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Anguish and Confusion in American Internment Camps

Credit: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images/Foreign Policy illustration)

 

Imagine being forced to sell everything you owned in preparation to be forcefully relocated to an unknown territory. Then imagine the conditions of your new home were absolute squalor, yet you were forced to live in them under the threat of being labeled ‘disloyal’ by your country. Once you were released, you were expected to start your life over from scratch without so much as an apology from the country that imprisoned you. This was a reality to nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans and their parents during the Second World War. The interned Japanese community experienced substantial anguish from the United States government due to the unsanitary conditions of the camps and the fears of what life would be like after the war.


The anguish of internment for the Japanese community started when the government ordered mandatory evacuations for the West Coast, forcing thousands to pick up their lives in an instant. Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt, effectively carved into law the legal incarceration of 120,000 Japanese residents. While the document does not specify any one of a specific ethnic group, it does give the military the authority “to name ‘military areas’ from which ‘any or all persons may be excluded’” (Daniels, 46). The entire Japanese community was immediately labeled as a national security threat and ordered to vacate the West Coast, under threat of arrest. The act of forcing an entire ethnic community to leave their established lives under the guise of national security was a logistical nightmare, and Japanese residents footed the bill. According to ‘Civilian Exclusion Order No. 82’, each evacuee could only carry “bedding and linens for each member of the family; toilet articles for each. . . extra clothing for each. . . essential personal effects for each member of the family” (Only What We Could Carry, 8). The military’s restrictions of how much each family was allowed to take are akin to going to a slumber party, not a forced upheaval of an entire family’s life. The confusion of evacuation, combined with the uncertainty of when they’ll see their homes again, allowed a place for anguish to fester within the community. This confusion is best expressed in Ben Iijima’s testimony in Only What They Could Carry where he describes his family packing up their house on a strict timetable established by the government. “We went to sleep on the floor, as we had all our mattresses packed and made ready for the storage man who was to come the next day. The front room was littered with. . . small cardboard boxes filled with things we had repacked over and over again. . . How very confusing, how utterly hesitant we were” (Iijima, 3). Evacuees were given very little information about where they were going and what the conditions were when they got there.


The act of packing up an entire life without the confidence of returning to it permeated the minds of the Japanese community in the weeks leading up to internment and many resorted to selling their homes and businesses at heavily discounted prices. Testimonies from Only What We Could Carry substantiate the forced selling of valuable property through a picture essay detailing the process in which scalpers would buy Japanese people’s valuables at fire sale prices. “Right away, all of these junk dealers came into town, and oh, it was terrible. . . This was in December, so a lot of the families had already bought their Christmas presents, like new phonographs or radios, refrigerators. . . These guys would come in and offer ten or fifteen dollars and because they had to leave, they’d sell” (Fred Fujikawa, 63). The anguish of giving up a family’s Christmas presents because of a forced evacuation highlights the pressure that many Japanese families were under to sell their properties and move on from the West Coast.


When the internees arrived at the camps, their confusion and anguish continued when they saw the squalor condition of the camps. Prior to arrival, Japanese residents were forced to sell their assets to the lowest bidder and the government had frozen Japanese bank accounts, leaving many of the Issei and Nisei generations stuck in a limbo where they had no money and no backup plan for after the war. “It was possible for Japanese American families to leave the West Coast, although relatively few had either the assets or the will to do so. . . the rest of the United States was terra incognita, and few wished to face unknown dangers in unfamiliar territory” (Daniels, 49). The action of freezing assets left many Japanese Americans beholden to the wills of the United States government, where they were forced into poorly constructed camps in the desert. Ernest Uno’s testimony in Only What We Could Carry highlights the squalor that Japanese families were imprisoned in. “These stalls just reeked. . . The amount of lye they threw on it to clear the odor and stuff, it didn’t help. . . It was so degrading for people to live in those conditions. It’s almost as if you’re not talking about the way Americans treated Americans” (Uno, 70). These inhuman conditions reinforced the notion that Japanese families were seen as a separate class from white families. The racism and prejudice they faced when on the West Coast while living as free citizens were rearing their ugly heads once again, only this time in the form of manure-smelling shacks that they were forced into by the government. In addition to poorly disguised shack ‘apartments’, the military seemed to have zero regard for the privacy and overall quality of life within these camps. Hot water ran out very quickly, leaving many without the means to do their laundry, or worse, forcing residents to walk a mile across the camp to find hot water. The conditions of the latrines within the internment camps were degrading and even akin to inhuman. “The lack of privacy in the latrines and showers was an embarrassing hardship especially for the older women, and many would take newspapers. . . or squares of cloth to take up for their private curtain. The Army, obviously ill-equipped to build living quarters for women and children, had made no attempt to introduce even the most common of life’s civilities into these camps for us” (Uchida, 74). The anguish of not having even the most basic of necessities permeated in the minds of Japanese residents and the military’s laissez-faire attitude to provide these basic requirements reinforced thoughts of being exiled from one’s own country and legally given rights. It wasn’t long before the government implemented a system to gauge internees’ loyalty to the United States, threatening their livelihood both inside and outside of the internment camps.


