The beauty parlors, barber shops with manicurists, modern shops and stores which the Hearst newspapers publicized that we would have at the Manzanar Relocation Center were concocted bushels of lies.
The "free" press, like that of Hearst, drummed up the propaganda back in the spring of 1942, that we were being coddled by the government. And this propaganda started as soon as the government began uprooting 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, largely because of the anti-Japanese American hysteria created by the newspapers.
One morning, Elaine, the wife of my longshore friend from San Francisco, came storming into our tar-papered barracks. I asked her what was the matter. She said she had just seen Assistant Administrator Kidwell and had asked him to partition the women's toilet.
"The young girls are so bashful," Elaine complained and told us about mothers who brought curious little boys into the women's washrooms.
"Are the partitions going up?" I asked her.
"Kidwell said the army made the specifications for the buildings," she explained, and "partitions were not provided for. But he said he would see what could be done."
Soon after this incident newer washrooms had partitions put up. Those in already established blocks were installed later. This pleased Elaine immensely, although by her standards her contribution was small. But these little things, small improvements here and there, made the camp more liveable.
Elaine kept calling the camp administration's attention to such matters. In such a way this Jewish woman won the hearts of countless alien Japanese and Nisei who were prejudiced against Elaine's people because of incessant anti-Semitic propaganda they had been exposed to. She had a double-count against her in a community where so many of the people, held behind barbed wire, harbored bitterness against the white people, a category into which Elaine fell.
Manzanar had great need for a woman like Elaine. She put to use effectively all the training and experience she had acquired in the labor and civil rights fields. She had. been district secretary and national vice president of the International Labor Defense League from 1931 to 1941. She had helped organize and had participated in the defense of labor and political prisoners.
This organization which she had led on the West Coast, had come to the aid of Filipino workers on Maui right here in the Territory when, in 1937, the Vibora Luviminda, an organization of Filipino workers, struck the Puunene plantation. It made a vital contribution in preventing the Vibora Luviminda strike from being crushed through the jailing of its leaders.
A Consistent Fighter for Civil Rights
The history of our country is marked by labor and political arrests. And it also shows many victories of the common people who protested such persecutions during times of whipped up hysteria and resultant fear.
In the 1930s. California had 39 long-term labor and political prisoners, more than any other state. In line of labor defense, Elaine had participated in the 1934 waterfront strike, Salinas lettuce strike, lumber and gold strikes, the free speech fight in Los Angeles, organized the unemployed during the depression, and so on. She herself, had been arrested eight times on charges ranging from "suspicion of criminal syndicalism," riot, refusing to move, vagrancy, for which she was fined $1,000. etc. Twice she had been convicted, on the vagrancy charge and on riot. She appealed her cases, handled her own defense and in jury trials won complete releases.
To Elaine, this experience with her Nisei husband, Karl, made her all the more anxious to help the evacuees. Their son Tommy, namesake of Tom Mooney, who was framed up and jailed following the Preparedness Day bombing in San Francisco, asked many pertinent questions about the barbed wire, watchtowers, sentries, and the searchlights that shot strong beams into the camp and through barracks windows.
Cruel and Embarrassing Experiences
The washroom and the mess hall constituted pur community centers for a long time. When we first arrived in Manzanar, small, single-seat privies were placed between blocks. These were built on sleds so that the drum receptacles could be emptied after trucks dragged the privies to a sewer hole.
One morning a truck driver, who generally knocked on privy doors, forgot to do so. He tied a rope to the sled and started the vehicle. A feminine voice yelling from inside the privy attracted people from the rows of barracks, alarmed by the cry for help. Somewhere down the line the truck was flagged down and an old, gray-haired woman stepped out, extremely angry at the careless truck driver.
Cruel and embarrassing experiences often resulted in a camp hurriedly put up, into which the government poured evacuees even before the limited facilities were installed. The people were highly indignant and embarrassed at such a situation as the one described above, but in public, they tried to pass it off as a joke.
Adjustment To the New Life Was Difficult
In the beginning cooks in the public mess lacked essential cutlery. Once in a while when frozen pork arrived, they let it thaw in the sun before cutting it. The result was devastating. From midnight on we rushed to the privies only to discover long lines of the afflicted ahead of us.
Food was a problem. A great many of the evacuees were old rural farmers, and they could not stomach food prepared in bulk in the Western style. Weeks passed before farmers could enjoy food served in mess halls and more weeks passed before food was prepared semi-Japanese style. The cooks had a difficult problem in satisfying the evacuees, for each person was allowed about 35 cents a day for food.
A Community Like Everywhere
It was the farmers who soon began planting vegetables in the fire breaks between rows of barracks, and the vegetables supplanted food supplied by the government.
In this crowded community, people had difficulties in adjusting themselves to the new situation. The older women, for instance, both from the cities and farms, never felt clean unless they bathed, Japanese style, in a tub filled with steaming water. So quite a number of them shunned the showers and relaxed comfortably in laundry tubs in the washhouse. When this news got to the administration's ears, it caused excitement because officials thought the tubs might collapse. Posters prohibiting bathing in laundry tubs immediately went up everywhere.
