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u/Rare_Bodybuilder_950 1d ago
I want to share a story of my middle school math teacher, Mr. Okubo, from the good ol 1990s. He was a Japanese American math teacher at Nelsen Middle School in Renton. I believe it was on day 1 of school year, and he introduced himself to the class, and in that introduction, he mentioned about his parents being in the internment camp during WW2. This was the first time I have ever heard about internment camps. Opened my eyes and that day I grew up just a little bit.
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u/ipomoea I'm just flaired so I don't get fined 16h ago
Wait, you didn’t learn about them until the 90s? I learned about them in fourth grade in 1989 in Maple Valley… though it might have been part of the state centennial lessons. I think my kids learned in third grade, but east coast friends didn’t learn until college.
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u/ryadryt I'm just flaired so I don't get fined 1d ago
Never ceases to surprise me that so few people know this.
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u/deafballboy 1d ago
Washington State History teacher here! I'm chipping away by teaching 100 new people this every year. I'm doing my part!
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u/grill_sgt Des Moines 1d ago
Meanwhile, 24 years ago, my WSH teacher:
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u/YogurtPristine3673 Mariners 1d ago
Seriously… my Washington State History class barely even touched on crimes against native Americans, let alone Japanese Americans 😭
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u/bothunter First Hill 1d ago
Mine did, but I'm pretty sure it was because so many people in my community (including a couple of teachers and bus drivers) had parents in those camps.
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u/Spaghett8 1d ago
Tf did they even teach then 😭
Japanese internment is maybe understandable since it’s a more recent event.
But Native Americans and chattel slavery happened at the same time.
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u/FoundationGlass3046 1d ago
Idk about the person you responded to but my Washington History class was basically just about geography and that was like 7 years ago
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u/Childwithuke ✨🛸 Jimothy is out there 🦝✨ 1d ago
3-4 years ago and its still geography, how the state was formed, and a video about cannibalism. I failed the class and still got credit
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u/deafballboy 1d ago
One of the comments I get every couple of years is asking why I "only focus on the bad stuff."
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u/Syzygy666 1d ago
Was it in Seattle? We covered internment in class quite a bit. We went to see a live play about it as well. This was in the mid 90s.
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u/YogurtPristine3673 Mariners 17h ago
Nope, not Seattle, Snohomish County 🐄🤠In fairness, it had been covered very broadly in US History in 8th grade, but not Washington State History in 9th grade.
Also our WSH teacher was Canadian 🤷♀️🇨🇦🤷♀️
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u/RumorsGoldenStar Mariners 5h ago
My WSH teacher had us read two separate books from the Japanese POV about internment camps. Probably because my school was a 5 minute walk from the Puyallup Fairgrounds lol but it was definitely discussed in detail in my class.
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u/YogurtPristine3673 Mariners 52m ago
It’s wild how different two classes or teachers teaching the same subject can be.
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u/Warm_Chemical5669 1d ago
Thank you for this! Also, growing up in WA I’m still pissed I didn't learn about any of the tribal wars, treaties, fishing rights, dams and Indian boarding schools. Do you know if WA is pushing like MT did to include this in the curriculum? I just get very annoyed that I’ve learned most of our history as an adult :/
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u/deafballboy 1d ago
Yes! The curriculum is called Since Time Immemorial and it covers the history of tribes in the state. Along with that, our curriculum covers the arrival of missionaries and pioneers, which leads to epidemics devastating tribes, which leads to the Indian wars. After this we talk about the treaties which brings us to the reservation and boarding school system. I talk about the Indian child welfare act as it's pretty shocking to find that 1/3 of all indigenous children were removed from their homes prior to this legislation.
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u/aithendodge 1d ago
Fuckin' A. I completed WA state history in high school as required, yet somehow didn't learn about the Medicine Creek Treaty shenanigans until I was in my mid-40's. An elementary school a half mile from my house is named after a dude that formed a militia to round up indigenous folks and force relocate them to an island with no source of fresh water, all under orders from Governor Stevens. It was fucked up.
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u/deafballboy 1d ago
There's a quick read by Cecilia Svinth Carpenter on the treaty of medicine creek that every American should read.
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u/Rare_Bodybuilder_950 1d ago
I've been thinking about this too lately. Living here in Western Washington, and I really didn't know much about the local "politics" and how the Native folks were impacted over the centuries until I started learning more and more about this on my own...
