Above photos: Mitsuko (Murakami) Otani and Seigo Otani, left, were matched and married inside the Minidoka War Relocation Center, an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. Their daughter, the Rev. Polly Shigaki served as deacon of St. Peter’s Episcopal Parish, a historically Japanese church in Seattle, Washington. Shigaki’s husband, John Shigaki, was born inside Minidoka. He is pictured, right, with his older siblings, Dale and Irene Shigaki, and mother, Yasuko (Kawakami) Shigaki. Photo: Courtesy of Erin Shigaki
[Episcopal News Service] This weekend, St. Peter’s Episcopal Parish, a historically Japanese church in Seattle, Washington, will commemorate the 83rd anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s executive order to authorize the incarceration of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. 2025 also marks 80 years since the camps closed.
“So much intergenerational trauma came from my grandparents and my parents, who met and had gotten married in Minidoka [War Relocation Center in Jerome, Idaho], and passed on to my cousins and me,” the Rev. Polly Shigaki, a retired deacon of St. Peter’s, told Episcopal News Service. She will answer people’s questions during the “Weekend of Remembrance: Never Again is Now,” which will take place Feb. 8-9.
“2025 is the 80th year since the official closing of the camps, so now we’re at a big juncture with the urgency to capture the stories of the few living survivors,” said Shigaki, whose husband was born in Minidoka. A horse veterinarian assisted with his birth because health care was extremely limited in the camps.
The Weekend of Remembrance will include historic tours, a luncheon and a livestreamed worship service. Click here to view the livestream from the Diocese of Olympia’s YouTube channel beginning at 10:30 a.m. Pacific.
This year will mark 37 years since the U.S. government formally apologized for incarcerating Japanese Americans during World War II, after a decades-long redress movement for restitution for survivors. Most of the people ENS interviewed for this story said they saw “a lot of parallels” between what happened to their relatives immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor and anti-Muslim and anti-Middle Eastern sentiment immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. They also said they’re seeing the same parallels – fear of the other – today with ICE arresting and deporting more than 8,000 migrants since President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20.
“We haven’t learned our lesson yet; we can’t let history repeat itself,” the Rev. Irene Tanabe, rector of All Souls Anglican Episcopal Church in Okinawa, Japan, told ENS. Tanabe’s father and grandparents were incarcerated at Minidoka.
Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, in response to the Empire of Japan’s Dec. 7, 1741, attack on Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawai‘i, and the resulting growing fear and distrust of Japanese Americans compounded by long-standing anti-Asian racism. At this time, about 275,000 people of Japanese descent were living in Hawai‘i and the mainland United States. Over the next six months, about 125,000 of them – including 70,000 U.S. citizens – were forcibly moved to “assembly centers” in 10 remote areas in seven mainland states. Those living in the Seattle area at the time, like Shigaki’s family, were sent to Minidoka.
Proponents of internment justified it as a military precaution, guarding against Japanese immigrants and Americans of Japanese descent who might secretly work to support Japan in the war’s Pacific theater. Defenders of internment also argued that it also would protect those detained from racial attacks, though such arguments were undercut by conditions at the internment camps, which resembled prisons more than safe havens. Very few people were permitted to temporarily leave the camps, such as for conscription into U.S. military service.
“We spend so much time talking about how the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor and how we retaliated by dropping the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in schools, but we don’t spend the same amount of time talking about how we retaliated by setting up internment camps for Japanese Americans right here on our own soil,” the Rev. Jo Ann Lagman, missioner for The Episcopal Church’s Office of Asiamerica Ministries, told ENS. “[It’s an erasure] I think that’s consistent with how Asian Americans are perceived in our society presently, that we’re invisible. …But history must never be erased.”
The Weekend of Remembrance’s first day will include gathering at the Washington State Fairgrounds in Puyallup to view the Puyallup Remembrance Gallery, which showcases photos and personal stories, and a documentary. Most Japanese Americans then living in the Seattle area spent the first few months of detention at the Puyallup Assembly Center, where the Washington State Fairgrounds stands today, before settlement at Minidoka for the remainder of the war.
St. Peter’s was formed in 1908 by a group of Japanese Anglicans who gathered in houses until raising enough money to buy property in 1932 and build a church. When the congregation’s families were forced to relocate to internment camps, the church boarded up and closed on April 26, 1942, and didn’t reopen for more than three years. During that time, St. Peter’s served as a storage site for parishioners’ belongings while they were interned.
