Japanese American internment camps

Yes and no. German, Austrian and Italian internees were allowed to take a few personal possessions into camp with them, but everything else had to be left at home. There was always the possibility of homes being looted before internees were released as being non-threatening to national security.

 

perception of the "camps", even though they were an embarassing portion of American history. Especially in a nation which had not yet come to grips with its "Jim Crow" laws in the south. That said, here is my contribution to the subject.

After the "Gentleman’s agreement" of 1907 Japanese immigration was curtailed, both in the recruiting and immigration phases. But those already in America could not become naturalized citizens. But by the time of the Pearl Harbor attacks, when removed from the west coast they could retain their assets, their lands (Isei could own real estate in any state outside of California) but Neisi could legally own real estate in every state. Their possessions, their bank accounts and other assets, their household goods, their emerging crops were categorized and recorded; nothing was confiscated. In California the first generation Japanese could only be tenant farmers, and their share of the last crop was sold and the money placed in their bank accounts. The California agri-land was then rented to non-Japanese persons in their absence.

The same applied to the land they owned in Oregon and Washington, especially the Yakima Valley where they were recognized as the "best farmers". Their bank accounts were left intact, and continued to accrue interest. Their household goods were inventoried and stored. Warehouse receipts were issued to the owners. Unfortunately many lost or mis-placed the receipts. These lost receipts and other disputed claims led to the 1948 "War Loss Claims Act", and the first compensation for lost property. During their internment, much of the possessions were later shipped to them at Government expense, particularly in the case of those families who relocated themselves in the interior, accepted employment and established new homes away from the exclusion zones. Much of this was gleaned from an interview of retired Col. Karl Bendetsen in 1972 and his records. He was one of the many officers trying to supervise this need of removal of foreign nationals and their families from our west coast.

Colonel Bendetsen also added this; "In furtherance, from the very beginning I initiated diligent measures to urge the Japanese families to leave with the help and funding (whenever needed) of the WCCA (Wartime Civil Control Administration) on their own recognizance and resettle east of the mountains. To this end, I conferred with the Governors of the seven contiguous states east of the mountains. I called a Governors’ Conference at Salt Lake City. I invited them to urge attendance by members of their cabinets, by members of their legislatures and by the mayors of their communities. It was a large and successful conference. I advised them in full, sought their full cooperation, asked them to inform their citizens and to welcome and help the evacuees to feel welcome without restrictions, to become members of their inland communities and schools and to help them find employment and housing. I told them that these people would become a most constructive segment of their respective populations. These who resettled certainly did. Where needed I told them that the WCCA would provide financial support for a limited period.

"Further to this end, I conferred with the elders of each major Japanese community along the Pacific Coast, wherever they were and, as well, in Arizona and New Mexico. I carefully explained all this to them. I urged them to persuade their fellow Japanese to leave before the evacuation to assembly centers began and while it was proceeding. I assured them that the WCCA would provide escort, if requested, by those who felt insecure. We organized convoys and shipped to those, who had resettled, their stored possessions." (this was before the Executive Order was issued making it mandatory, the proposed volunteer method failed)

Now here is where this old file is pertinent, with regard to the Latin American Axis nationals, it is generally acknowledged by those who have completely checked the records that only approximately 8,500 Axis nationals (Germans, Italians, and Japanese) were arrested and interned by 15 Latin American countries during WWII. In accordance with treaty obligations, the U.S. was obligated to accept Axis nationals for internment in the U.S. from those Latin American countries which were unable to establish costly internment programs of their own. Not all of the 8,500 were deported to the US however. But at least twelve Latin American countries actually deported a total of about 3,000 Axis nationals consisting of just under 2,300 Japanese (500 of whom who had already applied for repatriation to Japan at the Spanish Embassy in Peru) and just over 700 Germans and Italians. Consequently, the U.S. was only involved in the internment of about 3,000, not 8,500 Latin American Axis nationals. The others were repatriated to their home nations, some willingly, some not. One of the tragedies here was that even German Jews who had found refuge in Latin America were returned to Nazi Germany where they certainly were put in camps, and much less pleasant than the American versions.

