Internment of Americans of Japanese Ancestry in Oregon, 1942


It's likely that there had always been residents in Nyssa and its vicinity, of Japanese ancestry, since so many railroad workers were of Japanese descent, and Nyssa was founded as a hub of the Oregon Shortline railroad. OSU's Ray Hashitami was from Nyssa. The census is not specific to Japanese ancestry for 1900-1940, but it can be inferred from the various subcategories that the population of Asian ancestry in Malheur County rose by 1000% between 1940 and 1950 after staying relatively stable for 40 years. Most were probably of Japanese ancestry.	A number of these were people who fled eastward from areas west of the Cascades, believing - correctly - that imprisonment was coming. Among these were OSU's Clifford Tadakuma, Jimmy Mizote, Paul Shinoda and others. On May 22 (according to Ms. Tomita's diary; May 23 according to the Commission on Wartime Relocation), 15 people left the Assembly Center in Portland to help thin sugar beets in the Nyssa-Ontario area. For many, this was an escape from the conditions at the Assembly Center. The primitive conditions in the fields were superior to barbed wire.	Others left on the 27th. Still more left on June 7: "Chiyo is very worried because Ben insists on going to the Ontario farm. At 7:00 p.m., a group of 99 people left. There were many young men around the age of twenty in good spirits on the train." [ed. note: Chiyo Endo, widowed, whose 17 year old son Ben, and 3 daughters were imprisoned alongside her for the crime of Japanese ancestry.] -Diary of Saku Tomita. The last group of 50 left the Assembly Center on June 13.
			*Below: the FSA camp at Nyssa. Above: Oregonians sent to the sugar beet fields.*


	Reviewing the various government and private documents on the imprisonment of OSU students can be a little confusing. The Army, DOJ (Department of Justice), INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services), WRA (War Relocation Authority), FBI, G-2, and FSA (Farm Security Administration) and other agencies all played a role. It seems at times that everybody was making decisions about these kids and their families except they themselves. Left: Nyssa Oregon, 1943.		Left: The Owyhee River dam was considered finished when a CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) highway replaced railroad tracks in 1937. The dam was built over a decade and more, to provide work for the unemployed and irrigation for the dry lands of Malheur County, Oregon. The CCC left a campsite which the Farm Security (FSA) Administration took over in 1943. The CCC camps dotted Oregon. Below is a 1940 photo of a CCC camp at an arboretum on the outskirts of Corvallis.
*THE ROAD TO EASTERN OREGON*

The racists of the west coast's right wing groups had always been open about their agenda: take everything the immigrants had, and utilize the newly pauperized men and women as slave labor in the eastern parts of the state where labor was scarce.	"Be it Resolved that the Corvallis American Legion go on record that all Japanese, and aliens of the Axis powers, be removed inland to a work camp." - Gazette Times Feb 28,1942

The FSA had originally been charged with ensuring the turnover of farms from Americans of Japanese descent to those of European descent, and with assisting those who wanted to move "voluntarily" into eastern Oregon and Washington before DeWitt's proclamations. The FSA was responsible for them finding jobs with local farmers.		In reality, the FSA ended by collaborating in the plundering of the Japanese American community and in the establishment of slave labor camps, often at the site of old CCC camps but just as often improvised towns of cabins and tents. Left: Nyssa, Oregon: "FSA camp which is now occupied by Japanese-Americans who have been evacuated from coastal regions." -FSA
			*Above: Nyssa Oregon: "Japanese-American camp" -FSA*

(Right) Nyssa:" FSA mobile camp [ed. note: i.e., a tent]. Mother and father with their American-born children in tent-home. One of the sons of this family is in the United States Army. Two of the sons were studying engineering... and are now greatly worried about possibilities of continuing their education."- FSA		There were work camps elsewhere too, in addition to Nyssa: "Nug was working as a farm laborer topping sugar beets and other odd farm jobs in Caldwell, Idaho. Since marriage was in our plans, he rented a cabin in a farm labor camp where my parents could come to spend the summer...."	"...working on farms nearby. They returned to Minidoka [ed. note: Minidoka concentration camp] in December of 1943. Nug and I were married on December 15th at the Minidoka Recreation Hall. We lived at the Caldwell Labor Camp picking up all types of jobs." - Oregonian Mae Ninomiya

	Kate Iwasaki, of Waldo Hall, left, registered and graduated from Albertson College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho. A quarter of the Albertson students listed in a search for lost alumni of the war years were of Japanese descent.		Left: "Japanese-Americans playing baseball. They do farm work, live at the FSA (Farm Security Administration) mobile camp, and use the town ballfield on Sundays when they come in a supervised group." - FSA, 1943 [ed. note: Believe that caption?!]

