Justice / Exhibit

Japanese American WWII Incarceration

FDR cited military necessity as the basis for incarcerating 120,000 Japanese Americans.

by Natasha Varner via Densho: Japanese American Incarceration and Japanese Internment on February 9, 2016

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American Concentration Camps

Densho

...and report for their own exile. Stories abound of profiteers offering distressed Nikkei pennies on the dollar for their possessions or taking over farms filled with ready-to-harvest produce. As Japanese Americans got on the trains and buses, they wondered what the future held for them.

Part Three

American Concentration Camps

After short stays in temporary detention centers, men, women, and children of Japanese descent were moved to one of ten concentration camps located in desolate sites throughout the West and in Arkansas.

Exiled Japanese Americans were sent first to short-term detention facilities euphemistically called “assembly centers.”

Most exiled West Coast Japanese Americans were first sent to short-term detention facilities run by the army that were euphemistically called “assembly centers.” The “assembly centers” utilized existing facilities such as fairgrounds and horse racing tracks located near the areas where Japanese Americans were being removed. In the largest of these facilities—Santa Anita in Southern California, Tanforan in Northern California, and Puyallup south of Seattle, Washington—many inmates lived in recently vacated horse stalls and slept on straw mattresses. “Of course, it was smelly there,” recalled Shoji Horikoshi of Tanforan, “The floors were wooden but I think they painted the walls with very thin paint, like whitewash, and the odor of the horses was strong.”

After stays ranging from a few weeks to a few months, Japanese Americans were moved to ten concentration camps run by a newly created federal agency, the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Located in desolate desert or swamplands throughout the West and in Arkansas, these “relocation centers” were surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, and were still being completed when the first inmates began to arrive.

The travails of living behind barbed wire

Inmates lived in blocks of barracks with communal bathrooms, laundry facilities, and dining halls. Many cited extreme weather, dust storms, the lack of privacy, and inadequate food as among the many travails of living behind barbed wire. “And just seeing the living arrangement was, it was a real bummer. Thinking that, wow, this room has one light bulb,” remembered Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga of Manzanar. “And there were seven of us in one small room.…it was not very comfortable for newlyweds, especially, or any family, to live that close, not have the privacy. Which is the thing… I think liberty and privacy is what I miss the most.”

Others pointed to the breakdown of the family unit, due to communal life that saw children spend nearly all their waking hours, including mealtimes, with friends rather than family and to WRA policies that favored the American-born Nisei over their Issei parents.