On an air-conditioned bus to Tule Lake, we fold shimmering sheets of colored paper into delicate, mystical birds. The weight of the shared ritual makes my fingers fumble. It’s been decades since I made origami with my immigrant mother, and I feel pressure to reprise the long-learned practice. I’m on a journey to my past, after all, attempting to connect with the history of Japanese Americans. During the 11-hour trek, we crawl along choked highways outside Seattle and Portland, then roll through verdant valleys in central Oregon and into northern California. Creating cranes (tsuru) is more than just a distraction; in Japanese culture, these birds are believed to live for a thousand years and bring happiness, good luck, and healing. So we resolve to help make a thousand tsuru, then string them together for the 330 prisoners who died at the Tule Lake Segregation Center.
My pilgrimages to incarceration sites in the West began last year, during the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which triggered the roundup of 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent—many of whom were born in the United States—during World War II. (Today’s detention centers are echoes of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s prescribed “military areas.”) The order was revoked in 1946, and survivors were awarded reparations by the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. As one recipient of the allotted $20,000 told me, “1990 was the year of a bunch of Japanese Americans driving around in new cars.”
Tule Lake is the fifth and final stop on my list. Every other July, hundreds of Japanese Americans gather here to remember their shared experience—but the landscape holds another familiar thread for me. At each of the monuments I visit, there’s been an unshakable avian presence. Some birds were in the flesh like the swirling swallows at Heart Mountain; others were fabricated like the ubiquitous bird pins styled after old National Geographic magazines and Audubon trading cards. These pieces were crafted out of scraps of concentrations camps: from ceramic, to lumber, to wire snipped off of windows.
With the Issei and Nisei, the first- and second-generation captives, now almost gone, it’s up to younger Japanese Americans to prevent their stories from fading. My aim during the journeys was to collect as many as possible, and in that mission, I discovered several that led back to birds. The feelings we often equate with feather and wing—happiness, luck, remembrance, and hope—were all present during Japanese imprisonment. But the ache for freedom was stronger then, and it brought my people closer to birds.
Ancestral Spirits
It’s also where I met Clarence Moriwaki, a full-blooded, third-generation Japanese American who helped spearhead efforts to build and manage the memorial (which is now affiliated with the National Park Service). He recalls a story from 2002, when he was leading a ceremony on Bainbridge . . .
It was the 60th anniversary of the Japanese incarceration, and the very first piece of the site, a granite marker, had just been installed. Moriwaki was about to perform a ceremonial roll call for the memorialized 276, when a ruckus arose. Cawing loudly, crows began to flood the trees around the clearing where the crowd of about 750 people was waiting. The birds became so cacophonous, many in the audience later complained they couldn’t hear the names over the speaker system.
As Moriwaki read the last name, a switch seemed to flip. The crows quieted and began flying away. Moriwaki was stunned. When an elder of the long-residing Suquamish Tribe approached him afterward, he couldn’t help but point out the auspicious event.
“The crows had quite the timing,” Moriwaki said.
“We believe that crows are the spirits of our ancestors,” the elder replied.
Later, Moriwaki obtained raw footage of the ceremony from a local television station. Sure enough, he could hear the crows as he started calling out the names. But they stopped as he read the last one.
“There’s something special about this place,” he told me. The birds had spoken that truth.
An Ally Behind Barbed Wire
Last summer, I heard the expressive septuagenarian read his picture book, “Hello Maggie,” to a group of children at the library in Cody, Wyoming. Yabu laughed and pantomimed through the true-to-life tale, which he later shared in full when we spoke after the event . . .
A group of restless Japanese American boys were roaming the foothills around the Heart Mountain camp, slingshots in hand. When they reached the Shoshone River, a challenge arose: Who could hit one of the magpie nests dotting the treeline?
Soon a dislodged nest began rolling toward them. Inside was a magpie chick. The boys gathered insects and water from the river, but someone said the bird’s mother would reject it because it’d been touched by humans. That’s when a 10-year-old Yabu scooped up the nestling, tucked it under his t-shirt, and escorted it to barrack No. 2, block 14, unit C, where his family lived.
Yabu’s newest friend, which he named Maggie, would never be wild again. His father built the magpie a cage, and they later clipped her wings. She learned to say, “Hello, Maggie,” and other words, some Japanese. When the Yabu family left Heart Mountain at the end of the war, they had to so without the bird—she died a month too early to share their freedom.
“That magpie was brought behind barbed wire,” Yabu told me. “And, in that way, she became like us.”
Revenge on Wings
I soon learn that Takeshita and the local gulls go way back. During his stay at the Tule Lake Segregation Center, he led a small resistance—with the help of some Hinomaru birds . . .
There are rumors that after the Tule Lake camp opened in 1942 the U.S. military painted the red sun from the Japanese flag—also known as Hinomaru—on the undersides of gull to antagonize the prisoners. Even wilder are the reports that the gulls were dispatched by Japanese military as agents of propaganda.
Turns out, the birds were just a youthful prank, and Takeshita was one of the perpetrators. He and his friends were bored during the sullen days of imprisonment, so they learned how to capture gulls with string and bread-baited hooks. As one of the boys pinned down the unlucky captive, another would paint a crimson disc on its wings. Takeshita doesn’t remember where they got the red paint; but he does remember the adult prisoners looking up from their work in the fields, astonished as the reimagined Hinomaru flew through the air.
Years later, Takeshita came across a political cartoon showing an American G.I. with a rifle trained on a Hinomaru gull. “Good!” he remembers thinking. “We got them!”
