Residents of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, in northwestern Wyoming, first arrived on August 12, 1942. As they disembarked the train, weary men, women, and children trudged the quarter-mile walk uphill to face 459 barracks as far as the eye could see. Each barrack was constructed in only fifty-eight minutes and contained five single-room apartments (20 by 24 feet).
There were no ceilings, so voices traveled the 120 feet before echoing back. Each room had a coal stove, one light bulb dangling in the center, and an Army cot and mattress. . . . In the haste of planning, the WRA acquired green wood, which meant that the barracks were shrinking before they were even completed. Dust covered the rooms, and incarcerees would later be forced to plug pages from Sears, Roebuck catalogues into the growing gaps.[1]
Heart Mountain residents experienced some of the most frigid winters in all of the camps. As one woman recalled, “The coldest temperature which we experienced there was minus twenty-eight degrees. When one touched a doorknob, the skin would stick to the knob.” Thankfully, “the good church women of Powell sent a contribution of clothing for our needy.”[2] Gusts of wind topping sixty miles an hour could knock down an unsuspecting person. Another resident described their living conditions: “The size of the room was twenty feet by twenty-four feet with open ceilings, a single lightbulb, a coal-burning stove, a mop, a broom, and a bucket. Each of us in our family of seven . . . was issued a steel army cot, a mattress, and blankets.”[3] Despite some outside sympathizers, the nearby town of Cody either banned the Nikkei or displayed other forms of racial prejudice.[4] During the war, many of the 10,700 residents at Heart Mountain would also bitterly protest against the so-called “loyalty questionnaire.” Some Christians who wrestled with their faith expressed their struggle in a poem:
Father, you have wronged me grievously
I know not why you punish me
For sins not done or reasons known
You have caused me misery.
But through this all I look on you
As child would look on parents true
With tenderness come mingling in
The anguish and Bitter tears;
My heart still beats with loyalty
For you are my Father, I know no other.[5]
The Heart Mountain Community Christian Church
The Heart Mountain Community Christian Church, which represented a unified Protestant group, would serve as a source of strength for such wavering believers:
Ministers in the Community Christian Church consisted of Methodists, four of them, two Presbyterians, one Reformed, one Christian, two American Baptists, three Salvation Army officers, and one Congregational evangelist. . . . The Community Christian Church administered Sunday Schools, worship services in English and Japanese, youth meetings, young adult meetings, choir rehearsals, prayer meetings and Bible study groups until the closing days of the Center.[6]
Ministries were started to reach all ages for Christ and an interdenominational women’s group was also formed:
Representative women from the Catholic and five Protestant churches of Powell [Heart Mountain] congregated to form a new club, whose membership is open to all Christian women, regardless of church affiliations. The name for the new organization is `The Christian Good-Will Group’ and it has as its primary object the extension of friendly courtesies to the Christian women among the Japanese Americans recently arrived from California to make their home in the Heart Mountain Relocation Center for the duration of the war.[7]
Gunsaku Kuwahara felt blessed to serve as a Sunday school teacher:
During those years, I was very thankful for what the Lord was doing through the Christians in the camp, because we had enough time to tell as many people as possible about God. You didn’t have to seek out Japanese people. They were all around you wherever you went in the center. As far as evangelism is concerned, I believe it was the best chance ever to proclaim the Good News to my people. . . . With the blessing of the Lord, it seemed to me as if it were a three-year vacation, yet it might have been a hard time for others who didn’t know the Savior. As Christians, we knew that in all things, God works for the good of those who love Him [Romans 8:28-30].[8]
Help also came from the outside. Local churches served coffee to the arriving Nikkei and gave them a “warm welcome.” According to the camp newsletter:
From the first day that the gates swung shut on Heart Mountain evacuees, Christian churches throughout the nation concentrated their efforts toward making life in relocation centers a little more bearable. At Christmas time in 1942 and 1943, gifts by the thousands poured from the “outside” into Heart Mountain in order that children would remember the spirit of Christ and that their parents would not lose faith in their earlier lessons of Christianity. . . . Once having seen the plight of thousands of families uprooted from their homes, their businesses and natural contacts of normal life, the Christian churches have undoubtedly gone to greater lengths to help not only the members of their flocks but have strained every source to bring public recognition to the problem forced upon both the issei as well as the nisei.[9]
