Nathan K. Hensley: The July 4, 1942 edition of the "Pinedale Logger," the newspaper written by inmates of the concentration camp in my hometown of Fresno, CA, describes a "Gala Fourth Festival" & features a masthead motto from Thomas Paine: "Tyranny, Like Hell, Is Not Easily Conquered."

The July 4, 1942 edition of the "Pinedale Logger," the newspaper written by inmates of the concentration camp in my hometown of Fresno, CA, describes a "Gala Fourth Festival" & features a masthead motto from Thomas Paine: "Tyranny, Like Hell, Is Not Easily Conquered."

July 4th Parade, Tule Lake Internment Camp, 1943.

The Pinedale camp was an "assembly center," where Japanese Americans from up and down the west coast were temporarily housed before being shipped to larger & more permanent camps for potentially infinite detention. The other Fresno camp was at the fairgrounds: inmates slept in the horse stalls.

the Pinedale location was selected because it was a lumberyard, w/ preexisting access to rail lines & extant water lines, if not sewer. inmates slept in shacks made of unfinished lumber. the camp newspaper, "the Logger," references this prior usage. after May, 1942, it was a concentration camp.

i learned in interviews that around the fenced perimeter, kids from Fresno would gather and throw rocks at the people inside. I spoke with a woman from Tacoma, WA, whose mother & mother's family were taken from Tacoma to the Pinedale camp by rail; an unimaginable journey.

She told me: "Our Japanese community [in Tacoma] was greatly impacted by the incarceration. Prior to imprisonment we had 800 residents, 90 businesses, a Japanese Language School, and 3 places of worship. It is all gone now except our temple." / end

Pinedale Logger July 3, 1942 issue available here: downloads.densho.org/ddr-densho-1...

downloads.densho.org

I like this change: bsky.app/profile/torr...

2023: “in a historic decision, LA Times announced Thurs it would drop the use of “ internment “ to describe mass incarceration of 120k people of Japanese ancestry during WWII. The decision comes 8 decades after LAT *campaigned* to incarcerate Japanese Americans.” www.latimes.com/california/s...

No, my Japanese American parents were not 'interned' during WWII. They were incarceratedwww.latimes.com The Los Angeles Times will no longer use "internment" to describe the mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

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