Diplomatic cables decoded from the Japanese embassies in May 1941 said in part; "We have already established contacts with absolutely reliable Japanese in the San Pedro and San Diego area, who will keep a close watch on all shipments of airplanes and other war materials..." That same cable also stated that the Japanese had Japanese-American spies in the Army and that they were watching traffic crossing the American / Mexican border. However, the only Americans charged and convicted of spying for Japan in the thirties and forties were Caucasian. Seems like I read of seven Causcasians somewhere. The FBI discovered after the war that Japan actively recruited Caucasians for gathering intelligence, not Japanese/Americans.

Just another reading or the "internment" policy during war-time. Some of it was a disgrace, I don't personally hide from that, but much of it was as well and kindly done as could be expected under the circumstances of the moment. The lens of hindsight sometimes can be not only 20/20, but ignore what was actually "known" at the time and make judgments which wouldn't apply.

In early 1942 there were also about 58,000 Italian and 22,000 German aliens in the Pacific states alone. A good many of the other German aliens were recent refugees from Nazi Germany and settled in the "east coast" areas. Many of them ended up interred in Texas at Crystal City. Most of the Germans, and a large proportion of the Japanese and Italians, lived in or near the principal cities and adjacent strategic areas. So was it wrong in the existing times? Or was it a totally justifiable protection of our coasts? The Japanese-Americans living outside of the mileage exclusion zones were not forced into the "relocation camps". Many actually choose to go to the camps due to the "hostility" of their former neighbors however, even though they were NOT required to do so by "law" due to their area of residence. Residents of such centers were free to leave when outside employment and living arrangements for them could be obtained away from the exclusion zones.

Of the approximately 112,000 Japanese evacuees, 15,000 were immediately able to relocate elsewhere on their own. Another 35,000 who did enter the relocation centers eventually left and resettled in other parts of the country as employment or college opportunities arose during the war years. In some instances, Japanese living outside the exclusionary zone sought and received admittance to these centers as they were excluded from rationing.

While the camps had been hastily constructed, and were rather shabby to start with, those in the camps had a higher standard of living (no food rationing), free medical, free clothing, continued education, a lower death rate, and a higher live birth rate than the rest of the US.

And don't let us ignore the so-called "no-no boys", these were Japanese-American males who answered no to two questions on the new "loyalty questionaire" when they were questioned. (# 27 & 28) Question 27 asked; "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered or called?" Question 28 asked; "Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?" They responded to each with "no".

Only 9,009 people of direct Japanese ancestry in the US were interned under the "Alien Enemy Act of 1798". At the beginning of the war, the instances of the only American citizens asking for renunciation of their citizenship were of Japanese ancestry. 5,620 of these renunciants, who had asked to be repatriated to Japan, were not included in the general internment totals. 19,000 Japanese actually applied to be returned to Japan during the war.

As I said, with all due respect to the 442nd, 94% of military-aged Japanese/American males said they would not serve in the U.S. Armed Forces, the "no-no boys" are in this group. Approximately 20,000 Japanese-Americans who were in Japan at the start of the war joined the Japanese war effort in both the Imperial Army, and also as official interpreters at camps holding allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

Iva Toguri (Tokyo Rose) is one of the exceptions, she refused to renounce her US citizenship, since she didn’t speak Japanese, and felt uncomfortable in Japanese society; she applied numerous times to be allowed to return to America.

And contrary to the opinions of some, the "reparations" payments to the relocated Japanese-Americans in the eighties and nineties wasn’t the only attempt to rectify this "theft" of property, in spite of the difficulty in qualifying for compensation directly after the war in the 1948 act, about $37 million in compensation was paid to "relocatees". Another thing that doesn't get brought up very often.

