SEQUIM — More than once, art opened a door for George Tamura.
The Lost Mountain resident made some of his most evocative paintings as a teenager in a camp known as Tule Lake.
The Modoc County, Calif., compound was hastily built during World War II, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing the evacuation of 120,000 Japanese-Americans.
More than two-thirds were U.S. citizens.
Tamura, born in Sacramento, Calif., in 1927, was among the children sent to what would later be called “America’s concentration camps.”
He was 13 when he went with his family to Tule Lake, a desolate 26,000 acres of barracks, barbed wire and guard towers.
Tule Lake closed 60 years ago on March 20, 1946. Tamura was 17 when he was released.
“That was no place for people,” he said of the camp that, at its peak, held 18,789 prisoners, mostly from Western Washington, Oregon and California.
On the dry lake bed where the camp lay, the wind blew seemingly endless clouds of dust, summers were blistering hot and winter temperatures fell below zero.
At the camp, Tamura painted stark but detailed pictures of the buildings, fences and barren mountains that loomed over it all.
Marvin Opler, a War Relocation Authority anthropologist, visited Tule Lake and saw Tamura’s paintings. As the war was ending, Opler tried to arrange for Tamura to attend a New York City art institute.
Tamura didn’t want to leave his family members behind — and they needed him to work and help support them after they left Tule Lake.
The War Relocation Authority gave the Tamuras train fare to Los Angeles, where they started from scratch.
“We were destitute,” Tamura said.
Tamura worked odd jobs and then found work at a grocery store.
And he kept painting.
“My art talent carried me through,” he said.
“It was the only thing I had confidence in.”
But spending his adolescence in a detention camp left its marks.
Tamura remembers hearing about Japanese-American soldiers who helped liberate Nazi concentration camps — and shakes his head at the irony.
“After I got out, I realized that from a psychological standpoint, I could survive anything,” he said.
Another milestone came on Dec. 7, 1953. Twelve years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Tamura was drafted into the U.S. Army.
