Ireicho: Connecting with My past
Written by Rev. Kathy Chatterton.
In the spring, I received news that the Ireicho book was coming to Idaho and I signed up for the opportunity to stamp the names of my maternal grandparents and my parents in the book. I was able to participate in this event in July of this year. It was important to me to make this connection to family members who are a part of the causes and conditions that made me who I am today.
If you’re not familiar with the Ireicho, here is some information from the
Ireicho website: “Irei: National Monument for the WWII Japanese American
Incarceration is a multi-faceted project to address the erasure of the identities of
individuals of Japanese ancestry who experienced wartime incarceration and to
expand the concept of what monument is through three distinct, interlinking
elements:
- A sacred book of names as a monument (Ireichō),
- A website as a monument (Ireizō),
- Light sculptures as monuments (Ireihi)."
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=134847678
Photo: The Ireicho Book
The Ireichō contains the first comprehensive listing of over 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry who wereincarcerated in US Army, Department of Justice, Wartime Civil Control Administration, and War Relocation Authority camps.
Embedded into the very materiality of the Ireichō are special ceramic pieces made from soil collected by the project from seventy-five former incarceration sites from Alaska to Hawai‘i, Arkansas to California, and from almost every other region of the United States.”
One of the first things we did after checking in was listen to an orientation to
this book and its origin. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the name of our presenter, but
she was fabulous. She was a professor at USC and has written a book about her
experience researching to find the names of all who were detained by the
government during WWII.
Surprisingly there were no official lists of individuals who were incarcerated at the various detention sites. It took a lot of digging through old newspapers, birth and death records, and any other source that could be found to come up with the names of the people at the different sites.
The current project is to find the names of about 10,000 people who “voluntarily” evacuated before Executive Order 9066 was issued. Again, there will be much research and interviewing to identify these folks.
After the orientation, we were shown to the room where the Ireicho Book
was displayed. The docent told us a bit about the book and had us individually put
our hand on the ceramic tile that was fired from the earth of the 75 detention sites. It was a powerful connection to that time and to all those who were unlawfully detained because of their race.
The book seeks to acknowledge the lives of these Japanese and Japanese-
Americans so that they cannot be erased from history. Before we stamped the
names of individuals we had selected, we were directed to stamp the name of an
individual that might not have anyone to remember them. The pages were flipped
back to the earliest dates, and names were pointed out for us to stamp.
Photo: Rev. Kathy with her mother (who had been interned during WWII)
Then it was time to stamp the names that I had selected. Names are submitted ahead of time so that they can be located and the pages noted. It was quite bittersweet to see the names of my family members. I felt the connection to the past and understood the sacrifice that was made so that they could live the lives they led after WWII and so I could live the life I have today.
Once we finished the stamping, we filled out memory cards with the Ireicho stamp. We wrote down the names we stamped and finished with a thought. I wrote, “In honor of their sacrifice. Namo Amida Butsu.”
If you get the opportunity to stamp the Ireicho, I would encourage you to
take the opportunity. The book is on tour in 2025-2026 since the Japanese-
American National Museum is closed for renovations. The ultimate goal is to have
every name in the Ireicho stamped and acknowledged.
Websites to investigate: www.ireicho.org (This website will give you some
background on the sacred book), www.ireizo.org (This website is where you can
search for names.); https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/list-japanese-
americans-internment-camps-ireicho-180981133/ (This is an article from the
Smithsonian Magazine about the Ireicho.)
Namo Amida Butsu
Rev. Kathy Chatterton