An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration
CONNIE Y. CHIANG
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chiang, Connie Y., author.
Title: Nature behind barbed wire : an environmental history of the Japanese American incarceration / Connie Y. Chiang.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018003904 (print) | LCCN 2018028938 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190842079 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190842086 (Epub) | ISBN 9780190842062 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Japanese Americans—Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945. | Concentration camps—United States—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Environmental aspects. | Human ecology—United States—History. Classification: LCC D769.8.A6 (ebook) | LCC D769.8.A6 C35 2018 (print) | DDC 940.53/1773089956—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003904 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 3 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Anna Klingle and Jollin Chiang and in memory of Augustine Young
Acknowledgments
It took me a decade to complete this book. Many debts have accrued over the course of ten years, and I’m delighted (and relieved) to finally have the opportunity to extend my heartfelt gratitude to a long list of friends, colleagues, and institutions.
This book would not have been possible without Bowdoin College, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Society for Environmental History. They all provided critical financial support for archival research. Bowdoin also funded two sabbatical leaves that gave me time to conduct research and write. I am deeply grateful to work at an institution that provides such generous support for faculty scholarship.
I am indebted to the staffs of several libraries and archives, all of whom provided invaluable assistance. Thanks to the Denver Public Library, the Huntington Library, the Idaho State Historical Society, the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC, Special Collections at the Charles E. Young Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles, Special Collections at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, and Special Collections at the University of Washington. Bowdoin’s librarians are also outstanding. Special thanks to Guy Saldanha for securing dozens of microfilm reels and Barbara Levergood for teaching me to navigate government documents. During the course of my research, many institutions also began to digitize records related to the Japanese American incarceration. My ability to remotely access thousands of documents and images facilitated the completion of this book. I would especially like to thank the Densho Project for recording the memories of hundreds of Japanese Americans and making a treasure trove of sources available to the public.
I had the pleasure of presenting my research at several colleges and universities, where engaged audiences asked smart questions and helped me refine my claims. Many thanks to my gracious hosts at these institutions: Jen
Acknowledgments
Seltz and Niall O’Murchu at Western Washington University and Fairhaven College; Melanie Kiechle, Kara Schlichting, and Adam Zalma then at Rutgers University; Liz Escobedo at the University of Denver; Tamara Venit-Shelton then at Reed College; Louis Warren at the University of California, Davis; Scott Wong at Williams College; and Jay Turner at Wellesley College. I also thank Peggy Shaffer and Phoebe Young for inviting me to participate in the Third Nature Symposium at Miami University of Ohio. The feedback that I received from them and the other participants transformed chapter 5.
Many friends and colleagues offered thoughtful suggestions and encouragement over the years. My deepest thanks to Matthew Booker, Kathy Brosnan, Kate Brown, Lizzie Grennan Browning, Bill Cronon, Jared Farmer, Mark Fiege, Drew Isenberg, Karl Jacoby, Karen Leong, Neil Maher, Mary Mendoza, Tom Okie, Rachel St. John, Paul Sutter, Julie Sze, Elena TajimaCreef, Jay Taylor, Cecilia Tsu, Richard White, and Bob Wilson. Andrea Geiger offered sage advice at a key moment of the revising process. Kathy Morse not only helped me think about the bigger argument of this book, she also photographed sources for me in the archives while she was doing research on her own book. Kendra Smith-Howard did the same thing, long before we actually met in person. Liz Escobedo carefully read and critiqued several chapters of the manuscript. I am beyond grateful for her keen insights and, most importantly, her unwavering friendship and support for over two decades.
My Bowdoin colleagues also shaped this project in many ways. Laura Henry, Jill Smith, and Krista VanVleet provided incisive comments on an early version of chapter 6. I spent several summers and holiday breaks writing in an empty classroom alongside Natasha Goldman and Jayanthi Selinger, both of whom offered camaraderie and friendship. Jayanthi, along with Sakura Christmas, fielded my numerous questions about Japanese language, culture, and history as well. I am also indebted to Dharni Vasudevan, who, in addition to being a wonderful mentor, explained basic soil chemistry and helped me make sense of the pipeline corrosion story that unfolds in chapter 3. Thanks also to Belinda Kong and Nancy Riley, whose insights into the Asian American experience informed this project in many ways, and to Chuck Dorn, Brian Purnell, Susan Tananbaum, and Allen Wells for cheering me on throughout.
