Internment camp detainees risked all to fish

Internment camp detainees risked all to fishBy Ed Zieralski (Contact) Union-Tribune Staff Writer
2:00 a.m. March 21, 2009
He was known as “Ishikawa Fisherman,” a seemingly mythical person who disappeared for weeks at a time and returned with a stringer of trout.
But Heihachi Ishikawa actually was a legendary and brave Japanese-American who would risk his life and sneak out of the well-guarded Manzanar World War II internment camp north of Lone Pine to go fishing.
Ishikawa's mini-journeys from the mundane life in the relocation camp took him high into the Sierra where he created his own adventures with handmade fishing gear and caught California's golden trout.
For 65 years, a photo taken of Ishikawa by fellow Manzanar internee Toyo Miyatake was the only photographic evidence that more than 150 of the Manzanar internees “escaped” camp to go fishing. Manzanar was the first of 10 internment camps that housed an estimated 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast at the start of World War II. From March 31, 1942 to Nov. 21, 1945, Manzanar would hold more than 11,000 internees.
Ishikawa's incredible story of living off the land in the hard Sierra mountain range for a couple of weeks at a time is one of many incredible stories of survival that make up Cory Shiozaki's work in progress. Shiozaki's partially completed documentary, “From Barbed Wire to Barbed Hooks,” will preserve the stories of how Japanese-Americans used their ingenuity and called on their bravery to fish Sierra streams and lakes.
“The most important message I got after getting all the oral histories and experiences of the internees is how they were able to endure,” said Shiozaki, 59, a film maker from Gardena. “The fabric of their character was like bamboo. They bent, but they bounced back and rebounded. There is an expression in Japanese, 'shigataganai,' which loosely translated means, 'it can't be helped.' They embraced that and found a way to live through it. That, more than anything, has inspired me to continue this project and has made me proud of my Japanese-American heritage.”
Shiozaki will display photos, fishing equipment made in the camp and other items from Manzanar at next week's Fred Hall Fishing Tackle and Boat Show which runs Wednesday through Sunday at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. He said he has exhausted a $30,000 grant from the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program that enabled him to begin the project. Now he seeks funding so he can finish it.
“I'm determined to get this done, one way or the other,” Shiozaki said. Even though his parents were in internment camps, Shiozaki didn't learn of the camps until he read about them in a U.S. history class in high school. He later used Manzanar as the subject for his senior film project at Long Beach State.
“When I first heard about them I was angry because this country took over 120,000 Japanese-Americans out of their homes and businesses without due process,” Shiozaki said. “And then after 9-11, it did the same thing to 5,000 Arab Americans, incarcerated them based on their ethnicity. Freedom is not free.”
These days, Shiozaki is a docent at Manzanar. He also developed a lecture, tour and artifacts exhibit about the lives of the Manzanar anglers. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the annual pilgrimage to Manzanar, an event that usually coincides with the Sierra Trout Opener. Shiozaki gives walking tours that weekend and also serves as historian for the Manzanar Committee, a non-profit organization that also is sponsoring his documentary. He said any donation or sponsorship to help him finish his documentary would be tax-deductible.
Shiozaki has been an avid Eastern Sierra trout angler since 1994. He figures he once spent 50 to 100 days a year in the Sierra. He guided fishermen from 2004 to 2008 and worked at the tackle shop at Crowley Lake.
“I noticed a whole bunch of Japanese-Americans up there fishing,” Shiozaki said. “I'd passed Manzanar over 1,000 times, and I wondered if there was some connection to Manzanar, if somehow some of these fishermen's first experience trout fishing was at Manzanar.”
When Manzanar opened as a National Historical Site in 2004, complete with an interpretive center, Shiozaki began asking if any of the surviving internees had fished. That started his journey. He heard tales of how one internee was shot at while trying to sneak out to fish. Another angler died in a blizzard when he turned the wrong way heading back to camp. They risked their lives because, as one of them, Archie Miyatake of Montebello, son of famous still photographer Toyo Miyatake, said: the air just “smelled better” outside the camp when they were fishing.

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