Hikaru (Carl) Iwasaki was a high school student in San Jose, Calif., at the outbreak of World War II, when the government issued Executive Order 9066. It allowed for all Japanese- Americans living on the West Coast to be rounded up and interned in 10 inland camps. Along with his mother and sister, Iwasaki was sent to Heart Mountain, Wyo.
Internees were not allowed to take cameras or radios, so Iwasaki, a promising young photographer who’d worked on his high school newspaper and yearbook, was forced to leave his cameras behind. (In fact, each internee was allowed to take only what could be contained in a single suitcase.)
Assigned a job as an X-ray technician, Iwasaki caught the attention of the head of the camp newspaper, who recommended him for a darkroom job with the War Relocation Authority photo unit. So Iwasaki was sent to Denver to work for the WRA, then located in the old Midland Federal Savings Building on 17th Street.
The WRA was the government entity charged with moving Japanese-Americans from the camp back into America’s mainstream. The idea behind internment was that the Japanese- Americans would be forced to leave the West Coast and live temporarily in camps. Eventually, according to the government plan, loyal internees and their families would leave the camps for jobs in the interior of the U.S.
Within a year, Iwasaki had become a WRA photographer assigned to photograph hundreds of these Japanese-Americans who had moved back into society. Iwasaki’s photos show the lives of former internees at work, home and leisure.
One of the most haunting for Iwasaki is a 1944 shot of 16 Heart Mountain men in front of the Powell, Wyo., draft office, waiting to be shipped to Fort Warren for pre-enlistment physicals. One of the men, Iwasaki says in an interview, pointing to a young man in an overcoat, was a friend. The man joined the 442 Regimental Combat Team, the famed “Go for Broke” unit, and didn’t come home.
Early WRA photographs documented removal of Japanese-Americans to the camps. But by 1943, when the WRA was encouraging evacuees to leave, Iwasaki and others took pictures showing former internees living happy, productive lives outside the camps. The purpose of the pictures, says Iwasaki, was to “show people in the camps that things were OK.”
“Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens” is a two-part book, first, the story of the WRA’s photographic mission, written by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, followed by an album of Iwasaki’s photographs.
While the photographs were essentially a propaganda tool and Iwasaki was accompanied by a Caucasian WRA staff member during each shoot, Iwasaki says he was never told how to photograph the subjects. “Maybe I was waiting for that to happen, but no, no one ever told me how to photograph the people,” he says. Nor were his photographs censored. Film was scarce, and Iwasaki generally tried for a single shot that would tell the whole story.
Iwasaki says he never ran into prejudice while on assignment, either, even though mass hysteria and fear were what had led to the roundup of Japanese-Americans. “The curious thing was, I was never stopped by anyone. I was carrying cameras around my neck and was sent into the deep South where they had different drinking fountains for black and white people, but nobody ever said anything.”
Hirabayashi’s history of the WRA is interesting. Still, it is Iwasaki’s photographs that carry “Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens.” There are photographs of men and women at work — harvesting cabbages, picking peaches, feeding chickens. A female soda jerk works at a fountain, and a butler arranges flowers in a mansion.
There are pictures of families as well. A Japanese-American couple sits on the front stoop with their soldier-son. A grandfather horses around with a grandson perched on his shoulders. A young couple dances at the YWCA in Denver. There are pictures Iwasaki took inside the camps too. The most emotional shows a USO representative presenting Gold Stars to Japanese-American mothers whose sons were killed fighting for America.
After he left the WRA at the war’s end, Iwasaki worked in a portrait studio in Denver before a chance meeting with Barron Beshoar, Time magazine’s Denver bureau chief. When Life magazine needed a photographer to shoot a Wyoming Senate race and the magazine didn’t have time to send a staff photographer from Chicago or Los Angeles, Beshoar was told to get anybody. He hired Iwasaki. And later, when a terrible snowstorm hit the West, Beshoar once again hired Iwasaki to take pictures. His Life magazine shot of a frozen steer dripping with icicles is iconic.
As a result of those photos, Iwasaki became a freelance photographer, working for Time, Life, Sports Illustrated and many other national publications.
Iwasaki, 85, lives in Denver after retiring some 25 years ago. Looking back at those early WRA photographs, Iwasaki insists that some look like the work of an amateur. But Hirabayashi didn’t think so, and neither will readers. They are striking images of proud people who faced their government-imposed adversity with dignity and even humor.
They are photographs for the ages, and Iwasaki hopes the book will teach Americans about a shabby and little-known chapter of U.S. history. Says Iwasaki, “I bet 99 percent of schools don’t teach classes about (Japanese-American internment). Young kids and even college students have never heard of this situation. They should have this book in classes.”
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist and freelance writer.
NONFICTION
Japanese American Resettlement Through the Lens by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, with photographs by Hikaru (Carl) Iwasaki, $34.95
