Infamy (11 page)

Life
magazine took the same tone in six pages of coverage published on April 6. The popular magazine emphasized the beauty of Mount Whitney towering over the horizon fifteen miles away, reporting that other “volunteer” evacuees drove the 240 miles from Los Angeles to Manzanar in a four-mile-long motorcade of their own cars with army jeeps between each ten vehicles. One unnamed evacuee was quoted saying, “We’re coming here without bitterness or rancor, wanting to show our loyalty in deeds and words.” Then the magazine did add, “Yet Manzanar, for all its hopes and assets, was no idyllic country club. Manzanar was a concentration camp, designed eventually to detain at least 10,000 potential enemies of the United States.”

Most first impressions of Manzanar were a great deal more negative than Ohtaki’s. Jeanne Wakatsuki said after her first night in Block 16, “We woke early, shivering and coated with dust that had blown up through the knotholes in the floor and through the slits under the door.”

Another early arrival, named Yuri Tateishi, had more personal troubles. As she and her children were leaving for Manzanar from the Santa Anita Assembly Center, her one-year-old broke out in measles—epidemics were common in the centers—and was taken from her and kept in a Los Angeles hospital for three weeks. “When we got to Manzanar,” she said,

we went to the mess hall, and I remember the first meal we were given on those tin plates and cups. Canned wieners and canned spinach.… It was dark and there were trenches here and there. You’d fall in and get up until you finally got to the barracks. The floors were boarded, but they were about a quarter to a half-inch apart, and the next morning you could see the ground below. What hurt most were those hay mattresses. We were used to a regular home atmosphere.… It was depressing, a primitive feeling.

When they woke, on straw-filled bags called mattresses, still wearing street clothes, they discovered that the one faucet for the barracks was frozen solid. It wasn’t until noon, as the desert warmed up, that water began to trickle from the faucet.

The place, Manzanar, had a history, primitive and modern. The original inhabitants of Owens Valley were several Native American tribes, particularly Paiutes, who were used as labor and then driven away in the mid-1860s by white settlers, miners, and then farmers attracted by fertile land and the plentiful waters of Lake Owens and the Owens River. It was by all accounts a beautiful place at the base of the snowcapped Sierra Nevada mountain range, often compared to Switzerland. Early in the twentieth century, the city of Los Angeles, desperate for water and expansion, began secretly buying up farms and ranches along the river, which was fed by the snowmelt of the mountains. By 1905, river water was being taken by aqueduct to Los Angeles, particularly for irrigation of the San Fernando Valley. By 1913, city officials wanted more water and built an aqueduct more than two hundred miles long from the valley to the city. Over time, Los Angeles was taking all the water from the river and the lake. By 1929, the valley was a desert wasteland plagued by dust storms from the dry remnants of the ancient lake bed, and the town of Manzanar was abandoned. Like many of the relocation sites, no one lived there after the Japanese left in 1945 and 1946.

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On May 8, the evacuation notices went up on Vashon Island, just south of Bainbridge. The Matsudas, who farmed two acres of strawberries, turned their farm and house over to a Filipino worker, Mack Garcia. Knowing Garcia could not handle the business side of the farm, they worked out an arrangement with a local sheriff’s deputy, B. H. Hopkins, to keep the books and pay the mortgage and buy necessary supplies in return for half the profits. Mary and Yoneichi Matsuda were American citizens, born in Washington, but their tags marked “Family 19788” said “Non-Alien.”

When the Vashon ferry reached Seattle, an angry group of white men in coveralls were waiting with shotguns. “Get outta here, you goddamned Japs,” one shouted. “I oughta blast your heads off.” He spat on Mary Matsuda.

As the evacuation notices went up throughout the western states, there continued to be widespread and growing fear among the American Japanese. It was not only that their lives were being smashed. The Issei, whose average age was fifty-nine, thought there was a chance the government was planning to execute them all. The Nisei, all of them citizens and most of them young—their average age was nineteen—were thoroughly American in their hopes and dreams, only to see their lives ripped up like pieces of paper. Often, the designated evacuees had just a day to put their affairs in order, to sell or rent their houses and farms and cars—usually at a fraction of their real value. Worse than that, thousands of families would lose their homes or farms to foreclosures by banks because their bank accounts were frozen by government order. Many lost their land and the work of a lifetime to plain and open thievery by local officials and residents because California’s escheat laws allowed the state and banks to take over “abandoned properties.” The furniture of the evacuees and, in fact, almost everything they owned was packed into churches, warehouses, and abandoned buildings, easy targets for thieves and vandals.

