- Another Time of Smoke and Camellias
- A Promise of Peaches
- An Outrage in the Name of National Security, on Exhibit at Descanso Gardens
“Only the oaks remain.”
This is the mantra of the Tuna Canyon Detention Station, which later this week (March 7 through 9) will bear witness — “honor” is perhaps not the correct word – to the unjust World War II incarceration of Japanese, German and Italian aliens eight decades ago.
The essentially anti-Japanese incarceration was authorized by Presidential Proclamations 2525, 2526 and 2527. Today, the inclusion of a small number of Italian and German aliens seems a transparently token gesture.
And today, what went on at Tuna Canyon takes on a weird sort of relevancy as ash from the Eaton Fire continues to haunt our neighborhoods. Virtually everyone we meet these days is talking about loss, spiritual and historic as well as material and financial.
But realize this sense of deep loss has persisted in Japanese-American life, usually held in check by exquisitely delicate cultural restraint, for 80 years.
To learn more about the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition (TCSDC), which is sponsoring this week’s event, we connected with event organizer and Coalition President Kyoko Nancy Oda, who was born in 1945 at the Tule Lake Segregation Center. That’s where her father, a teacher, was beaten, exposed to frigid cold, starved and locked in the stockade.
The occupants of Tuna Canyon, like most of the smaller detention camps, were primarily for men who were deemed so dangerous to national security that they were separated from their families and kept under the closest scrutiny. Topping the list: Shinto and Buddhist priests, language teachers and fishermen.
Tuna fisherman, to be specific.
In a 2022 interview with KCRW, Oda commented, “They thought they were potential saboteurs. Fishermen on the tuna boats use shortwave radios to communicate. So this could be used, in the mind of the military, as potential transmitters to contact a foreign government.”
It is purely coincidence that the Tujunga-area camp that confined them references “tunas.” In the case of the canyon and camp, the reference is to the abundant prickly-pear fruits (called tunas in Spanish), versus the canned albacore that many of us love with mayonnaise and pickle relish.
As a UCLA student in the 1970s, Oda devoted her energies to documentngi her family’s experience to reveal truths long-suppressed by the post-war American government. Through a chance encounter with a scholar named Masumi Izumi, a professor from Doshisha University in Kyoto, Oda was able to have entries from her father’s diary translated from Kanji into English. These translations, illustrated by Kyoko’s sister Masako, have since been published online and in hardcover book form. Her work with the TCSDC has led to the site being designated as Los Angeles’ Cultural Monument #1039.
The Japanese-American National Museum Web site states: “Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US Department of Justice took over a vacated Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the Tujunga neighborhood of Los Angeles and converted it into a detention station by installing twelve-foot-high barbed wire fences, guard posts, and flood lights. The Tuna Canyon Detention Station became one of many initial confinement sites set up by the government. Targeted individuals were quickly arrested in their homes, leaving behind confused and frightened families; most detainees were later sent to Department of Justice or Army internment camps.”
The barbed wire is gone. Little physical evidence remains of the camp. Oda tells us, “The stay at Tuna Canyon was about two weeks, so artifacts are rare. We began our journey by translating the diary of Reverend Daisho Tana by Duncan Ryuken Williams for our educational outreach program about religion in Tuna Canyon. A vase and hand-made box were presented to kind officer in charge, Merril H. Scott from the prisoners who felt that he was a fair and good man. A burl made at Tuna Canyon was a memento of Kenzo Sugino’s long stay as a translator. We have letters, post cards, and a signed handkerchief shown in the exhibit. No real objects follow the tours.”
This scarcity of material proof also seems almost freakishly aligned with today’s local conversations, where we grieve the incineration of decades of family photos, birthday cards from moms long gone, documents both essential and trivial, trifles, treasures, trinkets, precious junk and priceless ephemera, literally gone in a puff of smoke…a magician’s cruel trick.
This scarcity has given rise to Coalition’s founding of the Marc Stirdivant Scholarship for Justice outreach program. Scholarships are offered to students in grades 9 through 12. The application form challenges young artists, essayists and videographers as follows: “Only the oaks stand testament to the civil liberties violations that occurred at Tuna Canyon: no historic buildings exist. Create art that will enable people to fully understand the history and feel deeply enough to stop future civil liberty violations.”