(Right) Dancing to Big Band records, 1943: "Japanese-Americans who were evacuated from a coastal area and who now live at the FSA (Farm Security Administration) camp attending a dance given by a local Japanese farmer.There are some Japanese-Americans who are permanent..."		"...residents of this section of Oregon; they were not subject to evacuation orders. These permanent residents naturally have retained complete freedom, while the Japanese-Americans living at the FSA camp are under certain restrictions. -FSA	The most important crop in the Nyssa area was sugar beets. Cane sugar had been imported on ships now devoted to carrying war material and sugar was in great demand. Used for making industrial alcohol for ammunition, canning, sweets and soft drinks, it was rationed (below left).

		[ed. note: My father dropped out of school in the third grade to work in the sugar beet fields of Colorado, to help support his family. It's back-breaking work though he usually found something of interest and at least a little fun in any occupation he followed. Nonetheless, he never felt 'drawn back to' the sugar beet fields.]	As war industries paid premium wages, farm work went begging, and according to Governor Sprague's biographer, it was his secretary George Aiken who suggested using CCC camps to house slave labor for the sugar beet industry when needed, and road work at other times. A school in Ontario, OR is named for Mr. Aiken.
*Right: A queue for rationed sugar. Above: A ration book.*

	From the Portland "Assembly Center", people were shipped to one of 10 permanent concentration camps. From Portland, most people were shipped to Minidoka, Idaho, as were, in the end, most Washington residents (people from Bainbridge Island had been shipped directly to Mazanar in California).		Most of Washington's population were shipped first to the Puyullap Fairgrounds - called Camp Harmony though it was considered the least fit, for human habitation, of all the centers - for 3 months, and then most were sent on to Minidoka along with Portlanders and many OSU students, as well as others. Left: Buses meet the train from Puyullap to take people to Minidoka. - NARA photo
*Above, trains arrived and left throughout summer and early fall.*

As best they could, the Quakers on the West Coast tried to provide a minimum of support for those imprisoned. Among the most active was Tom Bodine, whom the Army called to account: "I received a telephone call at our office...the phone call came from the offices of the Western Defense Command on Market Street in San Francisco and summoned me to come there at once. I drove across the Bay Bridge (no gas rationing in California until November, 1942) and reported to an Army officer whom I took to be General Bendetsen, who had in his office with him a civilian gentleman to whom I was not introduced. Bendetsen had before him an article I had written in the Christian Century, I believe, criticizing conditions in the Puyallup Assembly Center outside Tacoma, Washington, where I had visited as a then staff member of the American Friends Service Committee in Seattle. He scolded me for what he felt was an unfair criticism of the Army and threatened to deprive me of further visitor's permits if I ever wrote anything of the sort again. He then asked me if I knew what day it was. When I replied "Fourth of July," he asked me rhetorically if I knew what the Fourth of July commemorated. He -replied to his own question by saying it stood for the Declaration of Independence, which promised "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." He went on to assert that none of the evacuees had been deprived of any of these in the Evacuation, first into Assembly Centers and later into the Relocation camps. He asked me if any evacuee had been deprived of life and paused for me to agree with him. I thought of some of the older evacuees living in Army-style barracks with central latrines, but admitted that none had been deprived of life. He went on to declare that no evacuee had been deprived of liberty. When I started to demur, he said, "Young man, do you know the meaning of 'liberty'?" "Liberty is derived," he said, "from a Greek word referring to liberty of the spirit. It has nothing to do with physical liberty..."And as for the pursuit of happiness," he went on, "these people have never been happier. They are fed and housed and don't have to work. They are creating gardens and taking classes and enjoying themselves." - Tom Bodine, Quaker, West Coast Director of the National Student Relocation Council. [ed. note: Mr. Bendetsen was later Undersecretary of the Army. A part of the Aberdeen, Washington native's vengefulness may have sprung from his role as Special Representative of the Secretary of War to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippine Islands and to Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, Commanding General of the Hawaiian Department, in 1941. Both commanders took a humiliating shellacking from Admiral Yamamoto of the Japanese Empire, with great loss of life. A lifelong racist, he never made the distinction between ancestral origin and the individual.

