Book Details Racism In Yakima Years Of Bias Against Japanese Culminated In Wwii Internment

Washington State University professor Thomas Heuterman grew up in the Yakima Valley.

But it wasn’t until he began a research project into the valley’s Japanese-American population that he realized how important the area was to the history of Japanese immigrants and their children.

When he first started researching the project, “I still had a childhood view of the valley being a bucolic place,” Heuterman, 61, said. “Then I got into the record and found out what it was really like.”

Heuterman grew up in Wapato, his interest in the Japanese-American population of Yakima Valley first starting through family friendships with Japanese-Americans.

Heuterman’s recently published book, “The Burning Horse,” details an amazing history of racism against the Japanese-Americans in the Yakima Valley prior to the much-discussed hysteria and internment camps of the World War II period.

It is Heuterman’s contention that the racism experienced by Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor had been brewing for decades.

The Yakima Valley, with its fertile farming grounds and leased reservation land available on the Yakama Indian Reservation, attracted Japanese immigrants in the late 1800s.

From then, Heuterman details an ebb and flow of racism against the Japanese-Americans between the 1920s and 1941, including anti-alien legislation during the 1920s and a period of bombings in the Yakima Valley during the Great Depression.

The meticulously researched book delves into the media of the time, which did its fair share in promoting racism themes with headlines screaming about the “Yellow Peril” and “Yakima Valley in Jap War.”

Heuterman began the project during a 1988 sabbatical from his duties as a WSU communications professor. He has spent 31 years at WSU and prior to that spent eight years as a journalist at the Yakima Herald-Republic.

The book started with Heuterman exploring the question of how the press covered the Japanese-Americans, he said.

From there it grew into a study of the population and the tradition of racism levied against them.

Even some modern Japanese-American residents have expressed surprise when Heuterman spoke with them about the history of the valley he uncovered in his research, he said.

“I think the conclusion I would draw from this is what we experience as individuals probably is not the whole story of what is going on. We need to get into the documents, the records, the public accounts,” Heuterman said.

Although Heuterman modestly acknowledged his research into the history of the Yakima Valley Japanese-Americans may qualify him as an expert on the topic, he gives the credit to the population itself.

“They are the real experts, they lived it,” he said, relating what he told a Japanese-American group during a recent talk. “Who am I to tell them their history?”

The book was published by Eastern Washington University Press and will be available in bookstores after Jan. 1 for $27.50.