Folk Beliefs at Tule Lake: How Old Japanese Omens Revived Behind the Fence — and Faded Outside It

Soon after the Tule Lake Relocation Center was built, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) set up a Community Analysis office to study and report on life there. Its staff mixed WRA employees, incarcerated Japanese American residents, and university social scientists. Many residents were glad to help, but the office could only partly understand how people at Tule Lake thought and lived — and that got harder once Tule Lake became a Segregation Center, where anyone seen talking with the administration risked being called a government collaborator. Even so, its records give a valuable view of a turbulent society.

A note on words. The WRA's own terms were often euphemisms that disguised what was happening. Today the Park Service uses other language — for example, "incarceration" rather than "internment." See the Tule Lake glossary and suggested reading.

One product of that office is a study by Marvin K. Opler, community analyst at Tule Lake from 1943 to 1946, published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1950. What follows summarizes it.

The argument

Opler saw a rich range of Japanese folk beliefs at Tule Lake, many carried over from Japan after the Meiji era or earlier. What struck him was their revival, from 1944 to 1946, as part of a wider nativistic reaction — and their equally sudden collapse once people left.

About 25,000 people passed through Tule Lake; 19,000 lived in the Segregation Center over its three years. (Another 6,000 left late in 1943, from what was then still a relocation center, and missed the revival.) Between 1946 and 1949, Opler rechecked his material outside, with the same informants and former research assistants. The beliefs had largely vanished: a handful of people dimly remembered them, and almost nobody still believed.

To Opler this was a natural experiment. Folk beliefs rose and fell with the conditions people lived under, not with who the people were — the same individuals embraced them in camp and dropped them outside. He framed it with the anthropologist Linton's distinction between perpetuative movements, which quietly keep a culture going, and revivalistic ones, which use magic and tradition to push back against a hostile environment. Lore that a handful of Issei had kept alive was taken up by Issei and Nisei alike, as a dignified way of striking back at the administration with Japanese culture. The same pressure had earlier fed a revival of senryu poetry, messianic movements, and a growing readiness — even among Nisei — to believe rumor.

1. Fireballs

In the Japanese countryside, hidama ("fireball") could be rice treated with disrespect — carelessly burned — spinning out of the house as a bad omen; the related hitodama is a glowing light representing a human soul. At Tule Lake, after 1944, burnt rice became something to fear, and certain mess halls and their cooks were thought to bring bad luck.

Above all, stories spread of hinotama — a ghost seen as a ball of fire, foretelling a death. Nisei who had never heard the word began seeing them or passing on sightings, and friction between Nisei and their Issei parents helped the stories travel. Issei tended to say a fireball came after a death, not before. As tension grew, Nisei came to see the crematory area as dangerous, and around the time of citizenship renunciation — one of the camp's stormiest periods — Opler saw people of every age, for the first time, walking in a wide arc around those buildings.

The accounts he collected included greenish lights larger than a fist hovering near a barrack; a glow bobbing near the ground; a girl in Block 32 who saw a strange light over a latrine roof, whose mother said it must be hinotama — and an elderly, bedridden neighbor who died a few days later. A staff member reported at a December 1945 conference that almost everyone in their ward now talked about hinotama, which no one had two years earlier.

Outside, the same people explained the fireballs away with a scientific-sounding theory — phosphorus escaping from the dead — or tied them to the Bon Festival. But Bon was held yearly at Tule Lake without extra sightings, and in 1945, when Bon was dropped as frivolous, the stories grew anyway. Hinotama rose with community distress and disappeared outside the fence.

2. Foxes, cats and badgers

In Japan the fox is linked with Inari, the rice and fertility god of popular Shinto, but is also a shape-shifter that bewitches the unwary. At Tule Lake only the bewitching survived. Fox, and to a lesser degree dog and badger, were said to enter people as spirits.

• A woman married to a part-Caucasian man kept a dog in camp without complaint until late 1944; then rumor had it she was possessed by its spirit. Opler saw nothing unusual about her but a frank manner.
• In 1945 a divorced woman with ties to a small religious cult — and a son known for not planning to renounce his citizenship — was said to be fox-possessed (kitsune-tsuki), though there were no foxes in or near camp. A distraught neighbor reported tapping, screams and barking; the gossip spread to Nisei circles, and her daughter was slandered too.
• A real badger caught in Block 36 in February 1945 fascinated the children until rumor said it could bewitch people. An Inari priest disposed of it and prayed for the children, and that week brought a wave of stories about dog spirits, cat spirits and witches.
• In one block of Ward VII, where tension over renunciation ran high, hostility settled on two women; one, said to have burned a litter of kittens, was called a witch, and no one would take her apartment after she left.

Informants retold older stories from Japan: people led astray by foxes disguised as beautiful women or old friends, found days later dazed and filthy; a man who took a fried bean-cake offering from a fox shrine and was found at dawn in a pond, pushed back each time he tried to climb out; a grandmother guided home by a lantern that would not leave until she thanked the fox by name. A Nisei from Gilroy said they had barely heard such stories before camp.

