Site of prison camp renamed for inmate interned during WWII
By Jim Erickson, Arizona Daily Star
Publication Date:Â November 8, 1999Â Page:Â 1BÂ Section:Â METRO/REGIONÂ
Harry Yoshikawa spent 17 months and 10 days busting rocks, washing dishes and stoking wood-burning ovens at a federal prison camp in the Catalinas during World War II.
He served his time for draft evasion, then left the mountains in 1944 and never came back.
Until yesterday.
Yoshikawa and five other former Japanese-American inmates returned to the prison camp ruins for a ceremony honoring those who were sent there for taking a stand against injustice.
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"There are a lot of memories around here," Yoshikawa said as he surveyed the scene for the first time in 55 years. "A lot of memories, all right."
The former prison camp site was renamed the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site yesterday to recognize the first and most famous of 45 Japanese-Americans sent there during the war.
As a University of Washington student in 1942, Hirabayashi defied federal curfew and evacuation orders imposed on Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. He spent three months in the Catalinas after the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled against him for violating the military orders.
Other Japanese-American prisoners were sent to the Catalinas after Hirabayashi left. They worked in the camp or joined road crews blasting the 25-mile Catalina Highway from the granite mountainside north of Tucson.
The prison camp was razed in the 1970s, so there's scant evidence of the sprawling 50-building complex that once housed more than 200 prisoners at a time. A few scattered stone walls, rock foundations and concrete floors can be seen along Prison Camp Road, just past Milepost 7 on the highway.
Yesterday, Yoshikawa and other former inmates remembered the prison site as it was 55 years ago, when whitewashed rocks on the hillside marked the camp boundary. There were no barbed-wire fences and no guard towers.
"Barracks A, B and C were here, and there was a big mess hall over where those trees are," Yoshikawa, 77, said as he studied the flat, parklike space now overgrown with oaks.
Near the mess hall was a laundry building, and behind that was a baseball field. Beyond the field was a chicken and turkey ranch.
"We could roam around as we wished, the guards didn't bother us, and the food was good," Yoshikawa said. "It was better than the concentration camps the other folks were in."
During the war, more than 115,000 Japanese-Americans were sent to 10 "relocation centers" built at remote locations in the West. About a quarter of them were confined at two Arizona camps, Poston and Gila. With a combined population of 31,000, Poston and Gila became the state's third- and fourth-largest "cities" during the war.
Early in the war, Japanese-Americans were declared ineligible for the military. But in 1943 the ban was lifted, and Japanese-American men were recruited from the relocation camps.
More than 20,000 of them fought, but more than 300 refused to be drafted until their constitutional rights as citizens were restored. The resisters were convicted of draft evasion.
"I told them to release my parents and family from the camp and then I'll go, because then I'll know what I'm fighting for," Noboru Taguma, 76, said yesterday after the dedication ceremony. "They told me my parents were having a good time in the camp."
Taguma's parents and his six siblings were held at Amache, a War Relocation Authority internment camp near Granada, Colo. After refusing to fight, Taguma was convicted and sent to the Catalinas for nine months.
"I don't think the younger generation understands what we did," he said.
"Understanding what Gordon did will help. This will help tremendously."
The Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site is in the Coronado National Forest. The U.S. Forest Service is planning interpretive signs that will tell the story of Hirabayashi, the draft resisters and others - including Hopis and Jehovah's Witnesses - sent to the prison camp for their beliefs.
Between $8,000 and $10,000 will be spent on the signs, and about $40,000 will be spent on a permanent rest room, said District Ranger Dean McAlister.
Last weekend a corral was built with the help of the Tucson Saddle Club and other organizations. The recreation site is used by picnickers, campers, hikers, equestrians and bird-watchers.
When Hirabayashi, 81, was approached last year about renaming the site in his honor, he told the Forest Service that he would support the idea if it would keep alive the memory of what happened to Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Hirabayashi's convictions for violating the evacuation and curfew orders were overturned by a federal appeals court in 1987. He has attained near-legendary status among Japanese-Americans for his unyielding intolerance of injustice.
"The Constitution is primarily a scrap of paper," he said yesterday during the dedication ceremony. "It comes to life with citizens who make something out of it, who commit themselves to it.
"So it's a personal commitment on the part of each citizen to uphold the Constitution," he said. "So I leave you with this challenge: Make it a personal commitment, day by day. One person makes a difference."
