Infamy

by Richard Reeves

  “Teddy! Bobby!” Yoshiko called, running to the fence. The four children reached through the barbed wire, squealing with delight, when a soldier lowered his rifle toward them, saying, “Hey, get away from the fence, you two.”

  Decades later, the Uchida children remembered this incident. They said they thought they were about to be shot.

  The Topaz Relocation Camp, where the Uchido girls and their mother were incarcerated, was in the Sevier Desert, on a high and windy plateau in southwest Utah. It was a shock, to say the least, for the daughter of a successful American family. She was a Berkeley graduate, planning to be a schoolteacher.

  After arriving in Topaz, the Uchidas and other evacuees were handed a list of camp rules, which, under the section called “Restrictions,” included:

  a. Stay within signs of limited area

  b. Do not pick fruit

  c. No fishing without license

  d. Do not dig flower plants

  e. No trespassing on farming areas

  f. Help prevent fire hazards

  g. Do not dig or damage trees

  h. No wading or otherwise polluting creek water

  i. Do not disturb birds or animals

  Yoshiko Uchida chose to avoid the officials enforcing these rules. “Sometimes as we walked,” she wrote, “we could hear the MPs singing in their quarters and then they seemed something more than the sentries who patrolled the barbed wire perimeters of our camp, and we realized they were lonely young boys far from home, too. Still, they were on the other side of the fence, and they represented the Army we had come to fear and distrust. We never offered them our friendship, although at times they tried to talk to us.”

  The lonely and bored young soldiers, probably just as disoriented, watched over the camp in this bleak landscape. Miss Uchida described her new “home” this way:

  The camp was one mile square and eventually housed 8,000 residents, making it the fifth largest city in the state of Utah. As we plodded through the powdery sand toward Block 7, I began to understand why everyone looked like pieces of flour-dusted pastry. In its frantic haste to construct this barrack city, the Army had removed every growing thing, and what had once been a peaceful lake bed was now churned up into one great mass of loose flour-like sand. With each step we sank two to three inches deep, sending up swirls of dust that crept into our eyes and mouths, noses, and lungs.

  A great many of the residents were constantly sick, with upset stomachs and colds, especially in the winter. “Illness was a nuisance,” she wrote, “especially after we began to work, for memos from a doctor were required to obtain sick leave. We had no idea when the water would be turned on, for its appearance had no predictable pattern.… People sometimes got caught in the shower covered in soap when the water trickled to a maddening stop.”

  She went on, “My mother is sick much of the time and her greatest problem was not being able to walk to the latrine. It was simple enough to find a makeshift bed pan, but it was embarrassing for her to use it, knowing the neighbors could hear everything but the faintest of sighs.” They solved the problem by subscribing to the New York Times. They kept piles of the newspaper and it was Yoshiko’s job to rattle them as noisily as possible to cover the noise whenever the bedpan was in use.

  It was not always easy to maintain the resolve of the Uchidas. At the same time, Shizuko Horiuchi, interned at Minidoka in Idaho—a dust bowl in the wind, a mud hole when it rained—wrote to a Caucasian friend, “The life here cannot be expressed. Sometimes we are resigned to it, but when we see the barbed wire fences and the sentry tower with floodlights, it gives us a feeling of being prisoners in a ‘concentration camp.’” He continued, “We try to be happy and yet, oftentimes, a gloominess does creep in. When I see the ‘I am an American’ editorials and write-ups, the ‘equality of race’ etc.—it seems to be mocking us in our faces.”

  * * *

  In late August, Twentieth Century Fox released a feature film titled Little Tokyo, U.S.A. The plot was driven by a Los Angeles detective discovering Japanese spies, saboteurs, and murderers preparing for an invasion of the United States. The New York Times review called it “63 minutes of speculation about prewar Japanese espionage activities.”

