Some people that lived way inside the camp, never saw the barbed wire fence.

but I saw it every day, so I knew where we were at.

For me, it was a daily reminder that we were in prison.

It was it was a prison.

You could call it a re-location camp, internment camp, It was a prison.

Until finally they realized that we were not going to try to escape.

Where were we to go?

But I think it's important.

Very important for people to understand that Amache was a prison.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, our West coast became a potential combat zone.

Living in that zone, were more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two thirds of them American citizens, one third aliens.

We knew that some among them were potentially dangerous, but no one knew what would happen among this concentrated population if Japanese forces should try to invade our shores.

Military authorities, therefore, determined that all of them, citizens and aliens alike, would have to move.

This picture tells how the mass migration was accomplished.

These are the roses that were found at Amache and were planted by the incarcerees at least 70 years ago.

They had been planted up against one of the buildings and we're using the concrete foundation and some of the surrounding vegetation as sort of protection.

And it created a unique little microclimate that these found and were able to adapt to.

So they had either been planted right there or very close by and were able to survive.

I want to tell you a little bit about Amache, how it came to be and how people from the West Coast of the United States actually got there.

My name is Carlene Tanigoshi Tinker.

I'm a survivor of Amache internment camp.

And nowadays we call them incarceration camps.

I was three when I went into Amache with my parents in this, I think it was September 1942, and I was there until 1945.

A lot of people concentrate on the bombing of Pearl Harbor, December 7th, 1941, and the signing of the executive order by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, February 19, 1942.

Well, certainly those are the key events that created Amache, among other internment or incarceration camps.

But I want to point out they were the result of a long history of anti-Asian sentiment, not only in California, but all along the West Coast of the United States.

So when Pearl Harbor occurred, that was just sort of, okay, this is it.

We can now we can go ahead with, you know, what we want to do to these people.

So then in about May, I think the the signs went up on the telephone poles saying that you have two weeks or two days to pack whatever you could carry and that's all you could have.

And you had to go to an internment camp.

Before we could actually move to places like Amache.

And that was where we were headed.

We had to go into temporary facilities.

The one that we went to was the Santa Anita racetrack.

And according to my mom, we were in one of the horse stalls.

And if you can imagine what that must have been like, the smell, even though they whitewashed it.

I mean, my goodness, the the urine that the horses produced was probably impregnated in the wood.

So needless to say, the people who ended up in those facilities had a terrible time, no matter how much they cleaned them.

- They put us in stables.

The worst place I ever stayed.

In the front line of Korea, it didn't smell like that.

My name is Minoru Tonai and I was age 13 to 16 in camp.

I thought what I thought Colorado was beautiful.

Mountains, big trees.

Snow in the winter was going to be beautiful.

Going through the Royal Gorge is, you know, it's dry.

That's the way it was down to Amache.

So when we get to Amache, we were at the western edge of the dust bowl, not very nice, very dry and we knew life was going to be tough.

When we first got there of course, they were manned 24 hours a day, with the guards on top.

Machine guns point in work and searchlights, teenagers you know, gonna flash at me, I'll hide in the dark behind the building so he can't see me.

Soon he moves away, we'll move on.

Play games.

Pretty soon, you know, they realize we're not going to try to escape.

Where were we gonna go to?

Run away to the sagebrush?

There was no place to go.

When you see the camp at the beginning, it's just bare.

I mean, you see the barracks, you see the coal bins that are outside.

Nothing is planted.

People want to make themselves comfortable.

And what is one way to do it is to build a garden.

So within a very short time, they were planting trees, planting gardens.

I mean, we're not talking just victory gardens, I mean, beautiful floral gardens and so forth.

That in itself was very significant in the survival and the ability to endure, to endure the incarceration.

I really think that's a key.

Well, Amache is one of ten primary places where the United States government confined Japanese- Americans during World War II.

So there were over 120,000 people who spent at least part of the war in one of these camps.

And Amache was the smallest of them.

And it's located in southeastern Colorado on the high plains.

My name is Dr. Bonnie Clark.

I am a professor in the anthropology department at the University of Denver.

Since 2005, I've been the director of the D.U.

Amache Project.

Each time we go down into the field, we are looking for the physical remains of the that are left behind.

So essentially the tangible history of what happened there at Amache, and the buildings are gone.

They were temporary buildings.

They were put up quickly and they were dismantled quickly.

But so what remains is, for example, landscaping, that people put in and little kind of broken bits of people's lives, you know, bottle cap here and an old tin can that maybe has holes punched in it.

So it could be a plant pot or used to steam vegetables.

So we're looking for these shred of evidence of daily life, as well as the evidence of how people took the the sort of raw landscape that was there at the camp when they arrived and turned into something much more habitable.

