Infamy (15 page)

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 when 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.

“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.”