  Filmed as if it were a documentary, using authentic news film of the roundups of California Japanese and Japanese Americans, the movie called for the evacuation of both loyal and disloyal Nikkei in the name of national security. The film ends showing Little Tokyo as a ghost town without people or lights. The Office of War Information responded by calling it “an invitation to the Witch Hunt” and began demanding that Hollywood scripts be shown to government censors before filming.

  The Santa Ana Register could not match Hollywood in a publicity fight, but its publisher, R. C. Hoiles, continued his lonely crusade, calling for a rollback of Executive Order 9066. On October 14, 1942, he wrote:

  Few, if any, people ever believed that evacuation of the Japanese was constitutional. It was a result of emotion and fright rather than being in harmony with the Constitution and the inherent rights that belong to American citizens. The question we should consider is whether or not this evacuation will in the long run really help us win the war. If it will not, we should make every effort possible to correct the error as rapidly as possible. It would seem that convicting people of disloyalty to our country without having specific evidence against them is too foreign to our way of life and too close akin to the kind of government we are fighting.

  We need all the manpower we can obtain. To remove the Japanese from the place where they could serve our country by helping us furnish food and doing useful services weakens us in our defense by that amount.… If we are not willing to run any risks and cannot have faith in humanity and regard people innocent until they are proved guilty, we are on the road to losing our democracy. We cannot help but believe that we would shorten the war and lose fewer lives and less property if we would rescind the order and let the Japanese return and go to work, until such time as we have reason to suspect any individuals of being guilty of being disloyal to America.

  Two weeks later the Register reprinted a long article from the Christian Advocate, a national journal. Clarence Hall of the Advocate reported on how, throughout occupied Europe, the American policy toward Japanese Americans was being compared to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, going on to say that Pierre Laval, the Nazi-backed prime minister of collaborationist Vichy France, “is said to have justified his deportation from France of 70,000 Jews by reporting what was happening in California.… Over in New Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru sat down to write a letter to an American friend, citing his amazement of and concern over what the [American] action portended for India in its relations with the United Nations.”

  * * *

  The peaceful endurance of many of the internees, particularly the Issei, was often seen by non-Japanese as an indication of passivity. Many American Japanese, instead, saw themselves as choosing “gaman,” a Japanese term that can mean “to persevere with dignity in the face of adversity,” or “to suppress anger and refuse to take retaliatory action against hardships.” Jeanne Wakatsuki also commented on how “shikata ga nai” was another common saying at the camps, meaning “it cannot be helped.”

  While the overwhelming majority of the American Japanese accepted their lot with little complaint, particularly in the beginning, tensions and a sense of injustice began to build among the Nikkei. A few resisted in the courts, others through violence. One of the first outbreaks of anger came at Santa Anita in early August of 1942, when evacuees were already being moved to Poston by the trainload. Fusa Tsumagari, scheduled to leave in five days, wrote to Miss Breed on August 9 about what happened.

  On Wednesday the army ordered our barracks searched.… Previous to this whenever such an order was given, [we were] notified of everything. This however was done abruptly with no reason given. Then, they closed certain gates and would not allow people to pass unless they were searched. Then, to top that, they began to con
fiscate scissors and knitting needles.… Some of the police had the nerve to steal people’s money and remove things from people’s houses without allowing the occupants to see what was being taken. One policeman in particular aroused the people to such a degree that they began to mob him.… Unfortunately the mob of people were so aroused they chased him and beat him with chairs.… The Army took control for three days.

  Her brother, Yukio, sent his own description: “The investigation created a frenzy in camp. A huge mob of infuriated people gathered to ask for the reason for such doings. Frightened by the large crowd and excited by pointed questions directed to him, the investigator drew his gun and threatened to shoot anyone who might molest him.”

  Charles Kikuchi knew some officials were trying to provoke the evacuees with exaggerated taunts and outright lies. When he became the editor of the Tanforan newspaper, a mimeographed sheet called The Totalizer, he sometimes was the first Japanese American to be told what would happen next. He was called to administration offices during the last week of August and was told, “Casa Grande.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Arizona.”

