Throughout the spring of 1942 the U.S. Army hastily converted racetracks, fairgrounds, and parks into seventeen temporary facilities for residence.[1] The shock of these assembly centers remained so fresh in the minds of many Nikkei that, forty years later, former residents could still vividly describe their first impressions:
Pinedale. The hastily built camp consisted of tar paper roofed barracks with gaping cracks that let in insects, dirt from the dust storms . . . [There were] no toilet facilities except smelly outhouses, and community bathrooms with overhead pipes with holes punched in to serve as showers. The furniture was camp cots with dirty straw mattresses.
Manzanar. [The barracks were] nothing but a 20 by 25 foot of barrack with roof, sides of pine wood and covered with tar paper . . . no insulation. But the July heat separated the pine floor and exposed cracks to a quarter of an inch. Through this a cold wind would blow in or during the heat of the day dusty sand would come in through the cracks. To heat, one pot bellied wood stove in the center of the barracks.
Portland. The assembly center was the Portland stockyard. It was filthy, smelly, and dirty. There was roughly two thousand people packed in one large building. No beds were provided, so they gave us gunny sacks to fill the straw, that was our bed.
Santa Anita. We were confined to horse stables. The horse stables were whitewashed. In the hot summers, the legs of the cots were sinking through the asphalt. We were given mattress covers and told to stuff straw in them. There were no partitions. Toilet paper was rationed by family members. . . . It had extra guard towers with a searchlight panoraming the camp, and it was very difficult to sleep because the light kept coming into our window.[2]
[Tulare.] A tiny nursery school tot, seeing nothing but Japanese faces whirl about him each day thinks this Center is Japan. He implored his parents to take him back to America.[3]
The army itself admitted that the “use of facilities of this character is not highly desirable”[4] and the U.S. Public Health Service condemned the unsanitary conditions.[5] The living standards in the rest of the center were similarly appalling:
The kitchens are not up to Army standards of cleanliness. . . . [In a hospital] there are no cribs for the children. While [we were] there one child had a rather bad fall. . . . The only [foods] for little children were bread and milk. No high chairs for the children and they seemed uncomfortable and unhappy. . . . The dishes looked bad . . . gray and cracked. . . . Dishwashing not very satisfactory due to an insufficiency of hot water. . . . Soup plates being used instead of plates, which means that the food all runs together and looks untidy and unappetizing.[6]
The latrines were even worse as one woman corresponded from Merced to her Caucasian friend back home:
The only thing I really don’t like are the lavatories. It’s not very sanitary and has caused a great deal of constipation in camp for both men and women. The toilets are one big row of seats, that is, one straight board with holes out about a foot apart with no partitions at all and all the toilets flush together . . . about every five minutes. The younger girls couldn’t go to them at first until they couldn’t stand it any longer, which is really bad for them.[7]
Perhaps the most severe problem was inadequate medical facilities and care. The Public Health Service recruited evacuee doctors and nurses to staff infirmaries, but provided minimal medical equipment and supplies.
At Pinedale, dental chairs were made out of crates and the only instruments were forceps and a few syringes. At Fresno, the hospital was a large room with cots; the only supplies were mineral oil, iodine, aspirin, Kaopectate, alcohol and sulfa ointment. In some cases evacuee doctors were permitted to return home to pick up their own instruments. In Fresno and Puyallup there was an outbreak of food poisoning affecting over 200 persons in each Center. At Santa Anita, hospital records show about 75% of the illnesses came from occupants of the horse stalls.[8]
Thankfully, the WCCA allowed religious ministry to continue within the assembly centers for Protestants, Catholics, and Buddhists, stating, “It is the desire of this office to adhere to the American principle of religious freedom regardless of sect or denomination, race or creed, and to tolerate no discrimination against any religious denomination which the Japanese constituency or group within the Center have requested.”[9] According to David Yoo,
temples and churches supplied space that enabled people to work through their trials. Religion helped create a sense of peoplehood. . . . Religious beliefs pervaded the culture and daily activities of the Nikkei, affecting both values and practice. In particular, religion helped combat the legacy of racism that predated the camps. . . . By upholding values such as filial piety, the family, and ethnic solidarity, religion affirmed key elements of the community.[10]
Christians in the camps took it upon themselves to organize churches and to care for fellow internees. Worship services and Sunday schools were initially held in grandstands and mess halls, but ministers soon started weekly Bible studies, evening devotions, and youth fellowships as well. Christian leaders also assumed many other responsibilities besides providing religious services.