The $20,000 per person paid out during the Reagan administration was the result of the commission established by Jimmy Carter, and finally settled under Reagan totaling $1.2 billion dollars, that one is remembered, but not the original $37 million. That one was the "American Japanese Claims Act", which stated that all claims for war losses not presented within 18 months "shall be forever barred" (turns out they weren't). Eventually in 1948/49, 26,568 settlements were made to family groups totaling more than $37 million in 1948 gold backed dollars. In September of 1992 the "Amendment of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988", appropriating an additional $400 million in order to ensure that all remaining Japanese-Americans received their $20,000 redress payments.

As to the Italians and Germans, there were some 600,000 Italian citizens in the United States classified as "enemy aliens" after World War II began. And ALL were put under extreme travel restrictions. On the west coast alone, about 10,000 Italian-Americans were forced to move from their homes in California coastal communities to "relocation" camps, just like the Japanese. 10,905 Germans and German-Americans as well as a few Bulgarians, Czechs, Hungarians and Romanians were also initially "interned". And one small group was only finally released from Ellis Island internment (shipped in from Crystal City and other camps) long after the end of WW2. I think most were deported to West Germany, Portugal and Spain. While it is only "humorous" in retro-spect, Joe Dimaggio's father was "travel resticted" to the point that he couldn't cross the bay to see his son play in San Fran.

Anyway, a large number (about 35,000) of the original Japanese/Americans who were relocated away from the west coast found residence outside the exclusion zone on their own, and left the camps within months. The National Student Council Relocation Program, which only gave benefits to Japanese re-locatees, funded 4,300 individual scholarships in more than 500 colleges and universities located outside of the exclusionary zone.

In the Hawaiian territory, which had a huge Japanese population (1/3 in the census) it is true that the bulk of the Japanese population on Hawaii were NOT "relocated" (as they were on the mainland), hundreds of the Issei leaders of the Japanese community in Hawaii were immediately rounded up and sent to camps on Sand Island, Honouliuli, Maui, Kaui, Lanai, Molokai, the Big Island and the most militant as far away as Tule Lake; California on the mainland. Then most of those from Hawaii who were sent to the mainland were Kibei who had been sent back to the Japanese islands for education and returned to the US with the militaristic mindset of their compatriots in Japan. The greater proportion of the community leaders detained were older, and were not sent to the mainland, but outlying islands. This selective internment/detention had the effect of "controlling" those remaining on the islands (after interogation/interview), and allowing them to continue to work in support of the economy. Given that about a third of the population of the Hawaiian territory was of Japanese ancestry, wholesale detention of Japanese Americans (Issei, Nisei, or Kibei) in Hawaii would have crippled the local economy. As well as reducing American imports of sugar from the islands.

The 1940 Census enumerated 158,000 Japanese, both U.S. citizens and resident aliens, resided in the then territory of Hawaii. Of this number, slightly less than 1,300 were actually interned, but the great bulk of them left to work the plantations of the Dole company (and others) had their movements restricted for a great deal of time during the "war years". They weren't "exempted" from internment exactly, just "controlled" on an island group, rather than left in place on a coast line of the mainland.

In the US, only one of the ten camps, Tule Lake, was in fact turned into a prison camp, with watchtowers, fences, and guards. Tule Lake was reserved for those Japanese who were specifically suspected of espionage, treason, or other such disloyalty, and their families could come with them if they asked to do so. Some of the families were held at Tule Lake because they requested to be repatriated to Japan. Other foreign nationals would be held in facilities run by the Department of Justice and the U.S. Army. There were 27 U.S. Department of Justice Camps like Crystal City, Seagoville, TX; Kooskia, ID; Santa Fe, NM; and Ft. Missoula, MT. These camps were also used to incarcerate 2,260 "dangerous persons" of Japanese ancestry taken from 12 Latin American countries and sent to the US. These were held by the US State and Justice Departments. Approximately 1,800 were Japanese Peruvians.

