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.
One speaker after another attacked the “inu,” shouting out their names and threatening to kill them. “We should not be afraid to die in this cause as our brothers are dying for justice and permanent peace and the new order in Asia,” one said. Two nights later, on December 7, 1942, some Black Dragons rushed from a demonstration celebrating Pearl Harbor to the camp hospital looking for Masuda, intent on killing him. Masuda survived by hiding under a bed. The camp director, Ralph Merritt, called in 135 military policemen to block the protesters at the center jail, where Miwa and others were being held, and then declared martial law and called in more troops.
“Hold your line. Remember Pearl Harbor!” an army officer shouted as a crowd of camp residents grew bigger and angrier. The soldiers put on gas masks and threw tear gas canisters. One fired his rifle into the crowd and others began to shoot. Ten evacuees were wounded, eight of them requiring major surgery. Two died, James Ito, who was eighteen years old, and Jim Kanagawa, twenty-one. An official autopsy showed that each of them had been hit in the back or side.
Harry Ueno, a thirty-seven-year-old Hawaiian who had lived in Japan for eight years in the 1920s, and who later owned a couple of fruit markets in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills—his clientele included Darryl F. Zanuck, Douglas Fairbanks, and Tom Mix—was another principal organizer of the kitchen unit, which came to symbolize Manzanar’s growing anti-JACL sentiment. He was among the most popular men in Manzanar, well known after he produced evidence, handwritten accounts, that Caucasian superiors were stealing sugar from the residents’ supplies and selling it on the black market. After he was arrested on December 5, accused of attacking Fred Tayama, he was taken in handcuffs to the town jail in Independence. He was held there for a night, then brought back to camp and held in a barracks room used as a temporary camp jail. He watched the action from there and said:
By the time the tear gas was clear, I could see one man, not more than ten or fifteen feet away, on the ground face down. Three men tried to take him into the police station. But when a man is dead, he’s pretty hard to carry. I open the window and I jump out and helped them carry the body into the jailhouse and put it on top of the table. He was bleeding. He must have been hit from behind at close range. Shot running away … I knew the one we brought in. James Ito. He’s eighteen years old. One man, very strong JACL, was sitting in the back of the table. He saw that dead man, and he pounded the table and he said, “I made a mistake! I couldn’t believe the United States could do this!” He was not talking to me or anybody else. He was yelling to himself.
Masuda and twenty other JACL members whose names were on a Black Dragon “killing” list were quickly moved to the old Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Death Valley—and then freed to resettle wherever they chose to go. Miwa, Ueno, and Kurihara, classified as “aggravated troublemakers” along with ten others, were moved to another old CCC camp, this one a thousand miles away in Moab, Utah, hundreds of miles from any sizable town. It was a prison, really, with armed guards watching them shower and use the lavatories. The forty or so prisoners there were isolated from their families, and one wrote to his wife, “I shall be happy to die as a descendant of the Japanese race. I am quite satisfied even to get shot for not licking a white man’s ass.”
The “troublemakers,” who had never been charged with anything, were moved on to an “isolation center” on a Navajo reservation near Leupp, Arizona. Even in official government correspondence, center officials were asking that the center, holding fewer than one hundred men, be closed down. “I should like to see a reexamination of the advisability of continuing the Leupp Center,” said one government lawyer. “I think it is an un-American institution, corresponds to and is premised on Gestapo methods. I don’t like the idea of individuals being sent to Leupp without being told why they are being sent.” The center director, Paul Robertson, told WRA director Myer, “We have 67 men at Leupp Relocation Center. In reviewing the dockets of these evacuees, I was very much amazed at the lack of evidence.”
* * *
Still, back in the relocation camps, most tried to do their best to endure. Louise Ogawa wrote to Miss Breed in September, “Poston would be a paradise if it were not for the dust, heat, wind and insects.… And it was not only insects flying around. Chinese pilots, being trained at an Arizona Army Air Force base, got their kicks by pretending to strafe the camps, flying so low that the barracks shook.”
Then she added: “Life is beginning to settle down to the monotonous regularity that is truly depressing.… Not much sociable visiting going on at all. The afternoons are still too hot to do so. And who wants to walk in dust up to the ankles?”
But Louise Ogawa was not a person to stay depressed for long. She wrote to Helen McNary, Miss Breed’s assistant:
I may have complained about my new environment but I know it will be difficult to adapt myself to the new surroundings right away. I am sure everything will brighten up soon and I will begin to love this place almost as much as my home in San Diego. When I stop to think how the pilgrims started their life, similar to ours, it makes me feel grand for it gives me the feeling of being a pure full-blooded American.
