Benton County formally recognized the Day of Remembrance for Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II at Tuesday’s county commissioners meeting with two local speakers sharing personal and professional connections to the history.
Janet Seiko Nishihara, director of the Educational Opportunities Program at Oregon State University, read a proclamation designating Feb. 19 as the Day of Remembrance of Japanese Americans Incarcerated During World War II. The national observance marks the 1942 signing of an executive order that resulted in the forced removal and incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans.
Nishihara spoke to both the injustice of the incarceration and the resilience Japanese Americans demonstrated while confined. Despite living under armed guard behind barbed wire, she noted, incarcerated community members built their own churches, schools, post offices, fire brigades and other internal structures to sustain community life.
“Our stories are two of the thousands from the incarceration and can add greatly to the understanding of the larger community about the ramifications of what happened and why ‘never again’ is a theme that we must keep going,” Nishihara said.
Benton County Deputy District Attorney Kevin Hashizume also addressed the board, sharing his family’s history. His father, Naotaka “John” Hashizume, was a young child when his family was sent to the Heart Mountain incarceration camp in Wyoming. Growing up, Kevin Hashizume said the experience was rarely discussed openly at home.
“We just called it ‘camp,'” he said. “As kids we thought it was like a summer camp or something.”
It wasn’t until adulthood that he came to understand the lasting toll the experience had taken on his father, including a deep reluctance to travel far from California. A personal visit to Heart Mountain — with his own children roughly the same age his father had been during incarceration — brought the history into sharper focus.
“I thought about what that must have been like and whether I would have been strong enough,” Hashizume said.
His grandfather deliberately preserved home movies and photographs from the camp years, materials now archived at the Japanese American National Museum and the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center in Wyoming. Hashizume said he is proud that documentation exists.
“It’s something we were never taught in school,” he said. “To know my grandfather put real effort into preserving it means a lot to be able to bring that history back into focus.”
Hashizume also noted that some modern migrant detention facilities are located near or on the sites of former incarceration camps — one reason families and advocacy groups continue working to keep this chapter of history visible.
District Attorney Ryan Joslin praised Hashizume’s willingness to share the history with colleagues and members of the public. Joslin, who lived in Japan from 1987-89 and later studied Japanese as an undergraduate, said the subject holds personal meaning for him as well.
A recording of the proclamation reading is available in the Benton County Board of Commissioners meeting video beginning at the 14:30 mark. An interview with Naotaka “John” Hashizume, conducted by the Japanese American National Museum in 2016, is available on the museum’s YouTube channel. Family footage from Heart Mountain is accessible through Discover Nikkei.