Infamy (24 page)

When Merritt invited Adams to Manzanar, the photographer agreed and came in September of 1943. He was a passionate man who hated the idea of the camps and thought that he could generate sympathy around the country for the hardworking and loyal Japanese and Japanese Americans being held behind wire fences and guard towers.

He spent a week in Owens Valley photographing the internees at work, at school, and in church. He was frustrated, however, by internees’ insistence on showing only the best side of their lives behind barbed wire. They wore their finest clothes and smiled with their families. They were anxious to pose for the kind of photographs released by the government to try to picture camp life as happy and normal. He put together a book of photographs with the title,
Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese Americans
. “It is,” he wrote of the book, “addressed to the average American citizen, and is conceived on a human, emotional basis accentuating the realities of the individual and his environment rather than considering the loyal Japanese as an abstract, amorphous, minority group.”

Both the book and an exhibit of the photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York were commercial failures. In Adams’s own words, “People refused to buy it.” It was too soon. To many citizens, the faces of the camp still looked like the enemy.

*   *   *

During 1943, the population of the camps dropped from a peak of about 107,000 in January to 93,000 in December. With many of the better-educated evacuees gone, there was less leadership of the evacuees and a good deal more violence, beatings, and attempted murders of evacuees, who were now being called the “disloyals” and the “loyals.”

The number of young men who answered no to questions 27 and 28 on leave application questionnaires, the “No-No Boys,” had shocked camp administrators—and their bosses in Washington. On July 3, 1943, the U.S. Senate had reacted to their answers by passing a resolution urging segregation of the “disloyals” in a separate camp. Within days, the WRA announced its segregation policy for “persons who by their acts have indicated that their loyalties lie with the Japanese during the present hostilities or that their loyalties do not lie with the United States.” The segregation had been proposed and backed by the same men who devised the evacuation after Pearl Harbor, including General DeWitt, Colonel Bendetsen, and Governor Earl Warren.

In effect, the government and its sloppily worded questionnaire had manufactured a new crisis in the camps. At the beginning of September, Tule Lake, where 42 percent of young men either failed to register for the draft or answered no to question 28, was selected as the segregation camp for “disloyals” and was converted to a maximum-security facility.

WRA director Myer specified the “disloyals” as:

• those who had applied for expatriation or repatriation to Japan and had not withdrawn their application before July 1, 1942;

• those who answered no to the loyalty question or refused to answer it during registration and had not changed their answers;

• those who were denied leave clearance due to some accumulation of adverse evidence in their records;

• aliens from the Department of Justice internment camps who the agency recommended for detention, and family members of segregants who chose to remain with their families.

As the transfers began, hundreds, then thousands of Tule Lake residents voluntarily declared themselves “disloyal” to avoid the breakup of their families or to avoid the chaos of one more move in sealed trains.

The plan, not publicized, was to strip “disloyals” of citizenship—the Constitution be damned!—and deport them to Japan when the war was over. A battalion of combat-ready troops, 899 men, backed by six tanks and a dozen armored cars, patrolled the fences of Tule Lake as the transfers of “disloyals” began. The first transfer started late in September of 1943 with 500 “disloyal” internees from Heart Mountain being sent to Tule Lake and 400 “loyals” sent from Tule Lake to Heart Mountain. There were more transfers to come: the WRA, with army help, came to move 6,289 more Tule Lake “loyals” to other camps and more than 9,000 “disloyals” to Tule Lake.

Chief Judge William Denman of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals described Tule Lake, after it became the segregation camp for “disloyals,” during legal hearings.

The barbed wire surrounding the 18,000 people, including thousands of American citizens, [made the camp look] like the prison camps of the Germans. There were the same turrets for the soldiers and the same machine guns for those who might attempt to climb the high wiring. The buildings were covered with tarred paper over green and shrinking shiplap—this for the low winter temperatures of the high elevation of Tule Lake.… No Federal penitentiary so treats its adult prisoners. Here were children and babies as well.… To reach the unheated latrines, which were in the center of the blocks of 14 buildings, meant leaving the residential shacks and walking through the rain and snow—again a lower than penitentiary treatment, even disregarding the sick and the children.