5
A DESERT CHRISTMAS
DECEMBER 25, 1942
Topaz, mockingly called “The Jewel of the Desert,” was the new home for residents rounded up in the Bay Area. The camp was on a plateau forty-six hundred feet above sea level in Utah. No one had ever lived there. Yoshiko Uchida described the terrible windstorms that plagued the camp.
Soon barracks only a few feet away were completely
obscured by walls of dust and I was terrified the wind would knock me off my feet. Every few yards, I stopped to lean against a barrack to catch my breath, then lowering my head against the wind, I plodded on. When I got to school, I discovered many children had braved the storm as well and were waiting for me in the dust-filled classroom.
I made an attempt to teach, but so much dust was pouring into the room from all sides as well as the hole in the roof that it soon became impossible, and I decided to send the children home before the storm grew worse. “Be very careful and run home as fast as you can.”
As my mother, and sister, and I waited out the storm in our room, the wind reached such force we thought our barrack would be torn from its feeble foundations. Pebbles and rocks rained against the walls, and the newspapers we stuffed into the cracks in the siding came flying back into the room. The air was so thick with the smoke-like dust, my mouth was gritty with it and my lungs seemed penetrated by it. For hours the wind shrieked around our shuddering barrack, and I realized how frightened my mother was when I saw her get down on her knees to pray at her cot. I had never seen her do that before.
The wind stopped short of destroying our camp.… Although our barrack had held, I learned later that many had been blown out into the desert.
One of the soldiers there, a Caucasian named Roger Walker, was as shocked as she was, writing home that “the sheeting had cracks at least a quarter of an inch between each board. There was no insulation whatsoever. There were bare light bulbs, eight to every 120 feet of wire.… There is no concrete foundations under the barracks.” He also wrote, “It is really difficult to see how they [the evacuees] survive.”
The Uchida family had good news and a good laugh when their father was released from prison in Montana and allowed to rejoin them. Dwight Uchida, the former Mitsui executive, taken from a comfortable home in Berkeley, became a block captain and a leader of the men who met regularly with camp administrators. He would occasionally be allowed to visit surrounding towns and other camps. Sometimes he would return with treasures, butter, eggs, bacon—and stories. The best one was about coming back to Topaz in an army car and stopping, as required, at the gate. “There are six of us including Caucasians,” said the driver. The guard put his head in the window and asked, “Which one of you is Mr. Caucasians?”
* * *
“I was the first Jap to knock at the gates of Poston,” said Shig Nakashima of El Centro, California. He had led three carloads—eleven people—with three Caucasians to drive the cars back to California. They had a hell of a time finding the three Poston camps. Even locals, and there were few of them, gave them bad directions. If the desert folk were generous with directions, good or bad, none of the cafés along the way were. They refused to give the evacuees food and water.
When they had finally arrived at Poston on May 8, 1942, it was a total surprise to the WRA people working there, who scurried around looking for the right paperwork. After a couple of hours, Nakashima and the ten other evacuees were moved into an empty barracks building. Inside, four soldiers with tommy guns arrived to guard them. The evacuees and their guards were sitting around for hours talking about baseball and life in California. When dinnertime came, the evacuees, who had not eaten all day, were invited to dine with the staff. It was good: green salad, Virginia ham with candied yams, peas and carrots, apple pie, lots of milk—and more friendly conversation. One of the evacuees, Marva Maeda, thought camp was going to be a holiday.
But by the next evening seventy-five more Japanese had arrived by train and buses. One of them, a diarist, wrote “HELL can’t be worse than this.” The temperature was well over one hundred degrees. This time a mess hall was opened and the new arrivals were eating the mush produced by army cooks in training.
“The earth around Poston is not unlike parched flour; it is fine dust which the wind blows around readily,” wrote a high school senior named Lawrence Yatsu. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire and harsh Arizona desert; temperatures could soar to 115 or 130 degrees in the summer. Masami Honda, another San Diegan, wrote of the twenty-five-mile desert bus ride to Poston: “It was so hot, over 110 degrees, that people, especially the older people and the kids, were getting sick. So we opened the windows. Immediately everyone was covered by dust.… I know you won’t believe this, but it’s really true, friends couldn’t recognize each other.”
Mary Sakaguchi Oda, who practiced medicine for forty-six years after leaving the camps, later described the impact on her family: “My older sister developed bronchial asthma in camp. It was a reaction to the terrible dust storms and winds. The asthma became intractable, and she died at the age of twenty-six.” Kanshi Yamashita, a high school senior sent to Poston, wrote, “Those hot summer days and the things we learned! Self-appointed experts in the art of keeping cool, that’s what we are! Saturate the floor with water, take off all clothing, dump all available bath towels in a bucket of water, drape them on oneself à la Gandhi, and there we were, just as hot.”
