Japanese-Americans Fight to Preserve Wartime Internment Camps

Betty Abe, who was 15 years old in 1941 and living on her father's vegetable farm near Los Angeles, remembers how suddenly the atmosphere changed after the order. "It was very scary," she says. "People, just like the snap of a finger, their attitude was different towards us." Some whites swooped down on Japanese communities looking for bargains. Cars, silverware, furniture—all were gobbled up for a fraction of their value. Jim Kubota's family asked a white man living in Seattle to take care of their farm, accepting a meager cut in the deal. "If they'd said they wanted it for free, we'd have had to give it to them," says Kubota, 78, whose family was interned at Minidoka. Because Japanese "aliens" were prohibited from owning agricultural land in 1941—while another law prevented anyone born in Japan from becoming a citizen—many families who reported for internment lost everything. Few internees were able to return to their land after the war.

Arriving at hastily built assembly centers, evacuees were unsure what was to become of them. Cameras, baseball bats, even popguns were confiscated. Tens of thousands spent the first spring of the war living in fairground parking lots and livestock pavilions. Hank Umemoto's brother slept in a horse stall for four months at Tanforan racetrack near San Francisco. Some internees worked as cooks, teachers, doctors, and clerks, but administrators capped pay at $16 a month, believing no evacuee should make more than the $21-per-month salary of an Army private. Later, pay would be bumped to $19.

That spring and summer, the evacuees were shipped to the 10 relocation centers built on remote government land, far from cities and the war industry, where they would spend the next 31/₂ years. When one man stepped off the bus at the Topaz camp in central Utah, he sank ankle-deep into fine dust. "There were mps all over with guns. What could you do but obey them?" says Abe. The barracks were cramped, with little privacy. The communal bathrooms didn't even have partitions between toilets.

Authorities banned the use of the Japanese language in meetings, effectively disenfranchising many of the older immigrants who didn't speak English. Mess halls served mutton and mashed potatoes, food that many internees, accustomed to rice and vegetables, could barely stomach. The dining halls had another unintended consequence: Because families weren't able to cook their own meals, many stopped eating together. "Once we got to Manzanar, we ate with our friends," says Umemoto, 79, who lived on a vineyard near Sacramento before the war. "We didn't associate that much with our own families." Parents and children drifted apart. "There was no family life in the camps," says Kubota.

Still, life behind the barbed wire came to resemble the world outside it. The internees formed newspapers and police forces. They built schools and auditoriums. High school marching bands practiced in the afternoons. Girls ordered batons out of the Sears catalog. Dressmakers and barbers opened small shops. Manzanar even had its own tofu factory.

Tragedy, though, lurked beneath the surface. Marielle Tsukamoto's aunt had a nervous breakdown in camp and was institutionalized. Raymond Uno's father, a World War I veteran, died of a heart attack at Heart Mountain, where he was given a military funeral. "My father was a loyal American citizen who fought for his country," says Uno, 78, a retired district court judge in Utah. "He died a prisoner of war."

The pressures of camp life created a rift in the Japanese-American community. There were a few small-scale riots and strikes as internees pushed back against the guards. In 1943, authorities distributed a "loyalty questionnaire" to every adult in the camps. It asked them to renounce all allegiance to Japan—an act that would leave the first-generation immigrants, who were not allowed to become American citizens, stateless—while also asking them if they would willingly serve in combat. Almost everyone in the camps "passed" the test, but many internees were still appalled. "They rob us of our property," said one, "throw us into concentration camps, knock us down and spit on us, and then invite us to 'prove' our loyalty by volunteering to go into an [all-Japanese-American] suicidal combat team." More than 13,000 Japanese-American men ultimately served in the 442nd regi- ment. By war's end, the unit suffered almost 9,500 casualties.