Back to the property of the Japanese-Americans, in fact during the relocation/internment process a great number of precautions were taken to protect the property of those forced to move away from the coast. The personal possessions of Japanese were indexed and warehoused, and the owners issued receipts. Unfortunately for the Japanese-Americans, many of them misplaced or lost the receipts. Items requested would be shipped to the camps free of charge if they were allowed in the camps themselves. Farms in Oregon and Washington were tended in their owners' absence, the products sold, and the proceeds deposited in the proper bank accounts for the owners less costs.

In spite of these precautions, many families still suffered heavy losses as a result of the internment. A key contributor to their losses was California's own; "Alien Land Act", which prohibited non-citizens from owning property in that state. As a result, many of the Japanese American farmers were actually tenant farmers and lost their rights to those farm lands. To compensate these losses, the U.S. Congress on July 2, 1948 passed the "American Japanese Claims Act ", stated that all claims for war losses not presented within 18 months "shall be forever barred". Approximately $147 million in claims are submitted, 26,568 settlements to family groups totaling more than $38 million are disbursed in the end. The lost receipts surely came into play here.

Besides the 1948 act for claims, other laws were passed to reimburse the Japanese/Americans:
1951: PL 82-116 1952: PL 82-545 1956: PL 84-673 1960: PL 86-782
This settled the matter (for a while). However, a movement beginning in the mid-1960s, focused on condemning America as a racist society, pushed to reopen the issue and gain government apologies and further reparations.
In 1972: PL 92-603 - Social Security adjustment was passed for Japanese/Americans.
The movement's first real success was in 1976, when President Gerald Ford proclaimed that the evacuation was "wrong".
And under Carter, in 1978: PL 95-382 - another Social Security adjustment was passed.
Then in 1980, again under Carter, a commission was established by Congress to study their matter. The commission's refusal to address non-Japanese interment/relocation was questioned however. On February 24, 1983, they issued a report entitled "Personal Justice Denied".
President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which provided redress of $20,000 for each surviving detainee, totaling $1.2 billion dollars. Despite congressional cries to individually determine worth, this was a straight tax-free dole, and included about 3,500 Japanese who had renounced their citizenship during the war and asked to be returned to Japan. It also applied to hundreds of persons who live in Japan today and have virtually no connection to the United States.
Finally on September 27 1992: PL 102-371 (H.R. 4551) the Amendment of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was passed, and an additional $400 million in benefits was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, who also issued another formal apology from the U.S. government.

 

At the time, it was a very good idea, and definitely was done to enhance national security. The US government, through the Office of Naval Intelligence, was aware of a Japanese espionage ring operating on the West Coast and employing both American citizens of Japanese ancestry and Japanese nationals resident in the US. Intercepts of Japanese diplomatic messages revealed active plans to use both first and second generation Japanese-Americans in intelligence gathering activities which would have been most inimical to American interests in the case of war.

There was no way of knowing exactly which persons of Japanese ancestry were disloyal, but the number was estimated to be something on the order of 15,000. With no time to thoroughly investigate that many people, the only reasonable alternative was to exclude all of them from the West Coast until such time as they could be investigated and sorted out.

See; PAGE A-51

 

was their Nazi interment camps within the USA, or did Governments lack of knowledge show bias and racism to an unknown culture and reveal the lack of intelligence against only 1 race of people..http://http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR9BfuhqdcU&feature=related

these american loss\ers seem more in light to be athreat the the descriminated against Japanese citizens,,,and to allow these to actually back hitler, and not be interned after German declared war dec 10 1941 is a jokehttp://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs0xYFZZNBI&feature=related

 

I think I'd reply to that in more detail if I was sure what was being said.