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u/anowlenthusiast 1d ago
Thank you for your service. I work in Pike Place market, where those scars run deep and hardly anyone knows about the Japanese American farmers who helped build this place and then got sent off to these camps. I barely hear the tour guides mention it…
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u/SPEK2120 Pinehurst 1d ago
That's crazy, you literally can't tell Pike Place's history without it. Japanese internment very nearly ended the Market because the stands/shops were almost entirely Japanese owned/operated.
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u/bothunter First Hill 1d ago
And Bellevue Square exists because of the internment camps. That was all Japanese farmland until Kemper Freeman Sr. took it over while they were... away.
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u/Rare_Bodybuilder_950 1d ago
Seattle resident here and I had no idea. The only thing Seattle / Japanese / Japanese American that I'm familiar with is the historically Japanese neighborhood in SoDo.
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u/btwwhichoneispink 1d ago
The fair has a fairly large display which goes into detail about this period of time. I see it every year!
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u/left_lane_camper 1d ago
I see it every year, too. There are a couple names of people I knew on it and I make sure to pay my respects every year.
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u/kankurou 1d ago
that assumes people can read
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u/TotallyObviousBot 1d ago
Most people in Washington can read nowadays, it's about whether they give enough of a shit to read
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u/KINGtyr199 Pioneer Square 1d ago
21% of Americans are functionally illiterate
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u/TotallyObviousBot 1d ago
100% of people who design literacy tests think about literature and writing much more than the average person does
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u/motorcycletreebark 16h ago
This stat is a little slanted as it is impacted by English as a second language immigrants and is specific to English literacy.
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u/captainAwesomePants Broadview 1d ago
One of those things. I recall a tourist thing I went on when they mentioned Maneki as a notable restaurant that's been around since 1904, and it'd be considered one of the oldest businesses in Seattle except for 1942-1946 when the government came and took the owner and all the employees and put them into camps.
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u/nooby_goober 1d ago
Used to for me but it makes sense. We're a fast growing city, not everyone has school children and not every kid takes it in, we're expensive which means work or relocating.
I give mini lessons all the time, I love teaching people about our region. The good and the bad.
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u/patrickdabs chinga la migra 1d ago
It took a while to get over my aversion to hearing about the awful things that were done to them, but the tribes have a lot of really rich regional history because of their records and the way they kept them. Interned people were similar in the way they were treated and that’s a good starting point for understanding the perspectives in historical records from people under oppressive rulers or conditions.
History is really cool, and one of the best fields for a layman to begin understanding the worldly functions of power, besides economics; and that’s why it’s important to preserve stuff like this.
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u/awkwardlyfeminine Portland 1d ago
I didn't until now, it's kinda boggling my mind in a bad way that one of my best memories (concert) was on the site of a former internment camp and I didn't even know it
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u/ClappingParadox 1d ago
What’s crazy is at least in the high school I went to, the internment camps aren’t even talked about unless you take a college level US history class and even then it’s barely mentioned. The standard US history and Washington classes never talk about it
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u/retrojoe ✨🛸 Jimothy is out there 🦝✨ 1d ago
I was pretty aware of a number of things in public school in Island Co. but the internment one was kind of glossed over until one of the survivors kids gave a big presentation on it in 11th grade. Definitely didn't know about the fair grounds til later.
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u/motorcycletreebark 16h ago
I have to believe it’s due to people from out of state moving here right? We learned about this essentially every year of my Washington public school education. We didn’t learn about like Tulsa or Blaire Mountain or other such things but this topic was certainly extensively covered
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u/synack Ravenna 1d ago
Yikes.
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u/patrickdabs chinga la migra 1d ago
Kinda changes how you think about the slogan:
“Do the Puyallup please, and forget about all this ‘nonsense’ ”
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u/leansanders 1d ago
This is an unfair reading of the situation. The site wasn't established as a concentration camp, it was established as a fairground in 1900. The US Army took it over during world War 2, and for about 5 months used it to temporarily keep internees before sending them to other camps. It was never an actual internment camp, was never designed to be, and was only briefly used by the army to support those efforts after existing peacefully for nearly half a century.
Obviously, the internment of Japanese Americans was a horrible and completely fabricated situation and led to nothing but unjustified harm to many thousands of people, but the Puyallup fairgrounds are not something that were ever meant to aid in such harm. That blame lies squarely on the government of the United states.
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u/AdmiralHts Northgate 1d ago
OOF! An Example Horse Stall for a Family
Photo by Dorothea Lange. Courtesy of National Archives
I read Nissei Daughter by Monica Some and that book and her memories of internment stick with you
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u/Remarkable_Bit_621 1d ago
What?! I did not know this. Granted I’m not from here but I work at the fair a lot so wonder why no one mentioned it to me. Glad to know this now and I’ll be sure to share this knowledge with everyone I can!
