Realizing the Effects of the Camps
Before last year’s Tule Lake Pilgrimage,1 Mike Ishii2 recommended some books for me to read, including And Justice for All, which consists of oral histories of former incarcerees. A few days before the trip, I was stopped at a stoplight. A Japanese-heritage couple who looked near to my age (I’m sixty-five) crossed in front of me, and for the first time I had the thought that their parents had probably been in the camps and that it had to have had an effect on them. I also realized that probably most of the Japanese Americans I meet here on the West Coast (of the United States) have parents or grandparents who were in the camps. I started thinking about the effects of the camps on the following generations and realized that I had never asked my Co-Counselors about the effects on their families.
Mary Ruth Gross
Richmond, California, USA
1 The Tule Lake Pilgrimage is a biannual pilgrimage to the site of the Tule Lake Camp, one of the ten concentration camps in which the U.S. government interned Japanese Americans during World War II. United to End Racism (a project of the RC Communities) has sent a team of Co-Counselors to the last four pilgrimages. The author was a member of last year’s team.
2 Mike Ishii is the Area Reference Person for the Triboro, New York City, New York, USA, Area and was another member of last year’s United to End Racism team at Tule Lake.