I am fortunate to teach excellent students, who humored my frequent discussions of this project and always asked terrific questions. In particular, students in my US home front seminar helped me grapple with the messiness of the war years; their influence pervades this book. Students in my North
American environmental history and Asian American history surveys also reminded me of the vibrancy of these fields and helped me think about their connections. Two students provided research assistance. Andrew Raisner helped to compile the bibliography, and Paul Landsberg dug up sources for me in eastern California.
As I was finishing the final revisions on the book, I had the pleasure and honor of participating in the Densho Scholars Roundtable alongside Tom Ikeda, Karen Inouye, Lon Kurashige, Eric Muller, Brian Niiya, Greg Robinson, and Alice Yang. Their comments, questions, and deep knowledge shaped my eleventh-hour tweaks in critical ways. I was also inspired by their warmth, passion, and generosity. Special thanks to Eric Muller for extending the invitation and for providing perceptive comments on the entire manuscript. His feedback proved to be indispensable.
Susan Ferber expressed interest in this project long ago, and I’m enormously grateful that she stuck with me for so many years. She has been a superb editor. She helped me think through the argument and narrative of the manuscript, then edited every single page, demanding precision and clarity throughout. Her professionalism, sense of humor, and encouragement also made this process a true pleasure.
Family and friends, near and far, provided much support. For their hospitality during my research trips, I thank my cousins Angela Kwan, Carl Potts, Jeff Young, and Stephanie Young. A million thanks to my remarkable mom, Jollin Chiang, whose presence nourished me in so many ways during her visits to Maine. Scott Chiang is everything an older sibling ought to be, and his resilience and wisdom are inspiring. Closer to home, I am grateful to Seth Ramus, Michael Kolster, and Christy Shake for showering my family with meals, drinks, and endless good cheer. I would be remiss if I didn’t also thank the Mackey family, my extraordinary neighbors who kept me laughing and always offered a helping hand.
My immediate family supported and encouraged me at every turn. Matt Klingle has been much more than my spouse and colleague throughout this process. He has also been the most loyal and loving friend. He always knows just the right things to say, and his unfailing confidence in my abilities and great enthusiasm for my work have sustained me for many years now. As I toiled on this book, I also had the immense joy of watching our children grow up into such beautiful and amazing human beings. Between Ben’s insatiable curiosity and strong sense of justice and Anna’s tender heart and enormous empathy, I had constant reminders of why this story matters. My love for and pride in them have no bounds.
Acknowledgments
This book tells a story that spans several generations of Japanese American families and speaks to their remarkable resilience. It thus seems fitting that my dedication is also multigenerational. This book is for my daughter, my mom, and my late grandfather, Augustine Young. Models of human decency, all three have enriched my life with their kindness and generosity.
Note on Terminology
The words used to describe the wartime experiences of people of Japanese ancestry are controversial. “Internment” has been the most commonly used term, but many scholars have rejected its use because it refers to the detention of enemy aliens during war. The federal government did intern some German, Italian, and Japanese enemy aliens in army and Department of Justice camps, but roughly two-thirds of the people of Japanese ancestry expelled from the Pacific Coast were US citizens by birth. Thus, I do not use the term “internment” and instead use “incarceration,” “confinement,” and “detention.”1
My choices are not without problems. Some scholars rebuff “detention” because it implies a short-term period of confinement, but I maintain that it adequately captures the lack of freedom that people of Japanese ancestry experienced. Others reject “incarceration” because it implies that the camps were penitentiaries and that those confined therein had committed crimes.2 My use of “incarceration” is not meant to question their innocence. Rather, it highlights the harsh conditions under which they lived. It is true that the facilities were not actual prisons; they did not have cells with steel bars that were unlocked only at certain times of the day. Nonetheless, they were surrounded by barbed wire fences and guarded by armed men. They shared enough characteristics with penitentiaries for “incarceration” to be an appropriate term.
