Infamy

by Richard Reeves

  The governor of Arizona, Sidney Osborn, repeated the “dumping ground” line. Utah’s Herbert Maw said he thought there was too much emphasis on constitutional rights. Then he stood up and shouted: “The Constitution could be changed.… If these people are dangerous on the Pacific Coast they will be dangerous here!” The governor of Idaho, Chase Clark, said, “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats. I don’t want them coming into Idaho.” He later compromised, saying he would accept American Japanese “only if they were in concentration camps under military guard.” The state’s attorney general, Bert Miller, backed him up: “All Japanese must be in concentration camps for the remainder of the war.… We want to keep this a white man’s country.”

  Only one governor, Ralph Carr of Colorado, said he would accept American Japanese in his state. “If you harm them, you must harm me. I was brought up in a small town where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred. I grew to despise it because it threatened the happiness of you and you and you.”

  Soon enough, the federal officials realized that the relocation of the Nikkei was going to be more difficult than first imagined. Finding the Japanese and Japanese Americans had not been difficult. Although for more than forty years the Census Bureau denied it—admitting the truth only in 2007—the 1940 census had just been completed and Census Bureau records were moved to the Presidio in San Francisco, so the army and the FBI had maps of where almost every Japanese family lived. The problem was where to put them, and how to move them. And there were still questions about who would be in charge of the relocation camps.

  It was not only officials and bureaucrats who were wary or just plain scared about the evacuation. May and June of 1942 became one of the peaks of hysteria in the West, as reports reached the public of the fall of Corregidor, one of the last American outposts in the Philippines. More than seventy-five thousand starving Filipino and American troops, many of them crippled by disease, surrendered on the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor, a rocky island in Manila Bay, in April and May of 1942 and were marched through eighty miles of jungle on their way to a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Thousands of Filipinos and hundreds of Americans died on the brutal march. Though the fall of Corregidor was reported in 1942, news of what would be called the Bataan Death March was kept from the American public until January of 1944.

  The fall of the Philippines and the perception that Japan was winning the war turned some Issei and Nisei against each other. Charles Kikuchi was walking through the grandstands in Tanforan when he saw an old Issei smiling, talking to a friend about the Philippines. “About time, no?”

  “It made my blood boil,” said Kikuchi. He challenged the old man, who asked him who he was for in the war. “America,” he answered. “The man,” wrote Kikuchi, “called me and my friends fools, saying they could never become Americans. ‘Only the Ketos [literally, hairy people] could become Americans.’”

  One of the units captured by the Japanese army on Corregidor was the 200th Coast Artillery Battery, originally made up of eighteen hundred reservists from the New Mexico National Guard, more than a third of them Hispanic Americans or Native Americans. At least two hundred of them died on the march, some shot or bayoneted if they could not keep walking. In Santa Fe, where local families did not know much about the details of what was happening in the Philippines, telegrams were arriving announcing the deaths of their young men at the places called Corregidor and Bataan. Local residents armed with shotguns and hatchets marched on the nearby internment camp where hundreds of the so-called dangerous Issei were being held, determined to kill as many American Japanese as they could. They were talked out of it by officials who said that a massacre would invite retaliation on the rest of the American soldiers being held in the Philippines.

  Other towns struggled with their own conflicting reactions to the movement of prisoners and evacuees to their areas. In Lone Pine, a ranching town of 1,071 people six miles south of the Manzanar Assembly Center and Relocation Camp, twenty-two local merchants signed a letter to the army requesting that small numbers of internees be allowed to shop at their businesses. Other townspeople, five hundred of them, then signed another petition asking that the evacuees be kept behind barbed wire. The town barber said, “We ought to take those yellow-tails right down to edge of the Pacific and say to ’em, ‘Okay boys, over there’s Toyko. Start walkin’.” A county supervisor in Inyo County, which had a population 7,625, said, “A Jap’s a Jap, and by God I wouldn’t trust one of them as far as I could throw a bull by the tail.” A flight instructor at a small local airstrip added, “It’s a plain case of survival of the fittest. It’s either us or the god-damned Yellow-bellies! What are we waiting for? The Army needs target practice on those sons-of-bitches.”