There were some Northwesterners not destined for Minidoka, such as Bill Hosokawa (right), who was sent to Heart Mountain, Wyoming : "We had been there from May until the early part of September, when it was announced that the people in the camp...would go to Minidoka, Idaho. But I got a summons one day to the office of the camp director..."		"...He said, 'You have four hours to get ready because you are going to be sent to Heart Mountain, Wyoming.' And I said, 'Just me?' And he said, 'no, you and your family - your wife and your son'. 'Why am I being sent to Wyoming when everybody else is going to Minidoka?' And he said, 'I don't know, those are just the orders I have.' I couldn't understand it. Then I got some other information..."	"...There were several others who were being separated from the main group of Seattlites but I had never had any conversations with them. After a while, it occurred to me that whoever it was in authority figured that we were potential disrupting elements. I was working with Jimmie Sakamoto in coordinating the activities of the camp...

... with the Caucasian 'overlord' and I was not shy about bitching if something went wrong or criticising things that I thought were unfair and I presumed that although my loyalty to the United States was unquestioned, someone figured I might cause problems by being so outspoken." - Bill Hosokawa		Left: Children - apparently also "potential disrupting elements", or descended from others who were, excited about escaping the Expo, on the train to be shipped to Heart Mountain, Wyoming from Portland. Right: their friends bid them farewell.

	*"The mosquitoes aren't quite so thick lately, it's probably because they have more people to pick on." -Fred Takahashi Letter to his brother Ted from Minidoka Concentration camp* *Below: "A panorama view of the Minidoka War Relocation Authority center." August 18, 1942. National Archives and Record Administration*		Left: "Japanese internees board a train in Portland for transport to an internment camp, Aug. 30, 1942". - Oregonian. In this case, the trip was to Minidoka concentration camp. Like all the camps except for those in Arkansas, the camps receiving people from the Portland Assembly Center were located in the desert - Tule, Minidoka, and Heart Mountain. The Arkansas camps were swampland. Most people from Portland were shipped to Minidoka, in Idaho.
*Above: A line leaves the Portland Assembly Center bound for Minidoka concentration camp, where most will spend years.*

"Dejected and miserable, men, women and children crowded together in temporary racetrack quarters, watching the searchlights sweeping over the black compounds, wondering what was in store for them." - Allen H. Eaton. Below: a floor plan from Fred Takahashi's Letter to his brother Ted Click here for complete plan.			"Minidoka was just so dusty, so dusty, and so cold in the wintertime. None of us... had clothes that were warm enough for that climate." -Theresa Takayoshi. For the crime of having a Japanese immigrant as a father, and a husband of Japanese descent, Ms. Takayoshi and her family were sent to Minidoka concentration camp. Left: children found the snow of Minidoka a new experience. Staying warm was the issue. As elsewhere in the camps, the welfare of the children was always an overriding concern and great effort was made to ensure they stayed as warm and healthy as the means an imprisoned people could improvise.
	*Above: the mud track along the uncompleted camp at Minidoka.*	*Above: Warming hands - and children - by the store stove at Minidoka - WRA.*
	"The camp is still very far from completed. They had to interrupt movement for a week because of lack of housing facilities in fact the last group of 500 which left had to sleep in mess halls, laundry rooms, and any available bed space. " Letter from Kenji Okuda to Norio Higano dated August 27, 1942

