Former internee to spend July 4 at Amache

By Hector Gutierrez, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published July 3, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.
Updated July 3, 2008 at 1:03 p.m.

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Photo by Special To The Rocky

Gary Ono, right, and his older brother, Stanley Ono, were interned with their family at the Amache camp in southeast Colorado.

Gary Ono will sleep on spot where his family once slept.

Gary Ono plans to mark Independence Day by sleeping on the spot where he and his family were denied their freedom during World War II.

Ono is visiting the Amache Japanese-American Relocation Center in southeast Colorado, which housed more than 7,500 people of Japanese ancestry during the war, after authorities forced them from their homes.

Ono, a third-generation Japanese-American, is helping a University of Denver team excavate parts of Amache, which was a self-contained community with more than 550 structures, including administration buildings, businesses, barracks, a hospital, warehouses and a school.

Researchers think they found the barrack where Ono, now 68, and his family lived on and off during the war. Ono was 2 when they were forced to leave their home in Cortez, Calif.

All that's left of Barrack 6 in Block 10-E is the concrete foundation. On Friday, Ono will place a sleeping bag on the spot where he and his three siblings once slept.

"I'm going to do it on the Fourth of July just to make it ironic," said Ono, who drove to Colorado with his 16-year-old grandson, Dante, from his home in San Francisco.

Ono, a retired medical photographer for the Department of Veterans Affairs, has joined University of Denver students as part of their summer field school, which began June 16. The students, under the direction of DU anthropologist Bonnie Clark, are carrying out archaeological digs at the Amache site until July 11.

Clark invited Ono about two months ago when she was visiting the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and learned Ono, a volunteer there, and his family had been interned at Amache. The museum's national conference is this week in Denver, and a trip to Amache is on the agenda.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the forced removal of about 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes. They were assigned to one of 10 relocation camps, including Amache.

Ono researched Amache over the years, learning about it mostly from other internees.

"Some stories were horrible," he said. "Well, like for me I learned the loss of civil liberties, you know, freedom, and imprisonment. We started developing stronger words for the camps. They were concentration camps."

• July 3, 2008

  5:25 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  happymike44 writes:

  It was never a excuse that this happened.
  Most people do not understand the internment camps were to keep us safe from the enemy.
  With Pearl Harbor and everything our government did this to insure the safety of the country.
  The rentment towards the japanese for what happened was high.
  Some japanese after the attack were attacked and threatened with death.
  So it was also a safety measure to protect them from the anger over Pearl Harbor.
  May he be able to forgive all of America for doing this to him.

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