[print-ready document]
GILA NEWS-COURIER SUPPLEMENT
ISSEI, NISEI, KIBEI THE U.S. HAS PUT 110,000 PEOPLE OF JAPANESE BLOOD IN "PROTECTIVE CUSTODY"
FORTUNE MAGAZINE, APRIL 1944
MIGRATION EASTWARD
At first the movement of the 110,000 people living within the prohibited zone was to be voluntary. the Japanese Americans were merely told to get out. Within three weeks 8,000 people had packed up, hastily closed out their business affairs, sold their possessions or left them with neighbors, and set forth obediently toward the east. But Arizona remembered all too well how California had turned back the Okies in the past, and many Japanese Americans were intercepted at this border. Kansas patrolmen stopped them. Nevada and Wyoming protested that they did not want to receive people found too dangerous for California. About 4,000 got as far as Colorado and Utah. It became apparent that the random migration of so many unwanted people could result only in spreading chaos. By March 29, voluntary evacuation was forbidden, and the Army made its own plans to control the movement.
The evacuees reported to local control stations where they registered and were given a number and instructions on what they could take (hand luggage only) and when they should proceed to the first camps, called assembly centers. Although they were offered government help in straightening out their property problems, many thousands, in their haste and confusion, and in their understandable distrust of government, quickly did what they could for themselves. They sold, leased, stored, or lent their homes, lands, personal belongings, tractors, and cars. Their financial losses are incalculable.
The Army, in twenty-eight days, rigged up primitive barracks in fifteen assembly centers to provide temporary quarters for 110,000. Each evacuee made his own mattress of straw, took up his new life. By August 19 everyone of Japanese descent (except those confined to insane asylums and other safe institution) was behind a fence, in "protective custody. " They were held here (still within the forbidden military zone) until a newly created civilian agency, the War Relocation Authority, could establish other refuges father inland. WRA's job was to hold the people until they could be resettled in orderly fashion.
WRA appealed to the governors of ten nearby western states. With one exception, Colorado's Governor Carr, they protested that they did not want the Japanese Americans to settle in their domain, nor did they want any relocation center erected within their borders unless it was well guarded by the Army. Finally nine remote inland sites were found, all of them on federally owned land. (One assembly center in eastern California became a relocation camp. ) Most of them were located, for lack of better acreage, on desolate but irrigable desert tracts. More tar-papered barracks were thrown up, more wire fences built, and once more the people moved. By November, 1942, all the evacuees had packed up their miserably few possessions, had been herded onto trains, and deposited behind WRA's soldier-guarded fences, in crowded barracks villages of between 7,000 and 18,000 people.
They felt bitterness and anger over their loss of land and home and money and freedom. They knew that German and Italian aliens--and indeed, Japanese aliens in other parts of the U.S. had been interned only when the F. B. I. had reason to suspect them. Second-generation citizens of German and Italian origin were not evacuated from California; nor were the second generation citizens of Japanese descent elsewhere in the U.S. put behind fences.
Although the evacuees resentment at regimentation within WRA's little Tokyos is deep, it is seldom expressed violently. Considering the emotional strains, the uprooting, and the crowding, no one can deny that the record of restraint has been remarkable. Only twice have the soldiers been asked to come within a WRA fence to restore order.
back | foward
[print-ready document]