*INFORMATION BULLETIN #5* "Water on the project comes from four deep wells, all of which are not yet in operation. Water should not be wasted. Hot water will be available in a few days when the necessary plumbing fixtures are received. Laundry tubs may have to be pressed into service for facial and hand washing until showers are installed. Some cold showers are available in the men's washrooms. Women may use the showers in Blocks 1, 6 and 13 which are reserved for them exclusively. Valves, fittings and other fixtures are necessary before completion of the sewage plant. Until then we must use the outdoor latrines. Two women's and one men's latrines have been constructed for each block." - Minidoka Project WRA: "Eden, Idaho" August 19, 1942 View the entire bulletin here. Note: the latrines, with a lack of adequate privacy, were a perpetual issue in the concentration camps and assembly areas. Below: "The meals are planned at an average cost of not more than 45 cents per person per day (the actual cost, as this is written, has averaged about 40 cents)" -WRA			"We've had to clean out our rooms and mop them. Our straw or hay mattresses had to be refilled and what a time the hay fever victims had. The day was very hot and it felt like an oven inside because the roofs are made of black tar paper which absorbs a great deal of heat." letter from a former student, at Minidoka to Elizabeth Willis, July, 1942 "The following schedules of grades and wages, based on a forty-four hour week, will be applicable to evacuees performing work at assembly and reception centers operated by the Army: Unskilled $ 8.00 per month; Skilled $12.00 per month; Professional and technical $16.00 per month". Memorandum for the Assistant Secretary of War from J.L. DeWitt Note: The wage scale proposed by DeWitt above. was increased slightly, with professionals at Minidoka paid $19.00 per month (11 cents per hour, for a doctor, for example, and 5 cents for a laborer, based upon 4.3 weeks a month, 40 hours a week). "The only furnishings provided by the Government in the residence barracks are standard Army cots and blankets and small heating stoves.One bath, laundry, and toilet building is available for each block of barracks and is shared by upwards of 250 people." - WRA
	"After the lush greenness of the Willamette Valley, to see the sterile, dusty desert which was to be our home for the duration, many sat on the baggage in the middle of nowhere and wept....We saw again the barbed wire fences, the watchtowers, guard houses, MP detachments, the administration housing, war house areas and block after block of black, tar-paper barracks...There was a pot-bellied stove and each block had a coal depot. One bare bulb hung from the center of the room...the walls were unfinished with open 2x4 studs, the floor was wood and single-layered, so one could see the earth below, through the cracks" -UO alum Minoru Yasui. [ed. note: Americans can always compete in resourcefulness and those sent to Minidoka were no exception, looping an irrigation canal back onto itself to form a swimming hole to combat the ever present dust. see photo above]	Above: The cafeteria. "I insisted that my two brothers and I eat together in the mess hall as a family unit. I insisted that we have grace before meals...we should live as a family group." - Helen Murao,15 year old head of a family of 3 orphans, "Housing is provided for the evacuee residents of the centers in tarpaper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind. Most of these barracks are partitioned off so that a family of five or six, for example, will normally occupy a single room 25 by 20 feet. Bachelors and other unattached evacuees live mainly in unpartitioned barracks which have been established as dormitories. The only furnishings provided by the Government in the residence barracks are standard Army cots and blankets and small heating stoves. One bath, laundry, and toilet building is available for each block of barracks and is shared by upwards of 250 people. - War Relocation Authority May, 1943

	While it was impossible to rebuild the tar-paper barracks people lived in at Minidoka, it was possible - even essential for the sake of the human spirit - to alter the surroundings somewhat, as Yasuske Kogita did at left (detail below), introducing a classical garden into the barren landscape.		Left: Shards of the most beautiful ceramic ware still grace the landfill at Minidoka, as does Americana: Coca-Cola bottles. Below, bottom :A 'pass' to work outside the concentration camp, for local farmers. Below, top: People with a long tradition of fine ceramic workers were unaccustomed to tin.

	"This chimney rock is a part of the garden shown in the previous photograph, being situated immediately to the left of the scene. Like all the stones used for this garden, it is of volcanic formation but this was the giant of them all, weighing about a thousand pounds....A brief description of the cart [ed.: left] used is given...To keep the wheels from sinking in the sand, Mr. Kogita cut up oil cans and nailed wide strips of tin. It took him about 2 months to get the rocks." - Oregonian Allen Eaton, 1944
Above:"Wheels were ...of laminated scrap wood, axles and hubs of water pipes."- Allen Eaton [ed. note: Mr. Kogita, the maker, was a successful hotelier before imprisonment, alone, with his two small boys.

People also tried to create some sense of beauty within the 'apartments'. Flower arrangement - ikebana - is a traditional folk art in Japan and local materials were utilized, often with a minimum of reshaping. At far right, is an intracamp poetry prize, the flowers carved at Tule Lake from shells. From its context, it most likely was awarded to the mother of OSU alum Harry Abe.		"Each camp discovered and developed some creative specialty of its own. Heart Mountain produced beautiful embroideries. Tule Lake andTopaz made artistic use of shells,because they were situated near ancient lake beds... Minidoka utilized sagebrush." - Allen Eaton Left: Kamajiro Yuasa, a widower who was a noted florist before imprisonment.

	One of those imprisoned at Minidoka was the artist Kenjiro Nomura (below left), who helped open the Seattle Art Museum with a show of his work. Left: his painting of the laundry room.	*Below left: A simple religious service in the desert, at Minidoka concentration camp.* *Below: a Buddhist prayer temple of improvised materials.*	Above: The hokku poem is translated as "I returned. I sat alone and apart in the autumn dusk." Poetry was an essential part of life in the camps. Left: spiritual faith played a role in sustaining people in these trying circumstances. Here is a Buddhist temple from Minidoka, made - except for a piece of brocade - from packing crate wood. Center: a simple prayer service in the desert. People kept their religious faith in the most trying of circumstances, throughout 1942-44, as is evidenced by numerous pictures.


