Jim Tanimoto, of Gridley, shares his story at the Butte County Library on Nov. 1, during a special screening of the 2017 documentary based on his family’s 18-month incarceration at Tule Lake during World War II.

CHICO, CA (MPG) - Jim Tanimoto was 19 years old when he walked into Gridley on Monday, Dec. 8, 1941, and sensed a change immediately. Neighbors who once smiled and waved turned their faces away.

“There was something different in town that wasn’t there Dec. 6,” Tanimoto said to a standing-room-only crowd at the Butte County Library on Nov. 1 during a special screening of the 2017 documentary based on his family’s 18-month incarceration at Tule Lake during World War II.

The screening of “Mr. Tanimoto’s Journey,” directed by Jesse Dizard, professor of anthropology at California State University, Chico, brought together scholars, students and community members for a conversation about civil liberties and resistance.

Tanimoto, 102, was joined by Dizard and April Kamp-Whittaker, assistant professor of anthropology at CSU Chico, who helped frame the historical context of Japanese internment and its ongoing echoes of fear, resilience and constitutional reckoning. The emotional event was a rare opportunity to hear history from someone who lived it.
The screening was the first of two. A second screening and lecture will be held Nov. 15 at the Oroville Branch of the Butte County Library.

The documentary and lecture offered more than a personal story; they revisited a turning point in American history. On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to enter World War II.

Tanimoto said in the weeks that followed, fear and suspicion toward Japanese Americans intensified across the West Coast. On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to designate exclusion zones and forcibly remove anyone the U.S. deemed a threat to national security.

“We looked like the enemy,” Tanimoto said.

More than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, were ordered to leave their homes and report to assembly centers before being relocated to incarceration camps.

Charity Chain, the Butte County Library assistant who organized the lecture, asked the audience to imagine what that moment felt like.

Daisuke Aoyagi, of Chico, and family share a moment with 102-year-old Jim Tanimoto, of Gridley, following a powerful presentation of the documentary “Mr. Tanimoto's Journey” in Chico on Nov. 1.

 

“You’ve been told you can only take what you can carry in your two hands,” Chain said. “You are looking around your house, trying to decide which few things to pack or the many, many things you are going to have to leave behind. You don’t know when you’re coming back - or if you ever will.”

On July 9, 1942, his brother’s birthday, Tanimoto’s family boarded the train at the Gridley Depot under armed guard. Shades were drawn tight, and soldiers stood at both ends of the railcar. They didn’t know where they were going, only that they were being removed. It took two days to reach Tule Lake.

Located in the remote northeastern corner of California near the Oregon border, Tule Lake was one of ten incarceration camps established by the U.S. government during World War II. Surrounded by high desert and sagebrush, the site was chosen for its isolation. Summer temperatures soared, and dust storms swept through regularly.

Tanimoto’s family spent 18 months confined behind barbed wire at Tule Lake, which became the largest and most heavily guarded of the camps. Barracks were divided into small rooms, offering little privacy. Families hung sheets between cots and used potbelly stoves for heat. Dust coated everything.

In 1943, the War Relocation Authority issued a loyalty questionnaire to all incarcerated Japanese Americans. Questions 27 and 28 asked whether they would serve in the U.S. military and swear unqualified allegiance to the United States while renouncing any loyalty to the Japanese emperor.

Tanimoto refused to sign, not because he felt any loyalty to Japan, a country he barely knew, but because the questions felt like a betrayal of his constitutional rights.

“We were American citizens,” Tanimoto said. “Why should we have to prove our loyalty when we were the ones being locked up?”

Tanimoto was one of 36 men in Block 42 who took that stand. Their refusal led to arrest, solitary confinement and threats of execution. Guards warned they would be shot if they refused to cooperate. Tanimoto and the other protestors were transferred to the county jail in Alturas, where they were held without formal charges.

“We weren’t trying to be heroes,” Tanimoto said. “We just wanted to be treated like Americans.”