  “I asked a lot of detailed questions,” Kikuchi wrote. “We are leaving next Tuesday at 6:45 in the morning. The train will leave from San Francisco at 3:15. I asked whether we would have any time to stop over in the city. [They] told me a scare story about how the Daylight Limited did not want any Japanese and that they were going to shoot us right on the train.”

  The information fed to Kikuchi was wrong on all counts. He ended up in Utah, in the Topaz Relocation Camp.

  The troubles at Santa Anita were the beginning of ongoing complaints and sporadic violence in most of the assembly centers and camps. Administrators, many of whom had worked on Indian reservations, wanted to create community councils and such to mimic life on the outside. “Pioneer communities” was the officially favored name for people surrounded by barbed wire and by soldiers with guns and fixed bayonets. The idea was that the evacuees themselves would democratically elect “community councils” to deal with camp administrators. But all that was mishandled from the beginning. The men from the government immediately ruled that only Nisei, born in the United States, American citizens, could be block captains or hold other minor offices in the camps. That ignorant blunder set the Issei, the older, more mature, more experienced Japanese American evacuees, against their own children, undermining the traditional structure of the hierarchical Japanese society. That mistake compounded the family conflicts caused by army-style mess halls, which further separated families. “My own family, after three years of mess hall living, collapsed as an integrated unit,” wrote Jeanne Wakatsuki. An Episcopal priest at Tule Lake, Daisuki Kitagawa, added, “The loss of the family table and the family kitchen was not simply a loss of opportunity to teach manners to growing children, but a forceful symbol of that human institution which transmits values from one generation to another.”

  If there had been a cohesive American Japanese community in California, it was breaking up along many fault lines. Despite what General DeWitt and others believed, the residents of the camps were as diverse as any other group of more than a hundred thousand people. City people were uncomfortable with country folk. The same was true of English speakers and monolingual Japanese. Buddhists and Christians often distrusted each other. Californians were generally disliked by Oregon and Washington people.

  A small but growing number of Issei and Kibei hoped Japan would win the war. Some, not believing what they read and heard in American journals and on the radio, continued to think Japan was winning even as Allied forces were turning the tide. The great majority of evacuees were simply pained by the war—many had relatives in Japan—but supported the United States and cooperated with camp administrators. Soon enough, some of those people were seen as collaborators and called inu—“dogs”—by the pro-Japan faction.

  Life magazine and other publications, using photographs supplied by the War Relocation Authority, portrayed the internees as model democratic citizens living a kind of resort life, but in fact, as early as August of 1942, many administrators were warning their bosses in Washington that the camps were likely to produce America-hating Japanese Americans. Dillon Myer, the new WRA director, was already talking, privately, about closing down the whole relocation camp operation. He instituted a liberal “leave” policy designed to begin that process. “Short-term leave” was allowed for a week or so to visit doctors or tend to personal affairs. “Work leave” was granted for camp residents willing to work on midwestern farms desperately in need of workers during harvest seasons. “Indefinite leave,” already granted to students attending eastern and midwestern colleges willing to accept them, was expanded to include evacuees who wanted to take their chances on finding work outside. The presidents of the campuses of the University of California, led by Robert Sproul, president of the university, persuaded Governor Olson to write to Roosevelt saying, “Unless some special action is taken, the education of those who might become influential leaders of the loyal American born Japanese will abruptly be closed. Such a result would be injurious not only to them, but to the nation, since well-trained leadership for such persons will be needed after the present war.”

  The president may have agreed with that, but many American institutions of higher learning, including some of the most prestigious, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology among them, refused to admit Japanese American students. Harvard offered to allow the army to train Japanese linguists on its campus, but wanted to charge more than double the rates offered by schools such as the University of Chicago. There was also a government restriction on Japanese American students: many universities were prohibited from taking evacuated students because of “secret” military training and research on their campuses, which usually merely meant that they had ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps). Still, by the end of the war, forty-three hundred Nisei were enrolled in colleges and universities east of the West Coast states.

