The Internment of Japanese Americans in United States History (5 page)

Once again, the Issei and Nisei traveled. Now they were going to camps called relocation centers.

These evacuation centers were never meant to be long-term facilities. They were temporary detention sites that housed internees until more permanent camps could be built. Most evacuation centers were located near cities that formerly had significant Japanese-American populations. The relocation centers were built near mountains, sand, and sagebrush.

By isolating Issei and Nisei from other people, the government intended to minimize the chance of espionage by Japanese saboteurs. The isolation could also help avoid negative publicity that might come from the government holding innocent people as prisoners.

Yoshiko Uchida rode with her family in a rickety train to Utah. During the day, they passed by sites they had not seen for months—houses, trees, stores, white children. By night, they saw nothing. Guards ordered everyone to close their shades between dusk and dawn. The guards took no chances on Japanese saboteurs flashing secret messages in the dark.

At the Salt Lake City station, an old friend greeted Yoshiko. It was a fellow Nisei who voluntarily had evacuated to Utah several months earlier. The meeting made no sense. Her friend was free to do anything except return to the West Coast. Uchida could not even leave her train car.
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Uchida’s train went to Delta, Utah. There the evacuees boarded buses that traveled into the middle of a desert. There, in land “dry as a bleached bone,”
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lay the camp known as Topaz. Camp directors called it “the jewel of the desert.”
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Topaz was one of the ten out-of-the-way relocation camps. The others were Manzanar and Tule Lake, in California; Minidoka, Idaho; Heart Mountain, Wyoming; Granada, Colorado; Poston and Gila River, Arizona; and Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas. Manzanar had been in use as an evacuation center; all the others were newly built. In addition to these camps, there were also special internment camps where troublesome evacuees were held.

“All ten sites can only be called godforsaken,” wrote historian Dr. Roger Davis. “They were in places where nobody had lived before and no one has lived since.”
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Tule Lake, Minidoka, and Heart Mountain were prone to severe winters. Temperatures would plunge to 30 degrees below zero at Heart Mountain. In the summertime, Poston and Gila Ridge evacuees roasted in temperatures that soared above 100 degrees. Poston saw temperatures as high as 130 degrees. Rohwer and Jerome were located near Arkansas swamps, full of mosquitoes and some of the deadliest rattlesnakes in North America. In Manzanar, located near California’s Death Valley, the swirling winds created blizzards in the winter and dust storms the rest of the year.

Even so, small cities grew up in these places. Topaz, with eight thousand residents, immediately became the fifth largest city in Utah. Manzanar, capable of holding ten thousand, was the largest city between Los Angeles and Reno, Nevada. Human capacities ranged from eight thousand (Granada and Topaz) to twenty thousand (Poston), although camps often exceeded their intended capacities. Manzanar, at six thousand acres, was the smallest camp. Poston, at seventy-two thousand, was the largest.

More than one hundred twenty thousand people lived in the camps. Two thirds of them were United States citizens. Almost all were of Japanese ancestry, but many non-Japanese spouses of evacuees chose to join their spouses and children in camps. Manzanar had an orphanage. Orphaned children from as far away as Alaska and with as little as one-sixteenth Japanese blood were placed there. No one explained how Alaskan orphans with one Japanese great-grandparent could pose a threat to national security.

Barracks

“When the bus stops, its forty occupants quietly peer out to see what Poston is like,” a traveler recalled. “People look tired and wilted, with perspiration running off their noses. . . . Nevertheless, there are remnants of daintiness among the women and all are smiling . . .”
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Newcomers to Poston and the other camps lined up at long tables. War Relocation Authority employees filled out forms and took fingerprints, gave housing assignments, and administered physical examinations. The WRA officials asked the newcomers about their previous jobs and skills. Anyone who had a skill needed in camp was assigned to work immediately.

The living quarters were an improvement over the horse stalls of Santa Anita or the pigpens of Puyallup, Washington. Yet the accommodations were anything but luxurious. Most camps followed roughly the same pattern. Topaz, for example, had forty-two blocks, each with twelve barracks. Each barrack was built with quarter-inch boards over a wooden frame. The outsides of the barracks were covered with tar paper nailed to the roof and walls. In the center of each block was a mess hall, washroom, and laundry barrack.

Each barrack had six rooms. The rooms were roughly twenty by twenty-five feet. They were furnished with nothing except four cots. Like the assembly centers, the camp apartments had no kitchens, bathrooms, or bedrooms, and little or no privacy. According to army regulations, camp housing was suitable only for combat-trained soldiers, yet half of the camps’ population were women and one fourth were school-aged children. Some families lived in these conditions for more than three years.

White employees of the camps were not subjected to the same restrictions as their “guests.” White apartments had running water, kitchens, all the lumber they needed, and even air conditioning.

Families immediately tried to make their dwellings livable. Men and women gathered scrap lumber abandoned by construction workers. From it, they made chairs, shelves, or tables. Many built closets and partitions to make bedrooms. Some even built porches outside their barracks. While this work took place, other family members began cleaning out the ever-present dust.

Once families set up their new homes, they were free to do virtually everything they wanted, except leave camp. Even the appearance of an escape attempt could be fatal. An old man at Topaz who wandered too close to the perimeter fence did not hear a guard’s warning and was shot to death. He was picking up seashells and arrowheads.

Concentration Camps

These camps were not as severe as the death camps run by the Nazis. In Germany, innocent civilians performed slave labor. Sadistic doctors performed ghastly medical “experiments” with unwilling subjects. Millions of people were put to death in these Nazi concentration camps.