Above: "I would scrub my brothers' blue jeans and their clothes on a washboard and try to wring them out and also launder all our sheets in the morning. Then I would write a note [ed.: to the school] saying "Please excuse Helen for being late. She is busy. And then I'd sign it and the teacher would accept it. I still managed to get good grades. But I never, never was in class." - 15 year old head of a family of 3 orphans, Helen Murao.
		*Beyond worry about immediate needs of food and shelter, there was also fear that the future might be even worse:* "Dear Mrs. Willis...What I wouldn't give to be back... Many of the boys say this too. Some of them who were not good students and didn't like school even say this. It is my belief that everyone here would like to go back to their normal life. But recently I've read quite a bit about taking away the U.S. citizenship of the American born Japanese and to deport them after the war. The Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West [ed. note: see left] are trying to do this, and from what I read they are in dead earnest. Our citizenship is very dear to us and I hope this thing never occurs.... -Letter from a pupil in Minidoka to her teacher	It is remarkable that in such circumstances, craft workers and artists managed to preserve and practice forms which stretched back over centuries and whose loss would have been irreplaceable. Embroidery, calligraphy, wood work, all found champions in the camps. The work produced, with the most primitive of tools - usually fashioned on the spot - was remarkable. A debt, beyond that owed for the imprisonment itself, is owed to these men and women who understood that the preservation of beauty is essential to the preservation of our species. It is impossible to overstate the achievements of those involved, many of whom were recognised experts in their fields prior to 1942.
	Above: After leading the plundering of people and hounding them into concentration camps, the Jerome, Idaho VFW afterwards claimed the Minidoka camp cafeteria for their headquarters. Below: food was always an issue at every camp.


"In those days and nights in the war relocation camps, I thought many times of an experience in my native Oregon which gave me a clear glimpse of the Japanese mind and heart than I had known before. We were 'rained in' one day, Jo Tominaga and I in my classroom in the school of architecture and allied arts at the University of Oregon, ... 'Jo', I said, "the sound of the rain on the skylight always reminds me of our farm home ... where we were children, sleeping in the attic, love to listen to the sound of the raindrops on the roof." Joe did not respond or look up-- but after a long silence said," it reminds me of my home too. My father was a workman. We lived in the neighborhood of out-of-door laborers. He built our little house and made a special garden on our stony plot of ground. When he had completed the garden he collected all the leftover stones and piled those carefully along the edge of the house, below the eaves. On rainy days, when the neighbors could not work, he would call them in and they would all make poems to the music of the rain falling from the roof to the stones below." - Alan H. Eaton [ed note: Mr. Tominaga and his young wife were imprisoned at Topaz, in Utah, in 1942.]

"Classes in calligraphy were held in every relocation center and countless examples of fine writing were also used to decorate the walls of the barracks buildings and public assembly roams. This portrait is a of T. Usui, a professional calligrapher, at work in his room at Rohwer. Declining to be photographed writing on the back at cheap wallpaper was for a long time had been his substitute, he rests a choice sheet of Chinese paper on a piece of red velvet and grinds a fine stick of slightly perfumed ink, which required two hours of swabbing before it was ready for use. The writing was done incomplete silence. A child obediently left the room until the work should be finished, so that there might be no interruption of thought or action. The brushstrokes were bold and free, coming from the shoulder rather than from the wrist. Not until the signature and red stam had been affixed did the writer relax his concentration. Mr.Usui explained that ornamental writing " takes a whole lifetime to learn" and is "very hard to tell". When suddenly he found that he was to go with many others to a detention center, he selected a few good brushes, some ink, and a little fine paper to help him to meet whatever was ahead. At the Arkansas relocation cente, he selected branches of the right form from one of the newly cut trees, and improvised the brush rack shown at his left." - -Oregonian Allen Eaton, 1944

"Papa spent a lot of his time in carpentry. Sometimes he got lumber from the maintenance crew, other times he used wood supplied for our stove... Papa gave away little tables and a lot of wooden vases - all shapes and sizes. - Oregonian Asayo Noji from Parkdale.

