'They aren't forgotten.' New memorial honors Japanese Americans incarcerated at Washington State Fairgrounds
The Washington State Fair opens Friday in Puyallup.
You might associate the fair with the smell of caramel apples, roller coasters, and concerts in the grandstand.
But you might not know that during World War II, Japanese Americans were incarcerated on those fairgrounds.
A new memorial has been created to remember that history. Survivors of the camp and their descendants took a first look at the memorial earlier this month.
T
he memorial is in the concessions area of the grandstand. In the center is an illuminated white wall with the names of more than 7,500 people who were incarcerated at the fairgrounds.
There are artifacts, interactive maps, and oral histories of the survivors, including 84-year-old Mary Abo. She attended the memorial with her 91-year-old sister, Alice Hikido.
Abo was 2 years old and Hikido was 9 years old when the United States entered World War II. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, they were forced to leave their homes in Juneau, Alaska.
“I remember my mother and my older brothers getting these long canvas duffel bags, and we didn't know exactly where we were going,” Hikido said. “So, what kind of clothing to take? But it was December in Alaska. So we did take warm clothing.”
The family was taken to Seattle by a military ship. They ended up at the Puyallup Assembly Center at the fairgrounds, nicknamed “Camp Harmony.” It was the first stop for thousands of Japanese Americans on their way to other prison camps, like Minidoka in Idaho.
The conditions at the camps were terrible.
According to the National Parks Service, barracks filled nearly all of the space at the Puyallup Assembly Center, including under the grandstand and below the wooden roller coaster.
The fairgrounds used to have a horse racetrack and stalls for the animals. Some people were forced to live in these horse stalls. The units had a dirt floor, no natural lighting, and still smelled of manure.
Inside the exhibit, there is a replica of an 8-by-10-foot horse stall. The walls separating the stall are seven feet high. But the ceiling is 10 feet high, leaving a large gap. This left little to no privacy between families housed in the stalls.
When people step into the exhibit, there is a subtle smell resembling a farm. An atmospheric track also plays in the background to simulate what it was like to live there. People can hear families in neighboring stalls talking, coughing, and babies crying.
“If someone were to cough at unit 1, you could hear it all the way down to unit 10, right? Babies crying in unit eight, everybody can hear because there was that gap in the ceiling,” said Eileen Lamphere, a descendant of the camp's survivors and an organizer of the gallery.
The stall also has military cots. On top of them sit mattresses that were stuffed with straw. Lamphere said survivors told her that some of that straw was mucked out of animal pens.
“You talk about demeaning, inhumane ways of forcing people to live,” she said.
Across the U.S., 125,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned in these camps. Lamphere said two-thirds of those people were U.S. citizens. Among them were Abo and Hikido.
“The reason we were brought to this camp is because our ancestral country was at war,” Abo said. “We had nothing to do with this conflict, but just because we look like the enemy, we were treated like the enemy.”
Even though Abo was only 2 years old when she was imprisoned at the fairgrounds, for years, she carried a sense of shame and guilt for being Japanese.
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But the memories aren't all bad.
Hikido remembered a time when a family friend tried to sneak a chocolate cake into the camp — by passing it over the top of the gate.
“The gate always stayed in my mind, because I could see them trying to hoist this cake up over the gate,” she said. “So the gate must not have been that tall. That’s my memory of that, and the feeling that we had that somebody still cared about us on the outside.”
Abo and Hikido’s family stayed at the Puyallup Assembly Center for about four months, then was sent to Minidoka in Idaho by train. That’s where they were held for about 2 and a half years, until the end of the war.
In the gallery of the new memorial, Hikido and Abo looked for their family’s names on the remembrance wall. They are listed under the sisters’ maiden name, Tanaka.
“My mother Nobu, my oldest brother John, then William, and then Alice, and Mary,” Hikido said. “To see their names on the wall being memorialized — it makes me feel as though they aren't forgotten.”
At the same time, Abo and Hikido feel the memorial at the fairgrounds is a contradiction.
“It is a place to have fun, but it was also a large place to incarcerate people,” Abo said.
That’s why the sisters hope that when people attend the Washington State Fairgrounds, they take a moment away from the festivities to reflect on the history.
“There are a lot of lessons for our current generation here,” Hikido said. One of them is to “have an awareness of other people and stand up for them — speak out for social justice, so things that happened once before don't happen again.”
The Remembrance Gallery Opens to the public on Friday.