To describe the facilities where people of Japanese ancestry were confined, I reject “internment camp” and “relocation center,” the government’s term, except when I am quoting from or referring to documents from the war years. What, then, is a more appropriate term? Some scholars have adopted “concentration camp,” but many question its close association with the Nazi death camps. Using this term in conjunction with the confinement of people of Japanese ancestry, they argue, diminishes the atrocities that Jews faced. Historian Alice Yang Murray adds that “concentration camp” and Nazi
“extermination camp” have become “inextricably linked in the popular imagination. During World War II, officials and commentators could say Japanese Americans were confined in ‘concentration camps’ without evoking images of Nazi atrocities. I don’t think that this is true today.”3 Sympathetic to Murray’s argument, I avoid “concentration camp” and employ “incarceration camp” or just “camp.”
In addition to “relocation center,” the federal government used the euphemistic terms “evacuation” and “relocation” to describe the rounding up and removal of people of Japanese ancestry from their homes. According to the leaders at Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and disseminating Japanese Americans’ wartime stories, “evacuation” is closely associated with a natural disaster and thus suggests that their removal was a safety precaution.4 While some federal officials believed that this was the case in 1942, numerous scholars have rejected that justification since. “Relocation,” likewise, has a benign connotation and does not suggest the compulsory nature of expulsion. Thus, I use “forced removal,” “mass removal,” and “expulsion.”
The last dilemma involves what to collectively call the thousands of people of Japanese ancestry who were confined at the camps. To this end, I have adopted “Japanese American.” While this term typically refers to Nisei— those who were born on American soil to immigrant parents and were US citizens—I apply it to Issei, the immigrant generation, as well. Because many Issei had lived in the United States for four decades at the start of the war, had no intention of returning to Japan, and would have become naturalized citizens had immigration law allowed, I think it is appropriate to call them “Japanese Americans.”5 Generational divides were certainly relevant, however, and I make the distinction when necessary. More generally, I also refer to them as “detainees” and “incarcerees.”
1. “Terminology,” http://www.densho.org/terminology/ (accessed July 27, 2015); Roger Daniels, “Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans,” in Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century, ed. Louis Fiset and Gail M. Nomura (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 190–214. See also Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, “Resolution Regarding Terminology,” http:// www.momomedia.com/CLPEF/backgrnd.html#Link%20to%20terminology.
2. “Terminology,” http://www.densho.org/terminology/; Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), vii–viii; Cherstin Lyon, Prisons and Patriots: Japanese
on Terminology
American Wartime Citizenship, Civil Disobedience, and Historical Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), xi–xiii.
3. Daniels, “Words Do Matter,” 204–205; Alice Yang Murray, Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 7; Edward Schumacher Matos and Lori Grisham, “Euphemisms, Concentration Camps, and the Japanese Internment,” National Public Radio, February 10, 2012, http://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/ 2012/ 02/ 10/ 146691773/ euphemisms- concentration- camps- and-the- japanese-internment (accessed July 27, 2015).
5. “Terminology,” http://www.densho.org/terminology/. It was not until the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952 that people of Japanese ancestry could become naturalized US citizens.
Introduction
The Nature of Confinement
When Dillon S. Myer became director of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) on June 17, 1942, he faced an enormous job: to oversee the confinement of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry.1 Many seemingly minor details also demanded his attention, such as choosing a name for the post office at the Central Utah Relocation Center, one of the ten camps that detained his charges. Seeking advice, he dashed off a letter to Utah governor Herbert Maw on July 2. “It seems to us that the name of the new post office should originate within the state,” he commented. Myer went on to note that detainees would be engaged in reclamation and conservation projects, so he wanted to honor a Utahan “actively identified” with this type of work.2 For Myer, a name embedded in local land uses was fitting, given plans for Japanese Americans to continue natural resource work in camp.
Maw’s secretary, Elias J. Strong, replied to Myer a month later. After conducting a telephone survey of nearby residents, he explained that there were “not any real old time settlers whose names could be used for this purpose.” The most prominent local resident involved with conservation work was R. J. Law, “who [was] still alive and very active.” Strong recognized that adopting the name “Law, Utah” “in conjunction with what many will refer to as a concentration camp hardly sounds appropriate.”3 Given the massive violation of civil liberties that was at the heart of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, “Law” would be completely incongruous—an ironic name at best, insulting and demeaning at worst.
