Thirteen hundred visitors from across the country are converging on Little Rock, Ark., this weekend to attend the conference “Life Interrupted: The Japanese American Experience in World War II Arkansas.”
The University of Arkansas is working jointly with the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to stage an international attraction that links America’s history with current political debates on fighting terrorism. The event may even bring in future economic growth and development as more than $1 million has been underwritten from the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation.
In a clear sense, the event is about remembering the two internment camps at Jerome and Rohwer, just southeast of the state capital of Little Rock. Barracks were erected on what was once a swampy wetland near the Mississippi River — 16,000 detainees were sent there.
Among the speakers, U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawai‘i, Medal of Honor recipient and a 442/100th Regimental Combat Team veteran, will recount how many of the male internees volunteered for the military and served with distinction, even as their families were detained. One exhibit illustrates Japanese American GIs helping to rescue Holocaust victims at Dachau, Germany.
Former President Clinton was scheduled to join the festivities but cancelled because of recent heart surgery.
Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta plans to relate his own internment experience at Heart Mountain, Wyo., but also remind the audience that America remains a great country despite this history and that it apologized for putting 120,000 Japanese American citizens behind barbed-wired fences.
Documentary producer Katherine Dietz is helping to bring these experiences into the present with an hour-long television documentary, Time of Fear, that premieres at the conference. It will be broadcast on PBS nationally in May 2005.
Dietz recognizes that there are new people who argue that locking up Japanese Americans was justified because of the war. Many of the same people are advocating the use of racial profiling to ensure national security and protect Americans from terrorists.
“I think we want our viewers to see [that] at times of national crisis, sometimes our constitutional rights are put in jeopardy,” Dietz stated. “It’s during those times that we have to fight harder than ever to preserve the rights of everyone.”
But it is the future economic benefits of the event that may be the most controversial and the most promising. Leaders are hoping that international attention, especially from Japanese executives, will present Arkansas as a people- and business-friendly state.
Lt. Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, son of the late governor has been championing an effort to bring an automobile assembly plant to the state.
“We’re engaged in negotiations with Toyota,” he acknowledged. “We’ve had some really outstanding discussions, and we’re developing some very good relationships with the Japanese automakers.”
“What’s important is we’re helping to build bridges of understanding,” said Irene Hirano, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum. “If one of the side benefits is an automobile factory coming here, that’s okay. It means bridges of understanding are taking place.”
Large exhibits will illustrate what the Arkansas internees went through. New textbooks have also been written and published for elementary and secondary school students. Over a two-day period, buses will transport the conferees to the two former camp sites.
Many of those memories will come to light when the conferees visit the mini-museum set up in the home of 78-year-old Rosalie Gould, former mayor of McGehee, the closest town to the camps. She has collected autobiographies of some of the school children, 200 paintings they did, carvings, documents and other reminders of the camps.
To learn more about the Arkansas camp experience, visit www.lifeinterrupted.org.