During this time, all kinds of signs went up prohibiting this and prohibiting that. Some did not make sense, while others did. Some signs were unheeded, like the ones which asked men and boys to refrain from making peeping holes in the fibreboard walls of women's shower rooms.
Manzanar was a community of all types of people, from various economic classes, temporarily stripped of their former status. There were comedies, tragedies, happiness and sorrow. With almost no outside technical assistance, the people made it a functioning society.
Double Standard In Wages For Evacuees and Free People
Our asset was a superabundance of trained personnel and inexperienced college graduates. The West Coast Nisei had plenty of education but little opportunity to use it in their field of aspiration. Thus, college graduates had been truck drivers, soda jerkers, farmers and produce market clerks. Manzanar was a break for them in that they were able to apply in practice what they had learned in theory. It could be a perfect training ground, for white employers were not there to discriminate against them.
A few white administrators sat at their desks to advise us. For the work we did. we received $8 a month for common labor, S12 a month for semi-skilled work, $16 a month for professional services like those of doctors. Later, the wage scale was upgraded to $12, $16 and $19. Some of us worked with white teachers, doctors and others, doing exactly the same thing for a mere fraction of the salaries they drew.
The Ways of the "Free" Press
Because it seemed in the early months of the evacuation that we would be kept behind barbed wire for the duration, Nisei I talked to spoke of the need of small and handicraft industries and agricultural projects at Manzanar.
Others began asking these questions: Why couldn't we be employed outside the center after we had been cleared? We could make contributions to the war effort. We wanted union wages as General DeWitt's Western Defense Council which set up Manzanar, promised the early volunteers. The press had featured this news in such a way that it antagonized the white people against us. Actually, the volunteers received $2.67 for the first month, but this, of course, was not printed in the newspapers.
We Were Not Allowed To Compete In Production
The War Relocation Authority, a civilian agency, took over the administration of relocation centers from the Western Defense Command a couple of months after we settled in Manzanar. An administrator told me just about this time that the WRA was considering work projects for us. But the plan eventually fell through.
"Why?" I asked the administrator.
He said the white people in California and inland states did not want us to have productive communities. They opposed ownership or cultivation of land, even reclamation of waste land.
"Not even to produce Food for Freedom?" I asked him. "No. They don't want you people to produce for the market. In other words, they don't want competition."
"Free" enterprise had to be protected. This was the free enterprise system with its divide and rule employer policy that had fostered anti-Oriental sentiment against immigrants from the Far East. And this "yellow peril" propaganda of the past had laid the groundwork for the evacuation.
Some People Became Progressively Alarmed
Into Manzanar came the Los Angeles Times and the Hearst Los Angeles Examiner. They spewed anti-evacuee propaganda and these were the only dailies we were able to get in camp. The Examiner frequently printed whole-page colored maps of the Pacific war front, showing Japanese victories. We saw groups of evacuees poring over these maps.
Japanese victories combined with anti-evacuee hysteria being heightened by the press brought concern to many in camp. Some began asking: "What if the Japanese landed on the West Coast, even on a short raid?"
"We would be starved out right here," said some.
Others felt that we would be slaughtered by the military guards and additional troops brought to Manzanar.
As the mode of living at Manzanar became more formalized, with the whole efforts of the people not taken to combatting dust and wind and inconveniences of a crowded life, people began to look to the future and began to think what would happen if war came closer to our West Coast.
Evacuees Began Hoarding Food for Any Emergency
Numerous parents would go to the mess halls in the morning, and even if they were not fond of boxed cereals, they took their share anyway. These and other food they could preserve, they brought back to their barracks and stored away. Some day, when the government stopped giving us food, at least the children would have something to eat for a while, they said.
The reactions of many of these evacuees were not unusual. Prior to evacuation, for instance, Attorney General Earl Warren, now governor, had read to the Tolan congressional committee that it was not a mere coincidence that Japanese farmers lived in close proximity to strategic air fields, oil fields, military installations and power lines. The fact is that by 1910 the main geographic pattern of the Japanese population in California had been set. The Japanese immigrants who arrived in California had limited opportunities and had settled wherever they could, and some inhospitable communities had burned down their shacks and others had put the immigrants in box cars with warnings never to return. The military installations, power lines, etc., came long after the Japanese had settled down in the area. They did not know that these areas would become strategic.
This reminds me of those who fight for peace and for civil rights today and are indicted and jailed for their activities. The majority of them had been advocating peace and civil rights long before the Smith Act or the McCarran Act came into being, just as the Japanese had lived in areas long before they became "strategic."
And regardless of these Acts, which must be repealed by the people, those who believe in peace and civil rights will continue to advocate and fight for their realization. The Japanese aliens and their sons and daughters were removed from the strategic areas, but an awakened American conscience brought about their resettlement on the West Coast.