- Eleven weeks after Pearl Harbor,
Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066,
which essentially said that the Army had a right
to exclude anybody from a area
that they considered a military zone.
Unfortunately, the entire West Coast
was deemed a military zone.
And by May of '42, they started a wholesale evacuation
of the ethnic Japanese living on the West Coast.
- This is the site of the oldest Japanese language school
in San Francisco.
This became one of the places
where the all the Japanese came to be registered
so the military knew exactly how many in the family
and how many people would be leaving the area.
Dorothea Lange was hired by the government
to photograph and record the history.
She captures the agony that the people were going through.
Many of her photos were impounded by the government
because they appeared to be too sympathetic
and what was happening to these Americans of Japanese ancestry.
- 120,000 of them were sent to internment camps.
2/3 of the people were born in the U.S.
They were American citizens.
- Wendy Maruyama: They were each issued a manila tag
that had their name, their locations of their camp,
and each family had their own serial number
issued by the U.S. government.
For my project, I was able to order new tags
made in the same dimension.
I had a database from the National Archives
that was probably about that high.
I had volunteers write them and stamp them and tie them.
We created 120,000 tags
to represent every single man, woman, and child
that was forced into these camps.
The tags would rotate very slowly
and then sometimes you can hear the paper rustling,
so it's almost like the spirits of all these people
were speaking to us.
- Eight of the camps were in the desert.
Two of them were in the swamps of Arkansas.
The well-known painter Chiura Obata
went to the authorities and he said,
"You take people out of their daily lives
"and you put them in this one square mile,
"10,000 people in a square mile, they're gonna go crazy.
Let me start an arts program."
He managed to talk artists into teaching classes,
and if you had a skill,
people would say, "Could you teach me how to do this?"
These were not professional artists.
They were farmers and fishermen.
[gentle string music]
I knew that all of my family had been in the camps,
but my parents never talked about it.
The community never talked about it.
So I really didn't know what this was all about
until I happened to discover this bird pin
that my mother had in the garage and I just liked it.
I thought it was a nice piece of jewelry so I started wearing it,
and one day somebody asked me where I got the pin and I said,
"Oh, you know, I think it was made in camp."
And I thought, "You know, what else was made in camp?"
Two of the camps, Tule Lake in northern California
and Topaz in Utah were over ancient seabeds.
And people did earrings,
table ornaments made out of shells that they picked up.
These groups would get together
and they'd do it as a little club.
People didn't just make floral pins.
They were very fond of the Disney characters.
They used fingernail polish and other types of poster paint
to decorate the characters.
People would make memory books
and had their friends write inscriptions.
This one is carved and it's decorated.
At all of the camps, people made bird pins.
They used fruit crates for material.
They got their hands on a National Geographic issue
on birds and they tried to be as authentic as possible
in how they carved it and how they painted it.
I started thinking about why this was so meaningful.
It was because the objects reflected the dignity
of the people who were in camp.
When you saw these amazing things
that they created out of nothing,
there was a respect for their unwillingness
to just give up and give in.
What I really came to admire about them
was that they were looking for beauty
in a place where other people wouldn't see that.
What the people who were in camp said to me
was it was just our way to gaman,
and gaman is a word that means to bear the seemingly unbearable
with patience and dignity.
They'd say, "We had to gaman.
"What else could we do?
We had to gaman."
[gentle string music]
- My mother is Momo Nagano.
She was 15 when she went into camp in Manzanar.
They were hiring the incarcerated Japanese Americans
to create camouflage for the war effort.
There was nothing to do, so she wanted to have a job.
They would create a piece of camouflage
by weaving strips through netting.
She said it always stayed with her
because she just really enjoyed the process.
She did ultimately become a weaver.
I found this picture taken by Dorothea Lange,
and there are five women,
but one is standing there just kind of focusing in
on what she's doing.
I swear it's my mother.
There's just something about the way she's standing there
and the way she's really working on the weaving part.
- Many Japanese Americans had parents
who did not talk about the internment experience.
It was a source of great shame
and humiliation and embarrassment,
but our mother spoke very freely about it,
and we were hearing stories about camp
from when we were, you know, very little.
My mother was willing to walk her own path through this life,
and her approach to life was really reflected in her artwork.
- Maria: The flag is woven with strips of cloth
through a netting that she created.
She collected the names of every family
that lived in her neighborhood and put them on the stripes.
In the blue field, it's all the camp names,
and 30th Street was her street
that she lived on in Los Angeles.
The shape is a tombstone
to symbolize the death of her neighborhood.
- For centuries, Asian Americans have been faced
with this questioning of their American-ness.
Because you have this face, you are the perpetual foreigner,
even though your family may have been here
for five, six generations.
One of the great ironies of the internment experience
is that many of these Japanese Americans
never lost their love for their country, you know?
They love the United States from behind barbed wire.
- Our parents made the best out of a bad situation
and they didn't talk about it.
Not just because it was hard for them,
but they wanted to spare us children.
They wanted us to grow up loving this country.
I realized that that silence was not meant to harm us,
but to protect us.
[gentle bugle music]