Amache: The Japanese Internment Camp in Granada, Colorado

Camp Amache Internment Camp is on a gravel road off of US 50.

There's plenty of room to park our motorhome and tow car.

7,300 Japanese Americans &

Japanese were interned here 

during World War II.

I don't think anyone was honored

 to be held here, fenced in with

 armed guards patrolling...

Japanese internees were moved in before the buildings were completed in 1942.  Families of 7 and less were crowded together into 20-foot by 24-foot spaces.  The Californians didn't have winter clothes.  Their first winter in captivity was brutal.

This Internment Camp is a National Historic Landmark 

The buildings are gone.

There are no foundations

left to compare to the

map of the Camp.

The interpretive signs detail the internees' life while in captivity.  The Camp has a school, vegetable gardens, sports teams, a newspaper, a silk screen shop, etc., and waited for the War to end.

Many former internees tried to return to their homes.  Some towns and villages didn't want their former Japanese neighbors living among them and posted signs stating that the Japanese were not welcome. This group scattered across our country.

Some detainees returned to their hometowns and found their houses occupied by strangers.  They had to evict the squatters before re-starting their interrupted lives.  Others experienced financial ruin during their time behind barbed wire and started to rebuild their lives in destitution.  

In 1948, the Federal government distributed $37 million in reparations to the 110,000 Japanese internees.  Each person who lost four years of their lives, and so much more, received $336.36.  Even in 1948 dollars, the reparation was meager. The Japanese-American community lobbied Congress for ten years and, in 1988 obtained an official apology and additional reparations for surviving internees.  

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.  In 1983, a government commission concluded that there was not a single documented act of espionage or sabotage committed by a Japanese immigrant or Japanese-American on the West Coast.

***Upate: San Diego issued an apology to Japanese Americans impacted by its support for a 1942 Resolution supporting the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II.  The resolution was also rescinded.  Acknowledging the racist intent behind putting Japanese Americans in Concentration Camps is part of San Diego's efforts to address the City's history and formally atone for wrongdoing.