Narratives from “Heart Mountain Relocation Center Photographs.”

By browsing through the “Activities and entertainment at Heart Mountain Relocation Center Photographs,” I could learn about different facets of life of Japanese who lived in the 1940s at the relocation centers, which were internment camps in the U.S. during World War Ⅱ. The archive is made up of photographs that show general view of outdoor scenes of the center, traditional performance, drawing, dancing, games, and field work. Not only the real objects, but also were there pictures of postcards and drawings, amplifying diversity in sources for the narrative.

We can induce numerous historical narratives and sources of the collections based on the information from the main/alternative title, and descriptions. I especially liked the collection “Game of Goh,” since it reminded me of my youth when I used to observe my grandfather playing the same game (which is called as “baduk” in South Korea). He would spend at least a few hours a day to watch game or play it himself, and his short trip to “baduk club” was his favorite pastime of the week. From alternative title of this collection, we can learn that there were recreation halls at the center, where people gathered to play games and socialize. It is interesting to see that even during those hard times, people still played games to have fun and gathered to be present for each other as the members of community. This one collection makes not only Japanese Americans from the 1940s but also almost all East Asians who share the same experience with the seniors be lost in old memories. Other collections that impressed me was “Couples Dancing” and “Alice and Mike,” since they depict how americanized the Japanese Americans were in the 1940s by showing their attire, hair, and makeup. In “Couples Dancing,” we can even find one Caucasian in the scene, dancing with Japanese woman. In “Alice and Mike,” their Japanese names are not recorded but only their American names. This “Americanization” is also shown in drawings of the center, “The last of Heart Mountain,” where people wearing fedora get off from a car with wheels. We can make a guess that the inflow of American culture and other ethnicities into the Japanese community became faster and easier, as well as their own traditional culture still remaining in general. By looking at the “Funeral at Heart Mountain Relocation Center,” we can make a guess that the community-based culture was still playing a key role at the center.

What we would be missing from our narratives is that we can never make sure about the exact real trend of the days by looking at a few photographs. The dancing party might have been an occasional event that had a “theme” of American style, rather than on regular basis. The photographs might have been taken for those people who were exceptionally americanized compared to the majority of citizens. The game of goh might not have been allowed for all but only a few citizens who were qualified, which betray our virtual narratives that most people had enough fun during the time. All these specific information are lacking, since there are not many descriptions provided. We barely know who took the picture, what the purpose of the photographs were, and most of all, whether the photographs are the representative of the majority of lives of the people or only a few who were captured in the scene either coincidentally or deliberately.

To address those gaps, we would want to have extra sources that would provide more specific and sufficient information, such as script of direct speech of community events, bibliography of photographer, recordings or radio broadcast, anecdotes described or depicted about the photographs by family members of the residents in the center, contents of the correspondence instead of only the front of postcards with address, and diaries of citizens from that time. Basically, we need a story from the mouth of the people themselves in the scene, since the pictures taken from eyes of the observers are not enough to be repository of the history. We can form an approximate narrative, but not the actual full narrative.

All in all, however, the collections of photographs stimulate our imagination on how the shape of lives of Japanese Americans in 1940s would have been. It was historically important period both for the U.S. and Japan, and the lives of people who had to adjust to the turbulent world situation still remain as one of the interesting and significant topic to be explored, creating different historical narratives every moments depending on the diverse sources discovered.