 

Good information in your post, Clint. I hadn't realized there were attempts to keep records for the Japanese internees, or that attempts at reparation were made earlier in the U.S.

bf109 emil - do a search on the Forum or online, and you will find information on the Canadian internment of Japanese-Canadians, Ukrainian Canadians, and some German-Canadians. Unfortunately, it is true that a lack of understanding and unfamiliarity with certain cultures who were newer to North America made it easier to isolate them, vs the German ethnic group which had a history within in North America for generations. Also, you need to recall that Germany did not attack the U.S. (its merchant navy yes); Japan did attack the U.S. It couldn't help but influence the attitudes of people and the bureaucracy.

 

I posted this elsewhere but thought they would be relevent here also.

An Internment Camp Within an Internment Camp


Remembering Japanese-American Forced Labor on an American Indian Reservation






By FRANK MASTROPOLO
Feb. 19, 2008



For Japanese-Americans, Feb. 19 marks the Day of Remembrance. That's the day in 1942 when President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 and put into motion the government's forced removal and imprisonment of more than 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry — 60 percent of whom were American citizens.
Photos
PHOTOS: A Rare View of Auschwitz

Military officials considered anyone of Japanese descent, whether a U.S. citizen or not, to be a potential spy and a security risk.
With little notice, Japanese were gathered up and ordered to leave their homes, businesses and friends to be incarcerated without trial. They could only take what they could carry and were moved to 10 internment camps spread across some of the nation's most inhospitable terrains.

In "Passing Poston: An American Story," a documentary premiering this month, filmmakers Joe Fox and James Nubile disclose a surprising and little-known secret about the Poston internment camp in the Arizona desert. Poston was built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation for a specific reason: Japanese detainees were brought to the desolate location to provide free, forced labor for the American government.
Ruth Okimoto, who spent her childhood years locked up in Poston, was haunted decades later by the experience. Cameras tracked her journey as she traveled back to Poston and research its beginnings.
"There was a different purpose for Poston besides just being an internment camp. I think the first discovery that absolutely startled me was finding out that the Office of Indian Affairs [now the Bureau of Indian Affairs] was in charge of running the Poston camp, along with the War Relocation Authority, who ran the nine other internment camps."
The Japanese were ordered to build the infrastructure — schools, dams, canals and farms — so the U.S. government could consolidate scattered American Indian tribes from smaller reservations in one place after the war.
Okimoto learned that the U.S. government had been trying unsuccessfully for decades to bring water from the Colorado River to the reservation. Historian Michael Sosi, of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, said it was a government official named John Collier who figured out an ingenious way to accomplish the task.

ABC News: WWII Internment Camp: Secret Emerges

The rest of the article,

ABC News: WWII Internment Camp: Secret Emerges
ABC News: WWII Internment Camp: Secret Emerges

 

Celebrating a shared history


Email Picture

Bryan Chan / Los Angeles Times​

Former internee Ruth Okimoto visits the burned-out remains of the auditorium at the Poston internment camp. She was among more than 17,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were held at the camp during WWII. The camp was south of Parker, Ariz.



POSTON, ARIZ. -- On an uninviting swatch of arid desert, marked by sagebrush and mesquite trees just east of the California border, the winds of war blew together the fates of two beleaguered peoples.

In a now familiar tale, 120,000 Japanese Americans were removed from the West Coast and relocated to internment camps after Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent U.S. entry into World War II. But in a little known piece of that history, the U.S. government sent nearly 20,000 of them to three camps on a Colorado River Indian Tribe reservation at Poston with an explicit plan to use Japanese Americans -- most of them Californians skilled in farming -- to help develop tribal lands for later Indian use.





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Under the plan, the Japanese Americans helped clear lands and build irrigation systems, started farms and built schools from handmade adobe bricks. Their work in developing a reservation that previously had no electricity, running water or modern homes -- many families lived in mud huts -- laid the foundation for the tribe to jump-start its standard of living and thrive financially, said Michael Tsosie, director of the tribal museum.

Now, 66 years ago today after then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the relocation, the two peoples are deepening their shared bonds.