Instead, Strong looked to the surrounding environment for inspiration. One possibility was nearby Drum Mountain, so named because “when the wind blows a noise comes from this mountain very similar to the noise of
beating drums.” According to Strong, this was the “favorite choice of the citizens.” The other possibility was Topaz, the name of another nearby mountain that “glistens in the sunlight” like the orange-hued gemstone.4 Both “Drum Mountain” and “Topaz” pointed to notable environmental features, whether sonorous wind or dazzling color. Neither name had problematic connotations. In the end, “Topaz” stuck and became the colloquial name for the camp. Embracing the gemstone idea, the masthead for the first issue of the Topaz Times the camp newspaper produced by Japanese Americans but under WRA supervision—was even emblazoned with the slogan “jewel of the desert.”5
At first glance, this discussion may appear unremarkable, even inconsequential, but the act of naming can be an exercise of power.6 For Myer and Strong, the post office name asserted how Japanese Americans might interact with the environment. Myer, who had worked for the Soil Conservation Service, saw the detainees as following in the footsteps of earlier white settlers and thus wanted a name to reflect that continuity. As they toiled to make the Sevier Desert productive, detainees would also contribute to a progressive narrative surrounding the WRA’s program. Their labor would make the camps self-sufficient and “fill gaps in the wartime economy of the Nation,” including food production, the development of “raw lands,” and “other essential public works.”7 For his part, Strong preferred to focus on Utah’s geographic features and draw attention away from the inherent injustices of the camp. In short, these men believed that the environment would be a site of productive labor or a source of inspiring scenery.
In practice, the environment played a more complicated and often contradictory role in the Japanese American incarceration. While detainees did clear marginal land and grow crops and did come to enjoy and find inspiration in their surroundings, the environment also proved profoundly vexing and oppressive. As illustrated by Japanese Americans’ wartime memoirs, social isolation and psychological distress were tied to the harsh environmental conditions of the camps. For example, Yoshiko Uchida associated “exile” and “uprooting” with the desert. In recounting her journey to Topaz, she recalled her dismay as the environment became “as bleak as a bleached bone,” with barracks “sitting sullenly in the white, chalky sand.”8
Artwork from the camps reinforces this point. Sevier Desert, a sumi-e (ink painting) by Chiura Obata, is explicit about nature’s toll:
The spring has come, but here in Topaz there is not even one green, growing plant.
Everything is like it is drawn with a grey brushstroke. Yellow dust blows into eyes, mouth and skin. It is not known how long we will stay in this desert.9
Obata was clearly discouraged by the harsh desert, but he also drew strength from nature. In Nagare no Tabi (Stream’s Journey), he chronicled Japanese Americans’ time in Utah. One panel shows the silhouette of Topaz Mountain looming over the barracks along with the text, “Four months of hardship have passed. Our strong hopes and iron will to succeed have never wavered. At last, we see the beautiful dawn as reflected in the morning sun bright against snowcovered Mt. Topaz!” After their first long winter, stunning vistas restored Japanese Americans’ spirits.10
Japanese American photographers also depicted the environment as a source of both hope and hardship. While detainees were initially not allowed to bring cameras to the camps, the government eased this restriction by the spring of 1943. At the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, several detainees, including Bill Manbo, subsequently retrieved their cameras and formed a camera club.11 While Manbo often featured camp events in his photographs, he also captured the pleasure and disquiet brought by the natural world. In one image, his family enjoys an outing to the Shoshone River. With the sun shining brightly, three women, pants rolled up to their calves, wade into the water, one with a broad smile on her face. In another image, his son, Billy, walks alone on a dirt road edged with tarpaper-covered barracks and piles of coal. He appears as a small figure against the gray skies and sage-colored earth, Heart Mountain looming in the distance. Even in this color photograph, the landscape is almost colorless, and the mood is somber. For Manbo, then, the natural world brought joy and sorrow.12
While these sources suggest that the natural world was an important, if not central, part of the confinement experience, most scholars of the Japanese American incarceration have not adopted an explicit environmental focus.13 They invariably mention the bleak and harsh conditions of the camps, but then focus on other themes. Many have explored the political and legal aspects of incarceration, such as the federal government’s justifications for removal and confinement, Japanese Americans’ efforts to resist and challenge their incarceration, and the movement for redress.14 Some have taken a social and cultural approach and examined the impact of confinement on Japanese American families and communities during and after the war.15 To illuminate these topics, still other scholars have edited the correspondence, memoirs, and oral histories of former detainees.16 Collectively, this scholarship highlights
the multiple factors that shaped incarceration policy and the resilience and creativity of Japanese Americans, but the environment remains mostly an unexamined backdrop rather than an integral part of this wartime program.
