Tule Lake History
– Introduction
Tule Lake was the crucible for Japanese American resistance to incarceration during World War II, where thousands of Japanese Americans met America’s betrayal of their hopes and dreams with anger, defiance and rejection.
Tule Lake was the largest and most conflict-ridden of the ten War Relocation Authority WRA camps used to carry out the government’s system of exclusion and detention of persons of Japanese descent, mandated by Executive Order 9066. The Order, which eliminated the constitutional protections of due process and violated the Bill of Rights, was issued February 19, 1942, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Two-thirds of the 120,000 persons of Japanese descent incarcerated in American concentration camps were American citizens, an act that culminated decades of anti-Japanese violence, discrimination and propaganda.
Tule Lake opened May 26, 1942, detaining persons of Japanese descent removed from western Washington, Oregon and Northern California. With a peak population of 18,700, Tule Lake was the largest of the camps – the only one converted into a maximum-security segregation center, ruled under martial law and occupied by the Army. Due to turmoil and strife, Tule Lake was the last to close, on March 28, 1946.
Text is drawn from Tule Lake Revisited: A Brief History and Guide to the Tule Lake Concentration Camp Site, Second Edition, by Barbara Takei and Judy Tachibana. Published by the Tule Lake Committee, 2012.