Digs of the Deal: Museum Commemorates Japanese Internees

Feature photo above: The Rohwer Relocation Center, circa 1943. (Courtesy of the UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture)

The Japanese American internment camps that existed in Arkansas during World War II represent two of 10 such facilities opened during the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Relocation centers were opened at Rohwer (Desha County) and Jerome (Chicot and Drew counties) in 1942 and closed in 1945. The Japanese American Internment Museum in McGehee, an Arkansas State University Heritage Site, commemorates those who were sent to the war relocation centers, as they were then called, at Rohwer and Jerome.

The Japanese American Internment Museum in McGehee. (Photo by Mike Keckhaver)

The museum, located inside the old Missouri-Pacific Railroad depot, features exhibits representing the history of internment in the area. The exhibits include a film, oral histories, photos, personal artifacts, internee art and a library.

Over three years, the Arkansas camps served as home to some 16,000 Japanese Americans relocated from the West Coast. Overall, roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans and ethnic Japanese were interned — 64 percent of whom were American citizens — across the 10 camps.

Other camps were located at Tule Lake and Manzanar in California; Poston and the Gila River in Arizona; Minidoka, Idaho; Topaz, Utah; Heart Mountain, Wyoming; and Granada, Colorado. Following the infamous attack on Dec. 7, 1941, that pulled the United States into the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 reflected the nation’s fear that a Japanese invasion was imminent.

A copy of a civilian evacuation order for Japanese Americans, issued in 1942, housed in the museum. (Courtesy of ASU Heritage Sites)

Japanese Americans, concentrated on the West Coast, were rounded up and forced to leave everything behind. Among those sent to the Arkansas Delta was George Takei, who would later gain fame as Lt. Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek.

Born in California to Japanese parents (his dad was born in Japan and his mom in Sacramento), Takei was 5 when the order was signed. His family temporarily lived in converted horse stables at Santa Anita Park before being assigned to Rohwer.

Actor George Takei, shown at age 5 in 1942 at the Rohwer camp. (Courtesy of George Takei per Encyclopedia of Arkansas)

Takei helped dedicate the museum in 2013 and returned to speak at the museum’s five-year anniversary celebration.

“We were all concentrated solely based on race,” he said. “We happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor and [were] put in prison camps simply because of our race. Places like Rohwer matter more than 70 years later — and so, we remember.”

Each Arkansas camp sat on about 10,000 acres with 500 acres set aside for 36 barrack blocks — each consisting of 12 barracks — as well as a school, administration buildings and a hospital, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas states. The remaining 9,500 acres were farmed and harvested for timber by internees.

Each barrack was furnished with canvas cots and potbellied stoves and home to three to six families. Internees in individual barracks shared a kitchen, dining hall and recreation building, as well as a community bathroom and laundry.

Encyclopedia of Arkansas:

“All were partially surrounded by barbed wire or heavily wooded areas with guard towers situated at strategic areas and guarded by a small military contingent.

Each block was designed to accommodate around 250 people residing in 14 residential barracks with each barrack (20 feet by 120 feet) divided into four to six apartments.

Each block also consisted of a mess hall, a recreational barrack, a laundry building and a building for a communal latrine.

The residential buildings were without plumbing or running water, and the buildings were heated during the winter months by wood stoves.

… Both camps were immense, sprawling cities that were two of the largest agricultural communities in Arkansas. …

Arkansas was neither receptive to nor supportive of the Japanese Americans being incarcerated in the state. Local residents were often hostile to those imprisoned in the camps for reasons beyond the race of the internees.

The camps often had amenities that were lacking in the poor, Delta towns that surrounded them: electricity, locally grown food and more.”

Of the 10 Japanese internment camps built during WWII, two were located in Arkansas. (Photo by Mike Keckhaver)

The federal government spent $9.5 million — in 1942 dollars — to build the Arkansas camps. More than 5,000 workers were brought in to drain the swamps and drain the land (Rohwer is only 5 miles from the Mississippi River), build more than 1,200 barracks-style buildings and lay miles of gravel roads.

Today, there is not a lot left of the camps. Each is home to memorial markers. The old hospital incinerator smokestack can still be seen at Jerome, and the Rohwer site includes the camp’s old cemetery, which was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1992.

SEE THIS STORY IN OUR JUNE ISSUE OF ARKANSAS MONEY & POLITICS MAGAZINE AND BELOW.