Bendetsen’s WCCA was responsible for getting the Japanese to assembly centers where they would be held under guard, until ten relocation centers were erected on distant and isolated sites from California to Arkansas. These camps were located on unused government property and Indian reservations, in deserts, swamps, and other terrible places where few people had ever lived or ever would. Seventeen assembly centers were set up along the West Coast, basically taking over large public spaces such as racetracks, fairgrounds, livestock auction grounds, and one abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp.
Inside the “War Zones,” villages, towns, and city neighborhoods were turned into subzones, where, each few days after March 24, all Japanese and those with some Japanese ancestry were ordered to bus stops and train stations. Surrounded by armed soldiers, the evacuees were loaded onto buses, trucks, and trains and taken to the assembly centers. They were unloaded at California centers in or near Fresno, Independence, Marysville, Merced, Pinedale, Pomona, Sacramento, Salinas, the Santa Anita racetrack in Los Angeles, Stockton, Tanforan racetrack near San Francisco, Tulare, and Turlock. Arizona residents were taken to Mayer. Oregonians were taken to the Pacific International Stock Exposition grounds in Portland. Washingtonians were divided between Puyallup and Manzanar, California, the only site to serve as both an assembly center and, later, a relocation camp.
That said, the army or the WCCA—aided by the polite compliance of Japanese families—did a remarkably efficient job of the logistics of moving more than one hundred thousand people to the assembly centers and then on to far and barren relocation sites in six months. Among those who praised the logistics of the moves to the camps was Carey McWilliams, a liberal, even radical, author and California’s commissioner of Housing and Immigration.
The “assembling” of Japanese and Japanese Americans continued through the spring and summer. The evacuation of downtown Los Angeles, where thirty thousand people of Japanese ancestry once lived, was completed on May 8. The Los Angeles Times reported on the closing of the last Japanese restaurant in the center of the city under the headline, “Japs Enjoy Their Last Meals in Café Before Internment—Beginning at 8 a.m. Today 2,200 Alien Residents of Colony Will Depart for Santa Anita Center.”
The article began, “Today is the beginning of the end for the little Nipponese settlement just east of City Hall.… With their departure, Little Tokyo will become a ghost community.” The stores became ghost stores, closed and dusty, often with signs in the windows, like the one at an empty grocery in Little Tokyo, which said, MANY THANKS FOR YOUR PATRONAGE. HOPE TO SERVE YOU IN THE NEAR FUTURE. GOD BE WITH YOU UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN. MR. AND MRS. KISERI.
In San Francisco, American Japanese found notes with very different messages slipped under their doors, like this one to the Tamaki family: “This is a warning. Get out. We don’t want you in our beautiful country. Go where your ancestors came from. Once a Jap, always one. Get out.”
On that same day, in Seattle, Yoshi and Theresa Takayoshi, who had been given a surprise going-away party by Caucasian neighbors, sold their popular ice cream shop. For weeks, they had bought a classified advertisement in local newspapers: “Ice creamery, library lunches, residential spot, sacrifice, evacuee.” The shop had machines and inventory insured for $18,000. Dozens of people answered the ad, offering $100 or $200 for the whole thing. The Takayoshis finally settled with a Caucasian buyer for $1,000. They sold their 1940 Oldsmobile for $25.
Theresa, whose father was Japanese and her mother Irish-American, was from New York. She had two sons and they did not find much more kindness after arriving at the Puyallup Assembly Center. The younger one, Thomas, was diagnosed with mumps when his throat began swelling. For six weeks, the growth swelled, turning red. Finally, Theresa’s cousin, a registered nurse, came around and then persuaded a physician to come to their stall and he quickly found that the boy had a swollen lymph gland. Then when her older son began vomiting—it was ptomaine poisoning, common in the camps—the same doctor ordered him taken to a hospital in Tacoma. An army car, with a security guard, took mother and son there. Nurses met her with a wheelchair for the boy, but when she began to follow him, the nurse in charge told her, “You can’t come in. You’re supposed to be in the prison camp.”