So one of the most remarkable things that we find are gardens almost everywhere we look.

And they can be something as simple as a tree line planted in front of where people's barracks were with a little bit of a fence to things as phenomenal as a miniature strolling garden that has a little pond and beautiful karesansui or dry gardens, as well as some really amazing sort of hybrid gardens that that take that sort of experience that people had had living in the United States with front yards.

But then they give them this very interesting Japanese twist.

One day my crews came back to the crew house and they were super excited and they said, Guess what?

They said, We think we found roses and I scurried right out.

And and sure enough, there they were, growing up against a barrack.

Somehow these roses have survived all of these years, even though no one had taken care of them since 1945.

But look how healthy they are.

Yeah, they're not blossoming, but boy, you know, roses take us and do take a certain amount of care.

So, I mean, they've survived, but they maybe haven't thrived.

I've never seen them bloom.

So each field season, when I go out to Amache I have high school interns from Grenada and also from the descendant community.

I have undergraduate and graduate college students, and then I have Amache survivors and Amache descendant volunteers.

- So my name is Craig Kitajima and I am a descendant of Amache incarcees.

My background is in Japanese gardens, but I work professionally, mostly doing esthetic pruning.

So I think the role of gardens at Amache, I think it was really multifaceted.

One of them just being as a way to kind of normalize your life when they got there.

You know, if you look at the historical pictures, it was, you know, the government, had come through with tractors and they basically just razed the entire site.

And so for a mile square, there was nothing but sand and some, you know, ramshackle buildings.

The soil type in the plains of Colorado, it's mostly it's mostly sand.

And so the soil is really nutrient poor.

And, you know, most of the most of the native plants that grow out there are things like sagebrush and cactus and certain grasses that they're very, you know, that are adapted to that climate.

And so in order to grow anything, you know, say ornamental or, you know, growing vegetables and things like that, you really have to do a lot of soil amendment and you have to build up some soil so that the plants have the nutrients that are necessary to grow.

- These gardens were an amazing success, and I think they're very much a testament to the skills of the people who were at Amache.

Overall, when we think about, you know, how they made these gardens, it's really about, you know, what they had at hand, right.

And what they could find and and used in really imaginative ways and a lot of what is in these gardens are things that people would consider trash and that they've used them in these really interesting and thoughtful ways to beautify a place that they didn't choose to live.

-So in Japanese gardens, there's really three essential elements water being one; stones, and then the plants.

And in pretty much every garden you'll see there's either you'll either see those three elements or you'll see a representation of that of those three elements in some way.

In that area in the plains of Colorado, like I said, the, you know, the native soil is a sand.

And so there really are no stones that occur naturally.

So all the stones that we found, at Amache, were stones that were either river stones that were collected from the Arkansas River, or they were cement fragments that were taken from the over-pour of these foundations.

And that's what they used for their stonework.

So when you clear off the vegetation and then we did ground penetrating radar, we could see that both of these they are an intact pair of oval garden beds.

And what this is, is cinderblock that has been very carefully split so that it looks like basalt.

And then there's some stepping stones in here that were from the garden.

And so and the thing that I love about this is that this is so not what we would think of as traditional Japanese garden.

Right?

That it's so symmetrical.

But I think it really speaks to the fact that these are Japanese American gardens and that people had experienced doing all kinds of gardens all over.

But one of the things that I think is one of the amenities of this this block is the furthest east block.

So from this garden, you could have looked out to this town that would have been this reassuringly civilian view.

In the farms that were associated with the camp, not only did they grow enough produce to essentially feed, you know, Amache, at least all the all their needs for for produce.

But the excess was shipped to the armed forces and was shipped to other camps.

And so they're they're not just feeding their fellow Amacheans, they're feeding guys in the Air Force and people who are in the camps that maybe like the camps in Arizona where growing things was a lot more difficult.

We exported our chickens to other camps, and to army camps.

But in the field, I remember corn, and oh, lots of melons.

In fact we were working on this other field and we have break time.

When they were not looking we would sneak over and get a melon and crack it open and eat the inside, the sweet part.

You know, a lot of people ask, how did you how did the government manage to get these people there?

Why?

Why were these people so adaptable, if you want to call it that?

So there there are these concepts of 'Gaman'.

You persevere.

Maybe that's a cultural norm that we have that allowed us as a group to survive because we had no idea how long we were going to be there, why we were there, well we knew why we were there, because we were treated as the enemy.

But certainly we didn't know how long we were going to be there.

So that particular value - 'gaman' to persevere, to make the best of it, okay, you do what you can to survive and I think that was what guided, in our case, 7000 people to survive the three years that they were there.

There's another principle called 'Shikata ga nai', it is what it is.