Seminaries such as the Pacific School of Religion donated Christian books for the church library[10] and outside ministers helped with worship services. Donald Toriumi recalled,
One of the first groups that came to visit us were the Protestant Christians from outside the camp who said to us, “Okay, you are here in camp. What can we do to help you?” They brought hymnals, a pump organ and offering trays, . . . mimeograph machines, paper supplies, and other equipment, which we needed to carry on our church ministry. . . . Here was the Church of Jesus Christ in action, regardless of the racial differences. They went out of their way to help us.[11]
The Heart Mountain Episcopal Church
As in the other centers, the Episcopal Church worshipped separately from the ecumenical church. Peter K. Simpson recalled his own excursions to Heart Mountain as an impressionable eleven-year-old boy:
I am an Episcopalian and was an acolyte . . . in the Episcopal church. . . . I was shocked to hear our minister, John McGlaughlin (who we would have literally followed to the moon), when he said, “Boys, I want you to help pack up the vestments, sacred vehicles and utensils. We are going to go out to the relocation center and hold a service.” . . . We went to a very plain tar-papered recreation hall. There was a table at one end of the hall, and as I recall, no windows. We put a cross on the table and gathered things together. I remember sitting up close, right in the front. I sat stock still and watched as the congregation came in. As the service progressed, I was fascinated to see that not only did everybody there speak the same darn language I did, they actually knew the service better than I did. . . . After that Sunday, it was never quite as easy to fit the people of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center into the stereotype of the enemy abroad.[12]
That first Thanksgiving Sunday, Rev. Toriumi preached on 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” He exhorted the church to give thanks always and to rejoice in the Lord no matter the situation. Christmas then became a special season to share the love of Christ with others. According to the Heart Mountain Sentinel, “Busy, tired hands are preparing gifts for distribution at the Block 16 Community Christmas Committee headquarters where hundreds of gifts are arriving daily as church groups and individuals throughout the nations manifest their desire to share Christmas with children of this center.”[13] One resident related,
As Christmas drew near, the Girl Scouts of Powell came to go a-carol-ing with the Girl Scouts of the Center. Christmas parties were held in every block for the children. Gifts for them came from all over the United States from churches of every denomination, telling us better than a thousand words that America was still a Christian nation. Of Christmas Eve, Kay Tanouye wrote in the Sentinel: “The night was cold and sharp. The watchtowers stood out bold in the moonlight. The searchlight sprayed the boundary of the for-bidden area, picking out the cruel barbs of the wire fence. Six Nisei gathered below the tower and formed a circle. The leader lifted his hands. The words came softly and beautifully in the quiet night: ‘Silent night, holy night. All is calm; all is bright.’ As the last notes drifted away, the Army sentry spoke. His voice caught a little as he said, ‘Thank you, fellows. . . . Merry Christmas.’”[14]
During the internment, Christ’s love was manifest more clearly because of his church planted behind the barbed wire. Outside churches sent gifts to Nikkei children they had never before met. A young soldier, separated from his own family at Christmastime, discovered a temporary family through the shared joy of familiar carols. These interactions would never have taken place if the government had not segregated Japanese Americans from the rest of the population. Tomeo Nakae had not been a Christian during the internment, but she later remembered being strangely moved as she opened those large boxes filled with Christmas presents. She had read about the Christian teaching, “Love even your enemy,” but here it was displayed in action. The truth was extremely difficult for her to accept after her husband had been brutally shot outside their home in March 1932. Among those gifts Nakae especially remembered were dolls made by loving hands: “In spite of their busy house work these ladies must have met together in making these dolls. They were dedicating their time and money for us enemy aliens. I imagined such a scene and pondered these things. I could not sleep that night.”[15] After the war, in 1946, Nakae would eventually turn to Christ due to the loving sacrifice of women she had never met. As Rev. Toriumi had preached,
Life is largely made up of little things and little happenings. The big things of life occur once in a great while, while the little things, the common things, take place every day from moment to moment. . . . The smallest things become great when God requires them of us; they are small only in themselves; they are always great when they are done for God.[16]
[1] Pearson, Eagles, 148-49.