Among those scholars who have embraced an environmental perspective, some have grappled with the paradox of the wide-open spaces of the American West—long associated with freedom, democracy, and unfettered opportunities—as the site of confinement. WRA officials equated the camps with “pioneer communities” and suggested that Japanese Americans were following in the footsteps of their white predecessors, but western lands were undeniably the site of their oppression.17 Others have explored detainees’ material changes to nature, whether as agricultural laborers outside the camps or as farmers and gardeners within the camps.18 The work on gardening has been especially enlightening, as this endeavor helped to ameliorate the hardships of incarceration while allowing Japanese Americans to resist state power.19
Nature Behind Barbed Wire provides a more comprehensive environmental history of the Japanese American incarceration, from the early debates about removal in 1941 to the postwar resettlement years. It embraces the “core tasks” of the field, offering thick descriptions of the environment’s influence on detainees and analyzing their interactions with and transformations of the natural world.20 With the environment placed squarely at the center of the story, it explores several facets of camp life, from outdoor recreation to agricultural production, and analyzes how natural forces shaped them.21 Agriculture is particularly important because it was central to many Japanese Americans’ lives before, during, and after the war. Like other agroenvironmental studies, this book examines how various environmental factors—soil, weather, insects, to name a few—affected crop output and social interactions on the farms.22
In addition to reorienting the scholarship on the Japanese American incarceration, this book contributes to Asian American history and environmental history. Few studies in either field have analyzed the environmental practices of Asian Americans and how the shifting political and racial climate shaped their changes to and attitudes toward nature.23 Given Asian Americans’ diverse interactions with the natural world since the nineteenth century, the wartime experiences of Japanese Americans must be understood as part of a longer environmental history. Their time in the camps, moreover, demonstrates how racial identities and the dynamics of race relations have intertwined with the environment through time. Indeed, this book expands discussions about environmental inequalities and further illuminates how the natural world has helped to both define and challenge racial divisions.24
Ultimately, the book asks: how does the lens of environmental history alter our understandings of Japanese Americans’ wartime incarceration? It argues that the confinement of Japanese Americans was an environmental process, deeply embedded in the lands and waters along the coast and the camps further inland. Each step in the process was shaped by the natural world, whether its physical properties and fluctuations or humans’ shifting understandings of and interactions with it. For example, building camps in undeveloped areas required the clearing of large swaths of land, which often contributed to dust storms. These blinding squalls wreaked havoc on the infrastructure, but they also intensified Japanese Americans’ feelings of outrage and despondency. Throughout the war years, the environment operated as a material reality and a cultural force, molding the camps’ physical contours and influencing how both WRA officials and Japanese Americans perceived the incarceration.
The environmental process of incarceration was simultaneously a social process, shaped by confrontations and compromises between and among Japanese Americans and WRA officials. Once at the camps, they engaged in constant negotiations with the environment—and with each other. For WRA officials, their ability to keep the camps running smoothly depended, in part, on favorable environmental conditions as well as the cooperation of detainees. Neither was a given, and state power was never absolute.25 Of course, Japanese Americans faced the most constraints. The WRA restricted their ability to work and checked their access to the resources with which they could feed and shelter themselves. Their state of relative dependence and their overall vulnerability compounded the environmental limitations that they already faced. Nonetheless, they found many ways to harness nature and assert some control over the terms and conditions of their confinement. In doing so, they often proclaimed their Americanness.
These negotiations and adaptations took place during a time of global war, which had widespread environmental implications.26 As natural resources were funneled to soldiers fighting abroad, Americans at home had to make do with less and abide by federal rationing strictures.27 Japanese Americans and WRA officials were not exempt from these mandates, but confinement in desolate locales made their plight far more challenging. Food was rationed so as to provide meals for the troops overseas. Construction materials were often second-rate. Coal for heat and wallboard for insulation were in short supply. The war stymied efforts to make the camps habitable and hospitable.
