Tule Lake: When No Was the Honest Answer

Picture a questionnaire. Two questions. The government wants you to answer yes to both.

Question twenty-seven: will you serve in the armed forces of the United States? Question twenty-eight: will you swear allegiance to the United States and renounce loyalty to the Japanese Emperor?

The year is nineteen forty-three. The people being asked are Japanese Americans who have already been removed from their homes, their farms, and their businesses without charge, without trial, and without compensation. Many are American citizens who have never set foot in Japan. They are living in tar-paper barracks behind barbed wire in the high desert of northeastern California, at a place called Tule Lake.

The War Relocation Authority called this a loyalty questionnaire. For the people answering it, the questions meant something more complicated. If you answered yes to question twenty-seven, you were agreeing to serve in the military of a government that had just imprisoned you for the crime of your ancestry. If you answered yes to question twenty-eight, some men worried it would strip them of any legal claim to citizenship at all.

Many answered no. Some answered no as explicit protest. Some answered no because both questions, given their circumstances, were unanswerable as written. The government called them disloyal and transferred them here. Peak population reached approximately eighteen thousand people. Tule Lake was the largest and most punitive of the ten wartime incarceration camps.

In nineteen forty-four, Congress passed the Denationalization Act, and under conditions of fear and social pressure inside the camp, approximately five thousand five hundred Japanese Americans signed papers renouncing their citizenship. Attorney Wayne Collins spent years fighting to have those renunciations declared void. Most had their citizenship restored by the nineteen fifties and sixties.

The government designated Tule Lake a National Monument in two thousand eight, thirty-four years after former internees began making annual pilgrimages to a site the government had allowed to disappear into farmland.

The land around you was their camp. It is still farmed today.