Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Resilience: The Spirit of Resistance
Episode Date: October 14, 2022On this episode of Resilience: The Wartime Incarceration of Japanese Americans, we are continuing our exploration of camp life. Through it all, many incarcerated found ways to add beauty and joy into ...their long days and nights. They cultivated the dusty land around them, practiced their crafts, and created a sense of community and belonging. Though they never should have had to, incarcerated Japanese Americans showed strength and resilience from behind fences made of barbed wire. We will hear again from Professor Lorraine Bannai as well as from the book Silver Like Dust by author Kimi Cunningham Grant. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hello, friends. Welcome. I'm so glad you're here today. We're going to continue to talk
about camp life for incarcerated Japanese Americans during the war. For three years,
they endured so much, the loss of privacy and the freedom to come and go as they pleased.
They lost control over their futures and even the small decisions we take for granted.
When and what to eat, where to shop, how to celebrate holidays and occasions.
But through it all, many found ways to add beauty and joy into their lives.
They cultivated the dusty land around them, practiced their crafts, and created a sense of community and belonging. Though they never should have had to,
incarcerated Japanese Americans showed strength and resilience from behind fences made of barbed
wire. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.
At first, life in incarceration camps was bleak. Buildings were crude, the weather was unforgiving, and people were thrown together in blocks with strangers. There was very little structure to
the days. At the temporary assembly centers, there had been very little organization around schooling,
and children had gone weeks or months without the opportunity to learn in a classroom.
Parents were determined to rectify that once they settled into the long-term camps.
And even though they had the support of camp officials to begin school programs,
their access to resources was almost non-existent.
The camps had been built without school buildings, and there
were no desks or textbooks waiting for children during the first weeks of instruction. A government
report from 1942 shows us just how little they were given. It says, with no exceptions, schools
at the centers were opened in unpartitioned barracks meant for other purposes and generally bare of
furniture. Sometimes the teacher had a desk and chair. More often, she had only a chair.
In the first few weeks, many of the children were obligated to sit on the floor or stand up all day.
Slowly, donations began to make their way into camp classrooms. School districts or humanitarian groups like the YWCA collected and sent materials for teachers and students.
And teachers themselves were hard to come by.
Before the war, many teacher training programs discriminated against Japanese Americans,
which made it more difficult for them to pursue opportunities to learn the vocation.
And very few white teachers taught at incarceration camps.
There was really no incentive.
The jobs were located in the middle of nowhere, and they paid poorly.
So camp officials began recruiting teachers' aides.
These were often older teenagers or young adults who had taken some college courses
before they were forced
to leave for the camps. One aide, Bess Chin, remembers her job at Heart Mountain. She said,
the classroom where I first started was a barrack with just benches. There must have been 30 kids
in those little desks there. Their laps were the desks. Maybe they had a book to write on.
The books came from the Wyoming public education system because the superintendent was from Wyoming.
The first class was in this barrack room, and right next to it would be another room and noise.
Just all the noise.
I don't see how the teacher controlled all these kids.
I suppose she managed.
And they did manage. By the end of the first year of incarceration,
most camps had growing education systems. They carved out the space they needed to start
preschools, elementary schools, high schools, and in some cases, even continuing education
classes or vocational training for adults. The government, recognizing the camp's successes with schools, seized the opportunity to step in.
Camp officials instituted Americanization programs into the schools.
These programs were designed to teach schoolchildren patriotism.
Elementary students were photographed waving American flags, and they cut strips out of old newspapers and colored them red, white, and blue,
fastening them into paper chains to decorate the walls of the recreation areas.
Each morning, students started their day by singing, My Country, Tis of Thee.
A visitor who toured the schools at five of the camps later wrote, Their spirits are unbroken.
They took the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag
in an assembly, and my voice broke as I joined them in their promise of loyalty.
How could they say it? But they did, and they meant it. In the spring of 1942, Sunday school teacher Mary Tsukamoto was sent to the Jerome Incarceration
Camp in Arkansas. Mary, her husband, and their daughter had spent weeks in the Fresno Assembly
Camp where Mary had set up a small makeshift school to teach the children there. In the
evening, she often taught English lessons to a group of gathered Issei.
When they were moved to Jerome, Mary was shocked at the conditions and determined to continue to do what she could to help educate and serve the people she now lived with.
chapters and organized a group of Nisei women to serve as hostesses for the visiting soldiers of the 442nd Battalion as they traveled across the Mississippi border to train at Camp Shelby.
The Tsukamoto family was able to leave the camp earlier than many others, first to work in Michigan
and then when the war ended, they returned to their grape farm in Florin, California.
