Interned at Topaz: Age, Gender, and Family in the Relocation Experience

Japanese American occupants of this Topaz barracks worked to enhance their bleak surroundings. Courtesy of National Archives.

Interned at Topaz: Age, Gender, and Family in the Relocation Experience

BY SANDRA C. TAYLOR

WHAT WAS LIFE LIKE FOR THE JAPANESE AMERICANS incarcerated by the American government in relocation camps during World War II? Dillon Myer, the "keeper of concentration camps," swore that of the 70,000 people (over half the original number) still in camp in 1944, "probably at least half had never had it so good." Richard Drinnon recently wrote, "incarceration had unintended consequences and byproducts, not all of which were negative," a sentiment that evacuee author Harry Kitano had earlier voiced. What has not been discussed is the extent to which reaction to life in the camps was a function of one's age, gender, family situation, and generation. The experience for the citizen Nisei, the second generation, differed markedly from their alien Issei parents, while the small number of third-generation Sansei were too young to be greatly affected psychologically. This paper will study the impact of the Topaz experience on the Nisei through the use of oral histories.

opaz, in central Utah, was one of ten so-called relocation centers or concentration camps built by the American government during World War II. These ten bleak sites housed Japanese Americans evacuated from the West Coast by Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1942. "Military necessity" was the reason the administration advanced for relocating some 120,000 people from California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii In reality the motives stemmed from economic greed, politics, and above all, racism. The population of Topaz peaked at 8,255 people in the fall of 1942 and diminished by about 15 percent a year until the rapid expulsion of the remainder prior to the closure of the camp on October 31,1945. During those years Topaz was the fifth largest city in Utah with the Nisei numbering 65 percent of the total interned there.

Topaz was neither the best nor the worst of camps. Its population was quite homogeneous, coming almost entirely from the San Francisco Bay Area It experienced a minimal amount of mob violence—unlike Manzanar or Tule Lake, which became the resegregation center for those desiring repatriation to Japan— but it did experience the brutality that the white overseers could inflict One inmate, James Hatsuaki Wakasa, an elderly Issei, was shot by a guard when he strayed too near the fence and allegedly ignored four orders to halt This certainly had a traumatic effect on the population, especially on the lives of those who resided nearby and knew him, like Karl Akiya, a fellow Issei who had even eaten dinner with him that fateful night, and Nisei teenager Michiko Okamoto, who remembers it to this day. There was no specific draft resistance at Topaz such as occurred in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. The climate in the central Utah desert was extremely hot in the summer, but it was probably worse in the two camps in Arizona and in the swamps of Arkansas. The winters could be bitterly cold but probably no worse than at Heart Mountain. Housing everywhere consisted of uninsulated tar paper-covered barracks, heated by potbellied, coal-burning stoves. The distinguishing feature at Topaz was dust storms that plagued all the residents, especially those suffering from asthma and allergies, which made it impossible to keep oneself or one's quarters clean. Kazu Iijima vividly described a dust storm, telling how they covered their noses and mouths in vain and yet the sand got in everything. "I can still remember how torturous those storms were," she said. Beyond that, it was just an ordinary concentration camp, appalling for that very fact if for no other. As Morgan Yamanaka, a Kibei, termed it. Topaz was a "peaceful, quiet place where people were pretty much left alone."

Oral histories obtained from survivors more than forty years later provide one way of understanding Topaz beyond the voluminous documentary record the War Relocation Authority administration compiled. Yet they suffer from a number of handicaps. First, they are obviously limited to the living, approximately half of the original number. Access and availability played a large part in my selection of interviewees, for there is no single listing of the survivors. Memories also tend to be selective and are influenced by the succeeding events in one's life. Those whom the years treated well may be more positive or at least neutral in their assessment of camp life, while those who suffered traumatic experiences or who have led stressful lives since the war may recall more vividly the negative impact of the internment experience. This sample is not random; the interviewees were recruited by Japanese Americans whom I had met or was referred to and by the Japanese American Citizens' League headquartered in San Francisco. Not all I met wanted to talk, and some who were interviewed later declined to have their interviews used. Those who were unwilling may have been the most traumatized of all.

Prior to the beginning of the Redress movement in which many Japanese Americans, some organized through the JACL, sought apologies and compensation for the wrongs done them, many of the former internees had attempted to put relocation out of their minds. They had reestablished their homes, reunited their families, and found new livelihoods. Sixty percent returned to the West Coast, usually to the communities they had left Many did not even share memories with their children, for they were ashamed of the experience: a response born both of a kind of" survivors' guilt" and their Japanese heritage. Their desire was to be loyal Americans, to prove by their lives how wrong incarceration had been. By the 1960s they had become the so-called "model minority," for the most part having achieved economic success at just the time their children, the Sansei, were awakened by the Civil Rights movement to challenge their parents' acquiescence and demand compensation. Nisei silence did not mean that the incarceration had not been traumatic, nor can one say that the scattering effects of relocation, which brought some people more economic opportunity in new locations than they had possessed on the West Coast before the war, justified its pain. The price of success, as the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians reported in 1982, was psychologically very high.

