| ORGANIZING AND THE QUESTIONNAIRE | As the unnecessary and utter destruction of communities, of hopes and livelihoods, by a government whose policy towards them was driven by racists, settled in, resistance surfaced among some people, in activities ranging from letters to officials, to strikes. As the authorities responded repressively, the resistance increased, first at Poston, and then at Manzanar and Tule Lake, the first 2 camps opened. |  |
 |
||
 |
|||||
| Above: a military police patrol at Manzanar concentration camp. - National Parks Service | |||||
| Food
was perpetually a concern at Tule as in other camps. The beef and pork
grown in the camps were rationed (click here)
and valuable in the black market. They were sometimes stolen by guards and
sold on the black market, which was discovered at Tule only when an auto
accident popped the trunk of one vehicle open. At Manzanar, a similar
issue arose:
"Food was being taken out of camp not by one carton but by the truckloads. They had the guy in the warehouse loading up trucks, and not only one semi but double semi...one guy was keeping a record of it and they snatched him. They grabbed him and a crowd formed and was going down to get him released, and right away the guards came out and they lined up. They said come back that night and they would talk to us. So that night everybody went went down to the jail and the crowd got bigger and they were marching back and forth and the guards got called out again... And I remember a guy having a .45 caliber machine gun and he was saying "Now I hope you Japs do something..." All of a sudden somebody threw this tear gas and the tear gas you can't pick up. It keeps exploding. Well out there, in the desert you know, it sounded like a shot, so everybody took off... and they opened up with everything." - Tom Watanabe [ed. note:-- US Govt . From the US NPS:"although no order to fire was given, shotgun and sub-machine gun blasts by two soldiers. Privates Ramon Cherubini and Tobe Moore,were fired into the crowd. Moore fired three 12-gauge shotgun blasts, while Cherubini fired two bursts (about 14-15 shots) with a .45 caliber Thompson sub-machine gun." ] |
 |
Above
and above right: Harry Ueno
"Harry Ueno was born on April 14, 1907 in Hawaii... Harry Ueno was employed as a salesman for retail fruits and vegetables until the evacuation. The Ueno family was evacuated to Manzanar. A few months into his internment, he initiated the investigation of the sugar and beef shortage, and organized 1,600 kitchen workers into a Mess Hall Workers Union [ed. note: Many were from Terminal Island in Seattle, among the first to be imprisoned]. On December 5, 1942, Tayama, a JACL (Japanese American Citizen's League) leader in Manzanar, was severely beaten by masked internees. Although Ueno was arrested for this incident, he was not charged or given a trial. The internees in Manzanar congregated in front of Ueno's jail cell demanding his release. Ueno was the veritable folk hero, the martyr of Manzanar, around whom the internees marched. The riot ended with eight internees wounded and two killed. Ueno along with other camp leaders were removed to isolation centers where they were cut off from all contact. It was not until nearly a year later, that he would see his family again." - Stanford University Library [ed. note: often referred to as a 'riot', it hardly was such, if the accounts are correct. It was a demonstration by "a crowd of some 2,000-4,000 evacuees" which ended in killings, in the wake of a beating, by authorities determined to control 'without question' thousands of people, most of them born and raised in the US. That's a pretty tall order, and one not likely to be filled, whether at Manzanar or Corvallis.] |
 |
||
| Above:
a silent protest at Tule:
"The same thing was happening at Tule Lake, prior to the strike there. They used to have hog farms and chicken farms, and they slaughter the hog outside of the camp, but under camp control. The guy taking charge in slaughter house was Caucasian. One day he had an accident. They never would have found
out. He had a trunkful of hog meat in there. That's the way they do it.
