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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
"POLITICS"
They have always been an isolated, discarded, and therefore ingrown people. Today this is more true than ever. The barracks village as a rule is literally isolated. At Manzanar, California, for example, the center is but a tiny square in a vast and lonely desert valley, between two great mountain ranges. Spiritually the people are just as isolated as that. Thrown together in a compact racial island of their own frustrated people, they grow in upon themselves and each other; they become almost completely detached from American life, the war, the world. Their small children speak more Japanese than they would if they competed daily with other American school children. The teen-age boys and girls are ostentatiously American in clothes, slang, and behavior. It is as if they were trying too hard to convince themselves that they are Americans. They know that they must and will go out the gate soon.
The adults think about themselves, and about the past they left. With time and distance, California's farm valleys, towns, and cities become more golden-hued than ever to the evacuees. They brood vaguely and fearfully on the future. The war sometimes seems like a vague abstraction, the cause of their troubles. And they think about rumors--which they often trust more then they do printed Official announcements. It may be rumor that the Army will take over. Or that the evacuees in this center will all be transported to another. This is the most nightmarish rumor of all to people who have moved so much in the past two years.
They think too, about the endless details of their camp life. Each group of 250 or so evacuees has a block manager who gets $16 a month listening to their complaints and, if possible, straightening out innumerable daily problems. The food in the mess hall is badly prepared; there is no toilet paper in the ladies' latrine; the neighbors play the radio too late and too loud; the roof of No. 29 barrack has a small leak.
Finally, there are gossip and politics. The Japanese Americans back in California went their way without much participation in politics as most American citizens know it. In the barracks village of WRA there is little real self-government. Most of the centers have a Council made up of block representatives or managers. But there is only a slight area within which such a congress can make community decisions. Usually at the meeting of the Council the members do little more than listen to new rules, new plans of WRA, handed down from Washington or the local director. The block representatives are expected to pass on the information to all the people.
Originally WRA ruled that citizens alone could hold office in the centers but this proved to be unwise. Two-thirds of the evacuees are citizens, but most of these American-born Nisei are from eighteen to twenty-eight years of age--too young to take on such responsible jobs as the block manager's. Besides, among the Japanese-Americans born here are hundreds of Kibei--young men who were sent to Japan for part of their education. Not all--but a large percentage of them--are pro-Japan, particularly those who gained the latter part of their education in Japan. Disliked by the Nisei majority, outnumbered and maladjusted, the Kibei often become a nuisance, creating little areas of dissatisfaction in the Center.
Thus it turned out that the Issei--the aliens, parents of the Nisei and Kibei--could best provide the authority, stability, and seasoned wisdom needed in block managers. They possessed a tradition of family and community leadership, desire to make the block of 250 or more people in which they live function in an orderly and quiet fashion. They are aliens primarily because U.S. law forbade them to become citizens. Many of them have a real loyalty but because they look to their children's American future for their own security.
Politics in the centers has nothing to do with office or votes or apparent powers. But it is power--the power of demagoguery, of spreading the infection of bitterness, exaggerating an instance or affront into an issue that may even get to the point of a small strike against WRA. The leaders have not invariably been pro-Japan. Some, both aliens and citizens, who had been good Americans became indignant at their loss of freedom and their right to participate in the life of the nation.
It may be that the administration was not willing to permit a big funeral for a man accidentally killed when a work truck overturned; it may be that three or four of the Caucasian staff displayed signs of race discrimination; it may be a rumor more plausible than fact. The "politicians" take any one of these, or a series, and worry it into a big camp issue. How great an issue it becomes depends most of all on the degree of confidence the center as a whole has in its director and the coolness and fairness with which he customarily handles his people. Too often the administration is out of touch with the main issues and grievances within the camp. WRA suffers, like every other agency, form the manpower shortage. Competent center directors and minor personnel are scarce. Often enough the director finds his Caucasian staff more of a problem than the evacuees.
The two so-called "riots", which brought the Army over the fence, arose from the accumulation of small grievances, whipped up to a crisis by groups struggling for powers and eager to put the administration on the spot. There was, in each instance, a strike. Actually strike in a relocation center is self-defeating, since almost all labor in the community works to provide goods and services for the evacuees themselves; no more than a handful work in the staff mess and office building. Only when violence occurred, and the director thought he needed help in maintaining order, was the Army invited.
But trouble rarely reaches either the strike stage or violence. The people in the Pacific Coast's little Tokyo rarely appeared on police blotters in the past, and now the crime record of WRA centers compares favorably with that of any small cities of their same size, or, indeed, with any Army camp. Most of the policing is done by the evacuee themselves, appointed to the "internal security" staff of each center.
Policing should be simpler than ever from now on. The ideological air has been cleared; the pro-Japan people have been moved out. The process of sifting the communities, separating the loyal and the disloyal, is virtually complete. The "disloyal" have been sent to a segregation center in northeastern California, leaving the other nine centers populated only by loyal.
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