  Nine miles north of Manzanar, in Independence, the Inyo County seat and a town slightly bigger than Lone Pine, a storekeeper’s wife said, “There’s people in Independence who were just frightened out of their wits. They thought the Japanese were going to break out of Manzanar and we’d all be slaughtered in our beds.” A former official at Manzanar added, “I can’t remember the guy’s name, but there was a man in Independence who formed his own militia and was training people.… They were going to save the women and children of Independence.”

  * * *

  As the government wrestled with issues of authority, logistics, and statistics, the spring of 1942 was a time of anguish and uncertainty for American Japanese families and individuals in the three West Coast states. The army, with the help of civilian contractors, was still searching for relocation sites, usually on empty land already owned by the federal government. The military was designing and building—sometimes with the help of American Japanese volunteers—President Roosevelt’s “concentration camps.” Ten locations were finally chosen from the dry lake beds and lava fields in the far north of California to Arizona deserts and Indian reservations and swampland in Arkansas. By the summer of 1942, most of the Japanese and Japanese Americans had been moved or were in the process of being moved from the assembly centers, Santa Anita and the sixteen others. Most of the camps were ready—almost ready, anyway. Beginning on March 22, the army had begun moving people inland from the assembly centers. The long, slow, and dirty trains—171 of them—were alternately too hot and very cold, always dark, with window shades pulled so the evacuees could not see where they were going.

  Estelle Ishigo, the white woman who chose to go with her husband, Arthur Ishigo, a Nisei, to the camps, wrote back her impression of the first relocation camp, Manzanar. “The sight of the barbed wire enclosure with armed soldiers standing guard as our bus turned slowly through the gate stunned us.… Here was a camp of sheds enclosed with a high barbed wire fence, with guard towers and soldiers with machine guns.”

  Manzanar opened on March 22 and became a relocation camp under WRA control, built to hold ten thousand “evacuees,” or prisoners, from Bainbridge Island, Los Angeles, and San Joaquin County, California. Nine more camps opened between May 8 and October 6.

  Poston, Arizona, was one of the first to open, starting on May 8. It was actually three camps—Poston I, II, and III—built on an Indian reservation near the California border. Its peak population was 17,814. People there came from all over California and southern Arizona and they called the camps “Roastin’, Toastin’, and Dustin’.”

  Tule Lake, California, a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp built on lava beds close to the Oregon border, opened soon after, on May 27, and accommodated a peak of 18,789 people from Sacramento, Oregon, and Washington. When a young opera singer well known in the Sacramento area, Fumiko Yabe, was headed for Tule Lake, she bought a bathing suit, not knowing that the lake had disappeared into a barren plain five hundred years before.

  Early that summer, with seven of the ten relocation centers still to open, Milton Eisenhower left the WRA. He hated the job, earlier telling his boss, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, that he had intended to use the camps as platforms to move the evacuees into
useful jobs around the country. In the end, his inclination did not matter. On June 17, when the Office of War Information director, Elmer Davis, offered Eisenhower the position of assistant director, he jumped at the chance.

  Eisenhower, desperate to leave the WRA, had recruited his own successor: Dillon Myer, a lifetime civil servant who was serving as deputy director of the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Soil Conservation Service. Eisenhower and Myer were friends. At a dinner one night, Myer asked Eisenhower one last time if he should take the job. “Yes, if you can do the job and sleep at night. I couldn’t.”

  Eisenhower was offered a new position only eleven days after the U.S. Navy, with the crucial (and secret) help of Japanese American code breakers and translators, crushed the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway. It was the turning point of the Pacific War. Thereafter, there was almost no chance the Japanese military could approach the West Coast of the United States, much less invade California, Oregon, or Washington.