One of the saddest of many sad stories was told by Hiroshi Kashiwagi of Sacramento. His forty-year-old mother had dental problems, particularly a painful impacted tooth. Because of curfews it was difficult for her to see a dentist. When she did find a dentist, he told her there would be no dental care where she was going. He then proceeded to pull out all her teeth one by one.
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On March 24, uniformed soldiers appeared along the coast, tacking “Civilian Exclusion Order No. 1” on the trees, telephone poles, and walls of Bainbridge Island off Seattle in Puget Sound. The posters read:
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NOTICE
HEADQUARTERS: WESTERN DEFENSE COMMAND AND FOURTH ARMY
1. Pursuant to the provisions of Public Proclamations Nos. 1 and 2 … dated March 2, 1942, and March 16, 1942, respectively, it is hereby ordered that all persons of Japanese ancestry, including aliens and non-aliens, be excluded from that portion of Military Area No. 1, described as “Bainbridge Island,” in the State of Washington, on or before 12 o’clock noon, P.W.T., of the 30th day of March, 1942.
2. Such exclusion will be accomplished in the following manner:
(a) Such persons may, with permission, on or prior to March 29, 1942, proceed to any approved place of their choosing beyond the limits of Military Area No. 1.… On March 30, 1942, all such persons who have not removed themselves from Bainbridge Island in accordance with Paragraph I hereof, shall, in accordance with instructions of the Commanding General, Northwestern Sector, report to the Civil Control Office referred to above on Bainbridge Island for evacuation in such manner and to such place or places shall then be prescribed.
J.L. DeWITT
Lieutenant General, U.S.A.
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Booklets dropped on doorsteps listed what the evacuees must carry: “Blankets and linens for each member of the family; Toilet articles for each member of the family; Clothing for each member of the family; Sufficient knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, and cups for each member of the family.… All items carried will be securely packaged, tied and plainly marked in accordance with instructions received at the Civil Control Office.”
There were soldiers and chaos on the island, as there had been when Terminal Island had been cleared by the navy. The scavengers were on Bainbridge, too. Bill Hosokawa, who had just graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle, described their trucks rolling through his neighborhood with drivers shouting, “Hey, you Japs! You’re going to get kicked out of here tomorrow. I’ll give you ten bucks for that refrigerator. I’ll give you fifteen bucks for your piano. I’ll give you two bucks and fifty cents for that washing machine.” Hiroshi Kamiya was forced to sell his family’s pickup truck, with a new battery and four new tires—the brand-new tires alone cost $125—for just $25.
“You trying to sell them?” a man said to Mary Takeuchi, pointing to the gold-ringed china, the family’s most treasured possession. He offered $17.50 for the set. Weeping uncontrollably Mrs. Takeuchi, like Mrs. Wakatsuki on Terminal Island, took the plates down one at a time and smashed them at the feet of the man.
So the 271 Japanese and Japanese Americans of Bainbridge Island, 91 aliens and 180 American citizens, mostly farmers and their families who produced three million pounds of strawberries a year, wearing their best clothes, marched to the ferry Kehloken, which would take them to Seattle and beyond. They had no idea where beyond was.
The Seattle Times reported rather romantically on the departure of the Islanders, editorializing, “If anything ever illustrated the repute of these United States as a melting pot of diverse races, it was the evacuation of Japanese residents, American and foreign-born, from the pleasant countryside of Bainbridge Island.… The Japanese departed their homes cheerfull
y, knowing full well, most of them, that the measures were designed to help preserve the precious, kindly camaraderie among divergent races which is one of this country’s great contributions to humanity.”
Thirteen of the marchers that day were seniors at Bainbridge High School, who had not been allowed to attend their senior ball the night before because of the 8:00 p.m. curfew for all American Japanese. Many of the white residents of the island lined the ferry road, some of them crying and calling out to friends in the march. Some of the spectators were holding the dogs and cats of the evacuees, who were not allowed to carry pets. Many of the dogs had stopped eating when they were taken from their owners and died within a week or two.