They charge that the Nihonjin
[ed. note: people of Japanese descent] kill so many hogs and so many pounds, and charge to Japanese in camp. Meantime he's all the time taking out a trunkful of meat to
the black market outside. |
THE
WWII BLACK MARKET
Above: Library of Congress Black Market Photo: "Black market in meats. Maybe she's getting a bargain in points, but the price will slice heavily into her budget." Below: a local Poster on the subject. In a pamphlet distributed by the federal government on the subject, it is stated that over 1000 were prosecuted for black market violations by May, 1943. Penalties were severe, ranging from 10 years to $10,000.00. Nonetheless, the trade in rationing stamps and scarce goods seems to have been widely practiced. My own mother's family saved their sugar rations for a neighbor who was hypoglycemic, which was strictly forbidden. |
||||
 |
|||||
| The Manzanar demonstrations and killings occurred Dec. 5-6, 1942. Officials at various levels began to spread the story that it was a demonstration celebrating the bombing of Pearl Harbor, an absolute falsehood. | |||||
 |
 |
OSU was also affected by rationing. Lifestyles altered radically, Left: "Transportation, other than walking, became a thing of the past as tires grew thinner." Right: "Living organizations found rationing a growing problem, discovered that during winter term almost every day was a meatless day." Both photos are from 1942. The shortages were even more severely felt in the camps, where racism was also felt in allocation of resources. |  |
||
| Above: A scrap heap at OSU for salvaged metals for the war effort. 1942. | |||||
| Even the poetry of the camps in the winter of 1942 began to reflect despondency or anger of the authors as people came to terms with a government policy driven by racism. Below: Grafitti (and barbed wire) from Tule Lake. "Please be my second when I commit suicide." |
dandelion has bloomed a moment of bitterness - of what consequence? - Hyakuissei Okamoto, Tule Lake haiku |
The direction taken by this anger varied. Letters were written to politicians and community figures (see earlier pages). There were strikes and demonstrations. The Japanese American Citizens' League, treated by the WRA as representing the people, was beset by challenges, beginning as early as the Assembly Centers from which people were sent to the camps. As an accessible target and seen by some as a proxy for the government, the JACL was threatened regularly. Other organizations sprang up, of which the most important was perhaps the Fair Play Committee from Heart Mountain, where Bill Hosokawa and others from Portland, were sent. | In time, militants akin to the Black Power movement of the Sixties arose in the camp, asserting pride in a Japanese ancestry which had been denoted by the government as a badge of shame. Then, into this confused and increasingly restive situation, the government - strapped for soldiers - announced it was going to introduce conscription for a racially segregated unit composed of soldiers from among the community whose soldiers had been discharged as racial undesirables a few months earlier. In doing so, it also introduced a "loyalty" questionnaire, for people of Japanese descent only, which was badly worded and even more poorly presented. | ||
 |
No
sound of insects
Segregation center Moonlit windows. Alone Sei Sagara, Tule Lake haiku |
||||
|
The
impressions given, besides its obvious racist connotations, were many. It
appeared that it would render all immigrants as 'men and women without a
country'. It appeared as though anyone who joined the armed forces were giving
up all rights as citizens.
The government also made it evident that any one who signed would be leaving Tule Lake for unknown destinations, a move many simply could not bear to think of after enduring 2 moves already. Those who did not sign were destined for Tule, an attractive proposition for anyone separated from loved ones. The racially segregated army unit was an issue for others, as were the concentration camps themselves. The entire episode was a 'can of worms' destined to have grave consequences in the Japanese American community for decades to come as bitterness about the questionnaire and its consequences still linger. The entire episode, and the hell which followed ought to be laid at the foot of the government, and the racists who drove its policies. Unfortunately, resentments remain. Oregonians signed, almost without exception: "the decision was not that wrenching." - Hatsumi Nishimoto of Pine Grove, Oregon. For others, it was. Refusing to sign, refusing to submit to conscription until civil rights were restored was a serious business. "While in Denver I met Joe Grant Masaoka...He was very concerned about Nisei refusing to register for the draft. Many of the young Nisei men were being arrested and put in prisons.... |
I
remember going with Joe Grant to the FCI [ed.
note: Federal Corrections Institute in Englewood, Colorado]
and meeting a young Nisei who had just turned 18 years of age, who had
refused to register, and refused to conform to draft-board orders.He had
been indicted, arrested, and was being held, pending trial. We said to him
'Please
reconsider and cooperate with your draft board.' He replied:' Why should I
when the government has taken our rights away and locked us up like a
bunch of criminals anyway? ....Look, the government took my father away,
and interned him someplace. My mother is alone at Grenada [ed.
note: Grenada concentration camp] camp with
my younger sister who is only fourteen. If the government would take care
of them here in America, I'd feel like going out to fight for my country
but the government is treating us worse than shit!'