  So, by the time Myer took over, “military necessity” was effectively dead as an argument for the camps. On that same day, June 17, 1942, the director of the American Friends Service Committee, C. Reid Carey, told a church conference, “We are doing exactly the same things as the Germans.”

  Still, the camps were being built and continued opening. The openings under Myer were:

  Gila River, Arizona, opened on June 20. The land, a reservation, was the home of the Gila River Indian Tribe and held a peak of 13,348 people from Fresno County, Sacramento, and Los Angeles.

  Minidoka, Idaho, near the town of Hunt, opened August 10, with a peak population of 9,397, and held people from Seattle, Portland, and northwestern Oregon. One of the first arrivals there, Monica Sone, wrote, “We felt as if we were standing in a gigantic sand-mixing machine as the 60-mile gale lifted the loose earth into the sky, obliterating everything. Sand filled our mouths and nostrils and stung our faces and hands like a thousand darting needles.”

  Heart Mountain, Wyoming, with prisoners from Los Angeles and Santa Clara County, California, opened on August 12. Peak population was 10,767.

  Amache (also called Granada), Colorado, built on a treeless prairie for prisoners from all over California, opened on August 24. Peak population was 7,318.

  Topaz, Utah, with a peak population of 8,130 evacuees from the San Francisco Bay Area, opened September 11.

  Rohwer in McGehee, Arkansas, opened on September 18. The camp held people from Los Angeles and San Joaquin, California. “It was a living nightmare,” an evacuee wrote of Rohwer. “The water stagnated at the front steps.… The mosquitoes that festered there were horrible, and the administration never had enough quinine for sickness.”

  Jerome, Arkansas, was the last camp to open, on October 6, 1942. The people interned there were from the San Joaquin Valley and San Pedro Bay area, and the camp had a peak population of 8,497. Later on, Rohwer residents were moved to Jerome, and Rohwer was converted into a prisoner of war camp housing captured German soldiers.

  The camps and various federal prisons, at their peak, held a total of 120,313 American Japanese, alien and citizen. Of those, 92,786 were Californians. Their new “homes” were described this way by the California Site Survey of the National Park Service:

  The camp interiors were arranged like prisoner of war camps or overseas military camps, and were completely unsuited for family living. Barracks were divided into blocks and each block had a central mess hall, latrine, showers, wash basins, and laundry tubs. Toilets, showers, and bedrooms were unpartitioned; there was no water or plumbing in the living quarters; and anyone going to the lavatory at night, often through mud or snow, was followed by a searchlight. Eight-person families were placed in 20-x-20-foot rooms, six-person families in 12-x-20-foot rooms, and four-person families in 8-x-20-foot rooms. Smaller families and single persons had to share units with strangers. Each detainee received a straw mattress, an army blanket, and not much else. Privacy was non-existent. Everything had to be done communally. Endless queues formed for eating, washing, and personal needs.

  A conscientious objector named Don Elberson was assigned to meet each trainload of evacuees arriving at Tule Lake. “It was brutal,” he remembered.

  Some days we had to process 500 or more people.… Nothing mitigated the moment I had to take them to their new homes. You’d have to take these people into this dingy excuse for a room, twenty by twenty-five feet at best. These were people who’d left everything behind, sometimes fine houses. I learned after the first day not to enter with the family, but to stand outside. It was too terrible to witness the pain in people’s faces, too shameful for them to be seen in this degrading situation.

  His daughter, Marnie, was born while he was at Tule Lake, the first Caucasian child born there. In later years, when she changed schools as her family moved around after the war, teachers would ask where she was born and she would answer, “Tule Lake Japanese American Relocation Camp in California.” Some of those teachers said there was no such place and the little girl learned to say, simply, “California.”

  The WCCA began moving ten thousand of the evacuees at the Santa Anita Assembly Center to the Manzanar Relocation Center or to one of the three relocation camps holding seventeen thousand people in Poston, Arizona, on May 29, 1942. The government estimated that within two to three months, all Japanese would be in one of the ten relocation camps, even though many of the barracks were not complete. Some of the letters sent to the Friends Service as Santa Anita closed down said things like, “I do hope the women can get better toilets and showers. They cannot bear the toilets where they must sit side to side and back to back (with strangers) and no partitions.”

