By Moe Shimizu
REDDING, Calif. — On July 3, the First United Methodist Church in Redding was crowded with families and individuals who chattered over lunch, wearing colorful lanyards that read “Tule Lake Pilgrimage.” Church members and Redding community members busily placed bowls of boiled edamame on the tables, next to the Japanese dolls and ceramics that had been laid out as decorations that morning.
The Tule Lake Pilgrimage is a biennial initiative led by the Tule Lake Committee, an organization of survivors and descendants of Japanese American families who were incarcerated by the American government in the Tule Lake prison camp and segregation center during World War II. On July 4 weekend, every two years, around 400 participants of several generations travel in five buses up to the site of incarceration at the Tule Lake National Monument, which is spread across Modoc and Siskiyou counties just southeast of Oregon.
Among those sitting at tables was 82-year-old Satsuki Ina, a psychotherapist and author who was born in the Tule Lake Segregation Center in 1944. Ina, whose parents were held at separate concentration camps during the war, said her earliest memory is of leaving the Crystal City Family Internment Camp in Texas at two-years-old.
When Ina’s parents passed, she discovered a collection of letters and haikus written by her parents to each other, inspiring her book The Poet and the Silk Girl about the trauma of Japanese American incarceration.
“It’s very powerful to be back with the community to share our stories,” Ina said, referring to the crowded room of individuals, many of whom were in conversation about family histories and their connections to shared Japanese American history.
The First United Methodist Church has hosted a lunch stop for pilgrimage travelers for over two decades now, and has since become intertwined with the work of preserving a part of northern California history that is often forgotten.
America’s dark past of unjust incarceration
Following the Pearl Harbor Attack by the Japanese Empire in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and incarceration of any individual deemed a security threat.
The decision was driven by high anti-Japanese sentiment and suspicion, despite most Japanese Americans and individuals of Japanese descent in America having no ties to the Japanese government.
The order led to the mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans and other individuals of Japanese descent beginning in May of 1942. All persons with at least one-sixteenth Japanese blood were given less than a week to leave their homes and “relocate” to one of ten prison camps operated by the U.S. government. Many families were separated without notice of where they were being sent or when they would be let out.
About two-thirds of those incarcerated were full U.S. citizens, born and raised on American land. None were provided legal basis or due process for their incarceration.
The incident is often referred to as Japanese American “internment,” but incarceration is a more accurate term as “internment” refers to legally permissible detention of “enemy aliens,” or non-citizens. While the U.S. government referred to the camps as “relocation centers,” Tule Lake and others were more accurately prison camps, or concentration camps.
Ina, and some of the others who stopped in Redding as part of the Tule Lake pilgrimage this year, were among those incarcerated at the Tule Lake site. It was the largest of the ten concentration camps, with a total of 29,840 incarcerated over the course of four years. The site is now preserved as a national monument, and on a clear day, Mount Shasta is visible from the camp remains.
In February 1943, one year after Japanese Americans were first put in camps, the American government issued a “loyalty” questionnaire to those incarcerated in all ten camps. It included two questions: one which asked if they would be willing to serve in or volunteer for the armed forces of the United States, and another asking if they would swear “unqualified allegiance” to the United States of America and “foreswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor.”
Anyone who had answered “no” to either question, or refused to answer, was sent to be incarcerated at the Tule Lake camp, which had been converted into the high-security Tule Lake Segregation Center. It included guard towers, fences, and a large military police presence.
The Tule Lake Segregation Center became known as the site for “disloyal” prisoners, or those who had resisted, and were highly stigmatized within the Japanese American community. Young men who had answered “no” to both questions, in particular, became known as “no-no boys.”
Tule Lake closed in May 1946, seven months after the end of World War II and four years after it was opened.
Hiroshi Shimizu, chair of the Tule Lake Committee, was born in the Topaz Internment Camp and later moved to the Tule Lake Segregation Center. Shimizu, who is now 83, said that the majority of those who participate in the pilgrimage have had family incarcerated in the concentration camps.
Shimizu himself said he doesn’t recall much from his experience, but could recall certain moments from his childhood, and the way the prison camps impacted his family.
“I do remember once my mother taking me to this fence, and she was trying to point out my father, who was walking to somewhere from the stockade,” Shimizu said. “She was trying to point him out, but I couldn’t focus in on him, and didn’t actually find him, and I think I remember that because of the great disappointment of not being able to spot him.” In reflection, Shimizu said, he was likely not even one-year-old at the time of the memory.
“It had a lasting effect on the family, and on me, to this day,” Shimizu said of the incarceration, recalling his father, who returned to San Francisco after his release as an editor and reporter for local Japanese-language newspapers.
“Because of the incarceration and the war, he retreated back into the Japanese world in America, whereas before the war, he was more expansive in his ambitions and his ideas of what he wanted to do here.”
How the pilgrimage came to Redding
The Redding First Methodist Church has sponsored a lunch for the pilgrimage since the 1990s, when Lee Macy and Don Yost, local Redding residents and members of the First United Methodist Church, participated in the pilgrimage themselves.
Macy recalled that she first learned about Japanese American incarceration from a photograph exhibition featuring concentration camps. As a local middle school teacher, she began teaching about Japanese American history in the classroom, and eventually decided to go on the Tule Lake pilgrimage herself.
