Look Toward the Mountain: Stories from Heart Mountain Incarceration Camp

Thanks to the support of the Embassy of Japan in the United States, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is presenting a special three-episode series exploring the Japanese American experience beyond Heart Mountain, and our relationship to Japan. The third episode explores how Japanese American identity has been shaped by our connections to, and relationship with Japan and Japanese culture.

Thanks to the support of the Embassy of Japan in the United States, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is presenting a special three-episode series exploring the Japanese American experience beyond Heart Mountain, and our relationship to Japan. This second episode explores the postwar resettlement of Japanese Americans. Some kept their heads down and tried to assimilate into the broader society while others turned to activism that would birth the pilgrimage movement, that would ultimately help fuel a national reckoning with the injustice of wartime incarceration.

Thanks to the support of the Embassy of Japan in the United States, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation is presenting a special three-episode series exploring the Japanese American experience beyond Heart Mountain, and our relationship to Japan. This first episode tells the stories of Japanese immigrants who achieved great success in the California agriculture industry, others who settled rural parts of the West as railroad laborers or miners, and the undercurrent of racism and xenophobia that ultimately restricted further immigration after 1924.

The tenth episode titled “Sports and Leisure” looks at how the Heart Mountain incarcerees embraced both modern American and traditional Japanese types of entertainment and sports in camp. Although this helped Japanese Americans endure their time as prisoners and brought different people together inside the camp, it was also part of the government's plan to assimilate them into the broader American society in the postwar era.

The ninth episode titled “The Artists” will examine the dozens of professional and amateur artists who emerged from Heart Mountain with compelling bodies of work that informed their later careers. And almost 75 years after the end of the incarceration, a fight over the future of art made in camp would help define a new wave of Japanese American activism.

The eighth episode titled “Crime and Punishment” will explore how Japanese Americans incarcerated at Heart Mountain established their own system of self-governance, complete with elected officials, a legal system, and police force to maintain the law and order within the prison camp. Content warning: sexual assault.

The seventh episode titled “Doing Their Bit” will explore the many ways Heart Mountain incarcerees demonstrated their loyalty to the United States, and how they supported the war effort from behind barbed wire.

The sixth episode titled “Organizing Resistance” will explore how the Japanese American tradition of organizing evolved in camp to become a powerful resistance movement that dominated much of the Heart Mountain experience in its later years.

The fifth episode titled “Commerce in the Camp” will explore how Japanese Americans incarcerated at Heart Mountain developed their own prison economy, with incarceree-run businesses that helped make life inside camp into something that resembled their past lives on the West Coast.

The fourth episode titled, “Prison Food” explores how the more than 10,000 Japanese American incarcerated at Heart Mountain coped with the distasteful army rations they confronted when they first arrived in camp, and the important role that food played in their daily lives during the incarceration.

The third episode titled “A New Normal” explores the routines and coping strategies that Japanese Americans adapted during the first months of incarceration as they began adjusting to their new circumstances living behind barbed wire at Heart Mountain.

The second episode titled “What Is This Place?” will explore the Big Horn Basin of northwestern Wyoming and the people who called it home before the Japanese Americans arrived.

The inaugural episode titled “Who We Were Before,” explores the stories of Issei Japanese immigrants, and the communities they and their American born children established on the west coast prior to WWII.

Announcing the first episode of the new podcast series "Look Toward The Mountain: Stories From Heart Mountain Incarceration Camp" that will be released on February 19, 2021 to all major podcasting platforms. This series will explore life inside the Heart Mountain Japanese American Relocation Center that was located in northwestern Wyoming during World War II.