Paul Kitagaki Jr. had just started out as a photographer in the late 1970s when an uncle mentioned to him that Dorothea Lange had once photographed his father and extended family waiting to board a bus in Oakland, Calif. Their destination? A temporary detention facility, one of 15 assembly centers along the West Coast, before they were sent to one of 10 permanent internment camps where 120,000 Japanese-Americans were confined after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which required the forced removal of residents of Japanese descent from the West Coast regardless of their citizenship (although some 70 percent were citizens). Entire families were rounded up, even the children, and forced to leave their homes and businesses to go live in what advocates now prefer to call incarceration camps. Some lived in dirty horse stalls and makeshift barracks at temporary assembly centers before ending up at camps where they were imprisoned until the war’s end at facilities where showers and toilets were in open spaces and they ate in mess halls.
Mr. Kitagaki had asked his parents about that era when he first learned about it in high school. “Mostly they just said it was bad, it was cold and dusty,” he said. “They don’t complain. They keep their feelings inside of them. They are the quiet generation, but that’s also part of Japanese culture. But I wanted to know how this happened. How could they be locked up in locations with barbed wire and armed soldiers when they had done nothing wrong and were American citizens?”
That quest led him to the images made by Ms. Lange, who was among a group of photographers who had documented the camps for the government. Years ago, when he was working for The San Francisco Examiner, Mr. Kitagaki had visited the National Archives to peruse the images. Struck by their power and emotion, he wondered how that wartime incarceration affected the families and decided to seek out and photograph as many survivors as he could. The result is “Gambatte! Legacy of an Enduring Spirit,” a project that uses photos as well as audio and video interviews with his subjects.
“For most of these people, it’s a challenge to get them to open up and talk about their experience,” Mr. Kitagaki said. “They endured a lot of pain and shame for us. It’s the first time they’ve talked about it outside of their families. Some of the children come to me and ask to hear their parents’ interviews because they do not talk of it within the family in any detail. It’s really brave of them to share their experiences. They are really educating me.”
Soon after President Roosevelt issued his executive order, the War Relocation Authority, a civilian agency, was created to feed, house and care for them. Lange and Ansel Adams were among photographers who documented the families. The Los Angeles portrait photographer Toyo Miyatake took a lens to the Manzanar camp and made a box camera from scraps of construction wood during the building of the camp. He became friends with Adams, who worked independently of the War Relocation Authority, and was able to take photos inside Manzanar.
Reviewing these images by Lange and more by other W.R.A. photographers, including Clem Albers, Tom Parker and Francis Stewart, inspired Mr. Kitagaki.
He began his quest by taking copies of the vintage photos to Japanese churches, hoping someone would recognize a relative. The people he was looking for most likely did not use the Internet, and even an announcement he put on a board during a Buddhist festival drew no responses.
“I was totally devastated,” he said. “It started out really slow, finding just one or two people per year. Some people might be identified, but they weren’t interested in talking about it and I had to respect what they wanted. I relied on people seeing the photos and contacting me to help identify the family members.”
Among the survivors he tracked down are Harvey Itano, Lillian Matsumoto and Ben Kuroki, a war hero and journalist who died recently. After leaving the camp, Mr. Itano went to medical school and helped discover sickle cell anemia, collaborating with Linus Pauling. He later became the first Japanese-American admitted to the United States National Academy of Sciences, in 1979. Mrs. Matsumoto and her husband started an orphanage called the Children’s Village inside the camp where they were held.
This episode of American history has taken on new relevance in recent days after Donald J. Trump called for barring Muslims from entering the United States.
Anna Nakada, a survivor who is now 77, said she saw the project also as a call to rethink accusations against ethnic and religious minorities and immigrants. Japanese internment survivors, though, were not refugees; most were citizens.
“When you think of new immigrants, they will put up with almost anything and my parents did,” Ms. Nakada said. “They went through a lot of hard times, making a living and providing for us. I’m sensitive to injustice as a result of my experience. But we were always looking ahead. That attitude has been the basis of my approach to life. In every culture there are people that say hey, I got to keep moving ahead and keep on going.”
Mr. Kitagaki, who shared the Pulitzer Prize at The San Jose Mercury News for coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and is now a senior photographer at The Sacramento Bee, continues his search for more subjects. He also wants to spread the story beyond the West Coast to other museums and publish a photo book.
“It’s a civil liberties story,” he said. “I hope viewers will be inspired by their stories, and I would hope that the incarceration of people by their ethnicity or race could not happen again in the United States. I’m in a race against time as many of the subjects are in their 80s and 90s and passing away. I hope their stories are not lost forever.”
Gambatte! Legacy of an Enduring Spirit is currently on view at The Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center in Portland, Oregon and will be on display through Jan. 17, 2016.
Fayemi Shakur is a writer based in Newark. Her work has been featured online and in print in Nueva Luz Photographic Journal, The International Review of African American Art, and Hycide magazine.