We would talk in this vein for a half hour or more, cajoling, pleading, and reasoning until tears were rolling down his face, and his hands gripping the bars so hard that the knuckles would show white. It was emotionally traumatic for these young men."We scheduled trips to the Grenada WRA camp in Colorado. Our reception was cool. On our second and third trips it became necessary for the MPs to provide personal escorts for us...[Gila River concentration camp, Arizona was next:] out of respect for us having come so far, they did listen respectfully, and no one through rocks at us...Our reception in Poston [Poston Concentration Camp, Arizona] was hostile." UO alum Minoru Yasui |
 |
"When I returned on temporary duty, to my amazement, I learned that in every one of the ten centers there were grave problems. It seems that during the intervening months in each of the ten centers many militant activists had surfaced. Agitation was rife. There were fires; there were pitched battles. WRA had to provide heavy guard forces. The number of those who were apparently beyond any early rehabilitation was large. They and their families would fill a large relocation center. I then concluded after extensive analyses and consultations that the relocation center at Tule Lake, California, was of the size and had the right facilities to accommodate all of the identified militants and their families...Neither Tule Lake nor any other relocation center was ever established for such a purpose! We had no militants during the Army phase." - Karl Bendetsen Mr. Bendetsen was not only without feeling (he was the American equivalent of Adolf Eichmann). He was dishonest. There had been resistance at the Army's Assembly Centers and it only intensified as martial law was declared at Tule Lake and Tule became a hellish nightmare for the nearly 20,000 who lived there. The Army had labeled people as "resistors" before the camps existed. Some became such. The Army labeled the residents of Heart Mountain "potential troublemakers". Some became such. Now the Army labeled thousands as "militants". Some became such. Mostly, people just tried to endure the misery which the Army ladled out without forsaking the minimum set of principles necessary for self-respect. | ||
| Above: Seattle-born Gene Akutsu of the Minidoka concentration camp, one of those who formulated the very important principle that Loyalty is a covenant and not a state of servility. It flows in both directions or it ceases to be meaningful. Below: Cell Block #1 on McNeil Island, where the activists served their sentences (see following page)s. More than 300 internees refused to be drafted into the military until their constitutional rights as citizens were restored. In March 1944, 106 Nisei soldiers - recruits for the most decorated unit in history - at Fort McClellan in Alabama refused to undergo combat training while their families were held behind barbed wire without trial. Gordon Hirobayashi was held here, as were conscientious objectors - Amish, Quakers, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mennonites. In the end, some 8,000 refused to submit to the demands of the government. The remainder, some 93,000, and most Oregonians, responded. The government, once again under the leadership of Karl Bendetsen, moved the 8000 to Tule Lake, built new, double fences there, imported tanks and imposed martial law. | |||||
 |
|||||
 |
 |
Left and right: These photos were taken surreptitiously at Tule Lake and smuggled out. They are among the most important documents from the camps because they validate the claims of people imprisoned there, in the face of the Mr. Bendetsen's claim of "happy, smiling faces". |  |
||
 |
 |
 |
|||
| Above: Ben Wakaye refused induction until civil rights were restored and was sentenced. and served 2 years in the federal penitentiary. After release, the only work he could find with his prison record was as a janitor. He died in 1952 at the age of 39 of kidney failure. | Above: Minoru Tamesa was a Seattle oyster farmer and mill worker. At Heart Mountain he joined Frank Emi in de-legitimizing their incarceration by deciding to walk out of camp without a pass. They were arrested. Mr. Tamesa refused induction until civil rights were restored and was sentenced. | ||||
 |
 |
[ed.
note: As the US government was introducing conscription into the
concentration camps, Oregon legislators were introducing a bill sponsored
by the incoming governor, Earl Snell, the
Alien Land Law, designed as a supplement to the 1923
land law to prevent anyone of Japanese ancestry from owning land in
Oregon. It was passed and signed into law in early 1945.]