Michigan, and then when the war ended, they returned to their grape farm in Florin, California.
Mary persisted in pursuing a career in teaching, a job she had become fiercely passionate about.
She was one of the first certified Japanese Americans to teach in California's Elk Grove School District and spent 20 years in an elementary school classroom.
After she retired, Mary created the Time of Remembrance program,
a curriculum that uses oral stories, photographs, and other artifacts to connect students to the
histories of Japanese-American incarceration. Much of her program is still used as California
State Curriculum for Elementary School History. As time in the camps passed, more organization began to take
shape. Schools gave families structure, but organized pastimes gave people a way to create
community and normalcy. Without getting into the entire history of the sport,
let's take a look at the role of baseball in the incarceration camps.
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The Japanese people were immediate fans of baseball when it was introduced on the island by Americans in the late 1800s. It became their most popular sport, and Japanese immigrants who settled in the U.S. quickly organized games in their new communities.
In 1903, the first year Major League Baseball held a World Series, an Issei League was
formed in Los Angeles. Japanese immigrants and later their Nisei children continued to create
their own leagues when they were excluded from participating in leagues with white players.
When Japanese Americans were forced to relocate in incarceration camps, two of the three largest camps were located
in Arizona. In fact, the two camps became the third and fourth largest cities by population
in Arizona at the time. The Arizona camps quickly formed baseball teams and began playing each other
in an inter-camp league competition. George Omachi, who was nicknamed Hats, an incarcerated Nisei who later
became a major league baseball scout, said it was demeaning and humiliating to be incarcerated in
your own country. Without baseball, camp life would have been miserable. The inter-camp leagues
were orchestrated by Kenichi Zenimura. Zenimura had a long history
with baseball. At the time of his incarceration in Arizona, Zenimura was already hailed the Dean
of the Diamond in Japanese-American baseball circles. He was born in Hiroshima, Japan,
and was eight years old when his family emigrated from Japan to Hawaii.
He learned baseball as a kid while living in Hawaii, and the game stuck.
He began as a catcher and then moved on to managing and organizing international touring teams in the 1920s and 30s.
And even though the leagues were segregated, Zanamora was one of the few who had a crossover career.
He was good at his job and successfully arranged tournaments and tours for several well-known white major leaguers like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
When Zeddemora was sent to Arizona with his family, he was despondent. Many of his colleagues
and friends had been sent to Jerome or Rower in Arkansas, but after a few weeks, he began to view Gila River in Arizona
in a different light. There were miles of desert terrain in and around the camp, and Zanamora got
to work bringing his vision of the baseball field to life. He channeled a water line outside of one
of the block barracks to flow 300 feet outside of the barbed wire fence
to help the Bermuda grass grow in the field. Volunteers helped to dig an irrigation ditch,
and soon they moved eight-foot-tall shrubs to act as the outfield fence.
But Zedemora didn't stop there. He put out a call to the white residents of Butte,
asking them to drop off
scrap lumber and metal at the block manager's office. Zenimura wasn't creating just a baseball
field. He was giving the residents of Gila River a stadium. Actor and comedian Pat Morita, you
probably know him as Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid movies, was incarcerated at Gila River as a boy.
He said of Zenimura, I remember this little old man out there every day watering the infield.
One of the great sounds of joy for me was the sound of the baseball.
The Canal Athletic Society was formed and consisted of seven teams from the Arizona camps.
The field had dugouts to keep players protected from the elements and bleachers that were always full.
Games were covered by the camp's resident-run Gila News Courier newspaper.
And when the first doubleheader game was played, the event made the front page.
The article said, that Zanamora baseball diamond certainly is some humdinger. Makes us remember
the good old days back home. Art, too, became a regular pastime for many of the incarcerated.
In the camps, nothing went to waste. And if errant nails, empty
aluminum cans, driftwood, and sagebrush were available, they would be crafted into something
useful or beautiful. Often both. Crafters transformed wood brought to the camp in the
form of fruit crates into cribs and high chairs or serving trays for holiday meals.
When the wood was too small for furniture, people carved scraps into tiny birds.
One Issei at Topaz carved intricate teapots and candy dishes out of slate stone he found around
the camp. And while some of the incarcerated had been artists before the war, there were actually a handful of Disney animators in the camps.
Most were hobbyists, people who were farmers and shop owners, students and fishermen.
Some of the most poignant art made in the camps were images done by watercolor, charcoal, and oil paints.
were images done by watercolor, charcoal, and oil paints. They showcased the insides of crowded barracks and landscapes with distant mountains behind the long, dark facades of camp buildings,
smoke rising in gray clouds from the chimneys. Many intricate brooches and pins were made by
women at camps like Tool Lake and Topaz, where it was easy to comb the dry lake beds for seashells.