At its peak, Tule Lake was “home” to 18,700 “inmates,” twelve hundred combat-equipped soldiers, and 550 administrative personnel. The number of soldiers and administrators assigned to the segregation camp was more than ten times the average allotment of three officers and 124 soldiers to the other camps.

The extra contingents of military guardians of Tule Lake had been moved there in October 1943, after a truck carrying twenty-eight workers rolled over, killing one resident and severely injuring seven more. The workers were outside the gates headed for twenty-nine hundred acres of the farmland that provided food for the camp and for military bases in the west. The dead man was named Kashima, recently arrived from Topaz in Utah. Raymond Best, the camp’s director, denied evacuees permission to hold a public memorial service for the victim. He shut off the camp’s public address systems, but more than five thousand internees gathered anyway and declared a work stoppage, leaving $500,000 worth of vegetables to rot in the sun. The Tule Lake farm workers demanded improved safety and working conditions, and Best responded by firing them. He secretly brought in eight hundred farm workers from other camps, who were paid a dollar an hour, making more money in two days than Tulean workers made in a month.

Trouble became the norm at Tule Lake. WRA director Myer came to Tule Lake in November 1943. When word got out that the director was there, hundreds of internees surrounded the administration building for three hours. Led by “disloyals,” most of them
Kibei
, they shouted demands for more food and better pay for their labor. The situation was bad enough to be brought to the attention of President Roosevelt. In a memo, which exaggerated what had happened, Attorney General Biddle wrote, “Serious disturbances have recently taken place at a relocation center of the War Relocation Authority at Tule Lake.… Japanese internees armed with knives and clubs shut up Dillon Myer and some of his administrative officers in the administration building for several days. The Army moved in to restore order.”

On November 14, Raymond Best scheduled an Army-WRA rally at Tule Lake to support the camp administration. Colonel Verne Austin, commander of camp troops, was the principal speaker, but not a single evacuee appeared at the parade ground. The colonel gave his unity speech to rows of empty benches.

Martial law was declared the next day, as soldiers went from barrack to barrack trying to find out, without much luck, who were the ringleaders of this soft rebellion. Six barracks, fenced off, had been designated a “stockade” and were soon filled, though not necessarily with actual rebels. Then a stockade inside the stockade was built for suspect “disloyals” who were then forced to live in tents. A twelve-foot-high beaverboard wall was built around this inner sanctum, hiding the fact that the prisoners were denied visits, medical care, or mail.

The news of the army takeover became exactly what the military wanted to avoid: a national story. The
New York Times
referred to the Tule Lake riots in an editorial, saying, “We can’t give leeway to possible spies and saboteurs because we simply want to believe that human nature, including that which is wrapped in a saffron-colored skin, is inherently good.”

Another typical editorial was from the Huntington, West Virginia,
Herald-Dispatch
on November 8, 1943.

It’s something of a relief to learn that Army forces—some of whom are veterans of the fighting in the Pacific area—have taken over at the Tule Lake internment center for disloyal Japanese and presumably have the situation well in hand. The War Relocation Authority policy of coddling and kid-gloving these treacherous, fanatical, insolent prisoners has finally resulted in an incident which promises to clean up the whole mess. Protecting the nation from the thousands of disloyal Japanese rounded up after Pearl Harbor is a military policing job, not a welfare workers’ tea party.

In fact, Tule Lake was a citizen prisoner of war camp and a fearful place for most families. A 7:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. curfew was enforced by armed troops inside and outside the fences. As in many prisoner of war camps, the army protected the administration but let prisoners terrorize each other. At Tule Lake, there were gangs armed with clubs and homemade knives, including fanatic pro–Imperial Japan groups called
Hokoku Dan
and
Hoshi Dan
, The Young Men and Young Women’s National Defense Association to Serve the Mother Country, which specialized in midnight raids and savage beatings of anyone they suspected of cooperating with WRA or military officials.