Right: Mr. Bendetsen's decision to ship people out of Tule to make room for others he pulled from elsewhere simply created more hardships. The photo at the bottom is of 2 friends at Minidoka, parting company. Families were split asunder, friendships destroyed, and estrangements created which even today have not disappeared altogether. |
 |
||
| Jim Akutsu, above, of Seattle, studied civil engineering at the University of Washington. He was an excellent swimmer, wrestler, fencer and baseball player. He tried to volunteer for the National Guard and the Reserve Officer Training Corps before the war and immediately after Pearl Harbor but was turned away three times. He served 2 years in the federal penitentiary for refusing conscription until civil rights were restored to people of Japanese ancestry. | James Omura, from Bainbridge Island in Seattle. With his wife he moved to Denver when the evacuation was announced. He was charged for reporting and supporting the resistance at Heart Mountain and acquitted. After the war Mr. Omura was "hounded from job to job by other Nisei" and left journalism, instead becoming a respected landscape contractor in Denver. | Above: a nurse on the train from the concentration camp at Jerome Arkansas, holds one of the camp "militants", bound for Tule Lake. - WRA photo. | |||
 |
|||||
 |
Left: More "militant activists" suspected by Mr. Bendetsen, leaving Minidoka. Right: The train carrying Oregonians from Tule to Heart Mountain, at Bendetsen's orders, paused to allow exercise. People had their first view of the Columbia in many months. On this train was Roy Higashi. |  |
"Our departure [ed. note: from Tule Lake] was quite emotional because we were leaving our friends. Many were dabbing their eyes so it was probably as difficult for them as for us." - Oregonian Itsu Akiyama. | ||
 |
Left: The "militant activists" on Mr. Bendetsen's trains from Topaz concentration camp in Utah, bound for Tule. |  |
Left: the people from Tule Lake transferred to Jerome, Arkansas from Tule, including the family of OSU's 3 Kiyokawa children. | ||
 |
Left: "Recreation Hall partitioned with wall board to make bedrooms for Tule Lake transferees due to the shortage of regular housing space." - NARA | Right: Conditions at Tule became even more intolerable in the wake of Mr. Bendetsen's repression. Note the dogs at this roll call. |  |
||
| "It was on November 4th, 1943, as I recall, that the Tule Lake Food Warehouse Disturbances occurred. A Mr. Kobayashi, a Japanese American on security patrol, discovered several WRA Caucasian personnel stealing food from the Internee Food Warehouse during the night and loading the food on their own truck which was parked alongside the warehouse. Mr. Kobayashi, who had the authority of a warder, remonstrated with the WRA personnel because they were taking the internees' food. Mr. Kobayashi was attacked by the Caucasian WRA personnel and a scuffle ensued." | As the scuffle was going on, the Organization for the Betterment of Camp Conditions, made up of representatives of the numberous internee blocks, was holding a meeting. As soon as news of this incident was brought to the Organization, Rev. Kai and Mr. Kuratomi, the heads of the Organization, asked Mr. Koji Todorogi and me, who were attending the meeting, to go to the scene and try to restore calm and keep the situation under control by bringing back the internees who had gathered at the scene of the incident. | As Mr. Koji Todorogi and I were heading toward the warehouse area, several Caucasian WRA personnel suddenly appeared out of the darkness and attacked the two of us, without any provocation on our part, with pistols, rifles, and bats, and finally took us to the WRA office. As the two of us were being interrogated, Mr. Kobayashi, the warder, was brought in by another group of Caucasians. During his interrogation Mr. Kobayashi was hit on the head with such force that blood gushed out and the baseball bat actually broke in two. I was a witness to this brutal attack and remember it very vividly. | From about 9 P.M. that evening until daybreak, we were forced to stand with our backs against the office wall with our hands over our heads and we were continuously kicked and abused as we were ordered to confess being the instigators of the disturbance. We denied these accusations but our protestations of innocence were completely ignored by our tormentors. The beatings continued all night long and at day break the three of us were turned over to the Military Police and we were thrown into the stockade for confinement. | ||
| As
if the camp authorities had been expecting this incident to happen, the
Military Police Detachment immediately entered the detainee compound with
tanks, machine guns, and tear gas, and started their repressive measures
to cow the detainees, and to overwhelm the youth organization which was
made up of unarmed and defenseless teenagers. The repressive measures and
the martial law instituted by the camp authorites took the following
forms: 1. The MP tanks and jeeps constantly patrolled the area in a show of force designed to harass and frighten the detainees. 2. Unannounced and frequent inspections of the detainees' barracks in search of alleged contraband such as kitchen paring knives, sewing scissors, carpenters' and gardeners' tools. 3. Firing of tear gas at small groups of unarmed internees assembling at bath houses and bathrooms to get water for washing, or standing at the coal pile to get coal or kindling for heating, or standing at the shower area waiting to bathe, or at the laundry area to do their laundry. These repressive measures lasted two or three months and resulted in nightmarish fear, particularly among the very young and the very old detainees. Tokio Yamane |
|||||
| There were other problems at Tule. There would be until the camp was finally disbanded (it was the last to be emptied). Not a single individual or organization would ever be held accountable for an act which by all definitions was a war crime. | Winter
night
Pale faced man Taps my shoulder -Hyakuissei Okamoto,Tule Lake haiku, on the death of James Okamato, a truck driver shot by a guard as he stepped out of his truck. |
Mr. Bendetsen would eventually be promoted to Undersecretary of the Army. Mr Dillon Myer would go on to oversee the disbanding of indigenous American tribes. | In the end, 5,589 American-born citizens at Tule Lake gave up on us and decided they'd "had it". They renounced their American citizenship. 5,409 changed their mind after the war and asked for reinstatement. 4,978 requests were granted. | ||
 Back |
Next
 |
||||