Story by Mika Travis
ASHEVILLE, North Carolina — As a child, Ken Nakazawa had an inexplicable fascination with the Grove Park Inn, a beautiful old stone hotel set on a mountainside a few miles from his family’s home in Asheville. In a family photo album, there is a snapshot of a young Ken, smiling as he stood on the grand staircase outside the historic resort where presidents from William Howard Taft to Barack Obama vacationed.
What Nakazawa didn’t know then is that he stood in the same spot where his grandmother once posed for a photo. But she wasn’t a visitor; she was a Japanese detainee during World War II.
Nakazawa’s grandmother, Yoko, her two siblings and her mother, Setsuko, were four of 134 Japanese American women and children who were forcibly detained in the Grove Park Inn and later at the Assembly Inn in nearby Montreat.
As a child, Nakazawa didn’t know where or why his family members had been unjustly detained. His parents knew of the internment but didn’t know where it took place. His grandmother was too young at the time to remember most details. His great-grandparents had refused to ever speak about their ordeal after returning to Japan.
But today, now in his 20s, Nakazawa is piecing together the story of his family’s history by combing through archives, research and government records. The search has not been easy: North Carolina’s internment camps are hardly remembered by locals and records are scattered. The camps aren’t widely known to historians either. Brian Niiya, a historian whose mother was also detained at the mountain hotels, said that “even within our specialized field, it’s a very little-known story.”
In uncovering the story of his family’s arrest and detainment—a journey that took them from Hawaii to North Carolina, then Texas and on to Japan—Nakazawa is coming to terms with what it meant for him to have grown up as an Asian American in the United States.
“Something that makes me uncomfortable is the framing of this as a sort of necessary evil,” Nakazawa said about the detainment of Japanese Americans. “And I feel like that happens with many conversations within U.S. history.”
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More than 125,000 people of Japanese descent were detained in the United States during World War II in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack Dec. 7, 1941. Many of them were American-born citizens, while others were Japanese nationals such as the Matsuuras, who had wanted to become Americans.
After learning of a list of Japanese detainees, Nakazawa started searching for his maternal great-grandmother’s records four years ago. His first search turned up nothing. But after looking at other online resources, he eventually found his family’s information in the National Archives and FBI documents.
“My immediate thoughts were, ‘why?’” he said. “Why was our family in particular, why was our file classified information? I fell into the rabbit hole.”
Ken Nakazawa’s maternal great-grandfather, Shuun Matsuura, was a Buddhist priest and community leader in Kona, Hawaii. He was arrested in the middle of the night on Dec. 7, before the official declaration of war was issued. The FBI said he and other Buddhist priests could be Japanese spies.
The FBI targeted people in a position of authority, considering them possible agents of the Japanese government, said Professor Heidi Kim, the director of the University of North Carolina’s Asian American Center. She has extensively researched the North Carolina detainee camps.
“There were certain religions that were considered suspect,” she said. “Shintoism, which was considered a religion of emperor worship, was considered suspect. Certain types of martial arts were considered to be secret training grounds for military societies.”
But records show Shuun Matsuura had hoped to create a permanent home for his family in America and called himself a loyal American resident.
“I have endeavored through my Buddhism to teach Americanism and to teach the community in general to be loyal to the country that they owe their living to,” Matsuura testified to a board in Hawaii, according to documents in the National Archives.
Officials decided that Matsuura’s activities were considered “pro-Japanese though not necessarily anti-American,” and he would be interned for the duration of the war and deported to a camp in Crystal City, Texas.
Months after the Pearl Harbor attack, Setsuko Matsuura and her three children were forcibly removed from their Kona home and sent to North Carolina. The Matsuuras and other detainees had their Hawaiian property confiscated and were allowed to take only $200 to $250 with them.
“As young children, we did not know what was happening,” said Ella Tomita, who was detained in the North Carolina camps. Her story was collected by Linda Kay Smith, an oral history project coordinator in Hawaii.
“‘Not knowing’ is one of the most depressing feelings one gets.” Tomita recalled.
The process of moving these detainees was scrambled, according to Niiya, the historian who serves as the content director for Densho, an organization documenting the testimonies of incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II.
“It’s hard for me that the intent was to move the Japanese American families from Hawaii to these hotels,” Niiya said. “I think it was more a matter of, OK, we’ve got these families who want to be reunited with their husbands or fathers. Where are we going to put them?”
Families were sent to the Grove Park Inn. They were served meals in the dining room, and maids cleaned their rooms. The living conditions of the Grove Park Inn have been reported to be excellent—though the detainees weren’t allowed to leave.
Staff members weren’t always kind. In an oral account collected by Kim, Tomo Izumi recalls a Grove Park clerk yelling that “she did not know why Japs have to be in their hotel, for this was the hotel that the president of the United States stayed in when he came to Asheville.”
After two months in the Grove Park Inn, cost became a consideration. The Matsuuras and other Japanese detainees were escorted by guards to the Assembly Inn in Montreat. They were housed on the third floor, with German nationals on the second floor. In preparation for the detainees, the Assembly Inn removed rugs, good furniture and tablecloths, according to the Montreat College newspaper, The Dialette.