You accept it.

It is what the government said.

And we just go on forward.

So I think that in addition to Gaman, where the contributing factors that led to the adaptability, the survivability, if you want, of the people who were in Amache and other camps as well.

- It was bad enough to be in prison.

But when you came out, you had to start your life again.

You didn't know if you would to be accepted out there.

My father lost everything.

He had 15 produce stands in the larger markets around L.A.

He lost it all.

He went back and try to get it back in the business, and they told him that they had great relation with him, but when he left, he left everything with them.

The produce stands, everything.

So they took over.

Now they had infrastructure.

So they didn't need him.

So that business was gone.

Finally a friend, neighbor, gave him a job trimming vegetables in one of his produce stands, and he gladly took it and he did that for years and years.

Once the incarcerees were released from from these camps and as they continued their lives, you know most of them never spoke about about their their time there.

And that's really reflective of this idea and this and that's the expression of 'Gaman' is that, you know, you don't complain about things.

And I think a lot of that, too, is also reflected in the fact that when this all happened, you know, there wasn't a lot of resistance.

There were some there was some resistance and some, you know, by the by the incarcerees, but it was mostly coming from people who were the second generation and, you know, the younger generations.

But for myself, I know my family, you know, there was very little talk.

Nobody really ever spoke about, you know, about about Amache and their time there.

There was certainly, I think, a time for a number of people where it was not spoken about at all or very, very rarely.

And and it had all the buildings had been dismantled.

There wasn't a sign in town.

And, you know, so basically, sort of during the fifties and sixties, it was a time when when there wasn't anything going on.

And so I think sort of maybe that early seventies might have been a time where it seemed like it was all just going to go away and then in the eighties, when John Hopper got involved, I think it was assured that there would never, that Amache would never be forgotten.

I grew up 60 miles from here and there were cattle grazing, people partying here, trash being thrown everywhere.

It was neglected through the 60s 70s and 80s.

I had some bright, bright students in U.S. history.

I thought, Let's do a project.

Let's do a project on Amache.

And I got those kids pretty fired up, and it just blew up from there.

I think the town has adopted this site.

In fact, I've got three former students that belong on the city council today, and even the mayor's two sons went through my through the program.

These roses are something that they left behind that you can actually see touch and smell.

I mean, it's just it's a huge imprint.

Somebody took great care on on growing these.

So today we're potting these into a larger size, getting them more soil for a larger root system, and we'll start fertilizing them now that the growing season's kicking into high gear again so we can finally see what these beautiful plants will bloom like because our goal and the project is to get them to a size where they will start to bloom and we can figure out a little bit more of what kind of rose and unravel a little bit more of the mystery of what these are and potentially try to understand maybe where they came from.

Now, I have met personally some people, some young people in their forties who had no idea about imprisonment of us people in World War II.

I was just amazed, just amazed.

So I think just as you would give a lesson about other groups being mistreated, you definitely want to include a unit, a unit on that in the schools.

I think definitely.

And by teaching kids about this, maybe they will be responsible people and not support any ridiculous movement like this in the future.

And after I visited the site, I introduced a bill with Senator Hickenlooper to make Amache part of the national park system so that it would have the resources and recognition it deserves for years to come.

We have to get this done.

Madam President, because the survivors of Amache are growing fewer and fewer in number each year, we have to keep the memory of what they went through alive for the next generation.

I hope the passage of the bill will mean that Amache is preserved forever.

You know, we have a conversation with some of the survivors not that long ago, and they said to me, we're not getting any younger, you know, And miraculously, Congress actually understood that.

And and I think there's been a lot of relief among the survivors because they know that the Park Service will now be managing this forever.

We we have to teach a complete story of American history.

And we never have done that in throughout our history.

We've, in effect, denied the history that we've had, and the story is therefore incomplete.

It'd be my hope and I've said this on the floor of the Senate, that every high school student and in the Western United States should have the chance to visit there to understand more completely our history.

I think for us, just as a people, it's so easy for us to kind of sweep history under the rug and just kind of forget about it.

But, you know, to make this a national historic site is the recognition... it really means a lot.

I really am happy and proud because this is one way that the American people at all times would know what happened to us in those wartime years and never let it happen again.

This is a doorway right here.

So it's hard to know where the parent population was, but they probably weren't as close to here and there and see how there is these these guys right here?

- Well -- yes.

- No, that's - No, that's that's the the sunflowers.

See this little sunflower?

- Right.

Here's a bloom though, huh?

- Oh, my God!

- Right?!

- Is it blooming for you?

- Yeah.

- Right.

- Yeah.

Rain at the right time.

It's pink, didn't they say it was going to be pink?

-There you go.

- Damn.

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