But there was one important similarity. Jews and gypsies were sent to the Nazi death camps because of their ancestry. In America, people were placed in the camps because they had Japanese ancestry. The WRA called them relocation centers. However, another term was more commonly used. “I’m for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii, and putting them in concentration camps,” said Congressman John Rankin. “We picked [the Japanese] up and put them in concentration camps,” wrote United States Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark. “They were concentration camps. . . . We were in a period of emergency, but it was still the wrong thing to do,” said Harry Truman, who became president when Roosevelt died. “Men and women who knew nothing of the facts . . . hotly deny that there are concentration camps. Apparently that is a term to be used only if the guards speak German and carry a whip as well as a rifle,” wrote socialist reformer Norman Thomas.
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These people did not live in the camps. Kenneth Matsushige, a Heart Mountain veteran, did. “They had the army all the way around you, just like, well they were
concentration camps
more or less,” he said. “They didn’t call it that really, but relocation made it sound better.”
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Keeping Busy

“[W]e had absolutely nothing to do,” recalled William Hohri. “So what sets in is boredom. We used to play these long games of chess, four hours, one game of chess. Then we’d say, ‘Let’s play again.’ There was nothing to do.”
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Eventually, most evacuees shook that boredom. Many continued the activities of their previous free lives and the assembly centers. The actors returned to acting, the gardeners planted new seeds, and the Lexington Dodgers continued to win baseball games. The camps’ greater space led to new activities. Some roamed the desert grounds looking for arrowheads or fossils or interesting stones. “We would play near barbed wire. We weren’t supposed to, but we did,” said Hiroshi Kanno, who lived in the Minidoka camp. “There was a target range not far from us. I can remember hunting around us for bullet shells.”
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Camps set up schools, and children up to age sixteen were expected to attend. Vocational and adult education programs served older camp members. Both Nisei and white teachers taught basic reading and math skills. They also instructed students on how to act and what to say when they returned to the outside world. All classes were taught in English.

The camps had limited self-government. Block representatives formed community councils. Only Nisei could serve on the councils, but anyone sixteen or older could vote. For some Issei, it was the first time they could vote in an American election.

Judicial committees settled disputes within a camp. Three Nisei and three whites chosen by the camp director served on each committee. They recommended actions to the project director, who usually followed the recommendations.

Block managers took care of day-to-day functions of the camp. The managers supervised general maintenance of grounds and buildings and informed residents of new rules and regulations made by the camp administration. Older, respected Issei usually held these positions.

Dillon Myer claimed that the councils served as a communications liaison between residents and administration, and that they also enforced ordinances in the interest of the community. Myer’s critics pointed out that councils had only advisory, not decision-making, powers. Community government, they said, was a way to get inmates to do most of the camp’s housekeeping chores for a low wage.

Workers

All communities need workers to keep themselves operating. Like outside communities, the relocation camps needed doctors, cooks, farmers, teachers, and people who held dozens of other jobs. The Issei and Nisei became those workers.

Residents received wages for performing their tasks, but the pay was poor and workers seldom were paid on time. Myer feared an outcry if workers received as much as a soldier’s twenty-one-dollar a month pay. So unskilled workers earned twelve dollars a month, professionals got nineteen dollars, and everyone else received sixteen. Later, the twelve-dollar pay scale was omitted and the nineteen-dollar rate was expanded to include also “those making exceptional contributions.”

The rates were grossly unfair. Nisei doctors in camp hospitals who earned nineteen dollars a month worked alongside white doctors who earned their normal pay—more than fifty times as much as the Nisei.

Myer hoped to establish active agricultural and industrial communities in the camps, but the idea never came to pass. Local businesses feared competition from the camps’ cheaper-wage workers. Workers in the camps made some products, but most of the goods were made only for camp consumption. There were sawmills at Heart Mountain and Jerome, a mattress factory in Manzanar, garment factories in Manzanar, Heart Mountain, and Minidoka, and other various shops everywhere.

Workers pooled their money and formed cooperatives that helped residents form small businesses, from shoe repair shops to dry goods stores. Most of the cooperatives were well-managed and very successful. They provided employment for more than seven thousand residents, did more than $22 million worth of business, and paid out $2.3 million in refunds to cooperative members.

Outside groups noted the evacuees’ success. Sears Roebuck and Company advertised its mail-order business in some camps’ newspapers. Other companies followed its example. The Bank of America opened a branch in the Manzanar camp.

Threats to Families

Some positive results came from the relocation camps. For the first time, Nisei could assume leadership roles. They did not have to defer to the older Issei. Nisei students were no longer outnumbered minorities. They could star on baseball teams or edit the school yearbook. Those with professional skills were not kept out of the workforce. Teachers could teach and doctors could practice. Older residents, used to a lifetime of twelve-hour workdays, could take some well-earned rest.

But the camps extracted their toll in other ways. Japanese family life had kept communities together. Camp life threatened the family system. Husbands no longer were the breadwinners because the camp provided basic services such as food and medicine. There was no real opportunity for economic gain. As a result, many evacuees lost incentives for advancement.

Families no longer ate at home, but in mess halls. Children ate with their friends, not their parents. Younger ones did not remember private meals. When the kids played house, they lined up for meals instead of pretending to cook.

Teenagers who had spent after-school hours helping their parents now had time on their hands. Before the war, juvenile delinquency was virtually nonexistent among Japanese-American youngsters. In the camps, they started forming gangs.

Resentments between generations emerged. On the outside, the older Issei had made all the decisions. But because they were United States citizens, Nisei assumed authority in the camps. Some Nisei were disrespectful to the Issei. The Issei ridiculed the Nisei because their citizenship did not keep them from being held in the camps.