Art News

Museum tells story of Japanese-American detainees

By: Ruffin Prevost
RALSTON, WY. (REUTERS).- It was a bittersweet return for more than 250 Japanese-American former detainees at Heart Mountain Relocation Center in the state of Wyoming who gathered for the opening of a museum about their wartime internment. A replica guard tower stands over the museum on a remote wind-swept plain where nearly 14,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned in one of 10 such camps set up across the West after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Backers of the $5.5 million, 11,000-square-foot museum next to the crumbling camp say they hope it will tell the story of those once forcibly relocated there and remind visitors of the enduring civil rights lessons from that era. “It’s something like a dream come true,” said Jack Kunitomi, 95, who was imprisoned in the camp with his family and who had a son born at Heart Mountain, east of Yellowstone National Park. Scant is left of the actual cam