“Everybody literally got a 4-by-4-foot square space in the church where they could stack their belongings as high as they could,” Jay Shoji – whose grandfather, the Rev. Gennosuke Shoji, was vicar of St. Peter’s at the time and when the church was built – told ENS. “Obviously, 4-foot-by-4-foot is not very big, but you could at least store a few things. …Not everyone came back to Seattle after they were freed, so some items were not claimed.”
Click here to read Gennosuke Shoji’s ordination speech from Jan. 15. 1918.
Shoji’s grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles were incarcerated at Minidoka. After the war, they temporarily lived at St. Peter’s, which was converted into a hostel to house other parishioners who returned homeless to Seattle.
When survivors were released from the internment camps after the war ended in 1945, restarting their lives was difficult. Many were left homeless because their properties were occupied or sold off, leaving them no choice but to temporarily stay in hotels, hostels or trailer installations. They also faced discrimination and hostility from their former neighbors, limiting their job prospects.
On Feb. 9, St. Peter’s will host a special commemoration service that will incorporate history, music, dance, art and shared storytelling from parishioners and members of the Seattle community. Tanabe will preside. She told ENS that she will reflect on her own inherited trauma and the need to educate the public about the camps.
“A lot of Americans still to this day don’t know about the internment camps, even people who live in states that had them,” Tanabe said. “We have memorials and special events like what St. Peter’s does every year because, like the concentration camps during the Holocaust, the Japanese internment needs to be remembered so that such a tragedy doesn’t happen again with any group of people.”
During the service, Shoji will read his father’s testimony from Sept. 9, 1981, to the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Shoji’s father, Samuel T. Shoji, was a prominent community activist in the postwar redress movement, a decades-long campaign for reparations and an apology from the U.S. government for the Japanese internment camps. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which included a formal apology and $20,000 payments to internment camp survivors.
Click here to read Samuel T. Shoji’s redress testimony.
In the testimony, Samuel T. Shoji mentioned that his little sister, Florence Shoji, had a severe disability from early childhood that left her paralyzed on her right side, nonverbal and developmentally delayed with dietary restrictions. It took several years for Florence Shoji to learn to sit up on her own and develop some communication skills, but incarceration beginning at age 13 “destroyed almost all of this progress for her.” She couldn’t eat much of the food served in the dining hall, and she only had access to a commode in a corner of the family’s crowded barrack that was used as both a toilet and a bathtub. Over time, she regressed to the point of having uncontrollable seizures, and she was eventually admitted to a state hospital, where she died shortly thereafter.
“I was told on numerous occasions by my parents that the separation was very traumatic for Florence. …My mother bore the grief of her loss for many years,” Samuel T. Shoji wrote in his testimony. “Some may say that Florence would have died at an early age even though she was never moved from her home in Seattle because of her physical and mental conditions. However, we have always felt that her death came prematurely as a direct result of her separation from the few things she could adjust to and even more so because of the separation from her parents, especially from her mother who had cared for her in a way only a mother can take care of a special child.”
Erin Shigaki, Polly Shigaki’s daughter and an artist who has painted murals throughout Seattle, will also speak at the worship service. Erin Shigaki’s murals have been defaced multiple times – most recently two weeks ago when someone spread black ink over her mural memorializing internment camp survivors. The mural is called “Never Again is Now,” which also serves as the theme of St. Peter’s remembrance service. She told ENS that “such hateful acts” only encourage her to continue advocating for social justice and sharing the experiences of incarceration during World War II through her art. Erin Shigaki noted that most U.S. history textbooks barely, if at all, mention the camps despite their “indelible legacy.”
“These complicated American stories, like the internment camps, are kept out of the narrative and out of the textbooks by design of the government, and it’s baffling. We can’t forget about the camps,” she said. “There’s so much great material on this subject available now – books, documentaries, etc. – many ways to educate.”
Erin Shigaki’s mural on Japanese internment camps in Seattle, Washington, “Never Again is Now,” was created to serve as a reminder to never let history repeat itself. Shigaki created the mural in collaboration with Densho, a Seattle-based nonprofit that works to preserve and share the history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Photo: Erin Shigaki
After the service, participants will eat a Japanese lunch at St. Peter’s and tour the parish.
Everyone ENS spoke with for this story said it’s important now more than ever to educate and remember the internment camps’ history and their legacy to prevent the roundup and incarceration of other groups of people based on racial, ethnic and xenophobic hate.
“The Japanese American story relates to the liberation of all people, and people of color in particular. Our stories are intertwined – the things we overcame and will overcome by being a unified group,” Erin Shigaki said. “Working as a community builds strength, and talking about the ways we can use the lessons from our history to shape the future is our moral imperative.”
–Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.