Even though Ruth Yamauchi, 90, is an American citizen, she was forced from her home in San Francisco to live in a horse stall and then an internment camp in arid Topaz, Utah, for three years during World War II.
Yamauchi and her daughter, Elyse, both of Wheat Ridge, paid tribute Sunday to the 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were interned in camps, one in Colorado, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in World War II.
About 60 people attended the Day of Remembrance event at Simpson United Methodist Church in Arvada, part of a national effort to commemorate a controversial time in U.S. history.
They watched a one-actress play, “Within the Silence,” a fictional story about a teenage girl forced from her Seattle home to live with her family in an internment camp in Idaho.
The camps, including one near Granada in eastern Colorado, housed people forced to leave their homes on the West Coast between 1942 and 1946. Two-thirds of those detained were U.S. citizens, and half were children.
“We want to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” said Elyse Yamauchi, 55, a doctoral student who teaches courses at Metro State College in Asian- American studies.
One attendee, Frank Sakamoto, 81, of Denver recalled that his father wore his World War I uniform when officials picked up his family in California to relocate them to an Arizona internment camp.
“He was ordered to take off the uniform because they said he was causing a disruption,” said Sakamoto, who was a teenager at the time.
Once at the internment camps, people tried to keep life normal, Ruth Yamauchi said.
“We had Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and people volunteered to be teachers in schools,” she said.
Talking about her experience at the internment camp is easier for Yamauchi than some others because many Japanese-American women weren’t encouraged to speak up, Ruth Yamauchi said.
“Many don’t want to talk about it because they think it was a disgrace and humiliation,” she said. “A lot had beautiful homes and lost those things.”
Elyse Yamauchi said she felt ashamed of her Japanese heritage until the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Now she is learning as much as she can about her heritage and supports efforts to memorialize this period.
Granada has come a long way in the effort, she said.
The town was home to the smallest of the 10 camps, Camp Amache, named after a Cheyenne Indian chief’s daughter.
The location, which originally had 550 buildings clustered on 640 acres and 7,597 residents at its peak, was recently designated a National Historic Landmark. It has undergone significant preservation in the past few years.
“The town wanted to forget the past,” Elyse Yamauchi said. “But now people respect it.”
Staff writer Katherine Crowell can be reached at kcrowell@denverpost.com.