Last week, Native Americans and two dozen former Japanese American internees gathered in Poston to memorialize their experiences and view a new documentary about it, "Passing Poston," by New York filmmakers Joe Fox and James Nubile. They also discussed plans to restore some of the barracks, seek national historical landmark status for the site and build a museum about their shared history.

"The basis of our present-day wealth is the result of the activities during the war years by the Japanese," Tsosie said. "Maybe if they knew that all of their suffering and hard work did make a remarkable difference in the lives of so many tribal people, it might bring them some peace."

The lasting effect of their fateful desert encounter remained largely hidden for decades by elders in both communities who declined to talk much about it, both sides say. In 2000, however, Berkeley artist and researcher Ruth Okimoto, 71, began researching Poston in a personal quest to understand the experience that had torn her life apart.

Okimoto, a Tokyo native brought to San Diego as an infant by her Christian missionary parents in 1937, was only 6 when she arrived at Poston in 1942. Her memories of the time are sketchy: a German neighbor making her family split pea soup before soldiers with rifles and bayonets took them away. Shame at having to share latrines and showers with so many strangers. Hunting for petrified wood and scorpions in the vast, forbidding landscape.

Other, older former internees who journeyed to Poston last week shared their memories. Kiyo Sato, a Sacramento retired school nurse who was 19 at the time, remembered fainting from the blistering desert heat, which climbed as high as 125 degrees.

San Pedro resident Mary Hayashi, also 19 at the time, remembered arriving at the dust-filled barracks bereft of any furniture but an oil stove. She collapsed to the floor in tears.

Okimoto was chased and spit on, rocks heaved at her by schoolmates when she returned to her San Diego elementary school in 1945. As she became an artist in the 1970s, dark and troubling images began to surface in her work -- a two-faced portrait of herself, the American flag covering her child's eyes and adult mouth. That began her journey of self-discovery that, in 2000, led back to Poston.

"I needed to go deep into my subconscious to see who I am," Okimoto said.

For their part, the tribal people had no say over the mass encroachment on their land, museum director Tsosie said. Only when government trucks began rolling in to build the barracks did leaders begin to ask questions.

"The other Indians didn't like them coming in," recalled Gertrude B. Van Fleet, 83, who used to visit the camps with her father, the Mohave tribe's first Presbyterian preacher who ministered to the internees. "They were worried because people were always coming in to take land from the Indians. Some spoke out real hard. Some wanted to chase them out."

But the Indians were told: "It's part of the war effort. Don't ask questions. Do your patriotic duty and accept it," Tsosie said.

The Japanese American population, peaking at 19,000 scattered over three camps, dwarfed the 1,200 Mohave and Chemehuevi Indians living on the reservation at the time. But the encounters were limited, both sides say. An armed guard was posted at a canal that divided the populated upper reservation with the lower reservation where the internment camps were placed. And the Indians were told not to mingle with them.

Still, Tsosie said his own family remembered renting them horses and trading fish they caught from the nearby canals and Colorado River for camp provisions of sugar and flour. There were basketball games between Japanese Americans in Poston and American Indians from a nearby high school in Parker.

Dennis Patch, who heads the tribal education department, said many Indians felt empathy for the Japanese Americans. The tribes themselves had been herded up and forced onto the Colorado River Indian Tribe reservation when it was established in 1865 to open land for white settlers, he said.

"They saw people captured and put some place they didn't want to be, and they understood that," Patch said.

At least some tribal students were aware that the Japanese Americans had begun to transform the barren reservation. In one school essay, a student wrote that the bountiful fruits and vegetables they grew -- cantaloupe, lettuce, spinach and the like -- "were as good as can be grown anyplace. They have shown that this valley has great possibilities as a vegetable growing center," according to documents unearthed by Okimoto.

What the Berkeley researcher would discover was that the U.S. government had deliberately selected Japanese Americans with farming experience from California Central Valley towns like Sacramento, Bakersfield and elsewhere, to help develop the reservation's agricultural potential, Okimoto said. Researching documents in the National Archives, along with Colorado River Indian tribal archives and other sources, Okimoto discovered the then-named Office of Indian Affairs partnered with the War Relocation Authority to develop an internee labor plan..