Unlike the Grove Park Inn, mothers and older children at the Assembly Inn bore the responsibility for homecare and did their laundry in communal wash tubs. Tomo Izumi recalls her older sister Junko lugging the vacuum, ironing board and laundry around, including the baby’s cloth diapers which needed to be washed regularly.
The Assembly Inn didn’t live up to the expectations of government officials who visited the site. A Swiss diplomatic official recommended better food, better cleaning and new wash tubs for the detainees. Detainee’s requests for Buddhist statues and religious texts were routinely denied.
A letter Nakazawa found from his great-grandmother gives insight into her experience during those months.
“I am not healthy,” Setsuko wrote to the Department of Justice’s Enemy Alien Control Unit. “My children are young, and I want to get my husband’s help. I would like to ask your special consideration upon our family so that I and my children can reunite with my husband and wait for the exchange ship.”
The letter and other family documents uncovered from the National Archive angers Nakazawa.
“To hear about family separation under the guise of ‘national security’ is both infuriating and heartbreaking,” he said. “It’s especially infuriating to hear this rhetoric continued by elected officials today, making me wonder if this country has truly learned from its own history.”
Uncovering the truth about these North Carolina detainee camps has been difficult, Nakazawa said, because of lack of documents and ignorance. A key piece of misinformation surrounding the North Carolina detainee camps is the incorrect belief that these Japanese detainees were diplomats.
Although there were Japanese and German diplomats held in the Grove Park Inn, Japanese families like the Matsuuras were not connected to the diplomats.
“Diplomat! That is a pet peeve of mine,” Kim said. “Partly, I think it’s confusion, and partly, I think, it just sounds nicer. I think it is euphemistic to a certain degree.”
In 1988, the U.S. government issued an apology, admitting that the detainment was based on racial bias rather than a real national security threat.
A letter from President Bill Clinton to Yoko Matsuura and other detainees read, “Today, on behalf of your fellow Americans, I offer a sincere apology to you for the actions that unfairly denied Japanese Americans and their families fundamental liberties during World War II.”
“But, it’s also disheartening,” Nakazawa said, “because who’s to say that this can’t happen again?”
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After about a year of being detained in Asheville, the Matsuuras were sent to be reunited with their husbands and fathers in the Crystal City detainee camp in Texas. Shuun Matsuura, who had no idea when he would reunite with his wife, had crafted a wooden carving of Setsuko’s face.
The Matsuuras were repatriated to Japan before the end of the war. They moved to the outskirts of Hiroshima prefecture.
On August 6, 1945, Nakazawa’s grandmother, Yoko, said the family saw the bright white flash of the atomic bomb overtake the Hiroshima city sky.
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Nakazawa’s parents moved from Japan to the United States in the 80s. They relocated from Chicago to Asheville for work when Nakazawa was 5 years old. They didn’t know they were moving to the town where their family had history.
A few years later, Ken Nakazawa’s older sister Kay was assigned a family history project in which her teacher asked students to collect the stories of their family members. Their mother called their grandmother Yoko in Japan, who faxed over a variety of documents and photos.
The file included the photo of Yoko Matsuura as a child in front of the Grove Park Inn.
He wonders about the family’s move to Asheville.
“I don’t know if there’s some sort of higher power, because it’s such a coincidence to move there of all cities, and then really understand what happened with my great-grandmother there,” he said.
Nakazawa graduated from North Carolina State University. He struggles to identify what exactly motivates him to continue unraveling his family’s history. Nonetheless, the injustice against his ancestors haunts him.
He now lives in Washington, D.C., where he works in health care. With each new piece of information he learns, he sends his clues in the family group chat.
“There’s a sadness in that we’re not able to ask our grandma these questions,” Kay Nakazawa said. “But, it’s been really cool seeing how different pieces of information surface here and there, and we’ve slowly pieced together this history that we really had no idea existed.”
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Last September, Nakazawa attended a ceremony at Los Angeles’ Japanese American National Museum, in which a sacred book called the Ireichō was consecrated and installed.
The Ireichō is the first record aiming to compile the names of all Japanese Americans who were forcibly detained in World War II. It’s more than 1,000 pages long, weighs 25 pounds and has 125,284 names written inside. It also includes a ceramic stone made from soil across the 75 incarceration sites.
Wearing black suits, robes and dresses, hundreds of survivors, descendants and interfaith clergy members walked in a procession alongside the steady beat of traditional Japanese drums. 75 descendants held wooden grave markers, called sotoba, stating the name of the camp they represented, along with a cup of soil from the land of each camp. Nakazawa held the sotoba representing the Grove Park Inn. He also carried the photo of his grandmother on the Grove Park Inn’s steps.
This was the first time Nakazawa had seen so many Japanese Americans gathered in one place.
“It was a unifying experience,” he said. “For the first time, I was able to be around people who understood the trauma around what had happened.” Nakazawa placed his hand on the cold white stone embedded in the Ireichō and bowed, before stamping blue ink next to the names of his ancestors.
