Indeed, the current discourse over vaccines does in some ways recall the typhoid and smallpox vaccination efforts that mostly took place in the “assembly centers” that held forcibly removed Japanese Americans in the spring and summer of 1942. As noted in the government’s Final Report, Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942, “virtually all” Japanese Americans in the “assembly centers” were vaccinated, though interestingly, vaccination doesn’t seem to have been mandated, as the report notes several categories of people who did not get the shots, including “those individuals refusing absolutely.” But there were also community based efforts to secure vaccinations prior to the roundup, as well as vaccinations administered in the enemy alien internment camps and in the War Relocation Authority concentration camps.
But to start with Ms. Mizuta’s last question, the typhoid shots in particular—which were administered in three courses and which seemed to have significant side effects for most—are a well remembered part of camp lore, noted in many contemporaneous and retrospective accounts of camp life. Accounts appear in many Densho oral histories. “Those shots really hurt,” remembered Hiro Heidi Inahara, who was fourteen at the time. “And when I came back through the hallway, I fainted. And when I woke up, I was still on the floor.” Chizu Omori, age twelve, remembered the shots administered at Poston as “just awful” and being “sick after each one. In that heat and everything, that was really terrible.” Seven year old Shigeo Kihara recalled being literally knocked off his feet by the vaccine and having to crawl back to his barrack. Ted Hamachi, age 15, recalled that the shots were “done by blunt needles and sterilized with … a alcohol flame.”
But it seems that even at the time, the shots were recognized as significant milestones. The final issue of the Tanforan Totalizer includes a section that recalls the history of that camp and notes “[t]he typhoid and smallpox shots that periodically inflated Center biceps and left half the residents wistfully wishing that someone would somehow put them out of their misery.” Pacific Citizen columnist Bill Hosokawa devoted his July 9, 1942 “From the Frying Pan” column to the shots, noting that every inmate “in the not distant past has experienced the dubious pleasure of a series of anti-typhoid injections” and that while ”[s]ome come through the ordeal without so much as a swelling,… even the strongest of men may be confined to bed for a day or two with chills, fever, backache and headache. Miné Okubo’s classic 1946 graphic novel Citizen 13660 also recalls “groans in the stable” from the shots.