The Kobayashi family of Klamath Falls, Oregon, sold their house and barn, their land and crops, tractors and horses for $75. American Japanese in Los Angeles faced vultures who were grabbing up the businesses of Little Tokyo. Frank Emi had given up his pharmacy studies at the University of California in Berkeley to take over the family’s prosperous food market at Eleventh and Alvarado Streets in Los Angeles, after his father was badly injured in an automobile accident. A serious young man at twenty-nine, already married and a father himself, he had spent $25,000, all the family had or could borrow, for modern refrigeration cabinets and shelving. Emi had built the place into a small modern supermarket before he was informed he would be evacuated. He had to sell the market and everything in it for $1,500.

Some families took creative measures to protect their property. The Najimas of Petaluma, California, whose father, Jahachi, was already in a Justice Department camp in Montana, got their evacuation notice in May. The two teenage boys in the family, who had pooled their money to buy a good 35 mm camera, were determined not to give it up to the government—or to scavengers and vandals. “They wrapped it up real tightly,” said their sister, Irene. “We had an outhouse, and they wrapped up the camera and put it on a big fish hook. Then they lowered it down the outhouse toilet.”

Others were overwhelmed with despair about their losses. John Kimoto decided he would burn down his house on the day he was evacuated. “I went to the storage shed to get the gasoline tank and pour the gasoline on my house, but my wife … said don’t do it, maybe somebody can use this house; we are civilized people, we are not savages.”

A few white neighbors promised to look after homes and farms—some kept the promises, some did not. In Sacramento, a state agricultural inspector named Bob Fletcher agreed to take over the maintenance of three Japanese farms with ninety acres of vineyards. He paid the mortgages and taxes in exchange for 50 percent of the profits. When the war ended, the Nitto, Okamoto, and Tsukamoto families returned; their land and their profits were waiting for them. The same kind of thing happened in Fresno, where a prosperous local farmer, a retired major league baseball player named Hubert “Dutch” Leonard, who had won 139 games as a pitcher in the American League between 1913 and 1925, agreed to manage a Japanese farm and turned over $20,000 in profits after the war. But such stories were rare.

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Young people often had the hardest time understanding what was happening to them and their families. “As I passed my high school,” remembered Sally Tsuneishi as her train to nowhere pulled out of Los Angeles, “I saw the American flag waving in the wind, and my emotions were in a turmoil. I thought of the prize-winning essay that I had written for my high school English class. It was entitled ‘Why I Am Proud to Be an American.’ As tears streamed down my face, an awful realization dawned on me: I am a loyal American, yet I have the face of an enemy.”

In San Jose, an eleven-year-old boy named Norman Mineta, who was proudly wearing his Cub Scout uniform, had his baseball bat taken away from him by a soldier at his assembly point. Kids were allowed to bring gloves and balls—but no bats. “What did I do to scare the government?” he asked his father.

Another eleven-year-old, Ben Tateishi from San Diego, recalled his walk to an assembly point. “I remember seeing our neighbors peeking out of their curtains. They were friends we used to go to school with, and yet they were not coming out.… They were afraid of being called ‘Jap lovers.’ I felt like an outcast walking down that street. We had a strong feeling of shame.”

When they were called to report at assembly points, young couples faced difficult decisions. Few of the American Japanese knew where they were going to be shipped to and, obviously, no one knew when and whether they would be able to return to their old lives. Even apparently benevolent policies designed to keep families together were actually tearing the lives and dreams of both families and individuals to shreds. Young lovers had to make decisions whether to marry; should they go wherever their parents were sent or should they stay together as a new family? And how do you get married when you have forty-eight hours of “freedom” left and are restricted to an area within five miles of your home and need a government license with a three-day waiting period? Arthur and Estelle Ishigo, an aspiring actor and his art student wife, were a mixed-race couple. He was a Nisei, she was Caucasian. They had married in Mexico because interracial marriages were illegal in California. Would she be forced to evacuate? The answer was no, but like several other Caucasian spouses, she chose to go with her husband.