* * *
Four days after Shig Nakashima arrived at one of the Poston camps, Isamu Noguchi arrived at another. At the time, the only American Japanese there were JACL volunteers helping to finish barrack construction. Noguchi, a New York sculptor, was a solitary volunteer. He was also one of the best-known Japanese Americans in the United States. His work was known around the world and his latest piece was the huge steel bas-relief over the entrance of the new Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Center. The illegitimate son of a famous Japanese poet, Yonejirō Noguchi, and a young American woman, Leonie Gilmour, a Bryn Mawr graduate trying to make her way in the New York publishing world, young Noguchi had been a student of Constantin Brancusi in Rome, a friend of Alexander Calder and Man Ray in Paris, and a lover of Frida Kahlo in Mexico. Born in Los Angeles in 1904, he was back in California on December 7, 1941, driving south toward San Diego to inspect stone for his work when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor on the car radio.
He was tortured by what to do. He was a Nisei, a Kibei, and an American citizen living in New York. He considered himself American and was angry that his father, back in Tokyo, had become an important propagandist for Imperial Japan. He made the rounds of government and military offices in Washington and New York asking what he could do for the American war effort. He was routinely rebuffed. Finally, a friend, John Collier, director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, suggested he go into the new relocation camps and teach art to the thousands of American Japanese headed for those camps.
So he did, voluntarily entering Poston. As a New Yorker, he was not subject to any evacuation orders. His new address was Room A, Barracks 7, Block 5, Poston Relocation Center. He wrote a letter to his half sister, Ailes, explaining what he was doing. She wrote back, saying, “Your very beautiful and moving letter reached me.… I can only urge you to leave as soon as possible. In that intense heat and with no fruit or vegetables or milk you will lose your health.”
By mid-summer Isamu Noguchi realized he had made a mistake going into the camps. He set up an Arts and Handicraft Center in Poston but, really, no one came. He had great trouble communicating with his fellow residents. “I am extremely despondent for lack of companionship,” he wrote to John Collier. “The Nisei here are not of my own age and are of an entirely different background and interest.”
To another friend, he wrote, “The people here are for the most part farmers, completely unintellectual, and with little apparent interest in the policies or politics of democracy, other than resentment with their common lot.”
Noguchi asked to leave on July 28. It was not that easy. DeWitt and Bendetsen of the Fourth Army thought him “a suspicious person.” Secret intelligence files questioned his reasons for moving around California earlier in the year, when he tried to organize a group called Nisei Writers and Artists Mobilization for Democracy. He was being followed and army intelligence officers wrote that he was near military installations when he visited friends in Santa Barbara and Carmel.
Finally, on
November 2, the army allowed his release. He had been inside for 184 days. Driving back to New York, he stopped in Wisconsin to see his friend the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. From there he wrote to his half sister Ailes, “Please let my various friends know that I am on my way. I feel like Rip Van Winkle.”
* * *
The heat. The heat. The dust. Fathers dug foxholes under their barracks so that their children could lie in them for hours in the middle of the day. Spaces underground were sanctuaries in most of the camps. A professional photographer named George Hirahara actually built and equipped a secret darkroom under his “apartment”—ordering equipment from Sears Roebuck catalogs—at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. He took and developed more than two thousand photos.
The cold. Even in summer, the nights could be cold in the desert camps. The winters were terrifying. Charles Hamasaki, who was sent from Los Angeles to the Minidoka camp in Idaho, wrote, “Twenty-five degrees below zero man. I’m from Southern California. I had my moccasins—moccasins, not shoes—with me and just a tee-shirt and overcoat. When we got off the train there was a snowdrift ten feet high … and they have to line us up in the freezing weather to count the heads so nobody would escape.”
Frank Emi, the twenty-nine-year-old grocer who had liquidated his family’s little supermarket in Los Angeles, said this about the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp in Wyoming:
It was in the middle of a dusty prairie. You could hardly see 10 or 25 feet ahead of you.… Course, it turned out dust storms were the least of our worries because the winter was the coldest in Wyoming history; it was 30 below zero. If you went to the restroom, which was located outside, and wet your hands or took a shower your head would be in icicles and if your hand was still wet it froze to the metal doorknobs.… We didn’t even have topcoats when we arrived. We were California boys.
Infamy Page 13