Commissioner John Collier of the Indian Affairs office had long sought federal funds to bring irrigation and other projects to the reservation to make it self-sufficient so the government could bring in other tribes. World War II finally gave him an opening to offer the land up as an internment camp in exchange for permanent infrastructure improvements.






Among other documents, Okimoto discovered an April 1942 letter from William Zimmerman, the Indian office's assistant commissioner, to the House of Representatives that outlined the plan. Zimmerman proposed using the Japanese to transform 10,000 acres -- clearing it and constructing canals, drainage ditches and flood levees -- and then cultivate it "as rapidly as possible."

The projects were never fully completed, but the reservation ended up with new roads, electricity, irrigation systems, housing and the like.

Many tribal members were able to receive parts of the old barracks as their first modern homes, including Van Fleet. Before the Japanese came, she recalled, she lived in a mud hut and used kerosene lamps for lighting. Other wartime buildings were maintained and used for such purposes as tribal schools, youth centers and alcohol-rehabilitation programs. The buildings, now shuttered, were visited last week by several of the former internees and form the heart of the application for national historical landmark status.

Overall, the improvements gave the Colorado River Indians a "step ahead" on postwar progress compared to other tribes, Patch said.

They began leasing land for commercial agriculture and started their own farming enterprises as well. The tribal budget has grown from an annual $7,000 in 1952 to $28 million today.

"Much of this would not have happened without the Japanese laying the groundwork," Tsosie said.

Last week, on a wind-swept patch of desert, where Japanese Americans erected a stone memorial monument in 1992, Tsosie delivered his thanks to several former internees. Tribal youth performed traditional Indian songs and dances. A Japanese Buddhist priest burned incense and said prayers.

For Okimoto, the tribal progress has allowed her to find meaning in her personal saga of suffering.

"Here were two minority groups struggling," she said. "If what we did helped them, then I guess it was worth the suffering the Japanese endured during the war."

Celebrating a shared history - Los Angeles Times

 

Members may be interested in this very famous event in Australia.


The Cowra Breakout

Cowra breakout - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Many POW camps were established in the Shepparton area in central Victoria. They were generally kept in separate camps for each nationality.

My grand-father was the 'funeral director' in Shepparton, then my home town also, and I remember him relating soon after the war that he OFTEN had to go out to the near-by japaneses POW camps at Murchison and Tatura to attend to the burial of the jap soldiers who had suicided the previous night.

There was an Italian POW camp near the town of Tatura, and it had an irrigation channel running beside one fence. Australia treated the POWs in very strict accordance with the Geneva Convention, and this document stated that the prisoners were to be fed with "the same standard of rations as the general population". The Italians thought this was too good to be true, and expected that the good times would end at any moment. With this in mind they gradually built up a supply of canned food that they tossed over the fence into the irrigation channel with some plan to retrieve it all later. At wars end, they told the Army about it, and they fished out FIVE TONS of canned food from the water.

After the war the Italian POWs were repatriated back to the old country, and they immediately set in train applications to migrate back to Australia. There is now a VERY large Italian community in the Shepparton area.

OJ

 

A brutal policy. The japanese were americans

 

I love it when people that have no experience of the cruel ways of life, make such judgements about things they have no personal knowledge of.

 

I found an old article in the Time magazine archives that address this issue in "real time". Makes for interesting reading.

Few wartime problems have remained as puzzling to the average U.S. citizen as that of the West Coast's uprooted Japanese. This week, in a new book, The Governing of Men, Lieut. Commander Alexander H. Leighton, a Navy Medical Corps psychiatrist, suggested a key to better understanding. After 15 months at Arizona's vast Poston Relocation Center as a social analyst, Commander Leighton concluded that many an American simply fails to remember that U.S. Japanese are human beings.