Afterward, a former Block 36 resident summed it up: people in camp had believed plenty of things they never believed before or since.

3. Magical swordsmen

Legends older than the Meiji era circulated too: ninjutsu masters who could change shape, vanish, levitate or hypnotize crowds, their powers won through a hard apprenticeship with a mountain hermit. An old Japanese film shown in camp had such a hero, typically someone wronged in youth who returns to take revenge on the lords who killed his family. Outside, Nisei would hardly have called that entertainment; in camp, with little else to do and a theme of revenge that suited mistreated young people, such stories were very popular.

Nisei debated whether famous historical swordsmen had a touch of the supernatural — one who sensed his sword-bearer's plot, others said to snatch arrows in flight or pick flies from the air with chopsticks. Tellers often ended with pride in what their people could do, or with a hint that "anything could happen" again. Outside, a staff member helping with the 1946 survey reported, people were too busy for such stories, and Nisei called them nonsense.

4. Omens of death and bad luck

Opler was shown some good-luck charms — small wooden figures of the luck gods carved in camp in 1945, shrine medallions from Japan — but bad-luck lore far outweighed good.

5. Pregnancy

Warnings to pregnant women grew steadily from 1943 to 1946:

• avoid quarrels, so the child is good-natured; avoid dark-fleshed fish, sour foods, heavily seasoned foods and frights;
• eat kelp for a baby with thick hair;
• don't kill living things, especially lizards;
• don't stare at fires — the baby may be blotchy or birthmarked where the mother touched herself;
• east is the wrong way for a pregnant woman to travel — which became a joke about relocation.

After the fifth month, binding the abdomen with cloth became more and more common, according to the camp hospital. Although the sex ratio of births was normal, a story spread in 1944 that the hospital was delivering more girls — a sign that peace was near. Signs of a boy included a mother whose eyes grew fiercer, a husband lucky at gambling, an active baby and a sharply protruding belly.

6. Birth and infancy

Hospital staff saw a stoic silence in labor spread in the Segregation Center, unlike Nisei women outside or earlier in camp, and gifts for newborns grew more important. Families from southern prefectures — Kumamoto, Fukuoka, Kagoshima, Yamaguchi, Wakayama — gave baby girls miso soup for circulation and newborns a bitter drink to purge "poisons"; some shaved a baby's head so the hair would grow back darker, or dressed the baby in a red kimono and gave a light mogusa heat treatment against fear and dizziness later in life. All of it increased in the Segregation Center and all but vanished after the war.

7. Folk medicine

Camp tension showed up in health too — first as complaints about the hospital (which, Opler notes, really was inadequate), then, under segregation, as a turn to Japanese healing arts (chiryo), peaking in 1945–1946. Before Japan opened to the West in 1853, its medicine was chiryo and herbal medicine, both said to have come from India and China. Among Japanese Americans these had mostly given way to Western doctors and chiropractors, except mogusa heat treatment for infants — until the revival at Tule Lake, driven by the strain on the hospital and new interest in things Japanese.

They treated vague complaints — neuralgia, lumbago, sore arms and shoulders, poor health, old age.

• Anma, said to have come from India via China, brought to Japan by a Buddhist priest in the 14th century, is a cross between chiropractic and massage, usually practiced by blind people in rural Japan (only one Tule Lake practitioner was blind).
• Kiyu burns tiny balls of dried mogusa (at Tule Lake, sometimes thistle), one-sixteenth to one-quarter inch across, on a "vital spot" linked to each ailment — the elbow for eye trouble, the back of the neck for some stomach problems. It can scar, and mistreatment can cause complications. Some claimed the heat killed germs, even tuberculosis.
• Hari could cause gangrene or paralysis if done badly, yet had customers — even Nisei.

Afterward

Opler rechecked every belief with the original informants after the camp closed. The girl in Block 32 couldn't remember the fireball. No hinotama were reported at postwar Bon festivals in Hawaii or on the mainland. The Nisei who had marveled at magical swordsmen now scoffed. Only scraps survived — ways of predicting a boy, miso soup for baby girls, a food rule or two — and of more than thirty former healers checked, none had any call for their skills. Conditions had changed, and the beliefs, having served their purpose, died a natural death.

Sources

Based on "Japanese Folk Beliefs and Practices in Tule Lake Segregation Center," National Park Service, which reproduces Marvin K. Opler, "Japanese Folk Beliefs and Practices, Tule Lake, California," Journal of American Folklore volume 63, number 250 (October–December 1950), with an introduction by the Park Service; the Park Service's own words are a work of the United States government in the public domain. Opler's article and the residents it quotes are summarized and rewritten in hubnx's own words. The Park Service's note dates the article to 1945 while the citation and its description give 1950; only the publication date is used here.