Infamy (16 page)

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 confiscate 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.”

Mrs. Yoneda, who was Caucasian, and her young son, along with sixty other relatives of the new privates, were moved into administration buildings for safety and then sent to an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Death Valley. After two weeks they were allowed to go home, even to San Francisco, where Mrs. Yoneda’s parents lived. Her dark hair turned white in the three weeks after her husband left. In San Francisco, she was required to inform General DeWitt personally each month of her whereabouts and to report whether little Tommy had done anything to compromise national security.

At the same time, late in November of 1942, JACL officials in the camps were allowed out for a week to meet in Salt Lake City. The organization, which preached cooperation with administrators of the camps, was defined by its official hymn:

There was a dream my father dreamed for me

A land in which all men are free—

The desert camp with watchtowers high

Where life stood still, mid sand and brooding sky

Out of the war in which my brothers died

Their muted voices with mine cried—

This is our dream that all men should be free!

This is our creed we’ll live in loyalty

God help us rid the land of bigotry

That we may walk in peace and dignity.

The main piece of business discussed by the JACL leaders in Salt Lake City was the determination of Mike Masaoka, who lived in Utah and was never in a camp, to petition the War Department to once again allow Nisei to serve openly in the armed forces. Returning to the camps, the officials were the targets of anti-American thugs. Saburo Kido, the JACL president, had backed Masaoka’s efforts, and was attacked in his quarters at Poston by eight masked men, later identified as
Kibei
between the ages of eighteen and thirty. He was hospitalized for more than a month. The same thing happened to Dr. Tom Yatabe at Rohwer and to James Oda at Manzanar.

On December 5, 1942, at Manzanar, Frank Masuda, who had owned a restaurant in Little Tokyo and was a leader of the JACL, was badly beaten up by several other evacuees. He identified Dick Miwa, a camp cook and a
Kibei
, as one of his assailants. Miwa was already known as one of the kitchen workers attempting to organize a union. He had also publicly accused the camp’s chief steward, a Caucasian, of stealing rations and selling them outside on the black market. Joe Kurihara quickly organized a mass demonstration demanding Miwa’s release from the jail in Independence.