Emily Hanako Momohara

The places are haunting, their stories told by details left behind.

A cup. A broken plate. A piece of barbed wire.

The people who once lived there – who ate and drank from the dishes, who were imprisoned by the barbed wire – don’t like to talk about these places. The memories are too painful.

Emily Hanako Momohara wants to be their voice.

For the past six years, the Kansas University graduate student has photographed the remains of internment camps where 120,000 people of Japanese descent – including Momohara’s grandmother – were detained during World War II.

“Those people don’t want to tell their story,” Momohara said. “But I want to make sure every story that needs to be told is told.”

Momohara’s efforts received new recognition this summer when one of her photos was selected for the cover of the novel “Endure,” a fictionalized account of author Toshiko Shoji Ito’s time at the Minidoka internment camp in southern Idaho.

Like most of Momohara’s images, the cover photo’s composition is simple. It shows a bolt sticking up from what used to be the foundation of a warehouse at the Minidoka camp.

The dump at the former Minidoka Japanese internment camp near Hunt, Idaho, is littered with personal belongs left behind when the camp closed, such as this cup.

But to the author, it tells a much larger story. Ito said the image “catches your eye and tugs at your soul as a reminder of the past.”

“The hazy images hovering in the background are reminiscent of the past, and the small shattered pieces of debris that are strewn at the base of the stake personify our broken dreams,” Ito said. “Yet, the unyielding stake stands straight and steadfast within the firm foundation and has weathered many years of rust brought on by time.

“This,” she added, “is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit.”

The quest
Momohara said her grandmother has that same resilience – so much so the family never talked about the internment camps while Momohara was a child.

Instead of dwelling on her three years at Minidoka – starting in 1942, when she was 15 – her grandmother “provided the American dream” for her children, Momohara said.

This ceramic dump at the internment camp at Tule Lake, in northeastern California, is full of mostly government-issued ceramics left behind by those who stayed at the camp.

It wasn’t until college that Momohara began to pick up more details about her grandmother’s experience and to learn more about the internment camps in general.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order forcing people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast to be moved to 10 internment camps scattered throughout the country. About 70 percent of those sent to the camps were American citizens.

Congress in 1988 passed what is commonly referred to as the Japanese American Redress Bill, which called the camps a “grave injustice” and paid each of those interned $20,000.

In 1999, as a photography student at the University of Washington, Momohara decided to make her first pilgrimage to Minidoka, to see where her grandmother had spent part of her teenage years.

“I think I got two images I could print,” Momohara said. “I was an emotional wreck. I decided after that I’d go to as many (camps) as I could to tell the story. I had heard of camp, but I had no idea what it would be like. It was 105 degrees at 11 in the morning when I was eating lunch. There were dust storms constantly.”

Some personal items left behind by those headed to Japanese internment camps were stored at the Panama Hotel in Seattle, Wash., which was owned by a Japanese-American. Some of the items, such as those in the photograph, were never reclaimed.

Emotional images
The internment camps are like sacred ground to Momohara.

“I’m just really quiet,” she said, describing her photography trips. “I write poetry sometimes. I pray sometimes. I don’t think a lot about the subject matter per se as much as I just feel.”

She has photographed eight of the internment camps and hopes to get to the other two.

At each site, she shoots about 40 rolls of black-and-white film on her Hasselblad medium-format camera. She looks for anything that sheds light onto life at the camps.

At some sites, buildings still sit where they were during the camp era. Some have been reduced to concrete foundations. Some have gardens or ponds built by those who lived there.

“I think the imagery conveys a part of the story that words can’t convey,” said Anna Tamura, landscape architect for the National Parks Service site at the Minidoka camp. “Her photographs have a lot of emotion in them. They’re of mundane things like nails or foundations, but she brings an artful skill to them and sees them in a different way.

“They really make you think, ‘What was this place?’ and ‘What impact did it have on Japanese-Americans?'”

This stockade jail at the Japanese internment camp at Tule Lake, California, was built to house those who violated rules at all 10 incarceration camps.

Simple message
Momohara’s photographs have been used by the National Parks Service site. She also has had several exhibitions, including a recent one at the Qwest Field and Event Center in Seattle, her hometown.

She may incorporate the photos and video taken at the camps into the thesis she’ll complete for her master’s degree in expanded media, which she plans to complete in May.

Roger Shimomura, a recently retired KU art professor who will chair Momohara’s thesis committee, said her passion for the subject was evident in her internment camp photos.

“She’s a really devoted person to the cause of not only issues of having to do with internment, but also issues of being biracial,” Shimomura said. “These are the things she’s politically active in herself, and therefore they consume her interests in her studio as well.”

Her challenge, Shimomura said, will be to not let her activism compromise her artistic vision.

“It depends on the person,” he said. “I don’t think you can make any generalized statement. What’s problematic is determining what is art and what is propaganda. If one’s political zeal actually gets in the way of making artistic images, the images might have political clout but no aesthetic purpose.”

That’s partly why Momohara tries to keep her images simple, documenting the sites and letting the remnants tell a story of their own. It’s a philosophy she hopes to keep as she continues to photograph the camps.

“All my images seem pretty minimal,” she said. “They’re very simple compositions. That’s not only my sensibility, but the subject matter, too. There’s such a spiritual meaning to it.”