[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
CODDLING, AT 31 CENTS A DAY
But WRA and its director, Dillon Myer, have been under almost continual attack by congressional committees in Washington, and by a whole long list of badgering groups and individuals on the West Coast. The Dies Committee goes after WRA(*) and the Japanese minority at frequent intervals. Even Hedda Hopper, the movie gossip, prattles innuendos. Not wishing to "imply anything," she noted last December that "we've had more than our share of explosions, train wrecks, fires, and serious accidents" since WRA has released so many of the evacuees. Actually, not one of the 17,000 has been convicted of anti-American activity.
WRA has usually been criticized for the wrong reasons. It has been accused of turning loose, for resettlement, "dangerous Japs. " The implication usually is that no Japanese American should be released, although from the very beginning WRA's prescribed purpose was to help the evacuees to find some place to live outside the prohibited zone. Again and again, the pressure groups and California Congressmen have urged that WRA's ten centers be turned over to the Army. (In February the President, instead, dropped WRA intact, with its Director Dillon Myer, into the Department of the Interior. ) Most frequently Mr. Myer has been charged with pampering the Japanese Americans. Almost every day the Hearst papers fling word "coddling," with the clear implication that all persons of Japanese descent, citizen or not, women and infants, should be treated strictly as prisoners of war, which of course they are not.
No one who has visited a relocation center and seen the living space, eaten the food, or merely kept his eyes open could honestly apply the word "coddling" to WRA's administration of the camps. The people are jammed together in frame barracks. A family of six or seven is customarily allotted an "apartment" measuring about twenty by twenty-five feet. It is a bare room, without partitions. The only privacy possible is achieved by hanging flimsy cotton curtains between crowded beds.
Furniture is improvised from bits of scrap lumber: a box for a table, three short ends of board made into a backless chair. The family's clothing and few personal possessions are somehow stuffed neatly away--on shelves if scrap lumber, a priceless commodity in all camps, is available. Otherwise, they are stuffed away under the beds. The quarters are usually neat. There are no cooking facilities and no running water in the barracks, unless the evacuee has brought his own electric plate or had a friend "on the outside" send one in. As in Army camps, each block of twelve or fourteen barracks (250 to 300 people) has its central mess hall, laundry building, public latrines, and showers.
With faithful regularity, irresponsible yarns are circulated that the evacuees are getting more and better food than other Americans. Actually, the food cost per day is held below 45 cents per person. For 15 cents a meal the food is possibly adequate, but close to the edge of decent nutrition. In most camps, located far from dairy districts, milk is provided only for small children, nursing and expectant mothers, and special dietary cases. There are two meatless days a week and a heavy emphasis on starches. Nearly a third of the food requirements are grown on the irrigated fields of the camp itself. This reduces the actual cash outlay for food to 31 cents per person.
Practically everyone who wants a job can work, and most of the able bodied do. They plant and till the camp's vegetable acreage, prepare the food in the mess halls, do stenographic work for the Caucasian staff, work in the cooperative store(*) In some centers they make furniture for the administration building or cotton mattresses to take the place of the hard straw pallets. Some are barbers and cobblers for the community, doctors in the hospital, scrubwomen in the latrine, garbage collectors. The maximum wage (a doctor, for instance) is $19 a month; the minimum, $12; the average, $16. In addition, those who work get a clothing allowance for themselves and their dependents--at the most, $3. 75 a month for an adult in the northmost center.
Individual enterprise is forbidden. To set up one's own dressmaking service within the community or to sell shell jewelry or anything else to the outside is prohibited. In order to keep the center wage uniform, all economic activities must be conducted through the community cooperative, which pays its barbers and other workers the standard stipend. With their small monthly wage, and by dipping into their pre-war savings, most evacuees buy extras to eat, but they can get only nonrationed food, since they possess no ration books. They send to the mail-order houses for some of their clothes, buy shoes, yard goods, and clothing at the cooperative store. Their children go to school in the barracks village, and when they are sick, to the center hospital.
Thus the pampering and thus the humiliation. A doctor distinguished in his profession, who lived with grace and charm in a decently comfortable home before the war, is today huddled in a small room with all his family. He practices his profession for $19 a month at the center hospital, serving under a Caucasian of lesser accomplishments, hired for considerably more money. A man who spent twenty years building up his own florist business or commission house, or who operated a large vegetable farm in one of California's valleys, is merely "stoop labor" on the center's acreage.
The record of Japanese-Americans during the depression indicated that they did not take to public relief. They were too proud. They stuck together, helped each other, and almost never appeared on WPA or home-relief lists. To virtually all of them it is now galling to be distrusted wards of the nation, their meager lodging and food a scanty handout, the payment for their labor somewhat the same.
back | foward
[print-ready document]