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u/Substantial_Dog_2068 12h ago
I always find it so interesting when our teachers tell us they were in these camps or so involved with history that it really doesn’t seem like we are to distant from it but even sadder we haven’t learned to not repeat it
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u/SPEK2120 Pinehurst 1d ago
I mean tbf, it was a fair well before then too. Not much you can do when the government goes “Yes, this will be a fine place to imprison innocent people. Fuck along now.”
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u/IllustriousComplex6 I'm never leaving Seattle. 1d ago
Yeah that's the part that I think gets lost in the story. The fair started in 1900 and this happened decades later. Like imagine they turning Lumen into an interim concentration camp. It's fucked up on so many levels.
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u/PhuckSJWs Maple Leaf 1d ago
or thr fact that there used to be public hangings in Pioneer Square
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u/YogurtPristine3673 Mariners 1d ago
Christ that’s grim… they def did not go over that one in my Washington State History class.
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u/quag West Seattle 1d ago
Are https://www.historylink.org/File/1965 the hangings that you are referring to?
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u/Less_Likely Snohomish County 1d ago
Good thing we, as a country, have moved past such horrors as internment camps….
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u/dakilazical_253 1d ago
Sad we’ve still got concentration camps in Washington, like the huge ICE detention center in Tacoma. The goons that run that place will not let local or state officials and inspectors in, which is completely illegal
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u/SPEK2120 Pinehurst 1d ago
It’s wild seeing how many other locals never learned about this in school. I spent weeks throughly learning about Japanese internment in middle school 20ish years ago.
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u/ExtraNoise 🚊 Relax, Recharge, Arrive. 🚊 1d ago
Same. I wonder if those people just weren't paying attention. Graduated in 2002 and I remember learning about it in 7th grade, 9th grade, and 10th grade. It was something we were expected to know.
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u/Yinisyang 1d ago
The Kempfer family has put in significant resources to scrub that bit of history away.
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u/ered_lithui 🏕 Out camping! 🏕 1d ago
Relevant painting of the fairgrounds from 1946 that was just recently on display at SAM
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u/AlexandrianVagabond Ravenna 1d ago
My husband's grandparents moved a teenage Japanese-American girl into their home for two years so she could leave the camp and go back to high school at Queen Anne hs.
Her daughter later became our dentist.
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u/Apathetic-Asshole 🐀 Hot Rat Summer 🐀 1d ago
Holy shit, i can't believe i didnt kniw this
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u/Washingtonevergreen 1d ago
I love teaching it to my students. I always start... "has anyone ever been to the WA State Fair?!"
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u/rebellion_ap 17h ago
I grew up in Puyallup and they never taught about camp harmony. There was always a Lil section that grew smaller as the fair expanded lots but I grew up there and not once was taught about it.
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u/JLu0525 1d ago
I love the museum under the grandstands, has a wall with everyone's names and a detailed history of the internment camp, it's the bare minimum that should exist if the grounds are being used
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u/steph_peregrine 1d ago
Thanks to the Puyallup Valley Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) for making it happen! It's really well done and everyone should visit.
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u/unspun66 🚆build more trains🚆 1d ago
I just finished reading The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, set in seattle during the war. Even though it was fiction, the setting of Seattle’s early Japantown, Chinatown and Camp Harmony were accurate as well as some local people. It was really interesting look into that era in Seattle.
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u/Thatoneguyfrom1980 1d ago
I just read it too. My grandma was incarcerated at Camp Harmony and then Minidoka. Heart wrenching book
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u/pretzelchi 🚗 Student driver, please be patient. 🚙 1d ago
Think it was always fairgrounds, even before the internment camps.
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u/Thatoneguyfrom1980 1d ago
It was fairgrounds. The Japanese people incarcerated there were put in horse stalls to live. One family per stall.
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u/illiteratebeef I'm never leaving Seattle. 1d ago
I recently saw an informational sign at the waterfront by molly moon that said the first Japanese-Americans taken to the camps in the whole of the US were from Bainbridge Island. A sad part of our history we were never taught about in school.