The islanders traveled for more than two days in old railroad cars with curtains drawn to Manzanar, a barren, wind-whipped ghost town 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the eastern foothills of the Sierras, on the road between tiny places called Independence and Lone Pine. It was the first camp to open and would be the first camp under the stewardship of the new federal agency the War Relocation Authority.
There was no music and no crowd of white residents waving and crying when the families of Bainbridge arrived at Manzanar. There were construction workers, some of them Japanese volunteers, banging together 504 tar-paper barracks, each barrack divided into six units of sixteen by twenty feet. The camp was surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guard towers with machine guns pointed in toward thirty-six blocks of barracks.
One of the evacuees, Paul Ohtaki, had been a correspondent for the Bainbridge Island Review, which had strongly opposed the evacuation, and he filed an upbeat report of that thousand-mile trip from Seattle.
CAMP MANZANAR, Calif. Wednesday, April 1—Bainbridge Island’s evacuated Japanese residents, well and cheerful, arrived here at 12:30 o’clock this afternoon.
The last stage of the trip—which began in Seattle Monday morning—was accomplished by a fleet of busses that met the train at Mojave early this morning. Islanders were greeted by warm sunshine. They found the Owen Valley region to be level land, with high mountains nearby.
Everyone enjoyed the trip, but missed their Island friends. On the train there was group singing, card playing, and “chatting” with the soldiers who accompanied the evacuees. Islanders were treated “swell” by the Army.… From private to commanding officer, they extended help and kindness to the Japanese. Some soldiers wept as they guarded the move.
Life magazine took the same tone in six pages of coverage published on April 6. The popular magazine emphasized the beauty of Mount Whitney towering over the horizon fifteen miles away, reporting that other “volunteer” evacuees drove the 240 miles from Los Angeles to Manzanar in a four-mile-long motorcade of their own cars with army jeeps between each ten vehicles. One unnamed evacuee was quoted saying, “We’re coming here without bitterness or rancor, wanting to show our loyalty in deeds and words.” Then the magazine did add, “Yet Manzanar, for all its hopes and assets, was no idyllic country club. Manzanar was a concentration camp, designed eventually to detain at least 10,000 potential enemies of the United States.”
Most first impressions of Manzanar were a great deal more negative than Ohtaki’s. Jeanne Wakatsuki said after her first night in Block 16, “We woke early, shivering and coated with dust that had blown up through the knotholes in the floor and through the slits under the door.”
Another early arrival, named Yuri Tateishi, had more personal troubles. As she and her children were leaving for Manzanar from the Santa Anita Assembly Center, her one-year-old broke out in measles—epidemics were common in the centers—and was taken from her and kept in a Los Angeles hospital for three weeks. “When we got to Manzanar,” she said,
we went to the mess hall, and I remember the first meal we were given on those tin plates and cups. Canned wieners and canned spinach.… It was dark and there were trenches here and there. You’d fall in and get up until you finally got to the barracks. The floors were boarded, but they were about a quarter to a half-inch apart, and the next morning you could see the ground below. What hurt most were those hay mattresses. We were used to a regular home atmosphere.… It was depressing, a primitive feeling.
When they woke, on straw-filled bags called mattresses, still wearing street clothes, they discovered that the one faucet for the barracks was frozen solid. It wasn’t until noon, as the desert warmed up, that water began to trickle from the faucet.
The place, Manzanar, had a history, primitive and modern. The original inhabitants of Owens Valley were several Native American tribes, particularly Paiutes, who were used as labor and then driven away in the mid-1860s by white settlers, miners, and then farmers attracted by fertile land and the plentiful waters of Lake Owens and the Owens River. It was by all accounts a beautiful place at the base of the snowcapped Sierra Nevada mountain range, often compared to Switzerland. Early in the twentieth century, the city of Los Angeles, desperate for water and expansion, began secretly buying up farms and ranches along the river, which was fed by the snowmelt of the mountains. By 1905, river water was being taken by aqueduct to Los Angeles, particularly for irrigation of the San Fernando Valley. By 1913, city officials wanted more water and built an aqueduct more than two hundred miles long from the valley to the city. Over time, Los Angeles was taking all the water from the river and the lake. By 1929, the valley was a desert wasteland plagued by dust storms from the dry remnants of the ancient lake bed, and the town of Manzanar was abandoned. Like many of the relocation sites, no one lived there after the Japanese left in 1945 and 1946.