  For those remaining in the camps, though, life continued to be a struggle. In some cases, events took a tragic turn. There had been numerous suicides and suicide attempts and more than a dozen Japanese men had been killed or wounded by soldiers guarding them in the relocation centers and in Justice Department camps and jails. On May 12, 1942, a man named Kanesaburo Oshima was killed by a sentry at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a temporary center for the so-called dangerous aliens. The next day Ichiro Shimoda, a forty-five-year-old gardener from Los Angeles who had served in the Japanese army as a young man and was arrested on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, was badly wounded by another guard at Fort Sill. He was known to be mentally unstable and had twice attempted to kill himself by trying to bite off his own tongue. An FBI report dated May 18, 1942, said he was shot twice while trying to climb over a camp fence. On May 16, 1942, Hikoji Takeuchi was shot at Manzanar by a military police private named Edward Phillips. A WRA investigation report quoted his commanding officer, Lieutenant Buckner, as saying that guard service was so monotonous that MPs welcomed “a little excitement, such as shooting a Jap.”

  Frustration and fear were spreading in the camps—on both sides of the fences. On July 27, 1942, Hirota Isomura, a fisherman from San Pedro, and Toshio Kobata, a farmer from Brawley, California, were shot and killed by a guard, Private First Class Clarence Burleson. Both men, interned as “dangerous enemy aliens,” were being transferred from a prison at Fort Lincoln, Nebraska, to one at Lordsburg, New Mexico. Two of 150 transferees, they were both too sick or tired to walk the mile from the Lordsburg train station to the temporary camp and were fired on as they arrived in a camp automobile at 2:30 a.m. at Poston I on November 18, 1942.

  After a few months in the camps, the numbers of antiadministration or anti-American residents steadily increased. Young men, particularly young Kibei, organized as gangs and began to terrorize residents they considered spies or collaborators for the administration. They began traveling in groups during the day
, then harassing and beating the residents they did not like, usually at night.

  A community council member, Fred Tayama, was beaten almost to death for cooperating with camp administrators. The FBI was called into the camp to investigate and arrested two popular Nisei, young men hundreds of evacuees considered innocent. All of the members of the community council resigned and evacuees surrounded the small center stockade, determined to prevent the removal of the two prisoners to civil or military jails outside. The standoff lasted a week until the administration agreed to free one man and to allow an “evacuee court” to try the other one.

  At Manzanar, the young toughs began wearing headbands with MANZANAR BLACK DRAGON ASSOCIATION written across them in Japanese. Camp administrators ignored them at first, saying it was up to the Japanese to settle things among themselves. When women started a work project that first summer, weaving and making camouflage nets for the army, they soon became a target. Young children, egged on by Black Dragons, began throwing stones at the women.

  One of the Black Dragon leaders was Joseph Kurihara, the bitter World War I veteran, who was a college graduate and had been a successful businessman before the war. There were rumors of “death lists” of pro-American residents. Karl Yoneda, a former journalist and union organizer, was one of the names on a list, because he had met with Military Intelligence Service officers who were recruiting translators for the war in the Pacific. When the recruiters arrived on November 28, Dragons went door-to-door threatening men and their families, warning them not to talk to the army men. Yoneda, who said Kurihara threatened to have him killed if he met with the recruiters, was one of fifty men who applied. Fourteen, including Yoneda, a Kibei and a member of the Communist Party, passed language tests and were immediately sworn in as U.S. Army privates. Guarded by military police, the fourteen left Manzanar for MIS training at Camp Savage in Minnesota. Yoneda’s wife, Elaine Black Yoneda, and their four-year-old son, Tommy, waved from behind the barbed wire. “Daddy, don’t leave me,” the boy cried. “I want to go with you and help beat up the Nazis.”