Look Toward the Mountain: Stories from Heart Mountain Incarceration Camp

Thanks to the support of the Embassy of Japan in the United States, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is presenting a special three-episode series exploring the Japanese American experience beyond Heart Mountain, and our relationship to Japan. The third episode explores how Japanese American identity has been shaped by our connections to, and relationship with Japan and Japanese culture. 

Thanks to the support of the Embassy of Japan in the United States, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is presenting a special three-episode series exploring the Japanese American experience beyond Heart Mountain, and our relationship to Japan. This second episode explores the postwar resettlement of Japanese Americans. Some kept their heads down and tried to assimilate into the broader society while others turned to activism that would birth the pilgrimage movement, that would ultimately help fuel a national reckoning with the injustice of wartime incarceration.

Thanks to the support of the Embassy of Japan in the United States, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is presenting a special three-episode series exploring the Japanese American experience beyond Heart Mountain, and our relationship to Japan. This first episode tells the stories of Japanese immigrants who achieved great success in the California agriculture industry, others who settled rural parts of the West as railroad laborers or miners, and the undercurrent of racism and xenophobia that ultimately restricted further immigration after 1924.

The tenth episode titled “Sports and Leisure” looks at how the Heart Mountain incarcerees embraced both modern American and traditional Japanese types of entertainment and sports in camp. Although this helped Japanese Americans endure their time as prisoners and brought different people together inside the camp, it was also part of the government’s plan to assimilate them into the broader American society in the postwar era.

The sixth episode titled “Organizing Resistance” will explore how the Japanese American tradition of organizing evolved in camp to become a powerful resistance movement that dominated much of the Heart Mountain experience in its later years.

The fifth episode titled “Commerce in the Camp” will explore how Japanese Americans incarcerated at Heart Mountain developed their own prison economy, with incarceree-run businesses that helped make life inside camp into something that resembled their past lives on the West Coast.

The fourth episode titled, “Prison Food” explores how the more than 10,000 Japanese American incarcerated at Heart Mountain coped with the distasteful army rations they confronted when they first arrived in camp, and the important role that food played in their daily lives during the incarceration.