Infamy (50 page)

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited Gila River Relocation Center with WRA director Dillon Myer in 1943. That same spring, Japanese American soldiers were hidden from view while her husband was touring western army bases.

The cheerfulness of Ansel Adams’s camp subjects, as seen in his portrait of the Tsurutani family, irked the photographer, but served the government’s purpose in portraying camp life as something like a long vacation.

Mess halls broke up families, as children ate with their friends. In
Farewell to Manzanar
, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston wrote: “After three years of mess hall living, [my family] collapsed as an integrated unit.”

Many teenagers found freedoms in camp; Chiyo Kusumoto said it “was like a dream—going to the grandstands where there were records—and boys and dancing.”

Clara Breed, the children’s librarian of the San Diego Public Library, met hundreds of young Japanese Americans and during the camp years she sent them letters, books, and gifts.

All the camps had boy scout troops. As boy scouts, the future senator Alan Simpson met the future congressman Norman Mineta when Simpson’s Cody, Wyoming, troop came to visit Mineta’s camp.

Christmas at Heart Mountain. Children tried to continue normal American life in camp; it was only years later that they began to ask their parents why they hadn’t fought back.

Some internees, of course, did fight incarceration. Frank Emi led the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, protesting the fact that evacuees were eligible for the draft but were still denied their full civil rights.

In 1943 the WRA, using confusing loyalty questionnaires, sent those deemed “disloyal” to Tule Lake. This photograph is of “disloyals” from Manzanar arriving at Tule Lake.

Tule Lake became a violent place, with pro-Japan activists terrorizing “loyals,” and with troops and tanks regularly moving in to quell riots.

General John Weckerling recruited Private John Aiso as the first soldier to serve as a secret translator in the Pacific, saying, “John, your country needs you.” Later, Aiso said, “No American had ever told me America was my country.”

Harry Fukuhara (right) interrogating a Japanese prisoner of war in in Aitape, New Guinea. Major General Charles Willoughby said, “Never before in history did an army know so much concerning its enemy…. Those translators saved over a million lives and two years.”