The Redress movement required Japanese Americans to dredge up the past and to reflect on the injustice that had been done them. Testimonies at the commission hearings in 1981 were painful Memories were no doubt affected by the desire for justice—at least official acknowledgement of their innocence and the federal government's colossal blunder in establishing the camps, something termed even at the time by Eugene Rostow as its "worst wartime mistake." Not all Japanese Americans agreed with Redress, at least in the way the JACL had formulated it, and their feelings influenced their responses to my interviews.

Response to the concentration camp experience was the result of many variables. Age had much to do with people's reactions. Most of the Nisei were children in camp, and the experience affected their lives in ways different from its impact on their parents. Children were freed from parental discipline to play, while many adolescents, particularly females going through puberty and the stress of the teenage years, found the lack of privacy and the uncertainty of their futures troubling.

Normally hardworking students, Japanese American youth reacted to their fractured educational experiences in different ways, some working twice as hard as before, while others adopted a style they called she had created the"tree of Topaz," a demographic profile of the camp that resembles the shape of a tree. Kazu lijima remembered with fondness how she and her coworkers did not hesitate once to wake director Charles Ernst at 2 am to tell him what was bothering them and how graciously he received them. There were, all agreed, "good" and "bad" Caucasians, and among the former were those conscientious objectors who were assigned to the camp, like Emil Sekerak, and some truly gifted and dedicated teachers like Eleanor Gerard, Harry Kitano's favorite, who still attends reunions of the high school classes of the camp and was at the all-camp reunion held in the Bay Area in 1988. Many remembered Gerard, who married fellow administrator Eric Sekerak, with great affection.

The lives of the Nisei of Topaz demonstrate how the human spirit survives in adversity. These lives also help us to understand the impact of incarceration upon a particular age group, young people in their teens and twenties, and especially the ways in which it could affect their growing up. Coming of age in a concentration camp was a painful thing. Young children could probably withstand the experience the best, but even they were traumatized by loss of parents, the breakdown of the family system, and the arbitrariness and routinization of life behind barbed wire Teenagers were swept into gangs, a phenomenon unknown in prewar Japanese America, and some ran wild in school, while others only profited from their educations by dint of furious self-discipline, as did Shigeki Sugiyama. The rest had, as Fumi Manabe put it, "an attitude problem."

There were also differences in the way males and females reacted. Young girls approaching maturity suffered keenly from the lack of privacy, especially in sanitary facilities. Disruption of the family appears to have had a more devastating effect on some of them. Although there were some notably strong women like Mine Okubo, the artist, who cared for herself and her brother, and Faith Terasawa, who as a single woman worked as a social worker in camp and aided others with her strong Christian faith, the breakdown in family life and the virtual disappearance of the individual home was devastating to women. Some young women like Chiz Kitano found an outlet in political activism in a radical group known as the Young Democrats where she met her future husband Ernie Iiyama, but most did not stray far from school or job. Deviant behavior among women was virtually unknown; the Japanese American social ethic still prevailed, and the lack of private space curtailed actions as well.

Both sexes had to face the issue of renewed discrimination by the white community, something that the Nisei who were not interned (those living in the interior and East) already knew about Salt Lake City's small Japanese American community, for example, was not interned and had long since developed strategies of survival in a Caucasian environment.

Some questions applied to both sexes: whether to return with the family to the Bay Area or to strike out on their own to find a new future in a different environment where being Japanese might not matter so much. Finding jobs also was a factor whether to return to the fields and canneries of California or take a chance and do something radically different, as Michi Okamoto did when she went to New York to become an actress. Hardest of all was the choice of whether to follow parents who had rejected America back to Japan (a place many Nisei had never seen) or to cast one's lot with the U.S. despite the anger many felt over relocation. Gender did indeed play a role, posing different questions and choices, but making it easy for neither For no Japanese American internee living through relocation and resettlement were the choices easy ones. The experience marked their lives.

NOTES

Dr. Taylor is professor of history at the University of Utah.

1 Richard Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).

2 Dillon S Myer, Uprooted Americans: The Japanese Americans and the War Relocation Authority during World War II (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1971), p 292, cited in Drinnon, Keeper, p 44.

