Putting American history on ICE
In Long Lead's latest photo feature, some of the last survivors of Japanese American incarceration share haunting memories of injustice that echo to the present day.
Kyoko Oda was born in 1945, in an over-crowded, violent detention camp run by the U.S. government. This 1,100-acre incarceration center known as Tule Lake was home to nearly 30,000 people over the lifetime of its operation and had a specific purpose, Morgan Lieberman reports in The Age of Incarceration: It was designed to punish and separate people of Japanese descent — including American citizens — who in the eyes of the president were deemed particularly disloyal to the United States. Now 80 years old, Oda spent the first years of her life in this camp’s dehumanizing conditions, guarded by a large military presence.
George Takei, born in 1937, also lived at Tule Lake and still vividly remembers the morning two soldiers with rifles marched up the driveway of his family’s home, pounded on their door, and demanded they leave for the camp, immediately. “The soldier [who] pointed his bayonet at our father escorted my mother out,” the 88-year-old Hollywood icon says in an interview. “And when she came out, she had our baby sister in one arm, a huge duffle bag in the other, and tears were streaming down her cheeks.”
These are just two of the memories that survivors of Japanese American detention camps share in the latest Long Lead feature, The Age of Incarceration, published today. This series of portraits and interviews puts a human face on one of the blackest stains of United States history. It is a history lesson told by those who lived it, a testimony of a time when the U.S. locked up its own people simply because of where their families had come from. With the intent of releasing these testimonials to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, Lieberman began photographing and interviewing the nine survivors over a year ago, never imagining the relevance the project would have today.
To be clear, The Age of Incarceration is not about the xenophobia currently radiating out of the White House. In fact, the name “Trump” only appears twice in the story — but in neither instance is it uttered by a survivor. It’s Lieberman who notes that “President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — who deemed anyone with Japanese ancestry, regardless of citizenship status, a threat to national security — invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime power not employed again until March 2025, when President Trump used it to deport Venezuelan immigrants.”
Indeed, the playbook feels familiar. The Japanese American National Museum recently noted the parallels between “Alligator Alcatraz,” a Florida detention camp built by the Trump administration, and Heart Mountain, an incarceration camp in Wyoming opened by Roosevelt’s government. During World War II, 14,000 people — mostly from California’s warmer climate — endured Heart Mountain’s frigid, unforgiving conditions. Jo Anne Naka’s family was among them, though they were sent someplace else, first:
And they were sent at first to Santa Anita Racetrack, where they had to live in the horse stables. And [my mother] said they gave them a sack and told us to stuff it with straw so that they’d have a place to sleep. And there was something wrong with me, something they suspected, my kidneys or something. And so she was almost going to have to leave me. I was still in the hospital, but at the last minute, then they let me go. They released me from the hospital, and so then I went to live in the horse stables with my parents and my sister. And so she had to raise a newborn in the horse stables.
It’s an impossible challenge to tell the full story of one survivor, let alone nine. But through Lieberman’s compassionate reporting and camera work, she’s crafted an emotional narrative that connects them all through their shared experiences, hopes, and fears. There is so much relevant reporting here that we weren’t able to fit it all into The Age of Incarceration. With its launch, Long Lead will begin sharing some of the survivors’ experiences we couldn’t include via our social media accounts, especially our TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky feeds. Please subscribe and share the posts so the their memories can inform modern-day Americans during this current, anxious time.
Part of what makes past tragedies like Japanese American incarceration feel so distant are the ways that the U.S. has seemingly reconciled it in the decades since. Lieberman doesn’t just chronicle the survivors’ strife, she also explores the grace of a people whose own government turned against them, a forgiveness made possible in part by their eventual, successful fight for reparations.
But the truth is that this frightening period wasn’t that long ago, and the intimate details that the survivors share in The Age of Incarceration aren’t far from the circumstances of the present day. The ICE officers raiding workplaces to deport migrants today feels eerily like the U.S. military forcing people from their homes in the 1940s. The chain-linked fence living quarters shown off in the “Alligator Alley” detention center are even worse than the single rooms with a pot-belly stove (backed by a sheet of asbestos) that served as living quarters for entire families at Heart Mountain. And the lack of legal due process for so many imprisoned people is, unfortunately, all too familiar.
We don’t know what will break the current White House’s anti-foreigner fever, but it ultimately took the Supreme Court to free the Japanese American incarcerees during World War II. “Although several Japanese Americans challenged the constitutionality of the incarceration at the Supreme Court, only the case brought by Mitsuye Endo, a clerical employee at the California Department of Employment, succeeded,” Lieberman writes. “The court ruled that the U.S. could not detain ‘concededly loyal citizens.’” The 1944 decision closed the camps and legally ended Japanese American incarceration, but this ruling is not likely to have standing today because the current incarcerees are not American citizens — or, at least, they shouldn’t be.
Until recently the U.S. government had done an admirable job of maintaining records of its past misdeeds. However, during the production of The Age of Incarceration, information began disappearing from websites and databases that the government had maintained. We note at the end of the feature that while the multimedia feature was independently reported, its publication would not have been possible without the archives maintained by Densho, a grassroots nonprofit organization that has been documenting the history of Japanese American incarcerees since 1996.
It would appear — in light of the raids by ICE, America’s construction of modern day incarceration camps, and its abandonment of due process — the Trump administration would like to erase the country’s previous mass incarceration attempts and subsequent reckoning. But it is the responsibility of journalism to hold the powerful to account, and we owe it to the Japanese American incarceration survivors to make sure the world never forgets the injustice they endured.
So long for now,
John Patrick Pullen
Founding Editor, Long Lead