Cash prizes are offered, and the selection process will resume in October, 2025.
The exhibit has previously been shown at the San Diego Museum, Japanese-American National Museum, Pasadena Playhouse, Manzanar Historic Site, Santa Barbara Historical Museum, MIS Museum in San Francisco, the Japanese-American in Portland. Locally it has been on display at Bolton Hall, The Museum of the San Fernando Valley, and the San Fernando Valley Japanese-American Community Center.
Remembering the now-generously blooming camellias which comprise a significant part of Descanso Gardens’ allure, Oda reminds us, “Descanso Gardens is only five miles from the camp. Fred Yoshimura was arrested in March 1942, leaving his large stock of plants and especially camellias. His wife, Mitoko, had to dispose of their business when EO 9066 ordered all people of Japanese ancestry to report to assembly centers like Santa Anita race track or the Pomona fairgrounds. Along with the camellias from the Uyematsu family, (Descanso) is now a camellia forest.”
The trusting return of spring flowers, including camellias, iris and jasmine, are reminders of the persistence of life and of human will, long after the ashes have been blown away.
DEETS
- Tuna Canyon Detention Station Exhibit (location: Japanese Garden, near entrance)
- Friday through Sunday, March 7 through 9
- Descanso Gardens, 1418 Descanso Drive, La Cañada Flintridge
- www.descansogardens.org
- 818-949-4200
- Open daily
- Films of Remembrance
- Saturday, Mar 08, 2025
- Japanese American National Museum
- 100 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
- www.janm.org/events/2025-03-08/films-remembrance
Delighted to see this well written and interesting article about Tuna Canyon Detention Station which highlights the important work being done to commemorate this site and and what happened there and the link to Descanso Gardens. My father was one of a number of Germans detained at Tuna Canyon. I wish to point out that in the light of this and the fact that under Presidential Proclamations 2525, 2526 and 2527 overall around 31,000 persons were detained and this included about 16,800 Japanese, 10,900 Germans, and 3,200 Italians the comment that ‘the inclusion of a small number of Italian and German aliens seems a transparently token gesture’ seems inappropriate.
While your father, Fritz Caspari, was indeed incarcerated at Tuna Canyon, the number of Germans and Italians detained at TCDS was small when compared with the number of ethnic Japanese detainees processed through the facility.
For reference, we can recommend the following list:
https://www.tunacanyon.org/names-of-detainees
Additionally, this well-researched but out-of-print book (copies are available on eBay) details how approximately 11,000 Germans nationally (including German citizens captured in Latin America countries) were relocated at least 150 miles from the US coasts but were rarely incarcerated in camps:
https://a.co/d/4UoxAf0
By comparison, approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent were incarcerated in ten camps operated by the War Relocation Authority. Of these, approximately 2/3 were US citizens.
I am the primary historian for the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition and the compiler of the names to which Mr. Hopkins refers. He is correct. A large majority of Tuna Canyon detainees were Japanese. But the presence of several hundred Germans and Italians at Tuna Canyon was certainly not a “transparently token gesture.” It was the result of a broader effort (as Mr. Caspari points out) that was national in scope to arrest and detain over 14,000 Germans and Italians (in addition to 16,000 Japanese) who were seen as threats to national security. This overall effort, authorized by three Presidential Proclamations derived from the 1798 Alien Enemies Act was certainly not, as the article describes, an “essentially anti-Japanese incarceration.”
I am intimately familiar with the comparison Mr. Hopkins correctly points out about the 120,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast who were removed from their homes and sent to War Relocation Authority Camps. My parents and grandparents were at Jerome and Rohwer (my paternal grandfather was also at Tuna Canyon). But this was done as a separate and largely subsequent action under the authority of Executive Order 9066 and not the Presidential Proclamations. The Tuna Canyon Detention Station is the result of the latter and not the former, and it is this Detention Station that is the subject of the exhibit at Descanso.