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On May 8, the evacuation notices went up on Vashon Island, just south of Bainbridge. The Matsudas, who farmed two acres of strawberries, turned their farm and house over to a Filipino worker, Mack Garcia. Knowing Garcia could not handle the business side of the farm, they worked out an arrangement with a local sheriff’s deputy, B. H. Hopkins, to keep the books and pay the mortgage and buy necessary supplies in return for half the profits. Mary and Yoneichi Matsuda were American citizens, born in Washington, but their tags marked “Family 19788” said “Non-Alien.”
When the Vashon ferry reached Seattle, an angry group of white men in coveralls were waiting with shotguns. “Get outta here, you goddamned Japs,” one shouted. “I oughta blast your heads off.” He spat on Mary Matsuda.
As the evacuation notices went up throughout the western states, there continued to be widespread and growing fear among the American Japanese. It was not only that their lives were being smashed. The Issei, whose average age was fifty-nine, thought there was a chance the government was planning to execute them all. The Nisei, all of them citizens and most of them young—their average age was nineteen—were thoroughly American in their hopes and dreams, only to see their lives ripped up like pieces of paper. Often, the designated evacuees had just a day to put their affairs in order, to sell or rent their houses and farms and cars—usually at a fraction of their real value. Worse than that, thousands of families would lose their homes or farms to foreclosures by banks because their bank accounts were frozen by government order. Many lost their land and the work of a lifetime to plain and open thievery by local officials and residents because California’s escheat laws allowed the state and banks to take over “abandoned properties.” The furniture of the evacuees and, in fact, almost everything they owned was packed into churches, warehouses, and abandoned buildings, easy targets for thieves and vandals.
The Kobayashi family of Klamath Falls, Oregon, sold their house and barn, their land and crops, tractors and horses for $75. American Japanese in Los Angeles faced vultures who were grabbing up the businesses of Little Tokyo. Frank Emi had given up his pharmacy studies at the University of California in Berkeley to take over the family’s prosperous food market at Eleventh and Alvarado Streets in Los Angeles, after his father was badly injured in an automobile accident. A serious young man at twenty-nine, already married and a father himself, he had spent $25,000, all the family had or could borrow, for modern refriger
ation cabinets and shelving. Emi had built the place into a small modern supermarket before he was informed he would be evacuated. He had to sell the market and everything in it for $1,500.
Some families took creative measures to protect their property. The Najimas of Petaluma, California, whose father, Jahachi, was already in a Justice Department camp in Montana, got their evacuation notice in May. The two teenage boys in the family, who had pooled their money to buy a good 35 mm camera, were determined not to give it up to the government—or to scavengers and vandals. “They wrapped it up real tightly,” said their sister, Irene. “We had an outhouse, and they wrapped up the camera and put it on a big fish hook. Then they lowered it down the outhouse toilet.”
Others were overwhelmed with despair about their losses. John Kimoto decided he would burn down his house on the day he was evacuated. “I went to the storage shed to get the gasoline tank and pour the gasoline on my house, but my wife … said don’t do it, maybe somebody can use this house; we are civilized people, we are not savages.”
A few white neighbors promised to look after homes and farms—some kept the promises, some did not. In Sacramento, a state agricultural inspector named Bob Fletcher agreed to take over the maintenance of three Japanese farms with ninety acres of vineyards. He paid the mortgages and taxes in exchange for 50 percent of the profits. When the war ended, the Nitto, Okamoto, and Tsukamoto families returned; their land and their profits were waiting for them. The same kind of thing happened in Fresno, where a prosperous local farmer, a retired major league baseball player named Hubert “Dutch” Leonard, who had won 139 games as a pitcher in the American League between 1913 and 1925, agreed to manage a Japanese farm and turned over $20,000 in profits after the war. But such stories were rare.
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