There are a few stories of young people caught in the whirlwinds of local laws and local law enforcement. To begin with, Japanese American students were not allowed to leave their college campuses for Christmas vacations at home with their families. Love, marriage, and normal life were suspended.

Yoshimi Matsura was about to enter California Polytechnic Institute and planned to marry his American Japanese girlfriend in 1942. Forget that. “We decided to get married because we didn’t know where her family would be sent,” he said. But they needed to get a license from the city hall in Fresno, thirty miles way. They finally found a way to get to Visalia in Tulare County, got a license, and came back three days later to be married. “The government paid for our honeymoon,” he said, “in a tar-papered barrack in Gila River, Arizona, with partitions between ‘apartments’ that did not reach the ceiling. Everyone in each barrack heard every sound.”

Hideo Hoshide and his girlfriend walked and talked for hours about what to do. She lived in Seattle and he lived in Tacoma, in eastern Washington, which was then outside General DeWitt’s Military Area No. 1. Finally he took her home to Seattle. He sat sadly watching her house for a half hour, a silent good-bye. Suddenly she appeared at the door with a suitcase and ran toward his car. He was stunned.

“I’m going with you,” she said. Only thirty years later did she tell her husband that her father had said, “You belong in Tacoma with him.”

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The
San Diego Union
had run fourteen editorials in two months calling for the removal of Japanese residents. More than 1,500 internees from San Diego were sent to Santa Anita, one of the most luxurious racetracks in the country. It was immediately called “San Japanita.” The internees from San Diego were among the more than 18,500 Southern Californians housed at the famous track. Many of them swore that they were in the stall used by Seabiscuit, the great racehorse of his day. One of the soldiers assigned to the center, Private Leonard Abrams, described what he saw that first day. “We were … issued full belts of live ammunition.…We formed part of a cordon of troops leading into the grounds, busses kept on arriving and many people walked along … many weeping or simply dazed or bewildered.”

Richard “Babe” Karasawa, who was fourteen at the time and whose father was being held as a “dangerous person” in Santa Fe, New Mexico, also described the misery pervading the assembly center. The stables were filthy, so much so that Babe Karasawa’s mother had tears in her eyes, saying, “We’re not going in there.” Still, they were lucky in that their neighbors let them borrow their buckets and brooms. In the end, though, as much as they tried to clean the dried horse crud in the crevices of the asphalt, they couldn’t get rid of the stench. “There was manure in there with straw stuck on the side where the walls were spray-painted,” he reported. “We just kept pouring water on the asphalt and scrubbing it with the broom until we got the asphalt clean and my mother said we could move in.”

The conditions were almost unbearable for the evacuees; Karasawa went on to report: “The horse urine was so strong you could never get rid of that smell. So when I’d visit my friend, I couldn’t stay there long because of the horse urine. I don’t know how they could stand it … and I’m from a farm family, I was around horses all the time you know.”

Santa Anita was “home” to thousands of strangers trying to re-create a normal life, with only one laundry shack at the beginning. “I never dreamed I would see my children behind barbed wire,” said Toshio Kimura. “This is a terrible place.… We are not cattle but three times a day, in the morning, noon, and evening, to hear the gong, gong, gong of the bells. Then and there you will see men, women, and children come out of the stables.… My heart aches.”

Dr. Fred Fujikawa, the Terminal Island physician, volunteered to work at Santa Anita. He remembered how they were forced to make the best of limited staffing and resources: “A long shed that is used for saddling horses was converted into a hospital. I was one of six MDs and two medical students caring for 18,000 people.… We treated these people as best we could.” They managed to inoculate every person for typhoid, diphtheria, tetanus, and smallpox, but sadly, “Hundreds and hundreds had severe reactions … high fever, chills, sore arms and severe diarrhea.… Toilet facilities were inadequate with people fainting and releasing their watery stool while waiting their turn in line.”