[2] Mary Oyama, “My Only Crime is My Face,” Liberty Magazine (14 April 1943), 58.
[3] Bacon Sakatani, “A Youngster’s Life Behind Barbed Wire,” in Eric L. Muller, ed., Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 25.
[4] See the letter from Dr. E.W.J. Schmitt recorded in the camp newspaper (“Methodist Pastor Criticizes ‘Prejudice’ in Town of Cody,” Heart Mountain Sentinel, 5 August 1944).
[5] Cited in Daniels, Concentration Camps, 119.
[6] Suzuki, Ministry, 233, 238. Adjutant Tozo Abe of the Salvation Army, however, “led separate, well-attended meetings at Heart Mountain from October 1942 to the end of the war” (Blankenship, Social Justice, 118).
[7] Japanese American Relations Committee, Pasadena AFSC Information Bulletin 8 (5 December 1942), citing the Powell (Wyoming) Tribune (24 September 1942).
[8] OMS Holiness Church of North America, “Chiaki Kuzuhara” (14 July 1991), accessed at http://kuzuharalibrary.com/testimonies/kuwahara.html (also recorded in Sugimura, Holiness Church, 171). Kuzuhara also received periodic visits from seminarian Waichi “James” Suehiro because no ordained Holiness ministers resided in Heart Mountain at the start of internment.
[9] Heart Mountain Sentinel (12 August 1944), 2. In 1943, “Hundreds of gifts are arriving daily as church groups and individuals throughout the nation manifest their desire to share Christmas with children of this center” (ibid. [18 December 1943], 8). In 1944, “more than 3000 children 18 years of age were the recipients of bright-colored stockings filled with candy, fruit and nuts, and gift packages presented by various Christian groups from all parts of the country. These gifts were supplemented by approximately $500 in monetary donations from the outside” (ibid. [30 December 1944], 3). Heart Mountain received so many gifts that they were able to share the bounty with the Tule Lake Relocation Center (“Christmas Gifts Sent to Tule Lake,” Heart Mountain Christian Church News 1.46 [30 January 1944]).
[10] The clergy at Heart Mountain built themselves bookshelves out of apple crates on which to display the books.
[11] “The Rev. Dr. Donald Kaoro Toriumi,” in Nisei Christian Journey, vol. 3, 42.
[12] Peter K. Simpson, “Recollections of Heart Mountain,” in Remembering Heart Mountain: Essays on Japanese American Internment in Wyoming, edited and contributions by Mike Mackey (Casper, WY: Mountain States Lithographing, 1998), 182. An Episcopal mission called “The Church of the Atonement” began congregating at Heart Mountain in May 1943 and met separately from the Heart Mountain Community Christian Church. The priest-in-charge was the Rev. John F. McLaughlin, the rector of Christ Church in nearby Cody, Wyoming. He was assisted by Luke T. Yokota, who later became an Episcopal priest himself (Andrew N. Otani, A History of Japanese American Episcopal Churches [n.p., 1980], 62-65).
[13] Heart Mountain Sentinel 2.51 (18 December 1943).
[14] Oyama, “My Only Crime is My Face,” 58.
[15] Tomeo Nakae, “The Road I Walked,” cited in Taro Goto, ed. and trans., Our Christian Testimony (Loomis, CA: First Methodist Church, 1967), 8-11.
[16] Donald Toriumi, “The Little Foxes (Song of Solomon 2:15),” a sermon preached on 25 July 1943 cited in Suzuki, Ministry, 237-38.