Groups of women signed up for crafting classes, where they sorted the shells, bleached them, painted them, and then arranged them to look like flowers and leaves.
Often these pins would be worn as corsages at weddings or funerals as a stand-in for fresh flowers.
Because the Japanese Americans celebrated life, death, and new beginnings at camp.
Throughout the series, we've been following along with Kimi Cunningham Grant's grandmother as she
is moved from her home in Los Angeles to Heart Mountain as a teenager.
During her time at camp, she grew older. She grew up. She was introduced to a young man,
and not knowing what their future would look like, the couple got married.
That afternoon, the ceremony was simple. No organ or piano, no white aisle runner,
no fancy veil. It was held in the big
community room, the size of which made their small band of 40 people seem even smaller.
Chairs were set up toward the front of the room, where the minister and my grandparents stood.
In the first row, Obachan's mother, dressed in the gray tweed outfit she had worn on the day
they left Los Angeles seemed weary.
Her shoulders sagged, and her clothing was now too big on her small body.
Next to her, Papa looked fine in his black suit,
with his hair parted and combed carefully to the side.
A few silver flecks were beginning to show.
Uncle Kisho, Aunt Maki, and the cousins sat behind them.
Some friends came as well, young women who worked at the mess hall with Obachan and a handful of my grandfather's friends who lived with him in
the bachelor's quarters. Everyone listened as the minister read from First Corinthians and then led
my grandparents in their vows. At the back of the room, Obachan had arranged a table with some
refreshments. She had purchased some cookies
from the Heart Mountain Dry Goods store, as well as some fancy napkins. It was nothing like the
weddings you see today, Obachan tells me. Just drinks and a little bite to eat, that's it.
Later that evening, all of the guests would have headed to their assigned mess halls for dinner.
Weddings, funerals, birthdays, anniversaries,
most milestone events were held in camp community centers or churches and were simple affairs.
Brides wore their best dresses, or if they had time to plan, they sent away to places like
Sears Roebuck for material and had a seamstress in camp make a wedding gown and veil.
People became adept at improvising,
at turning the things they had at their disposal into something special.
And while I've talked a lot about how the incarcerated worked to make the best out of their lives at camp,
we must not forget that they were places of hardship,
and that there were many moments of resistance and tension.
Many Japanese American families have spent decades keeping silent about their incarceration.
Professor Lorraine Benai shares a little about her own family's experience.
My parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles were all incarcerated at Manzanar.
My parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles were all incarcerated at Manzanar.
And then after they got released, everyone saw I would hear about camp.
And they talk about, well, we know the Matsumoto's from camp.
And the only camp I knew about was Girl Scout camp.
And I knew that that couldn't fit, but you knew not to follow up and not to ask about it.
So they said very little about camp. But I knew something had happened, but couldn't ask about it. So they said very little about camp, but I knew something had happened, but couldn't
ask about it. I unbelievably learned about my parents' experience in ethnic studies classes
in college, which were just so incredibly important, not only because it introduces people
to people from different cultures, but I learned my own history, which was terribly important for me and has become actually my life's work.
And even then, my parents really didn't talk about it very much.
I think then what are the enduring effects?
There had to be something about my family not talking about it.
Something, things just so bottled up.
My mother told me that when she was allowed to leave camp to go to the interior to Chicago,
they had a group and they were told not to hang out with other Japanese Americans, not to speak Japanese.
They were given a list of don'ts that could only make you feel ashamed or it's dangerous to talk about
other things. There wasn't just fear of danger or shame when people were given permission to
take trips outside of the camps. In many places like Camps Postin, Heart Mountain, and Topaz,
there were reports of civil unrest that put everyone at unease. The incarcerated were often frustrated by wage differences and food shortages.
There was intergenerational friction.
The Issei and Nisei didn't always see eye to eye on issues like military enrollment or resistance.
Sometimes rumors would circulate about informers, people who reported camp happenings to officials or the FBI.
And at the incarceration camp at Manzanar, there was a riot.
When the military began to move Japanese Americans from assembly centers to Manzanar in the fall of
1942, the population, most of which had been forcefully removed from
Los Angeles, was already starting to feel divided. Part of this tension predated Pearl Harbor. Some
residents of LA's Little Tokyo were vocal about their distrusted members of the Japanese American
Citizens League. If you remember from our previous episodes, the JACL adopted a very pro-America mindset, which spurred rumors that members had begun to ally themselves with the FBI on the Office of Naval Intelligence, acting as informants in order to bolster their personal reputations as loyal U.S. citizens.
