Bob Fuchigami, a survivor of Colorado’s Amache internment camp who spent his life working to make sure its injustices were never forgotten or repeated, has died. He was 94.
Fuchigami was 11 when the U.S. Army forced him and his family from their Northern California farm and imprisoned them at the Japanese-American internment camp, also known as the Granada Relocation Center, for three years during World War II.
U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse and Sen. Michael Bennet announced his death Thursday, noting his service in the Navy and work to make Amache a national historic site.
“His grace, fortitude, and endless wisdom will leave a lasting legacy,” Neguse and Bennet said in a statement.
Fuchigami was one of more than 10,000 people imprisoned at Amache on Colorado’s Eastern Plains between 1942 and 1945 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. The barracks reached a peak population of 7,310 in 1943, according to the National Parks Service.
He and his family later moved to Greeley, where he graduated high school and attended two years of college before enlisting in the Navy and fighting in the Korean War, according to federal officials.
Fuchigami became an educator, teaching students in grade school, high school and at universities in California, Illinois and Hawaii before retiring in 1992.
He eventually settled with his family in Evergreen and continued advocating to preserve Amache, testifying in support of it becoming part of the National Parks Service. Amache was named a national historic site in 2024.
The three years Fuchigami, his parents and seven siblings were imprisoned forever changed them, he told the House Natural Resources Committee in 2021.
They lost their 20-acre fruit and vegetable farm and home in Yuba City, California. In Colorado, they endured subzero winters, 100-degree summers, blizzards and dust storms while packed into two rooms of a poorly constructed military barracks with no running water.
Both his parents suffered serious injuries and illnesses at Amache from which they never fully recovered, Fuchigami said.
“As a nation, it’s only by remembering these events and honoring these stories that we can learn from them,” he wrote in a letter to The Denver Post in 2021.
This is a developing story and may be updated.
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