In 1992, when she first participated, the pilgrimage was making its Redding lunch stop in a shopping mall. “That wasn’t a very welcoming experience,” Macy noted, and reached out to church member Ted Klaseen, who helped organize a lunch and welcome the pilgrimage members at the next occurrence.
Since then, church members Ann and Damon Cropsey have led the organization of the lunches, gathering volunteers to set up, cook, and provide hospitality as around 400 pilgrimage members pass through the church at staggered times throughout the day.
“The connections between the church and the pilgrims have been fantastic,” Damon Cropsey said.
Vicki Ono, a local community leader and retired teacher in Redding, took over the task of organizing the lunch this year. Ono’s own aunt, Joanne Iritani, had been incarcerated as a Japanese American and later worked with Ono’s uncle, Frank Iritani, in organizing pilgrimages in the 1990s. Though she herself has never been on the pilgrimage, Ono was determined to make others feel welcome.
For this year’s event, Ono gathered local members of the Japanese community as well as church volunteers, and decorated the room with kimonos and Japanese dolls. The lunch also featured artwork from Michi Takemoto, a local Redding artist born in the Topaz Internment Camp, whose paintings highlight Japanese American incarceration.
“It’s been a wonderful thing. They really go out of their way to be great hosts,” Shimizu said about the church members.
What the pilgrimage means for participants
Few survivors of Japanese American concentration camps are alive today, but some who are travel with the Tule Lake pilgrimage to tell their stories, and have done so since the pilgrimage unofficially began in 1969.
Mits Yamamoto was the oldest participant of the pilgrimage this year, at 100-years-old.
Yamamoto was incarcerated at Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas when he was 16, spending part of his teenage years behind barbed wire. He recalled that while he had a relatively positive experience around peers of similar ages in the concentration camp, many others, like the ‘no-no boys,’ had far more negative experiences.
The pilgrimage’s programming includes first-hand accounts from survivors like Yamamoto, as well as lectures and discussion sessions to learn in-depth about what happened at Tule Lake.
Many Japanese American families suffered racism and stigma following their release from the concentration camps, and the experience of being at the prison camps was often intertwined with shame. Many who were incarcerated never discussed their experience.
Tess Sakuma-Dunlap, a local Redding resident who volunteered at the lunch and whose father was incarcerated at Tule Lake, recalled that despite both her parents having been incarcerated, they never mentioned it and maintained their American patriotism.
“I didn’t hear anything about it until I was in high school, and it really surprised me,” she remembered. “They never said anything bad about the government, and they put up the flag during all the holidays.”
For many similar descendants of Japanese American survivors who don’t have first-hand experiences or accounts, the pilgrimage provides an opportunity to learn and understand their own family’s histories.
Mitch Higa, who is a Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, and whose parents were both incarcerated in their youth, said he was raised in southern California, where his parents mentioned their experiences in the camps only very casually. His first Tule Lake pilgrimage in 2002 was “mind-blowing,” he said, as he realized how little his parents had spoken of the darker parts of the camp’s history.
“I think it started to dawn on me at that point what a segregation center was, and the stigma from the Japanese American community who were not held in Tule Lake,” he said, describing witnessing the jail where “disloyal” Japanese Americans had been incarcerated. “That just started to make me want to learn more.”
Higa noted that to him, the pilgrimage is about honoring his family’s legacy, as well as being in community with others in order to make sense of a darker side of Japanese American history.
“I’ve been to about ten pilgrimages in the past 24 years, and I know going in that we all have a shared history,” he said. “It’s really rare for me to be immediately vulnerable and open to talk about my family history, but that setting is really great.”
Remembering as a way to protect others
Alongside the pilgrimage, the Tule Lake Committee also works to preserve the site of Tule Lake, which was named one of 11 most endangered historic places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation this March. The designation comes as the Federal Aviation Authority and Modoc County are attempting to construct a security fence around the Tulelake Municipal Airport, an airfield within the former concentration camp.
Committee leaders have spoken out against the plan, noting that the site needs to be preserved as it is to protect the legacy of the injustice that Japanese Americans endured.
The committee is also deeply involved in activism against present-day incarceration of immigrant children and families, many of whom are provided no due process, including some who are imprisoned under a rhetoric of “security risks” and “economic threats” that echo Japanese American history.
This year’s pilgrimage, which was titled “Resistance and Solidarity,” featured a protest to raise connections between the history of resistance at Tule Lake and present-day events, alongside a statement issued by the Tule Lake Committee calling for action to protect those unjustly removed, separated, or incarcerated with no due process.
Satsuki Ina, who is an avid activist with Tsuru for Solidarity, speaks out against unjust deportation and detention of children and others in racial communities. She said that traveling on the pilgrimage holds a special weight amid ongoing ICE raids and discriminatory detentions.
“The current situation highlights for people that our history is being repeated again, and we identify with the children that are being imprisoned today,” she said, noting that many Japanese American survivors who are now in their 80s or 90s were also children at the time of incarceration. “And we’re going to stand up for them.”
Moe Shimizu is a student at Yale University. She’s reporting for Shasta Scout as a 2026 summer intern, with support from the Nonprofit Newsroom Internship Program — created by The Scripps Howard Fund and the Institute for Nonprofit News.