Jim Tanimoto, classified as “disloyal” because he had refused to answer questions 27 and 28, described a night at Tule Lake.

Maybe twelve o’clock, two o’clock, this soldier comes running through our barrack and he’s shouting as loud as he can, says, “Get your ass out of bed and get outside.” We could see a line of soldiers ten, fifteen yards apart. There was probably ten or eleven of ’em. On one side, say there were five soldiers, loading their guns. And there was a machine gun right in the middle of the line. There was another five or six soldiers on the other side.… We’re standing there, middle of the night in our night clothes, and you begin to wonder, man, this is it.… We can see their faces, we can see their reaction, like “Hey, let’s shoot ’em. These guys are animals.” And then the officer in charge stepped forward, he comes forward and says nobody’s going to escape while he’s in charge. And he said that several times, real loud voice.… Next morning we heard that some soldier thought he heard someone planning to escape and that’s why we got awakened.

Most nights, the fear was not of soldiers but of other residents. Tadayasu Abo, an American citizen from Tacoma, Washington, who had registered for the draft before being sent to Tule Lake, testified: “I would have been willing to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States if the government had assured me and my wife and children that we would be free and safe like U.S. citizens.” But he felt that the government didn’t care what happened to the American Japanese. He and his wife witnessed others being beaten, and he lived in fear that his family would be attacked by the gangs at the camp.

California’s former immigration commissioner Carey McWilliams, long after he had praised the army for its efficiency when the camps had first opened, had become an important critic of the evacuation. He reported from the scenes of the new American Japanese exodus.

I witnessed the departure of the segregants from some of the centers for Tule Lake, and it was my most fervent wish that the entire membership of the Native Sons of the Golden West might have been present to see for themselves the anguish, the grief, the bottomless sorrow that this separation occasioned. They might have been convinced—although I doubt even those scenes would have convinced them—that the Japanese are not an inscrutable, unemotional, stoical, or mysterious people. The evacuees realized that those who were going to Tule Lake were destined to be deported, someday, to Japan; and this was a final separation, a fateful farewell. Parents were being separated from children and children from parents; brother from brother, sister from sister. In those scenes was the stuff of timeless tragedy and excellent documentation for man’s inhumanity to man.

On New Year’s Day 1944, 207 Tule Lake stockade prisoners began a hunger strike. Residents found a way to telegraph the Spanish consul in San Francisco. Spain, officially neutral in the war, was designated to handle Japanese affairs in the United States. Spanish diplomats passed the Tule Lake complaints to the War Department in Washington. The complaints were officially rejected, though conditions improved somewhat at the camp. But, then, stories began to appear in foreign newspapers, including Japanese papers, and Radio Tokyo, which reported that “the American Army has entered the Tule Lake Center with machine guns and tanks, and is intimidating the residents.” Then the Japanese government, accusing the Americans of gunning down innocent evacuees, permanently ended prisoner exchanges and exchange negotiations. Before the November incidents, 4,724 camp occupants, including 1,949 American citizens, usually children, were deported to Japan in exchange for American diplomats and businessmen and their families, six thousand of whom were still in Japanese custody, many of them only under house arrest.

*   *   *

On January 14, 1944, the War Department announced that young Nisei were again eligible to be drafted. As a group their status changed overnight from 4C to 1A. The rules had changed again and this created another sharp and obvious divide in the camps. JACL leaders and members were ecstatic; others were furious.

Many young Nisei worried about who would take care of their parents if they joined the military. At Minidoka in Idaho, Robert Mizukami enlisted, telling his younger brother, Bill, to stay in the camp and take care of their parents. Then, when he was in basic training at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, one of the first men he ran into was Bill. “I thought I told you to stay home,” said Bob. They were both in H Company of Battalion 2 in the 442nd. They served together in Italy before Bill was killed in action on July 11, 1944. The night before the brothers were talking and Bill said, “Boy, some of those shells are getting awfully close.” Bob laughed and said, “Well, what do you want me to tell them when I get home?” He regretted the wisecrack for the rest of his life.