Infamy (12 page)

Ironically, Santa Anita may have been the best of the assembly centers. Mary Tsukamoto, who lived outside Sacramento, was sent to the Pinedale center near Fresno. She wrote back to friends: “I saw how terrible it looked, the dust, no trees—just barracks and a bunch of people … peeking out from behind the fence.” From the Merced center, a woman wrote: “It’s not very sanitary here and has caused a great deal of constipation. The toilets are in one big row of seats, that is, one straight board with holes cut a foot apart with no partitions at all.… The younger girls couldn’t go to them at first until they couldn’t stand it anymore.”

After three days on a sealed train, Mary Matsuda was shocked when she saw barbed wire and towers at the Pinedale center. She remembered one of her first nights there, when she awoke at 4:00 a.m. and had to use the bathroom. She wrote later, “Once outside, a huge bright light flashed on me.… The search light at the nearby watchtower was focused on me. In the darkness the searchlight had grabbed my privacy and exposed it to the camp guards.” She fled back to the barracks, but “the light followed me and waited at the doorway as I hid, pressing my body against the inside wall of my family’s living space. Finally the searchlight resumed its automatic circuit. Shaking in the darkness I realized that at seventeen, I am a prisoner of war in my own country.”

Back at Santa Anita, a five-year-old boy, George Takei, who later became a famous actor, was fond of the searchlights. He thought they were there to help him find his way to the latrine and back—rather than to prevent him from escaping.

The nights and days were an endless series of humiliations for the evacuees. From day one, incarceration began breaking up Japanese families, humiliating fathers and mothers in front of their children—if the fathers were there. At least two thousand heads of families, Issei men, were in prisons, some of them thousands of miles away from their wives and children. Many of the children found freedom and license they never knew before. Chiyo Kusumoto talked about herself and her friend Fusa Tsumagari, saying, “We were pretty sheltered. We didn’t go out on dates. So when we got to Santa Anita it was just like a dream—having so many people and going to the grandstands where there were records—and boys and dancing.”

Nice enough, but they never got to go to a senior prom or graduation. The 1942 valedictorian of the University of California at Berkeley, Harvey Itano, was in the Sacramento Assembly Center on his graduation day. “Harvey cannot be with us today,” said university president Robert Gordon Sproul. “His country has called him elsewhere.”

Behind barbed wire.

*   *   *

As the Bainbridge Island evacuation had dramatized, the Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast were extraordinarily cooperative prisoners. They peaceably gathered at bus stations, parking lots, and crowded street corners, carrying a suitcase or two, a duffel bag, or possessions wrapped in a tablecloth. Their largest civic organization, the JACL, promoted total cooperation with authorities and actively worked with the military and all government personnel to facilitate the operations that took people from their homes. One Washington State strawberry farmer, Mutsuo Hashiguchi, wrote an open letter to his local newspaper saying, “Dear lifetime buddies, pals, and friends, with the greatest of regrets, we leave you for the duration, knowing deep in our hearts that when we return, we will be welcomed back as neighbors.… We accept the military order with good grace. We write this letter to thank the community for its past favors shown to us, the spirit of sportsmanship showered upon us, and the wholesome companionship afforded us.”

In Berkeley, Yoshiko Uchida wrote on April 21, 1942, that she felt numb as she read the front-page story in the
Oakland Tribune
under the headline “Japs Given Evacuation Orders Here.” The article reported, “Moving swiftly, without any advance notice, The Western Defense Command today ordered Berkeley’s estimated 1,319 Japanese, aliens and citizens alike, to be evacuated to the Tanforan Assembly Center by noon, May 1. Evacuees will report at the Civil Control Station being set up in Pilgrim Hall of the First Congregational Church between the hours of 8:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. next Saturday and Sunday.”