The Governing of Men (Princeton University Press; $3.75) is a full report on Poston, which—because of censorship —was the subject of many a wild rumor in the early days of the war. To Commander Leighton's detached eye, the war was only a minor cause of Poston's troubles. Many of those troubles sprang from the universal resentment men feel at being confined against their will, and from the universal conflict which results when different types of people are thrown closely together. For the 18,000 Japs at Poston were of all types. There were Christians and Buddhists, bankers and fishermen, farmers and shopkeepers. By birth and background they fell into three basic groups:

¶The oldest, the Japanese-born Issei, were reserved, puritanical people, who clung to an old country belief in hard work, personal integrity and obedience to tradition. They felt a sense of loyalty to Japan and had grave misgivings about the flipness, the new and careless attitudes of U.S.-born Nisei. Pearl Harbor had filled them with indecision. Many wanted Japan to win the war, but they did not want the U.S.—the country in which their children would go on living—to lose.

¶The Nisei had grown away from the Japanese beliefs that they had been taught as children, felt superior to their parents and a little ashamed of the Issei's bowing manners and broken English. They were full of protest at the idea of evacuation, afraid they were being stripped of their rights as citizens. Their faith in U.S. fairness was shaken. But they were still unconvinced by their parents' talk of the greatness of Japan.

¶The Kibei, young Japanese born in the U.S. but educated in the old country, found themselves in conflict with both Issei and Nisei. Most older Japanese considered them dissolute, domineering upstarts. Nisei, fresh from U.S. schools, considered them foreign-minded people.

To all the evacuees Poston (a conglomeration of cheerless wooden barracks on the unshaded desert) seemed like a concentration camp. The sun was cruel; dust was everywhere. The hospital had little medicine, food was often badly cooked; there was overcrowding, lack of privacy, discomfort. The camp's overworked administrative staff had been thrown together as hastily as the buildings.

A New Life. Despite all this, the displaced thousands gradually settled into a new pattern of existence. Clubs, baseball teams sprang up. There were parties at which old-fashioned dancing competed with U.S. jitterbugging—under their flowing robes the Japanese girls wore U.S. saddle shoes (see cut). Thousands of residents worked hard at tilling the soil, manufacturing adobe bricks, making camouflage netting—at wages of $12 to $19 a month. But a great part of Poston's people went on feeling insecure, bewildered, resentful. Many an older Japanese was convinced that Nisei and Kibei were "dogs" (informers). Gangs of men began roaming the camp at night beating suspected "dogs" with clubs and canes.

Torn by dissension, the Japs finally struck against their American warders. When the strike was settled after eight days, the air was cleared. But Poston was never a placid place again. By this week, nearly 13,000 of Poston's inhabitants, still uncertain and bewildered, had gone back to their old homes on the Coast.

Commander Leighton, objective throughout, reaches no conclusions on this U.S. experiment in governing another race behind stockades. But his attitude is aptly expressed in the quotation from which he got his title*: Oh, it were better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men.

* A remark made by Danton just before he was guillotined in Paris' Terror (1794).

See:

Japs Are Human - TIME

Hope nobody minds my bringing this old thread back to the fore?

 

Mind? Heck no! Thanks, Clint. I'm always learning something new here thanks to you and many other excellent posters.

 

Not at all.. No thread is an old thread in my view, they are just filed awaiting attention.

 

Well said urqh... just as I'm discovering it now

This thread causes me to reflect on how our Japanese-Americans felt who were serving amongst our U.S. military forces? I imagine that even though the internment camps were for the country's safety... the morale or awkwardness among Japanese-American soldiers must have been a prevalent emotion(s).....

Jem

 

I knew a Japanese American who was intered in California. He said at first he was embarrased by being "caged". I, like him find it interesting that the same gov't that locked him up recruited him out of the camp to fight the Germans.

 

Clint and Lou,

Great articles... sounds like they made quite an impression and showing some meritorious versatility!

Jem