for the impact of your research? What do you hope this does?


SARAH

I just want people to think and to understand like we are starting to understand. I have never, and I don’t want to speak for both of us but I've never felt so wool over my eyes almost until we started to learn about this and it was like, oh, this is so interesting that this is not a history that is talked about in the way that we're hoping to talk about it. And also highlight these individuals who are unbelievably strong and persevered through a persecution with such grace and, they have become personal heroes, I feel, of ours, so I’m hoping that people will feel the same way that we have.


HAYLEY

Or do.


BECKY

[45:04] I like to ask my guests a couple of fun questions.


SARAH AND HAYLEY

Thank you. [laughs]


BECKY

We’re going to make a little switch. So prepare yourselves.

Do you both know who MacGyver is?


SARAH AND HAYLEY

Yes.


BECKY

Yes! I have to ask this now because some people don’t know who MacGyver is.

As an ecologist, there’s always things I’ve had to do impromptu in the field to collect my data. A make it work situation. Have you ever had a MacGyver moment in terms of capturing the information, collecting the data? Have you ever been in an archive area and needed or tried to get information that might have been restricted?


HAYLEY

Well, we were able to get copies of a journal of a gentleman who was in Camp Livingston and we read over that journal I don’t even know how many times. There was a reference to someone coming and taking a photograph in the camp. So basically, we did a lot of online sleuthing to find out who this man was who worked for the Red Cross. And then to locate his family, we did a lot of Google searching and public records searching and were able to find his family. The response of his son who I was able to locate was, ‘yes, I am the son of this man, how did you find me?’ So we had to pull some magic tricks on that one, but we got lucky and were able to locate him. So that was a little MacGyverish.


SARAH

And as far as restricted information, one of the things that we’re having to deal with, unfortunately... On our recent trip to California, we were going through a lot of correspondence between the men who were interned and their families and so much of it was actually censored. So there’s no MacGyvering around it, it’s just picking up a letter and half of it’s either cut out…


HAYLEY

Just holes.


SARAH

So we don’t know if they were naming people, or they were naming locations, we don’t know. But it’s been something to see because you hear about things being censored, and I always think, like Russia, but turns out no, it was happening for that kind of correspondence.


BECKY

So you’re actually holding those pieces of, those documents, and you’re seeing first-hand.


SARAH

And it’s unbelievable, and thank god they did, to have kept their correspondence because these letters that we’re finding are not at the National Archives, these are going to be in archives, like university archives where families have donated their papers so that’s a whole different type of, I guess, librarian MacGyvering is trying to figure out where to go, where does this information exist, how to find it. Then a lot of times we get surprised because the way that things are catalogued don’t necessarily go into an item-level description, this is librarian speak…


HAYLEY

They very rarely do.


SARAH

So sometimes you’ll open a box or a file then surprise, there’s something that’ll make the project.


KYLE
One other challenge I just realized might have come up: Do either of you speak fluent Japanese?


SARAH

That is something we discussed not too long ago actually.


HAYLEY

No, neither one of us speaks Japanese, and that has been a big issue for us as far as like, we’re in an archive and we find a whole collection that’s in Japanese, is this something that we need to spend our time photographing? And if it is, how are we going to get this translated? We have been lucky enough to work with a professor here at LSU who has done some translations for us. But no, neither one of us has any knowledge of Japanese.


KYLE

So you’ve had to have other professors translate these journals for you?


HAYLEY

Yes.


SARAH

And what’s been interesting is the Japanese that we are looking at is not...


HAYLEY

It’s not modern Japanese.


SARAH

It’s pre-war Japanese. And so you have to have somebody who maybe grew up fluent, or has been studying this particular type of Japanese to be able to translate it.


HAYLEY

It’s a lot more time intensive, which translates to expensive when you’re dealing with grant funds, to have that translated.


BECKY

This has been one great big puzzle. And really searching a lot of different locations for the missing pieces.


SARAH

Absolutely. We’ve gone coast to coast and everywhere in between to locate information.


BECKY

Have you found the one spot that you enjoy going back to in particular?


SARAH

I would love, me personally, to go back to the Japanese American National Museum.


HAYLEY

Yeah, I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface there. There are so many other collections that we could not access at that time so that would be amazing.


SARAH

For anyone interested, that's in Los Angeles. They don't just do... internment is not necessarily the focus, it’s the Japanese-American experience. They had, they just kept bringing stuff, the archivist there…


HAYLEY

Yeah, they don’t just have papers. They have artifacts, which is amazing to be able to see for the first time.


BECKY

[50:40] The other question I like to ask participants of this podcast, and keeping in line with the topic, what's the coolest, craziest, weirdest, or most dangerous thing you've done in the name of your research?


SARAH

When we were at the National Archives, this is not even dangerous but...The National Archives has extremely… remember it's a government building so to get in is basically, like you have to get a new driver's license and then to get out is like they give you a body cavity search [laughs] but not really. But it feels like that. So you are not allowed to have anything on your person except for your ID to get in, which they make for you, and that's about it. We had received notice that there was something for us down at the very front desk, so we have to go through three levels of security and the guy that we were talking to gave us a Post-It note. Gave us, we did not bring in the Post-It note.


HAYLEY

[51:56] So we had to bring the Post-it note to the desk and they put it in a bag, which they locked so that we can go downstairs, because anything has to go in the bag and gets locked.


SARAH

And then, all hell broke loose because they thought that we had provided the Post-it note and that we were then, just, I don't know, going around to their entire collection and then...


HAYLEY

And just putting Post-It notes everywhere.


SARAH

And for those that don't know, a little archival note, the sticky on the back of a Post-It note will ruin any document that you have, give it about a year. That was that was something. It was like full lockdown.


HAYLEY

The Post-It note fiasco.


SARAH

We are clearly being hyperbolic but it was something that really made us understand the difference between... We are librarians entering an archival world and we have a different idea of information sharing. Whereas all we want to do is share information, where our archivists want to share information but they're also charged with protecting and preserving these historic documents, books, it could be anything. Movies. All of it is their purview to protect so they have to do that fine line and then we're rolling up like, ‘give us the red carpet, we’re librarians, we know everything!’ And so it was a real learning curve.


BECKY

I didn't think that I would get to hear about a debacle with a Post-It note.


SARAH AND HAYLEY

[laughs]


BECKY

But I do want to say thank you both, Sarah and Hayley, very much for sharing this with us. I'm glad that the two of you have been able to be inspired by an article and be able to uncover so much about our past. I'm very excited about all of your future endeavors and where this is going to take you.


SARAH AND HAYLEY

Thank you.


BECKY

And thank you Kyle for sitting in on this one. Honestly, I’m excited to see where you all go and I look forward to potentially talking to you again very soon.


HAYLEY

Thank you.


SARAH

Thank you for allowing us to share this. This has been wonderful. Thank you.

…

This episode of LSU Experimental was recorded and produced in the CxC Studio 151, here on the campus of Louisiana State University and is supported by LSU’s Communication across the Curriculum and the College of Science. Today’s interview was conducted by me, Becky Carmichael, and Kyle Sirovy. Kyle also edited this episode. Theme music is “Brumby at Full Gallop” by PCIII. To learn more about today’s episode, ask questions, and recommend future investigators, visit cxc.lsu.edu/experimental. While you’re there, subscribe to the podcast—we’re available on SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play. 

 

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