Japanese Americans and WRA officials also had to navigate the complex ideological terrain of the war. With the United States waging a war,
in part, against Nazism, many American intellectuals and activists continued their long-standing attacks against racial prejudices and pushed for antidiscrimination measures. This principle of racial liberalism—that “government could and should play a role in promoting racial equality”— received legitimacy when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which created the Fair Employment Practices Committee to combat inequalities in the workplace.28 However, as historian Nikhil Pal Singh argues, World War II was also “a war in which a discourse of antifascism, freedom and democracy was counter-poised with clashes along the color-line.”29 The incarceration of Japanese Americans was a glaring example of how racial liberalism fell short of its idealistic goals. This book expands on this point by highlighting how the suffering and indignities wrought by the natural world made the government’s empty words even more galling.
To illustrate the environment’s pervasive and vital role in the incarceration process, Nature Behind Barbed Wire focuses on four of the ten WRA “relocation centers”: Gila River, Manzanar, Minidoka, and Topaz. Gila River was about fifty miles south of Phoenix, Arizona, on the Gila River Indian Reservation, home to the Akimel O’otham (Pima) and Maricopa Indians since 1859. Located in southern Idaho, Minidoka was a US Bureau of Reclamation project, established in 1904 to control the flow of the Snake River in order to support farming in the region. In contrast, Topaz was a conglomeration of private, county, and federal property in central Utah, mostly used for grazing and agriculture. Meanwhile, Manzanar, a former ranching and farming town known for its lush apple orchards, was on Owens Valley land acquired by the City of Los Angeles in the 1920s to provide water for metropolitan growth.30 These camps represent a range of ownership and land use arrangements. They also highlight key themes in the history of the American West—the prevalence of public lands, the influence of aridity, and an enduring record of displacement and social inequality—that connect the Japanese American incarceration to the region’s development.31
Detainees at these four camps came from a wide swath of rural and urban locales up and down the Pacific Coast. Gila River was inhabited by many rural residents of California’s Central Valley, along with individuals from Los Angeles and the southern California coast; Manzanar was populated by metropolitan Los Angeles residents, a diverse mix of urban professionals, nursery owners, and Terminal Island fishermen; Minidoka was occupied by urbanites from Seattle and Portland and farmers from outlying areas; and Topaz pulled a predominantly urban populace from the San Francisco Bay Area.32 Japanese Americans from these communities had developed strong ties to nearby lands
and waters, often through their labor in natural resource industries. These prewar environmental experiences undoubtedly shaped their reactions to their incarceration.
Concentrating on Gila River, Manzanar, Minidoka, and Topaz comes at the expense of exploring Jerome and Rohwer in southeastern Arkansas. This is a notable absence given their distinct environmental features. Located on Farm Security Administration land in the marshy delta of the Mississippi River floodplain, these two camps contained bayous and swamps and were surrounded by forests, which Japanese Americans logged for heating fuel.33 While juxtaposing the southern and western camps could yield some intriguing points of comparison, it is beyond the scope of this book. Moreover, all of the camps, whether in the interior West or Arkansas, represented an environmental contrast from the Pacific Coast and required considerable adaptation on the part of detainees. The exact location of their confinement was, in some respects, less important than the larger process in which they participated.
The first step in the incarceration process was displacement, the topic of the opening two chapters. Chapter 1 examines how Japanese Americans’ prewar involvement in natural resource industries along the Pacific Coast— especially agriculture—shaped the campaign for their removal. Given the heightened need for foodstuffs during the war, federal officials struggled with how to address the elimination of Japanese American cultivators. Chapter 2 turns to the site selection and construction process for the ten “relocation centers,” concentrating on the WRA’s environmental and geographic criteria and local responses to their placement in particular locations. It also analyzes detainees’ initial reactions to these facilities and how they, along with WRA officials, addressed their first environmental challenges: the dust and heat. This chapter does not examine the temporary assembly centers, which housed Japanese Americans for an average of three months while the camps were being built.34 Because these centers were located in close proximity to Japanese Americans’ homes on the West Coast, the displacement experienced was both short-lived and not as dramatic as in the permanent camps.
The next four chapters delve into the subsequent step in the incarceration process: segregation and confinement. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the use of Japanese American labor to maintain the camps and make them self-sufficient. As they toiled on the land, the camps became workscapes, places transformed by “the interplay of human labor and natural processes.”35 Chapter 3 demonstrates how harsh environmental conditions structured detainees’ labor protests, while chapter 4 turns to agriculture, another important arena
for Japanese American work. The WRA wanted to develop viable farms to keep costs in check, but poor soil, short growing seasons, resistance from local municipalities, and wartime mandates made this challenging. Labor shortages were also an ongoing problem, despite the fact that both detainees and WRA officials couched farming as a noble endeavor that aided the war effort and displayed loyalty.