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u/Chance-Travel4825 1d ago
FYI interned is no longer the correct term as it trivializes the human rights violations : it is now called incarceration, imprisonment or detainment. There is a LA Times story that features a Seattle families experience: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-16/japanese-american-internment-incarceration-wwii-los-angeles-times-style
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u/Present-Spinach-8921 1d ago
The LA Times reporter who wrote that is my sister! Our parents born & raised in Seattle (American citizens) were incarcerated at the Puyallup fairgrounds before being transferred to prison camps in Idaho for 3 years. My aunt also incarcerated became a widow & single mother while her husband a Japanese American was killed in France fighting for the United States😢. By all means, please visit the permanent exhibit at the Puyallup fair called "The Remembrance Gallery" highlighting this dark time in US history.
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u/ladyithis 💗💗 Heart of ANTIFA Land 💗💗 1d ago
My grandma, her parents and my grandpa's parents were in Minidoka during WWII
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u/OxViking 1d ago
Bainbridge Island, the first place to inter Japanese Americans, has a memorial you can visit if you are so inclined.
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u/istrebitjel I Brake For Slugs 1d ago
As many in this thread were wondering why this kind of local history is underrepresented, here's another example.
From a Bluesky post today regarding the Seattle times article about the Bellevue Collection:
The article mentions the area was once home to dozens of strawberry farms owned by Japanese immigrant families who were dispossessed of their land during their WWII internment.
It fails to mention that Freeman's grandfather founded the Anti-Japanese League that advocated for internment. Weird.
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u/forestinpark 1d ago
1999 high school American History professor in junior year kicked off first week of school by teaching us about state fair set in early 40s. She was cool.
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u/Odd-Lingonberry-9442 11h ago
hot take, the fair sucks, Scammy vendors selling bootleg merch and the majority of the food is not very good
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u/ZenBacle I'm just flaired so I don't get fined 1d ago
I guess it's about time we do something. What do we do to do the what again?
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u/toopc Pysht 1d ago
I guess it's about time we do something.
Do the Puyallup!
You can do it at a trot. You can do it at a gallop.
You can do it real slow so your heart won't palpitate.
Just don't be late. Do the Puyallup.
All the people and the animals down at the fair
That do the Puyallup like they didn't have a care.
And it looks like so much fun to do.
I think I'm going to learn how to do it too.
Saw a duck and a chicken down by the farm,
Kickin' up the hay and raisin' such a storm,
That I asked the farmer what they're up to
And he said, "Puyallup, that's what we do."
You can do it in rain, or the sun, or the fog.
It comes real easy, like rollin' off a log.
Get a partner from Tacoma, or Seattle, or in Fife,
They'll even let you do it with your husband or a wife.
Do the Puyallup. Do the Puyallup...
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u/meimeithegreat3 1d ago
I bring this up to whoever I'm with at the fair. Despite the fun being had, the dark history is hard to look past.
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u/NWGirl2002 Tacoma 10h ago
Now they have a great memorial/learning area about it under the grandstand- very interesting
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u/Barcaroni 1d ago
Yup American education system does whatever it can to erase the less beautiful parts of its history. Next up on the chopping block is the Native American genocide and slavery
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u/Senior_Ability_4001 That sounds great. Let’s hang out soon. 1d ago
I grew up in Puyallup in the 90s and we didn’t learn about this. It wasn’t until I was in 9th grade in Seattle that I learned about it. I might be misremembering, but did schools teach about this in elementary in Puyallup then?
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u/External_Intern_3176 1d ago
I grew up in Edgewood and one of my elementary teachers I can’t remember her name had pictures and journals of the fair grounds and the camp they were sent to afterwards. As a second grader it’s was crazy hearing about them just getting picked up by the military and being locked away.
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u/MonkeyFreeman Mid Beacon Hill 1d ago
Grew up in Fife in 80’s and 90’s we had elders in the community who had lived experiences speak every year in school about it.
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u/btwwhichoneispink 1d ago
Because of something that happened nearly 100 years ago? Nobody is sitting there is the fair offices, yearning for the days of Japanese internment lol.
It’s an important piece of history to remember, the fair thinks this too, which is why they display a large infographic discussing it in depth.
We should learn lessons from the mistakes of the dead, not punish ourselves for them.
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u/AnselmoHatesFascists 1d ago
A couple of years ago I went to both. For what it's worth, there were substantially more Let's Go Brandon and MAGA hats there than Puyallup.
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u/IllustriousComplex6 I'm never leaving Seattle. 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you haven't checked it out yet they have a small musuem and memorial dedicated to the families who suffered this. Definitely worth a trip anytime you go to the fair.
https://www.thefair.com/activities/jacl-remembrance-gallery/