The government’s Loyalty Questionnaire allowed for confusion and paranoia to run rampant within the camps. In 1943, the government announced the need to create an all-Nisei combative team and used a modified version of an alien loyalty questionnaire to gauge the interned Japanese community’s loyalty to the United States. Immediately, one can recognize the contradictory nature of the government’s need for a Japanese infantry unit after imprisoning the potential soldiers of this potential battalion, and many Nisei caught on to this hypocrisy. Two of the questions on the loyalty questionnaire boiled down to: “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States. . .; Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States. . . and foreswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor” (Daniels, 69). The United States had wanted them imprisoned, branding them as ‘disloyal’, yet were asking them for their bodies in fighting a war. Some Nisei answered ‘yes’ to serving in the US Army and demanded that their citizen rights were to be restored. Yet, many Issei got caught in a Catch-22 designed within the questionnaire. Since the first generation of Issei legally couldn’t become citizens of the United States, on account of not being born in the States and due to citizenship caps set in place by the government, answering ‘no’ to an unfettering loyalty to the US would have effectively rendered them stateless. In the novel When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka explores the turmoil a family faced when answering question 28. “[the Mother] said she had nothing to forswear. She’d been in America for almost twenty years now. but she did not want to cause any trouble-- ‘The nail that sticks up gets hammered down’-- or be labeled disloyal. . . ‘There’s no future for us there’” (Otsuka, 99). The internal anguish that the mother in this story is faced with while explaining to her children in terms that they will understand, is reminiscent of countless other experiences within the camps. The government was no stranger to walking back on its promises and the anguish of potentially seeing your children ripped away from you while you were expatriated back to Japan would have been terrifying for any parent. In the story, she and her children answered ‘yes’ to unqualifying loyalty under a potential threat of deportation. This anguish was not uncommon within the internment camps and permeated the minds of internees.

When internees returned to the outside world, confusion and anguish persisted as they now had to navigate the racist culture that had deemed them, enemies. Since the Japanese community was forced to sell their homes and other assets as quickly and cheaply as possible, the transition to life outside of the internment camps was full of hardship and confusion. When the family from When the Emperor was Divine gets released from imprisonment, they are greeted with an empty and vandalized house, a shell of what once was their home. In the chapter, “In a Stranger’s Backyard”, the family recalls a lawyer who had offered to rent their house out while they were away. “Many people had lived in our house while we were away, but we did not know who they were. . . or why we had never received a single check in the mail from the man who had promised to rent out our house” (Otsuka, 110). This passage highlights the post internment confusion that many families faced while returning to the outside world. Their livelihoods had been passed on to the lowest bidder and those who had arrangements before the war now recognized that these arrangements were no longer valid, leaving them scrambling to find sanctuary in a world that didn’t want them there. While the family’s house was heavily vandalized and left to rot, they found themselves in somewhat of a better position than other released internees, many finding themselves in dilapidated trailer parks on the outside of town. This was the case of Estelle Ishigo and her husband Arthur, an interracial couple who went to the Heart Mountain camp together. “When we arrived in Los Angeles, there was no friendly greeting, or even a smile. Nearly 2000 of us, who could not find jobs or a place to live. . . were hustled into segregated makeshift trailer camps outside the city. We were surrounded by barbed wire” (Okazaki, 1990). Even after leaving Heart Mountain, Estelle and Arthur were in conditions not unlike the internment camps they had just left. Estelle documented her life in the trailer park through a series of drawings and paintings, noting that many of the Japanese children were ashamed of their heritage and would identify as Chinese to avoid the public’s persecution.


The anguish of the camps never left the minds of Japanese families and their persecution continued in their lives on the outside. The confusion of finding out their arrangements made before the war were made in bad faith exacerbated this feeling of anguish. Many, including Estelle Ishigo, were left destitute and in poverty for many years after they were released, with health problems caused by the poor conditions of the camps.


Works Cited:


  • ·Daniels, Roger. Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2004.

  • ·Inada, Lawson Fusao, ed. Only What We Could Carry. San Fransisco, CA: Heyday Books, 2000.

  • Otsuka, Julie. When the Emperor Was Divine: A Novel. New York, NY : Anchor Books, 2002.

  • Days of Waiting: The Life and Art of Estelle Ishigo. Days of Waiting. Internet Archive, 2017. https://archive.org/details/Days_Of_Waiting_The_Life_and_Art_of_Esteele_Ishigo_1990.

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