The terms relocation, internment and concentration have been
used to describe the camps uses to incarcerate as many as 120,000 Japanese during
World War II. But by 1998 the term concentration camp had become widely
accepted. According to a joint statement
by the American Jewish Congress and the Japanese American Museum, “A
concentration camp is a place where people are imprisoned not because of any
crimes they have committed but simply because of who they are.” In fact, none
of the Japanese Americans imprisoned in concentration camps during World War II
was ever charged with a crime let alone convicted of one. It’s one of the most egregious breaches of
civil rights in American history.
For an American to lose his constitutional rights and civil
liberties is almost incomprehensible today or is it? That’s precisely what happened in February of
1942 when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Within a couple of
months 40,000 Japanese immigrants who had already been denied citizenship by
the anti-Asian U.S. Naturalization Acts of 1870 and 1920 and 80,000
full-fledged American citizens of Japanese ancestry were forced to surrender
their homes, possessions and freedom. People who were at least one sixteenth
Japanese were covered under the order including children, the elderly and the
mentally ill. One sixteenth.
That German American Caucasians didn’t endure such
indignities suggests that race played a greater role in the treatment of the
Japanese than any plausible military risk.
Race was beyond doubt key to the anti-Japanese hysteria that swept the
country. Lt. General John L. Dewitt who
was placed in charge of the War Relocation Command said that, “A Jap’s a Jap”
and testified before congress that “They are a dangerous element…It makes no
difference if he is an American citizen, he is still Japanese…we must worry
about the Japanese all the time until he
is wiped of the map.” Emphasis
applied. Substitute Jew and see where that thinking leads. Earl Warren, then
Attorney General of California and later Governor of the state and Chief
Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court led efforts to remove all people of Japanese
ancestry from the west coast.
Columnist Harry McLemore fueled anti-Japanese fever when he
wrote, “I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a
point deep in the interior. I don’t mean
a nice piece of the interior either.
Herd’em up, pack’em off and give’em the inside room in the
badlands…Personally, I hate the Japanese.
And that goes for all of them.” McLemore got his wish.
A Los Angeles Times editorial also embraced this view.
“A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is
hatched…So, a Japanese American born of Japanese parents…notwithstanding his
nominal brand of accidental citizenship almost inevitably and with rarest of
exceptions grows up to be Japanese not American. Thus, while it might cause
injustice to a few to treat them all as potential enemies, I cannot escape the
conclusion…that such treatment…should be accorded to each and all of them while
we are at war with their race.”
Emphasis applied.
Topaz Concentration Camp 16 miles west of Delta, Utah consisted of 42
blocks. The use of prison nomenclature is chilling. The 36 residential blocks
were comprised of 12 frame and tarpaper barracks with cots, mattresses, a
single electric light and no plumbing. Living
conditions were so crowded and noisy that privacy was impossible.
Unlike the Manzanar Concentration Camp in California where a
number of buildings still stand, little of Topaz remains. Yet Topaz was four times the size of the
better known Manzanar. At its peak
population of 8,400 it was the third largest city in Utah a dubious honor
enjoyed by camps in Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming, as well. I could identify the foot
print of just one building though the 20,000 acre site is cris-crossed by cinder
roads. Two elevated non-residential
structures are the only ones standing. Architecture
and artifacts cannot tell the Topaz story so the sheer desolation of the site will
have to speak for the 11,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned there.
“When we arrived the camp’s Boy Scout bugle corps played and
an oversized banner greeted us with ‘Welcome to Topaz: Jewel of the Desert,’
but rifles were pointed at us, not outward.” remembers Grace Fujimoto Oshita.
Harry Kitano from San Francisco arrived at Topaz with six
siblings and his parents. He was
sixteen. They lived on block 34-3. Harry was the starting fullback on the high
school football team and played trombone in the school band. He was senior class president and voted Most
Popular Boy along with Tsuki Takaha who was Most Popular Girl. The sound of it is achingly American. When
Harry graduated high school the war was in full swing so he moved inland to Milwaukee
where he worked as a farm hand and played in a jazz band. When the war ended
and he could legally move back to California he earned his Ph.D in psychology
at UC Berkeley. He was a professor of Social Welfare and Sociology at UCLA
until his retirement. Harry Kitano wrote more than 150 books and articles the
last being “Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Achieved
Redress” (2000) which was being revised at the time of his death in 2002.
Julie Otsuka heard stories of her family’s internment from
her mother and grandparents. Julie’s
mother was ten when her family was among those “assembled” at Tanforan Race
Track in San Bruno. Her mother tells the
story of how her nine year old cousin was told that the family was going
“camping” so he wouldn’t be afraid. The boy brought a canteen for the hiking and
camping he expected. That night they slept in horse stalls.
In Julie’s words, “When I was a child my mother would
occasionally mention ‘camp’ to me in passing. ‘That rusty fork in the back of
the silverware drawer, we used it in camp,’ her mother would say. There was the
story of the mess hall cook who mistakenly used Ajax instead of baking soda in
the biscuits or the boy who fell through the roof of the women’s bath house
while sneaking a peak at the bathers below.
Julie’s mother told her that camp was ‘an adventure.’
But tragedy occurred at Topaz on April 11, 1943 when James
Wakasa, age 63, was shot and killed by an overzealous guard when he was too
near the southwest section of the fence. It was the only killing of a prisoner
reported at Topaz. While the record is unclear it is estimated that between
six and twenty internees were killed by guards in the ten main camps. That
there is no verified count is in itself telling.
Despite the injustice, the internees were amazingly
resilient and in the spirit of shikaganai
meaning “It can’t be helped,” made the best of the injustice that had befallen them by making life as normal, indeed as American as
possible. The women swept and dusted incessantly to beat back the dirt that
filled their porous barracks. Children
hauled coal for the pot-bellied stoves.
The men built furniture from scraps of lumber. Gardens were planted.
Schools were established and sports were played. An art school taught by
established Japanese American artists grew to more than 600 students. It may have
been the largest art school in the United States.
Sociologist and Psychiatrist Alexander H. Leighton spent fifteen months in the camps before writing the 1945 book The Governing of Man. Paraphrasing from the book; Time magazine wrote that “many an American simply fails to remember that U.S. Japanese are human beings.”
Topaz was raised immediately after its closing in late 1945 as
if to excise its existence from history.
Upon release from the camp each internee was given $25,
roughly the monthly wage paid an Army Private.
While widely discredited, our World War Two Concentration Camps
have defenders. And there are those who see the camps as models for the
treatment of dangerous racial elements in the American population today.