The church’s task of helping members prepare for the move extended into the assembly centers and the camps. Lay leaders and clergy served as part of advance teams enlisted to ease the transition between the various stages of detention. Church networks assisted persons as they moved into their residential cubicles and adjusted to changes such as communal latrines, showers, and dining halls. Pastors took on roles as interpreters and middlemen between the administration and the internees in relaying policies and requests. . . . In addition to formal worship services, churches allowed people to gather simply to talk about a wide variety of concerns, and these events complemented expressly religious programs.[11]
One minister wrote, “I suddenly found myself a shepherd of five thousand souls. . . . So it looks as though I am to be a busy pastor. Here I have the freedom of living an utterly self-forgetting, self-giving life. Surely the Word of God is not bound [2 Timothy 2:9].” Another minister expressed a prayer for grace: “As we remember ‘I Am an American Day,’ help us to pray that, as the song would say, that God shed his grace on her, God mend her every flaw, God her gold refine! Help us never to shout ‘America’ to receive blessings from her, but to be a blessing unto her. Give us grace to become and remain good servants of God. Amen.”[12]
Most of the experienced Protestant ministers in the camps were of the older Issei generation, so the English-speaking Nisei experienced greater difficulty as they were separated from their Caucasian pastors. One challenge for the Issei was the initial ban on all Japanese-language materials including hymnals, printed church bulletins, and Christian literature. In addition, the non-Japanese church was slow to provide assistance, believing that America’s leaders had acted in the best interests of all. Eventually, however, the outside church moved to help: “First came a subdued acquiescence to plans for relocating and incarcerating the Japanese population; next, individuals and denominations offered to help within the camps themselves; finally, churches helped organize the resettling of internees outside the camps.”[13] According to Blankenship, “Most aid took one of three forms: supporting worship practices of Japanese Christians, developing public relations campaigns on their behalf, and providing Nikkei with material aid and services.”[14] The following stories will briefly describe camp life in the various assembly centers and the ensuing Christian response. Accounts in each camp were virtually interchangeable as internees experienced similar struggles and similar joys.
[1] See Appendix Four: List of Assembly Centers.
[2] CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 138-39.
[3] Claire Gorfinkel, ed., The Evacuation Diary of Hatsuye Egami (Pasadena, CA: Intentional Productions, 1995), 76.
[4] U.S. Army, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943), 152.
[5] U.S. Public Health Service, District No. 5, San Francisco, “Report of Activities in the Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast” (2 June 1942).
[6] Surveys of Assembly Centers (July 1942) by Mary I. Barber, Food Consultant, and 1st Lieutenant J. W. Brearly, Quartermaster Corps, RG 107, NA.
[7] Anonymous letter to Grace Nichols (June 1942), Conrad-Duveneck Collection, Hoover Institution Collections of War, Revolution, and Peace (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University).
[8] Paul M. Nagano, “United States Concentration Camps,” American Baptist Quarterly 13, no. 1 (March 1994), 56.
[9] “Policy—Religion within WCCA Reception and Assembly Centers” (20 May 1942), Box 15/Fld 21, CCGS. Only Shintoism, a traditional Japanese religion, was barred from practice as officials viewed the practice of Shinto rituals as a sign of loyalty to Japan. Despite being the minority among Japanese Americans, Christianity received tremendous advantages over Buddhism because many of its leaders were not rounded up in the post-Pearl Harbor incarceration, its holy books were not banned in the camps, and outside churches provided financial support for its ministers. Buddhism was given no such advantages, despite the WCCA and WRA profession of religious freedom (see Duncan Ryūken Williams, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War [Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019]). As Herbert Nicholson admitted, “The Japanese Christians had more Caucasian friends” (Nicholson and Wilke, Comfort All Who Mourn, 83).
[10] Yoo, Nisei, 116. See Gary Y. Okihiro, “Religion and Resistance in America’s Concentration Camps,” Phylon 45, no. 3 (1984), 220-33.
[11] Yoo, Nisei, 115-116.
[12] Japanese American Relations Committee, Pasadena AFSC Information Bulletin 6 (3 June 1942).
[13] Taylor, “Fellow-Feelers,” 123-29.
[14] Blankenship, Social Justice, 58.
