Setsuko's Secret: Heart Mountain and the Legacy of the Japanese American Incarceration

by Shirley Ann Higuchi

Overview

As children, Shirley Ann Higuchi and her brothers knew Heart Mountain only as the place their parents met, imagining it as a great Stardust Ballroom in rural Wyoming. As they grew older, they would come to recognize the name as a source of great sadness and shame for their older family members, part of the generation of Japanese Americans forced into the hastily built concentration camp in the aftermath of Executive Order 9066.
Only after a serious cancer diagnosis did Shirley's mother, Setsuko, share her vision for a museum at the site of the former camp, where she had been donating funds and volunteering in secret for many years. After Setsuko's death, Shirley skeptically accepted an invitation to visit the site, a journey that would forever change her life and introduce her to a part of her mother she never knew.
Navigating the complicated terrain of the Japanese American experience, Shirley patched together Setsuko's story and came to understand the forces and generational trauma that shaped her own life. Moving seamlessly between family and communal history, Setsuko's Secret offers a clear window into the "camp life" that was rarely revealed to the children of the incarcerated. This volume powerfully insists that we reckon with the pain in our collective American past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299327804
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	10/20/2020
Edition description:	1
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	1,097,504
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Shirley Ann Higuchi is the associate executive director of legal and regulatory affairs for the American Psychological Association and the chair of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation.

Table of Contents

Illustrations ix

Foreword Tom Brokaw xi

Prologue: Setsuko's Secret 3

1 The Issei: Or, Where It All Begins 12

2 Executive Order 9066: Forcing People Out of Their Lives 28

3 Forced Removal, Exclusion Zones, and Assembly Centers 37

4 A New Home in the Dust and Wind 58

5 Establishing Loyalties 91

6 Relocation 109

7 Resistance 117

8 The Nisei Units: Uncommon Courage 141

9 Ending the Exclusion Order 153

10 Moving Forward 172

11 Creating a Memorial 184

12 Acknowledging Wrongs 193

13 Preservation under Duress 219

14 Generational Trauma and the Model Minority 235

15 Uncovering Setsuko's Secret 255

Epilogue: Back to Where It Started 275

Afterword Irene Hirano Inouye 280

Acknowledgments 283

Glossary 287

Cast of Characters 291

Notes 299

Selected Bibliography 335

Index 339

Editorial Reviews

08/24/2020

Higuchi, chair of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, examines “the triumphs and the turmoil” of Japanese-Americans interned by the U.S. government during WWII in this evocative account. Higuchi’s parents met as sixth-graders at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, where they were held from 1942 to 1944, and her mother, Setsuko Saito Higuchi, insisted that the “camp” was “fun” because it’s where she met her husband. Only after Setsuko’s death from pancreatic cancer did Higuchi, who took over her mom’s work at a museum at the Heart Mountain site, learn about the hunger, humiliation, and loss she had suffered. Higuchi interviewed friends and relatives in the U.S. and Japan, and delved into the history of the internment camp, including the refusal of young male internees to comply with a military draft. She also details the roles of President Franklin Roosevelt, Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, and California attorney general Earl Warren in justifying, devising, and implementing the relocation policy, and chronicles the war years of prominent Japanese Americans including Hawaii senator Daniel Inouye and U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta. Throughout, Higuchi describes the traumatic effects on the children and grandchildren of the 120,000 incarcerees. The result is a well-informed and deeply moving study of the long-term effects of a dark chapter in American history. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

A rich and original story. Shirley Higuchi captures the sweeping narrative of incarceration through the lens of a single camp and ties it to our present reality. Her resolve as a daughter of the camps is Setsuko's real legacy.”—Frank Abe, director of Conscience and the Constitution


“Shirley Higuchi takes us on a journey, the more she searches for pieces of the puzzle, the deeper readers will be drawn in and search with her.”—Noriko Sanefuji, Smithsonian's National Museum of American History

From the Publisher