This made some members of the Japanese American community wary of the JACL.
Issei in particular objected to the JACL stance that encouraged citizens to cooperate fully
with their removal and incarceration. They felt like anyone who promoted cooperation without question were traitors to their race.
So with tensions already high, people grew even more discontent when they were incarcerated together.
Some felt that some of the Nisei and members of the JACL were receiving preferential treatment with camp officials.
Cross words and arguments often broke out between the camp's JACL members and other incarcerated men.
And on December 5, 1942, JACL leader Fred Tayama was beaten by six masked men.
Fred Tayama was an LA businessman and a JACL leader, and before he was moved to Manzanar, he was accused by many in his community of
exploiting Issei fears after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. They said he charged frightened people
unfairly high fees for simple services as they worked to close up their businesses and leave
their lives behind. That November, Tayama was allowed to leave Manzanar to participate in a national JACL meeting in Salt Lake City.
There, the group advocated that Nisei eligibility for the draft be reinstated.
This soured people even further.
They didn't like that their own community members were pushing to send more of their men to war.
Men who would have to fight for a country
that was imprisoning them. When Tayama returned to Manzanar, he was attacked in his barracks.
His injuries were non-life-threatening, and even though he hadn't gotten a good look at his
attackers, he pointed his finger at the leader of the kitchen workers union, Harry Ueno.
Harry was arrested along with two other suspects, and he was taken to a jail in the nearby town of Independence. Back at Manzanar, people were angry. They felt like Ueno's arrest was a sham. They felt
like he was the fall guy because he had recently accused a director of stealing supplies from the camp.
They thought that Tayama and the JACL were working with camp officials to silence those who spoke up.
About 200 men, mostly from Harry Ueno's block unit, met the next morning to discuss what had happened and what needed to be done next. By the afternoon, over 2,000 people had gathered to listen to speeches that called
for Harry Ueno's release. The crowd chose five people to present their grievances to camp director
Ralph Merritt. With the five representatives in the lead, the crowd followed them to the director's
office. The representatives demanded that Ueno be released, but Merritt did not
immediately agree. The back and forth made the crowd restless and unruly, and Merritt, getting
nervous, agreed to release Ueno. He had conditions, though, and asserted that the crowd must disperse
and that no one was to try and break Ueno out of the camp jail after he was brought back from town.
That evening, when the representatives went to verify that Ueno was back at Manzanar,
an even larger crowd began to gather, and they were told by military personnel to go back to
their barracks, but instead, a small group of about 50 to 75 men broke off to look for JACL leader Fred Tayama at the camp's hospital.
Paul Otake, who was in the crowd that day, said, all of a sudden, they're all uptight and they're
going to go after him. They said, let's go after the JACL leader. When you're in a camp, a little
hatred grows. They don't think. A lot of people don't think very sanely. So I think
they went after the JACL. As it turned out, hospital staffs knock him out under a gurney.
With the smaller parties breaking off to look for anyone they thought was associated with the JACL
and Merritt trying to negotiate with the five representatives, the crowd began
to take on a chaotic energy. They threw bottles and rocks at the soldiers who gathered to control
the crowd. The military police responded with tear gas to disperse them. People ran every which way
trying to escape both the gas and a dust storm that had worked its way through the camp.
The military police abandoned the tear gas and fired into the crowd.
Jimmy Kofukuhara recalled that terrifying moment.
He said, when that dust storm kicked up, we all moved.
We turned to run away.
But that caused commotion and the military thought we were rushing them.
And that's why those
who got shot, got shot in the back. We had no weapons. We had nothing. Two men were killed that
evening. A 17-year-old boy died instantly and another, just 21, died a few days later. Nine others were wounded but survived. The next morning, on December 7th,
a year to the day after Pearl Harbor, martial law was declared at Manzanar and the military began
arresting the five representatives and others they felt were leaders of the riot.
They, along with their families, were removed from Manzanar and they were told it was for their protection.
Block managers distributed black armbands around the camp as a way to mourn for the two dead boys.
It's estimated that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Manzanar's camp population wore their armbands for weeks.
They did not rise up again as an angry crowd,
but they wore their resistance on their sleeves long after the dust had settled.
The people of Manzanar were not the only ones who challenged the oppressive orders they found
themselves living under. And next time, we'll learn more about those who dissented and defied
all the way to the Supreme Court. I'll see you again soon.
Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. And I'm wondering if you
could do me a quick favor. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating
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Here's Where It Gets Interesting is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson.
Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. See you again soon.