The Berkeley posters were Exclusion Order Number 19, uprooting families from their homes and sending them to the racetrack in San Bruno. The Uchidas had just nine days to move—Yoshiko’s father, a prosperous businessman, was already in detention somewhere—and were helped by two neighboring families, one Swiss and the other Norwegian. “We had grown up with the two blond Norwegian girls,” wrote Uchida. “Their ages nearly matched my sister’s and mine. We had played anything from ‘house’ to ‘cops and robbers’ with them and had spent many hot summer afternoons happily sipping their father’s home-made root beer.”

The Uchidas were now “Family 13453”—with numbered tags hanging from their coats. Despite destroyed lives and uncertain futures, few of the victims of the racist hysteria and panic challenged the government. Only a few Nisei protested the government’s authority to lock up their families. William Kochiyama angrily described his entrance to Tanforan: “At the entrance stood two lines of troops with rifles and bayonets pointed at the evacuees as they walked through guards to the prison compound. I screamed every obscenity I knew at the armed guards daring them to shoot me.”

After families entered, they were in another world, a closed, fearful place. The official story was that the government was protecting the Japanese from violence by whites, but of course the first thing Japanese Americans noticed about the centers and, later, the camps was that the machine guns on towers were pointed in, not out. The Uchidas were assigned Barrack 16, apartment 40, at Tanforan. Yoshiko Uchida described her first sight of their new “home.”

When we reached stall number 40, we pushed open the narrow door and looked uneasily into the vacant darkness. The stall was about ten by twenty feet and empty except for three folded Army cots lying on the floor. Dust, dirt, and wood shavings covered the linoleum that had been laid over manure-covered boards, the smell of horses hung in the air, and the whitened corpses of many insects still clung to the hastily white-washed walls.

High on either side of the entrance were two small windows which were our only source of daylight. The stall was divided into two sections by Dutch doors worn down by teeth marks, and each stall in the stable was separated from the adjoining one only by rough partitions that stopped a foot short of the sloping roof.… Once we got inside the gloomy cavernous mess hall, I saw hundreds of people eating at wooden picnic tables, while those who had already eaten were shuffling aimlessly over the wet cement floor. When I reached the serving table and held out my plate, a cook reached into a dishpan full of canned sausages and dropped two onto my plate with his fingers. Another man gave me a boiled potato and a piece of butterless bread.

There was a daily struggle to make the assembly centers something close to livable. Charles Kikuchi wrote to a friend, “The whole family pitched in to build our new home at Tanforan. We raided the clubhouse and tore off the linoleum from the bar and put it on our floor so now it looks rather homelike.… We have only been here three days, but already it seems like weeks.”

The facilities were awful at the assembly centers, but for most of the residents, particularly younger ones, a life of ordinary American things went on as if there were nothing unusual about living surrounded by fences, towers, and guns. There were boys playing baseball every day, jitterbug parties every week in most of the camps, where some of the boys wore zoot suits with big-shouldered jackets and tapered pants. One of the girls’ social clubs at Tanforan ordered red jackets embroidered with the name “Tanforettes.”

But, as Kikuchi wrote in his diary, family lives were inevitably beginning to change.

Mom is gradually taking things into her own hands.… For 28 years she had been restricted in Vallejo, raising children and doing housework.… Now she finds herself here with a lot of Japanese, and it has given her a great deal of pleasure to make all these new social contacts. Pop on the other hand rarely leaves the house and still retains his contempt for the majority of the Japanese residents. His attitude is intensified when he sees that Mom is gradually moving away from him. I have a suspicion she rather enjoys the whole thing. She dyed her hair today, and Pop made some comment that she shouldn’t try to act so young.

In fact, Kikuchi was more comfortable with the camp guards. “Sort of feel sorry for the soldiers,” he wrote in his diary. “They are not supposed to talk to us, but they do. Most are nice kids … but they have nothing to do.… One of the soldiers suggested we get up a volleyball team and we can play each other over the fence, but the administration would not think of such a thing.” He went on. “What a funny world. They feel sorry for us in our present situation and we feel sorry for them because things are so monotonous for them right now.”