Above Right: "During a preliminary survey of the camp, the writer stopped at a barracks home hoping to obtain some needed information. The resident was not at home but while speaking with his wife, the writer noticed a very interesting wood carving on the wall, and asked if it had come from Japan. She said no, that her husband had done it; but he never submitted it for public showing , believing it not good enough. After being assured that there was difference of opinion on the point of its quality, the lady shyly brought to light three or four more pieces, all of such merit that permission was asked to have them photographed. The wood carver later consented; thus was preserved for these pages two of his sensitive, finely executed carvings." -Oregonian Allen Eaton, 1944

	"There were at first almost no carving tools in camp life so the men made their own from discarded saw blades, worn down files, automobile springs and other waste metals, and in the absence of good lumber, they picked over and used pine slabs from the fuel piles. These slabs were covered with bark on the outside but had enough solid wood on the inside for carving" -Oregonian Allen Eaton, 1944

	"This [ed. notes: see below] is a corner in the tiny barracks apartment of the Abe family at Minidoka, Idaho. They had occupied a six-room house in Portland, Oregon; now three members of the family lived in an eighteen by twenty foot space divided into three parts by paper partitions and imaginations. This photograph shows two walls of the 'sitting room', which the homemakers have lined with composition board and decorated with attractive objects, most of them made by their friends or themselves in the camp, and also with natural objects discovered in or near Minidoka. The calligraphy was done in Minidoka and in other centers; the inscription in Japanese on the fan-shaped piece of wood on one of the shelves is 'Patience'. Two wooden panels on the right wall have inscribed on them poems written by Ms. Abe, whose verse had won awards in various poetry contests. Every camp had its poetry societies and Minidoka participated locally and in inter-camp writing activities. Mrs. Abe was also expert in flower arrangements. Mr. Abe was especially interested in nature forms, several of which are shown in this photograph. Perhaps his favorite find was the stone rabbit shown..." -Oregonian Allen Eaton, 1944		Below: Among those at the Assembly Center was Toshiaki Kuge, a junior pre-medical student at OSU who served with OSU's Harry Abe in the 442nd, as did OSU's Jimmy Mizote. A University of Washington report in 1942, on west coast colleges, listed 41 OSC(OSU) students in Fall of 1942, as having Japanese ancestry.
Above: a stone rabbit sculpture, exactly as found, except for the hand hewn wood base provided. Allen Eaton's caption reads: "The stone also resembles the chinchilla and is every bit as rare" - Allen Eaton.
ed. note: There was originally only one Abe - Ukichi Abe - in Minidoka, who came from Portland, according to the camp archives. His wife Yoshimi was in Tule Lake, not in Minidoka. She, for some reason (perhaps as a result of the "freeze orders" of DeWitt), had been left behind in Pinedale, Oregon where - the records state - she was a hair stylist while Ukichi - who, the records indicate, was a truck farmer - sold produce in Portland. The 2 were sent off to different camps when the internment orders were issued. Their son Fujio is not recorded in camp documents and it's probable that he was sent eastward to live with relatives to escape, at the age of 10, the imprisonment which was confined to the West Coast states, largely at the insistence of the Euro-American majorities and their government functionaries in those states. This enforced shattering of a family, with mother, father and child sent in 3 different directions, against the will of all concerned, had not been experienced in this country since the days of slavery.
			*Above: OSU's Harry Abe (see left), who was elsewhere - with the 522/442nd (see below)*

	The only other Portland family named Abe in the camps was that of OSU's Harry Abe('38), consisting of his mother Toshiko, father Paul, brother Morris and sister May. Initially, their assignment was to Tule Lake, but in 1943 the WRA shifted large numbers in and out of Tule and the three perhaps went to Minidoka. The families may have been related since Paul and Ukichi came to America, to the same port, at the same time. Morris was a 24 year-old who accompanied them to Tule Lake and must have been Harry's brother but, being 24 years old, might have been assigned different quarters. Harry, a brilliant individual - as must have been his sister May, judging by the records - was elsewhere in 1945 (see right). May eventually transferred to New York, and the 3 left may have been the 3 Allen Eaton was referring to. The bird in flight on the preceding page was also collected by Mr. Abe.
			*"May Abe, at a USO gathering in Nyack, New York", from a WRA photo.*

We also have the diary of Saku Tomita from the Portland Assembly Center, in which she mentions "Nanako was invited to May Abe's birthday party" and later "We received letters from May Abe, Hisako Tomita and others on August 16."	The implication is that Ms. Abe was able to find her way to the east before August, most likely with an "educational pass", but perhaps to a camp, although there is no record of the latter in the camp records.		Left: One of the last remaining traces of Minidoka concentration camp is the concrete slab for the searchlight, at left, used to control the camp. Minidoka reverted to being a "reclamation project", as did Tule Lake.

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