In the hysteria that followed Japan’s surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese-American families across the West were ordered to pack what they could carry and get on trains headed to isolated camps like the one at Heart Mountain.
At the time, the camp was the third largest town in Wyoming.
Exhibits follow the timeline, from normal life on the West Coast to sudden deportation. The history is written as first-person accounts with recorded testimony by ex-internees.
Acknowleding internees' plight
Ten Japanese internment camps were set up during the war. Only two have established centers to acknowledge and pay tribute to what internees went through. The museum at Manzanar, in California, is run by the federal government.
Shirley Ann Higuchi, chairman of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, stands next to a life-size photo of her parents taken in the camp.
Heart Mountain was set up by a private non-profit organization. Shirley Ann Higuchi, whose parents were interned here as children, is the chairman of the mostly Japanese-American board responsible for running the center.
She learned only recently about the importance of Heart Mountain to her parents, who were second-generation Japanese-Americans, or Nisei.
"When this experience occurred, the Nisei, being the quiet American and not talking much about this, their philosophy was to always look ahead, to endure, to keep on pushing forward and don’t look back," says Higuchi. "I think part of what occurred during that process was they really didn’t have the time to really process this and grieve and get angry."
最新
2013-11-27
2013-11-27
2013-11-27
2013-11-27
2013-11-27
2013-11-27