*   *   *

For all the army’s efficiency in moving around large numbers of people, army officers had no experience in re-creating civilian life. Crews built barracks and prison camps—there was a common architecture—but little was done about setting up schools, stores, or other civilian institutions. It was the evacuees themselves who began transforming the racetracks and livestock pavilions into something like poor and overcrowded American small towns with schools, churches, newspapers, and ordinary hospitals staffed by evacuee doctors and nurses. And there were bars. Alcohol was prohibited in the assembly centers and later the relocation camps, but small stills were everywhere, making sake, the Japanese rice wine, and stronger stuff made from raisins, potatoes, and sweet potatoes.

Men and children gathered scrap wood to build furniture for their stables and to build playgrounds for young children. Within weeks, even days, boys and men built baseball diamonds and organized more than eighty leagues at Santa Anita alone. There were Parent-Teacher Associations, garden clubs, Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, and an American Legion post for the Issei who had served in World War I. Women made curtains for privacy in the latrines and shower rooms. At the Fresno Assembly Center, the evacuees formed a chorus to recite the Gettysburg Address to celebrate the Fourth of July. There were American flags everywhere in the centers and camps—and soon there were a few of the little red-white-and-blue window pennants showing a son was serving in the military. A couple already had a gold star in the center, indicating a son or husband had been killed in action. Evacuees also created newspapers in all the centers and camps. In April, the
Santa Anita Pacemaker
included these headlines: “Golf Driving Range Now Ready for Use,” “Model Airplane Meet Results,” “Henry Ogawa Upsets Tanaka in Sumo Bout.”

Nisei students from Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and other colleges and universities organized elementary and high school classes in the grandstands or pavilions at the racetracks and fairgrounds. “We would have seminar classes. Of course, that was very difficult,” said one young volunteer teacher. “Most of us were looking out beyond the trees and we could see cars whizzing by and wishing we were out there too.”

“At the first high school assembly,” said another volunteer, Toyo Kawakami, “after the morning program was finished, as the students stood to return … they began to sing, ‘God Bless America.’ These young people believed in the land of their birth. We teachers could only gaze at each other, some of us with tears.”

*   *   *

Charles Kikuchi, who had always had trouble getting along with his father, had been put in an orphanage at age eight, the only Japanese boy in the place. He rejoined his family when they were interned at Tanforan, and it was the first and only time he lived among many other Japanese and Japanese Americans. By then, he was twenty-six years old and in his diary, on May 7, 1942, he provided a fairly detailed profile of his fellow detainees at Tanforan and their fracturing families.

There are all different types of Japanese in company seven. The young
Nisei
are quite Americanized and have nice personalities. They smile easily and are not inhibited in their actions. They have taken things in stride and their sole concern is to meet the other sex, have dances so they can jitterbug, get a job to make money for “Cokes.” Many are using the evacuation to break away from the strict control of parental rule.

Other
Nisei
think more in terms of the future.… They want to continue their education in some sort of “career,” to study and be successful. The background which they come from is very noticeable: their parents were better educated and had businesses. I asked a girl what her father expected to do after the war and she said that he and his wife would probably be forced to leave this country, but she expects to get married and stay here.

Kikuchi felt the same way, writing, “I just can’t help identifying myself with America; I feel so much a part of it and I won’t be rejected.”

Another time, Kikuchi commented on how American Japanese “can’t throw off the environmental effects of the American way of life which is ingrained in them.” He went on to say with some hope: “The injustices of evacuation will someday come to light. It is a blot upon our national life—like the Negro problem, the way labor gets kicked around, the unequal distribution of wealth, the sad plight of the farmers, the slums of our large cities, and a multiple of things.”

*   *   *

At the centers many kids ran wild for the first time in their lives. At Santa Anita, meals were served in shifts for three thousand people at a time, military-style at long tables seating at least thirty-two people. Instead of sitting with their parents, family-style, young Japanese Americans would go to far ends of the mess halls to sit and eat with their friends. Yoshiko Uchida, earning $16 a month at the Tanforan Assembly Center, a standard salary for evacuee teachers, noticed that when her second-grade girls at the makeshift school played house, they had their dolls lining up at a little mess hall.