Jim Tanimoto’s son-in-law, Patrick Gilmore of Nord, spoke of the irony of the family’s incarceration by contrasting it with Jim’s brother Shigeo “Jack” Tanimoto’s military service. As a child, Jack had been sent to Japan to live with relatives and learn the language and customs, a common practice known as kibei. He returned to the United States and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1941, months before Pearl Harbor. Jack trained as an interpreter and served in the Pacific Theater. In 1944, he was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action while serving with the 27th Infantry Division. He received the medal for heroism while Jim’s family remained behind barbed wire at Tule Lake.

“It added insult to injury,” Gilmore said.

April Kamp-Whittaker, assistant professor of anthropology at CSU Chico, frames the historical context of Japanese incarceration during World War II and its ongoing echoes of fear, resilience and constitutional reckoning before a standing-room-only crowd on Nov. 1, at the Butte County Library in Chico.

 

Dizard, who spent years documenting Tanimoto’s story, said the Block 42 protest remains one of the most powerful examples of constitutional resistance during the war.

“These were young men, many of them just out of high school, who had the courage to say no,” Dizard told the audience. “They weren’t refusing out of disloyalty. They were refusing because they believed in the Constitution.”

The loyalty questionnaire was a turning point for many incarcerees, Dizard said. It asked them to renounce something they never claimed in the first place. Dizard called it a trap.

Tanimoto’s protest came at great personal cost. After weeks in jail, he returned to Tule Lake, where he was labeled a troublemaker. Camp authorities monitored him, and some Japanese Americans avoided him out of fear of repercussions.

But he also found solidarity. During his time at Tule Lake, he met a young woman whose family had also been incarcerated. They married and returned to Gridley, where they raised a family and rebuilt their lives.

The Tanimoto family left behind 1,000 tons of peaches ready to harvest when they were forced to evacuate. Their land, like that of many Japanese American farmers, was entrusted to neighbors. Others returned to find their homes vandalized, sold out from under them, or everything they owned lost.

Tanimoto's family was among the few families able to reclaim their land, and over time, they rebuilt what had been taken. Tanimoto and his brothers helped transform the region’s agriculture, becoming leaders in California’s emerging kiwi industry.

But the scars of incarceration remained, Tanimoto said. For decades, he rarely spoke about what happened, out of respect for his wife, who wanted to put the past behind them to spare their children.

Their daughter, Judy Tanimoto, said she grew up hearing whispers about “camp,” but never understood what it meant. The word floated through family conversations without explanation, and her parents never sat down to tell the full story.

“My mom didn’t want us to grow up angry,” Judy said in the documentary. “She didn’t want us to feel like we were owed something or that we were victims. She wanted us to move forward, to live our lives without carrying that burden.”

The documentary, produced through CSU Chico’s Advanced Laboratory for Visual Anthropology became a vehicle for that testimony years after Tanimoto's wife's death. It allowed Tanimoto to finally speak not only for himself, but for the men of Block 42 and the thousands of families who endured incarceration and its aftermath in silence.

“Jim’s story is not just about the past,” Dizard said. “It’s about what happens when fear overrides the Constitution. It’s about what it means to be American.”

Kamp-Whittaker, who specializes in historical archaeology, spoke about Amache, the incarceration site in Colorado where archaeological work has helped uncover daily life under confinement. Tule Lake, by contrast, is located on private property and has never been formally excavated. Remnants of the segregation camp, including foundations, fence lines, and a few surviving structures speak to the isolation and horror that defined the site.

“These places are part of our national story,” Kamp-Whittaker said. “They remind us that civil liberties are fragile, and that silence can be dangerous.”

Tanimoto is the last living member of Block 42. His voice, steady but quiet, carried the weight of lived experience.

“I’m not bitter,” Tanimoto said. “But I want people to know what happened. I want them to remember...If it could happen to me, it could happen to you.”