'Preserving Amache': Japanese American returns to the WWII internment camp where she was once held

Nearly 100,000 Japanese Americans were detained by the U.S. government during World War II, deemed enemies as the U.S. fought Japan. The War Relocation Authority forcibly took men, women, and children across the country from their homes and bused them to one of ten internment camps in the Western U.S., where they were held prisoner for years until the war's end.

Carlene Tanigoshi Tinker was only three years old when she and her family were incarcerated at the Granada Relocation Center, near Granada, Colorado, just weeks after the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. She lived there with her family from 1942-1945.

Now known as the Amache National Historic Site, it was made a part of the National Park Service in February 2024. When Tinker lived there, however, it housed more than 10,000 people at its peak, two-thirds of whom were American citizens.

Tinker revisited Camp Amache with ABC News' Juju Chang where she was forced to live from 1942-1945. It took her a few years to call it an incarceration camp.

"One time, I was asked, 'What does it feel like?'" Tinker said, surveying the miles of flat, brown scrub where the internment camp once stood. "Well, just looking at this, can you imagine?"

Life in Amache was drastically different from life outside. Cramped, shared spaces and communal activities deprived people of privacy in the cramped barracks where detainees were housed. Tinker said they created private spaces as best they could.

"If you can think of it as let's say, we divide the apartment in half like this strung from one side to the other would be a cord," Tinker said. "And over that cord would be a blanket."

The lack of privacy also extended to personal hygiene.

"In the latrines, there were no partitions to separate any toilet," Tinker said. "So some people waited until very late at night, and then they would go to the bathroom and or go to the showers."

Most detainees at Amache came from California's Central Valley, including teachers, professionals, and farm workers. Despite the harsh living conditions, they cultivated flowers and vegetables. They operated shops and schools and published a newspaper.

Many detainees did more than that – they also served in uniform to defend the very country that considered them an enemy, enlisting to serve in the military. There was a 10 percent volunteer rate among detainees, among the highest of any group.

"They were trying to prove their loyalty in spite of the fact that their parents, their families, were being incarcerated," Tinker said. "And they voluntarily did that. They wanted to prove the loyalty of their family, that they were being unjustly treated."

During World War II, 953 men and women from Amache joined the military. One hundred five of them were wounded, and 31 were killed in action.

Two months after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, the Amache detainees were ordered to evacuate the camp – told to go back to their old lives after being stripped of everything they had, held captive behind barbed wire.

Amache was abandoned, left to be reclaimed by the sand and scrub, while the memory of what happened there threatened to fade away.

Fifty years later, John Hopper, a high school social studies teacher in Granada, Colorado, started researching what had happened down the road from his school at Camp Amache.

Hopper also had a personal connection to Amache: his mother worked with a former internee, named Emory Nomura. Hopper began by interviewing him. Soon, he began enlisting his students to assist in his research.

"The object was to collect as many stories and primary sources that we could," Hopper said.

What began as a modest oral history project soon blossomed into a full-blown Amache museum.

"People started giving us stuff," Hopper said. "And our first museum was actually on our campus."

Hopper and his students also undertook a task the federal government had yet to take on: preserving and restoring the essence of the camp. They started the Amache Preservation Society, and with the help of other organizations, recovered key landmarks at the camp site, including the water tower, a guard tower, and one of the barracks.

Thanks to Hopper and his students, Amache's survivors and descendants are able to return to a living memorial, to share their stories. People including Tinker.

"Amache represents the fortitude of 7,000 or more people who came obediently," she said. "Not willingly but obediently, even though they were being treated as enemies."