New view of history uncovered at ASU

By Ryan Gabrielson, Tribune

July 29, 2006

A crowd watched as the train pulled into the Colorado River Relocation Center in July 1942, delivering the first group of Japanese-Americans to their new home in the Arizona desert.

The first internees they saw were two little girls, wearing bubble-gum pink dresses and clinging to dolls.

The history of the U.S.' relocation centers — where more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forced to live during World War II — has been documented in government reports, newspaper clippings and black-and-white photographs.

But, until now, it is not believed to have been seen in moving color.

While taking inventory at the Arizona Historical Foundation last year, archivist Linda Whitaker found a brown film cannister labeled "Poston Color Dup." Inside was 16-millimeter film showing the Colorado River camp, commonly known as "Poston," being built and receiving its first inhabitants 64 years ago.

"Color just didn't happen then," Whitaker said.

The foundation, based at Arizona State University's library, is working to share widely this unique footage of a dark period in the nation and state's history. The 25-minute-long film has been copied into a digital file and shown to a select group at the university. Whitaker said the foundation is in talks to post the footage online for everyone.

It opens with an aerial shot of the Poston site, a bare and dusty stretch, before construction began. The camp, located about 12 miles south of Parker near the California border, was home to about 18,000 internees.

Due to the camp, Poston was Arizona's third largest city after Phoenix and Tucson, Whitaker said.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered residents of Japanese ancestry who lived along the West Coast to leave their homes and live in relocation camps amid widespread fear and racism in the months after the Pearl Harbor attack. It was billed as a measure to protect "against espionage and against sabotage," the order states.

The camps were constructed in a matter of months. Much of the film shows construction workers in overalls and short-sleeve shirts mixing cement for building foundations and rapidly hammering together the barracks' wooden frames. When the internees arrived, the women stepped off the train wearing crisp dresses and fine-looking hats. Men appeared to have yielded to the blazing summer heat, having unbuttoned the top of their shirts and rolled up their sleeves.

Nonetheless, the Japanese-Americans are shown to be happy.

"It's a very interesting propaganda film," Whitaker said, noting that most of the internees are smiling despite their circumstances.

This was typical of such films, said Brian Davis, a media development associate at ASU's library. They were used by the government to prove to the public that internees were not mistreated. Davis converted the footage to digital for the foundation.

The footage was likely taken by Fred Clark, a government photographer who has an extensive collection of pictures from Poston housed around the country. Davis said some of the people in the film can be found in Clark's pictures. "The shadows and everything match up perfectly," he said.

The images that Clark and other government photographers captured, however, document only a sliver of the story.

Ruth Okimoto was 6 years old when the soldiers arrived at her San Diego home to relocate her family to Poston. As they got off the train, she said only relief from the suffocating heat might have caused smiles.

"When I first saw those photographs, I cried," she said of Clark's work, "because I know what life was like for people."

Okimoto is part of an effort to preserve Poston, where she lived for three years, and build a museum about the relocation. Living in Berkeley, Calif., she has spent years researching the camp and said she was not aware of any color footage of the internees.

On the ride to Poston, Okimoto said the Japanese-Americans were not allowed to open the windows, lest people find out the train's purpose. Her youngest brother was 2 weeks old at the time and nearly died from the suffocating heat.

The film does not indicate there were dangerous conditions on the train. Rather, it shows white officials helping the internees with their luggage, kids throwing a baseball around, a woman sweeping her front porch.

"They wanted to present to the public that we're treating them well, we're feeding them and they have a nice home," Okimoto said. "Home being a 20-by-24 (foot) barracks room. And our family of six lived in that 20-by-24 room with no running water, just one light bulb."

Davis said he is surprised the government would shoot a propaganda film at Poston, which was surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire. At the Gila River camp in Pinal County, he said there were no such precautions, and it was deemed safe enough for first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to visit.

The answer might have been contained in narration recorded on the film's magnetic sound strip, which no longer works, Davis said.

Though assumed to be propaganda, the film has a section of black-and-white footage spliced in that does not fit that profile.

After the Japanese-Americans are shown arriving at Poston, there is footage of storefronts that were likely owned by the internees. The buildings have signs that say everything is for sale; there are no people in these shots.

Whitaker said those storefronts are thought to have been filmed in either San Francisco or Los Angeles, where thousands of Japanese-Americans left behind homes and businesses to spend years in the camps.

The last image of the businesses shows a sign reading, "Closed, Thank You," laying on the floor.

Contact Ryan Gabrielson by email, or phone (480)-970-2341