Chasing a mystery: Why was his family in a WWII detention camp in Asheville?
ASHEVILLE, North Carolina — As a child, Ken Nakazawa had an inexplicable fascination with the Grove Park Inn, a beautiful old stone hotel set on a mountainside a few miles from his family’s home in Asheville. In a family photo album, there is a snapshot of a young Ken, smiling as he stood on the grand staircase outside the historic resort where presidents from William Howard Taft to Barack Obama vacationed.
What Nakazawa didn’t know then is that he stood in the same spot where his grandmother once posed for a photo. But she wasn’t a visitor; she was a Japanese detainee during World War II.
Nakazawa’s grandmother, Yoko, her two siblings and her mother, Setsuko, were four of 134 Japanese American women and children who were forcibly detained in the Grove Park Inn and later at the Assembly Inn in nearby Montreat.
As a child, Nakazawa didn’t know where or why his family members had been unjustly detained. His parents knew of the internment but didn’t know where it took place. His grandmother was too young at the time to remember most details. His great-grandparents had refused to ever speak about their ordeal after returning to Japan.
But today, now in his 20s, Nakazawa is piecing together the story of his family’s history by combing through archives, research and government records. The search has not been easy: North Carolina’s internment camps are hardly remembered by locals and records are scattered. The camps aren’t widely known to historians either. Brian Niiya, a historian whose mother was also detained at the mountain hotels, said that “even within our specialized field, it’s a very little-known story.”
In uncovering the story of his family’s arrest and detainment—a journey that took them from Hawaii to North Carolina, then Texas and on to Japan—Nakazawa is coming to terms with what it meant for him to have grown up as an Asian American in the United States.
“Something that makes me uncomfortable is the framing of this as a sort of necessary evil,” Nakazawa said about the detainment of Japanese Americans. “And I feel like that happens with many conversations within U.S. history.”
