New WA State Fair memorial honors Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII

Over Labor Day weekend, the Washington State Fair opened to the public. Aside from carnival rides, live performances and fried treats, this year’s fair also offers visitors something they might not be expecting: an important history lesson.

Beneath the fair’s Grandstand performance area, visitors can view the new Remembrance Gallery, a permanent exhibit bringing renewed attention to the history of Japanese and Japanese American incarceration on the Washington State Fairgrounds during World War II.

“What happened to the Japanese Americans [here] is a piece of history that should be told,” said Eileen Yamada Lamphere, president of the Puyallup Valley Japanese American Citizens League, which collaborated with the fair to build the gallery.

The Remembrance Gallery, which debuted on Aug. 30, features a monument listing the names of more than 7,500 people incarcerated on the fairgrounds at the Puyallup Assembly Center in 1942. In addition to photographs, videos and survivors’ oral histories, the exhibit aims to give visitors an immersive peek into the detainees’ lives through a re-creation of the horse stalls that were used as makeshift housing, complete with WWII-era military cots and a potbelly stove.

Yamada Lamphere said it’s important to educate visitors about the fairgrounds’ dark history, which began shortly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed Executive Order 9066 during WWII. The 1942 order authorized the U.S. military to forcibly remove people of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and ultimately send them to 10 incarceration sites throughout the U.S.

The Puyallup Assembly Center, Washington’s only Japanese incarceration camp, was a temporary site that operated on the fairground from late April to September 1942.

Among the thousands of Washington and Alaskan residents incarcerated there: Yamada Lamphere’s mother, Kazuko Osawa, and other family members. After 31/2 months at the Puyallup Assembly Center, the family was transferred to the Minidoka War Relocation Center in southern Idaho.

“[The Remembrance Gallery] means my family and their history will be forever recorded,” Yamada Lamphere said. “I want people to make sure that this never happens again.”

The permanent exhibit is an embodiment of “never again is now,” she added. “Because we know that there are other groups of people currently who are being mistreated.” (That slogan, most often associated with the commitment to stand against the violent hatred that led to the Holocaust, has been adopted by other anti-hate groups, including Japanese Americans raising awareness of WWII incarceration camps.)

During the Puyallup Assembly Center’s nearly five months of operations, detainees lived in poor conditions. Hundreds of people were tightly packed in barracks across the fairgrounds, and barbed-wire fences were used to prevent them from escaping.

To give Remembrance Gallery visitors a glimpse into the difficulties inside the center’s makeshift barracks, the recorded sounds of sneezing, coughing, whispering and a crying baby play inside the replica 8-by-10-foot space to mimic the crowded conditions.

“If someone coughed in unit one, you could hear that cough all the way down into unit 10,” Yamada Lamphere said.

It was rare for the Puyallup Valley JACL president’s parents, who later met at the Minidoka camp, to share their painful incarceration experiences. As a child growing up in Kent, Yamada Lamphere assumed the camp her parents often referred to was akin to Boy Scouts or a space where Japanese Americans did activities – not somewhere they were imprisoned. By the time she had questions about her parents’ days at Minidoka, they had already died.

“The whole generation didn’t talk about it,” she said. “[We] were taught to respect our elders, and if our elders don’t want to talk about something, I’m certainly not going to push my parents to open up. So, that’s when I had to start investigating and doing my own research.”

As an adult, Yamada Lamphere looked to surviving community members to fill in these gaps about her family’s history. She now hopes the Remembrance Gallery can provide more insight into these painful memories of the past.

The Puyallup Valley JACL began fundraising to build the Remembrance Gallery with Washington State Fair leadership in 2022. It is the fairground’s first permanent exhibit detailing its role in WWII Japanese American incarceration. The JACL had previously hosted temporary fair exhibits about the Puyallup Assembly Center.

The state fairground is also home to “Harmony,” a sculpture created by late artist George Tsutakawa to honor the Japanese Americans incarcerated at the Puyallup camp, which Army public relations officials nicknamed “Camp Harmony.”

But Yamada Lamphere underscored that the nickname whitewashes the fairground’s history of Japanese incarceration.

“[The government] wanted people to think, ‘Oh, the Japanese are at Camp Harmony, kumbaya and s’mores,’ ” she said. “Inside the Remembrance Gallery, there is no Camp Harmony because it’s a euphemism. It was far from being Camp Harmony.”

Because there are relatively few living survivors of Japanese American incarceration, Yamada Lamphere said it’s important to have a permanent display to make sure this history is not forgotten.

“If we’re going to do something to honor them, we had to do it now,” she said. “There wouldn’t be primary sources for us to talk to [in the future].

“We have some stories, we have some artifacts, we have some pictures,” she said. “If we don’t display them, and if we don’t tell [these stories], who’s going to know that they even existed?”

After all of the Puyallup Assembly Center’s detainees were relocated to prison camps like Idaho’s Minidoka and California’s Tule Lake, the center was repurposed into a training facility for Fort Lewis’ Ninth Service Command. The Washington State Fair remained closed until 1946.

From 1943 to 1946, more than 20,000 Japanese Americans applied to leave the U.S. for Japan, according to Densho, a Seattle-based Japanese American history nonprofit that records oral testimonies of Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII. However, at least 4,724 people left for Japan directly from the camps, though many later returned to the U.S., data shows. Others, like Yamada Lamphere’s parents, returned to their pre-WWII communities to start over.

“I know our survivors don’t look back. They move forward. They show that what happened to them is not going to define them,” Yamada Lamphere said. “These people rebuilt their lives, despite what happened to them.”

The fact that the Remembrance Gallery now stands where prisoner barracks once did is not only a poignant physical reminder of the fairground’s legacy, said Densho Deputy Director Geoff Froh, it also “makes this history, and the people who lived through it, visible and undeniable.”

“It’s easy to ignore that history when there’s no evidence to remind us,” Froh said. “But when you have a permanent exhibit like this, it keeps the story alive for future generations even when the survivors are no longer here to tell their story themselves.”