Rev. Kazuaki Nakata Visits WWII Internment Camps

Fresno Interim Rimban Will Lead Pilgrimage to Rohwer, Jerome Sites

When Rev. Kazuaki Nakata began researching topics for his thesis at Ryukoku University, he discovered a subject he knew nothing about — the mass relocation and detention of Japanese Americans in World War II.

“I came across (BCA Minister Emeritus) Rev. Mas Kodani’s book where he talked about Issei, Nisei and Sansei — I had never heard of those terms before. Japanese American history isn’t taught in Japan,” said Rev. Nakata, the interim Rimban of the Fresno Betsuin Buddhist Temple, of the first-, second- and third-generation terms that Rev. Kodani used to describe the history of Japanese Americans. 

His interest was piqued, so much so that his final thesis was how Jodo Shinshu Buddhism was integrated into the cultural background of Japanese Americans.

Rev. Nakata’s research into one of the most sorrowful chapters in American history — the mass dislocation and detention of Japanese Americans — would take an unexpected turn when he was at the Buddhist Church of Sacramento in the early 2000s. As a new BCA Kaikyoshi minister, he was under the supervision of Rev. Bob Oshita, the legendary and now BCA Minister Emeritus. Rev. Oshita, along with his wife, Rev. Patti Oshita, currently serve as the chaplains of the California State Assembly.

At a memorial service Rev. Nakata conducted, he said the Issei individual had sacrificed a lot because of the internment. 

“The Nisei children questioned me — ‘How do you know about the difficulties?’ I was shocked,” he recalled. “The next of kin, the children, said, ‘Without knowing or going to the camps, how do you know?’ Because they, as Nisei, also experienced the camps. 

“So, I really didn’t know,” he continued. “Without going to these locations (internment camps), how can I reassure them? My knowledge was only from books.” 

That criticism — whether it was intended to or not — jumpstarted Rev. Nakata’s visits to the internment camp sites, beginning with Poston in 2006. He traveled to the Arizona camp site during the blazing heat of summer and recalled dodging scorpions while wearing sandals.

Since then, he’s made pilgrimages every year, except during the pandemic, when travel was on hold. He’s led groups of Sangha members, mainly from Central California churches and temples,

“I realized that people died during World War II and in the camps, including a lot of babies,” he said. “So I conduct memorial services for them.”

He’s since visited all 10 of the U.S. War Relocation Authority’s mass incarceration camps as well as the camp in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was run by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service or the U.S. Army.

Rev. Nakata’s next pilgrimage will be to the Rohwer and Jerome camps in Arkansas on Sept. 17-19. That pilgrimage has attracted widespread interest beyond Central California Sangha members. Others, from the Bay Area and Northern California, have signed up. 

Unlike most of his other trips by car, he’ll be flying to nearby Little Rock, Arkansas, leading a group of Sangha members whose parents and grandparents were sent to the Arkansas camps.

Rev. Nakata fully realizes he can’t begin to comprehend what the internees experienced, but he says the camp visits — at the very least — give him an inkling of how the internees lived in the harsh environment. He has visited the camp sites in snowy winters to blazing hot summers, complete with thunderstorms and unbearable humidity to the dust blowing in the harsh winds. 

“I try to imagine how people were living at the camp sites,” he said. “If there was a fishing pond (as was the case at Jerome), I try to imagine fish jumping in the pond.”

He tries to go at least every year to a different camp. And, in the case of the Amache detention camp in Colorado, he initially went there before it became a national park with an information center in March 2022. 

There have been some memorable trips — like the time when he drove from Virginia to Arkansas with his daughter, who was 2 at the time, more than a decade ago. He didn’t check the weather and he ran into fierce thunderstorms — and there was a tornado, too. 

He said he looks forward to each trip and wants to share the Jodo Shinshu lessons.

“Jodo Shinshu is the teaching of interdependence,” he said. “So, even if the current generations, the fourth- or fifth-generation Japanese Americans, may not have heard anything about the camps from their grandparents or great-grandparents, they are connected to the past generations — and their difficulties. They should at least know about what their ancestors did, who worked hard to strive for a better life.”