Japanese Americans engaged in many other activities that likewise carried symbolic or personal meaning. At a time when many Americans were suspicious of people of Japanese ancestry, participation in certain environmental activities was framed as an expression of patriotism. Chapter 5 focuses on these pursuits—from tending victory gardens to cultivating a plant-based rubber substitute—that purportedly helped detainees prove their loyalty. Chapter 6 shifts away from politicized activities and analyzes leisure—hiking, fishing, swimming, and gardening—which provided joy, freedom, and a sense of personal fulfillment and renewal. These activities sometimes took detainees beyond the guard towers and fences, demonstrating the permeability of the camp boundaries and Japanese Americans’ willingness to challenge their physical and social restrictions.
In the immediate postwar years, the environmental process of incarceration continued where it began: with displacement. Chapter 7 examines the closing of the camps and Japanese American farmers’ efforts to establish operations inland or back on the Pacific Coast. Neither destination provided an easy entrée back into agriculture, given hostile neighbors and neglected property on the Pacific Coast or unfamiliar crops and weather patterns in the western interior. Newly freed Japanese Americans simply could not resume their previous lives and were forced to adapt and readjust once again.
For WRA officials, President Harry S. Truman’s termination of the WRA on June 26, 1946, and the final liquidation of the camps marked the end of the incarceration process, but it continues to this day for former detainees and their descendants.36 While many Japanese Americans tried to put the war years behind them and never spoke of their confinement, they began to break their silence by the 1960s. The epilogue explores how the natural world has become a critical element of Japanese Americans’ wartime memories and the public commemoration of the incarceration. Diverse acts of remembrance are firmly embedded in the environments of the Pacific Coast and the former incarceration camps.
To narrate these years, this book draws on a variety of sources. The voluminous records of the WRA figure prominently, as they provide a detailed portrait of the camps’ daily operations from the perspectives of government
officials. Japanese American experiences are elucidated in their wartime correspondence, essays, and newspapers and their postwar testimonies, memoirs, and oral histories. Postwar sources can be skewed by the problems of memory, the passage of time, and the context of their creation, whether before a congressional committee or at the request of an academic scholar. Despite these shortcomings, they shed important light on how Japanese Americans responded to confinement.
Social scientists also studied the incarceration as it was experienced during the war years. The WRA Community Analysis Section employed twenty-one non-Japanese American “community analysts,” mostly anthropologists, who researched “camp life” and advised administrators.37 In addition, the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS), an academic investigation of the removal, confinement, and resettlement of Japanese Americans, dispatched over two dozen Japanese American and non–Japanese American fieldworkers to four assembly centers, six WRA camps, and several postwar resettlement areas between 1942 and 1946. Directed by sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the study delved into this “extremely important social experiment” in order to test social science theories and to offer principles for future forced mass migrations.38 Many have criticized these social scientists’ failure to critique the morality of incarceration, their inexperience, their ethical lapses, and their “lack of explicit direction and theoretical orientation.”39 Nonetheless, when combined with other sources, their records allow for the reconstruction of a nuanced environmental history of the incarceration process.40
For most Japanese Americans, wartime incarceration was part of an ongoing experience of exclusion and discrimination. Long before they boarded trains and buses for the camps in 1942, inequalities had become inscribed on the West Coast streets and fields where they had lived and worked since Japanese immigration began in the 1890s. In the urban West, they developed their own ethnic enclaves—Little Tokyos or Nihonmachi or settled in multiethnic neighborhoods because restrictive covenants and racist attitudes often prevented them from living elsewhere.41 Discrimination also pushed them to develop their own ethnic economy of restaurants, hotels, boarding houses, laundries, barbershops, and pool halls, and their own cultural institutions of Japanese-language schools, baseball leagues, and churches.42 What emerged were vibrant communities serving people of Japanese ancestry throughout the urban West.
Japanese American agriculture was central to this ethnic economy. Since many immigrants had previously farmed in Japan, they often pursued