  After they arrived at Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki’s mother, Riku, was one of the women who carried large unfolded detergent boxes to hide behind in the rows of toilet seats in the women’s latrines. Many of the women would go into the latrines only late at night for a bit of privacy and to avoid the long lines of other women waiting outside.

  Leland Ford, a California congressman with no love for the camp residents, had said from the beginning, “All Japanese, whether citizens or not, must be placed in inland concentration camps.” Still, even he was a bit shocked when he saw Manzanar. “On dusty days, one might just as well be outside as inside at Manzanar.”

  Jeanne Wakatsuki later wrote that the evacuees Ford and other officials saw were “a band of Charlie Chaplins marooned in the California desert.” The American Japanese, who were not told where they were going, had arrived in the high desert camp in the summer clothes of Southern California to find that nighttime temperatures were below freezing and then way below freezing in fall and winter. The army shipped in truckloads of surplus cold weather gear, including coats, hats, boots, gloves, and wool knit caps, all left over from World War I and all in sizes way too large for the evacuees. The floppy coats and pants did make them look like so many circus clowns. Finally the army responded to demands for sewing machines; for weeks, the women of the camp cut and sewed the oversized clothes. “They flopped, they dangled, they hung,” said Miss Wakatsuki, until the clothes were remade into smaller and more fashionable slacks, coats, and capes by the women of Manzanar.

  “Once the weather warmed up in the daytime, it was an out-of-doors life,” she continued, “where you only went ‘home’ at night, when you finally had to: 10,000 people were on an endless promenade inside the square mile of barbed wire that was the wall around the our city.”

  The end of the trail for the Poston evacuees was Parker, Arizona, the town near the Poston Indian Reservation on the California border. The temperature was 102 degrees when Shizuko Tokushige, a new mother, arrived. She described the cruel end of her trip, transferring from a train to the camp bus.

  A solider said, “Let me help you, put your arm out.” He proceeded to pile everything on my arm. And to my horror, he placed my two-month-old baby on top of the stack. He then pushed me with the butt of the gun and told me to get off the train, knowing whe
n I stepped off the train my baby would fall to the ground. I refused. But he kept prodding and ordering me to move. I will always be thankful [that] a lieutenant checking the cars came upon us. He took the baby down, gave her to me, and then ordered the solider to carry all our belongings to the bus and see that I was seated and then report back to him.

  The new residents of Poston felt the same shock as those who got off the buses at Manzanar. “There is going to be a fence around the camp!” Tetsuzo (Ted) Hirasaki wrote from the Arizona Indian Reservation. “Five strands of barbed wire! They say it’s to keep the people out.… What people? The Redskins!” He also heard claims that the fence was to keep out cattle. “Where in cattle country do they use five-strand barbed wire? If they don’t watch out there’s going to be trouble. What do they think we are, fools?”

  Another former San Diegan, Kiyuji Alzumi, wrote of his impression of arrival: “Extreme heat that can melt iron. No trees, no flowers, no birds singing, not even the sound of an insect, sandy dust whirled into the sky, completely taking the sunshine and light from us.”

  Charles Kikuchi, the diarist, learned that he was headed for Topaz in Utah. In one of his last diary entries from Tanforan, he had written, “I ran across something interesting today. Down by the stables there is an interesting old rest room which says ‘Gents’ on one side and ‘Colored Gents’ on the other.… To think that such a thing is possible in California is surprising.”

  The Uchida family at Tanforan was also on the Topaz list. Their neighbors back in Berkeley, a Swiss family, drove to Tanforan to say good-bye once more with baskets of food and flowers. But the children, both under sixteen, were not allowed inside the assembly center. Hearing that, the Uchida girls raced to the camp’s main gate, where they saw their friends.