By the fall of 1942, Japanese American internees were transported by train from the various assembly centers to ten different relocation centers in the country’s interior. Most of these multi-day trips, on what one Nisei dubbed “the Orient express,”[1] departed in the dead of night. The passengers were instructed to sit on strait-backed seats with windows closed and curtains drawn “for their own safety.” Miné Okubo recounted her experience,
The trip was a nightmare that lasted two nights and a day. The train creaked with age. It was covered with dust, and as the gaslights failed to function properly we traveled in complete darkness most of the night, reminding me of the blackout trains in Europe. All shades were drawn and we were not allowed to look out of the windows. . . . Many became train sick and vomited. The children cried from restlessness. At one point on the way, a brick was thrown into one of the cars.[2]
At the end of each uncomfortable journey, arriving Nikkei were further shocked by the stark barrenness of the relocation centers they would call home. According to one scholar, “All ten sites can only be called godforsaken. They were in places where nobody had lived before and no one has lived since. . . . These areas were still vacant land in 1942, land that the ever-voracious pioneers and developers had either passed by or abandoned.”[3] Such living conditions were less than ideal.
Each of the ten sites was relatively isolated. The six western projects were wind and dust swept. Tule Lake, Minidoka, and Heart Mountain were subject to severe winters. Poston and Gila, both in the Arizona desert, had temperatures well above 100 degrees for lengthy periods, and Rohwer and Jerome experienced the excessive humidity and mosquito infestations of swampy delta land.[4]
The camps were divided into blocks, consisting of 10 to 14 barracks each. Most barracks were 20 feet by 120 feet and divided into six apartments of three different sizes. Once again, internees were forced to make their homes out of makeshift materials.
The Natural Response
Nikkei without a sustaining faith in Christ attempted to make the best of their relocation with the fatalistic stance of shikata ga nai (“It can’t be helped”) and drawing upon the cultural value of gaman (internalization of emotions). Gaman-suru (perseverance and patience) subdued the emotions, discouraging further discussion and healing. The Japanese also sought societal approval. Giri, for example, was a moral obligation to the group as a whole and enryo was the practice of polite self-restraint or modesty (by thinking more about the well-being of others).[5] “Silence about the camps represented a ‘social amnesia’ to suppress unpleasant memories and feelings.”[6] “In fact, a key Nisei response was the suppression of their Japanese cultural identity and attempt to blend into American culture (Ima, 1976). ‘By trying to prove we were 110 percent American,’ noted Mass (1991), ‘we hoped to be accepted.’”[7] Internees could not even adequately express their emotions years after the camps had closed. Researchers at the University of Illinois later analyzed the psychological trauma they must have experienced.
Some Nisei felt that they were responsible for what had happened (Miyamoto, 1986; Nagata, 1993) as shown in the comments of one Nisei project participant: Being labeled as an enemy alien and incarcerated in a concentration camp was the most traumatic experience of my life. There is still a feeling of bitterness which I will have the rest of my life. My thoughts at the time were: This country, which I loved and trusted, had betrayed me. How can they do this to me? What did we do to deserve this kind of treatment? Although I was only 15 years old, I could not believe that my country would do this to me, especially when I had been a proud and loyal American. As I sat in the barrack in camp, tears would flow whenever I thought about this.[8]
According to psychologist Amy Mass,
Executive Order 9066 confirmed our worst fears. The psychological impact of the forced evacuation and detention was deep and devastating. For the honor-conscious Issei, it was the repudiation of many years of effort and hard work in this country. For the Nisei, it was a rejection of the nation we loved, the nation to which we had pledged our allegiance.[9]
From a personal perspective, Miné Okubo recorded her own feelings at the time of the internment:
We were suddenly uprooted—lost everything and treated like a prisoner with soldier guard, dumped behind barbed wire fence. We were in shock. You’d be in shock. You’d be bewildered. You’d be humiliated. You can’t believe this is happening to you. To think this could happen in the United States. We were citizens. We did nothing. It was only because of our race.[10]
Many occupied their time with hobbies such as art, ikebana (Japanese flower arrangement), baseball, school, and work projects. Internees labored in the camp for meager salaries between $12 (for unskilled labor like farmhands and construction) and $19 (for professionals like doctors and teachers) per month.[11] Such occupations merely served to pass the time, but did not offer any lasting hope for their situation. Internees without Christ would continue to grieve their losses like those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13).
[1] Motomu Akashi, Betrayed Trust: The Story of a Deported Issei and His American-Born Family during World War II (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2004), 58.
[2] Okubo, Citizen 13660, 117.
[3] Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps: North America: Japanese in the United States and Canada During World War II (Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing, 1981), 96.
[4] Dorothy Swaine Thomas and Richard S. Nishimoto, The Spoilage: Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1946), 28.
[5] Donna K. Nagata and W. Cheng, “Intergeneration Communication of Race-Related Trauma by Japanese American former internees,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 73 (2003), 266-78. Nagata cited the Sansei Research Project: “Sansei with a Christian religious background reported being more likely to resist than Sansei with a Buddhist background, a finding that may reflect value differences inherent within the religions and/or the degree to which affiliation with the Buddhist religion reflects a greater affiliation with Japanese cultural values of fatalism and the avoidance of disruptive behavior” (Donna K. Nagata, Legacy of Injustice: Exploring the Cross-Generational Impact of the Japanese American Internment [New York: Plenum Press, 1993], 135). See also Harry H. L. Kitano, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture, 2nd edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1976).
[6]Donna K. Nagata, Jackie H. J. Kim, and Teresa U. Nguyen, “Processing Cultural Trauma: Intergenerational Effects of the Japanese American Incarceration,” Journal of Social Issues 71, no. 2 (2015), 361. See Tetsuden Kashima, “Japanese American Internees: Return, 1945-1955: Readjustment and Social Amnesia,” Phylon 41, no. 2 (1980), 113.
[7] Nagata, Kim, and Nguyen, “Cultural Trauma,” 361. See Kenji Ima, “Japanese Americans: The Making of ‘Good People,’” in The Minority Report: An Introduction to Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Relations, eds. Anthony G. Dworkin and Rosalind J. Dworkin (New York: Praeger, 1976), 275 and Amy Iwasaki Mass, “Psychological Effects of the Camps on Japanese Americans,” in Relocation to Redress, 161. “Some 40% of the Sansei who had a parent interned indicated that their primary source of information about the internment came not directly from their parents but rather through overhearing conversations or through books and films. The conversations that did take place omitted the emotional and traumatic aspects of a parent’s experience” (Nagata, Legacy of Injustice, 99).
[8] Nagata, Kim, and Nguyen, “Cultural Trauma,” 360. Further discussion may be found in Nagata, Legacy of Injustice.
[9] Mass, “Psychological Effects,” 160. Mass explained, “The truth was that the government had betrayed us. Acknowledging such a reality was so difficult that our natural feelings of rage, fear, and helplessness were turned inward and buried. . . . [leading to] a deep depression, a sense of shame, a sense of ‘there must be something wrong with me.’ We were ashamed and humiliated; it was too painful to see that the government was not helping us, but was in fact against us. We used psychological defense mechanisms such as repression, denial, rationalization, and identification with the aggressor to defend ourselves against the devastating reality of what was being done to us.”
[10] Deborah Gesenway and Mindy Roseman, Beyond Words: Images from America’s Concentration Camps (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 66.
[11] The public protested that internees should not make any more than the lowest-paid military police who were guarding the camps (a private-in-training made $21 per month). For this reason, many of the Nikkei received salaries at least ten times less than what they were making before the war.