3 Harry Kitano, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969), p 74.

4 The terminology used in referring to the internment camps is itself very politically charged. The U. S. government called them relocation centers and described them as " temporary war stations" for the evacuated Japanese Americans from the West Coast However, they were surrounded by barbed-wire fences and had armed guards in guardhouses Inmates were warned to stay away from the fences, and one man in Topaz was shot when he did not They were, in the true sense of the term, concentration camps that forcibly held people who were virtual political prisoners The term " concentration camp" was used at the time out discarded when it was later applied, incorrectly, to the Nazi death camps.

5 Basic histories of the internment are to be found in Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps USA (New York; Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971); Roger Daniels and Harry Kitano, American Racism Explorations of the Nature of Prejudice (Englewood Cliff, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970); Dorothy S Thomas, The Salvage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952); Morton Grodzins, Americans Betrayed- Politics and the Japanese Evacuation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Leonard Bloom and Ruth Reimer, A Removal and Return: The Socio-Economic Effects of the War on Japanese Americans (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949), Audrie Girdner and Anne Lords, The Great Betrayal (New York MacMillan, 1971), and Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps (New York William Morrow, 1976). The only work solely on Topaz is Leonard Arrington, The Price of Prejudice: The Japanese American Relocation Center in Utah (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1962).

6 Arrington, Prejudice, p 15.

7 For details on the Wakasa killing see Roger Daniels, Asian Americans: Chinese and Japanese in the United states since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), pp. 228-31. His source was the Russell Bankson Papers, "U.S., War Relocation Authority," at the University of Washington library.

8 Arrington, Prejudice, p 14.

9 Interview by Sandra Taylor, New York City, October 4, 1987; tapes are on file with the American West Center, University of Utah, and transcripts are shelved in the Western Americana Division, Marriott Library, University of Utah, as part of its Asian American series. Funding for the oral history project was provided by the College of Humanities and the Research Committee, University of Utah, and the Helen Papanikolas Fund, Marriott Library Hereafter the interviews are cited by name, place, date, and AWC Collection.

10 Interview with Morgan Yamamaka, San Francisco, September 1988, AWC Collection Kibeis were Nisei educated in Japan.

11 Extensive primary source material on the camps is found in the National Archives, Washington, D.C , Record Group 210. This material is primarily concerned with administrative matters, but individual files are also kept there The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, has a smaller collection of materials, and records on individual camps are sometimes, but not always, located in university archives nearby One must note that the role of the Japanese American Citizens' League in relocation is still extremely controversial; it counseled an enthusiastic acceptance ofthe government's plan, and many today are still bitter about its acquiescence Although no realistic alternative to submission was possible, the JACL virtually collaborated with the jailers.

12 Redress became an organized movement when it was adopted as a cause by the Japanese American Citizens' League in 1978 after a decade of debate President Gerald Ford revoked the original order for relocation Executive Order 9066, in 1976 After much lobbying and work by the Japanese American community, the Redress legislation passed by Congress in 1980 was signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 This created the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which held a series of hearings around the country and finally published its report, Personal Justice Denied (Washington, D.C., 1982;. It set a figure of $20,000 for compensation to survivors President Ronald Reagan signed the implementing legislation in 1988 See John Tateishi, "The Japanese American Citizens League and the Struggle for Redress," in Roger Daniels, Sandra C Taylor, and Harry H L Kitano, Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress (Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1986), pp. 191-95. The first payments were made in 1991.

13 Harry Kitano and Roger Daniels, Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities (Engle-wood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1988), p 48 The term was coined by sociologist William Petersen in 1966.

14 Personal Justice Denied, Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Washington, D.C : U.S Government Printing Office, December 1982), pp 295-96.

15 Roger Daniels disputes this point in Concentration Camps, USA: "Th e legal atrocity which was committed against the Japanese Americans was the logical outgrowth of over three centuries of American experience." xiv Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps, also disputes this label, first applied by Eugene Rostow in 1946 in an article bearing that title in Harper's magazine Drinnon, like Daniels, traces internment to centuries of American racism.

16 The impact o fthe Redress movement has strongly affected the way that survivors of America's concentration camps remember their experiences. Only one of those interviewed did not agree that some form of compensation was warranted.

17 Interviews with Chiyoko Yano, Berkeley, October 28, 1987; Hiromoto Katayama, Berkeley, October 27, 1987; and Kazu lijima, AWC Collection.

18 See Eleanor Gerard Sekerak, "A Teacher at Topaz," in Daniels, Taylor, and Kitano, Japanese Americans, pp. 38-43.

19 See interview with Shig Sugiyama.

20 Interview with Faith Terasawa, San Francisco, November 6, 1987, AWC Collection.

21 See Harry H. L Kitano, "The Effects of Evacuation on the Japanese Americans," in Daniels, Taylor, and Kitano, Japanese Americans, pp. 151-58.