Portland
Rev. Andrew Kuroda, pastor of the Salem Japanese Community Church, wrote a lengthy letter to friends and associates before entering the Portland Assembly Center, stating that he was “determined to use this crisis . . . to promote the cause of the Kingdom of God.”[1] He and his fellow Nikkei Christians would then prove to be effective ministers. They held regular Sunday school classes, English and Japanese worship services in the morning. They also set up a youth fellowship, adult devotional group, and evangelistic services in the evenings.
The Portland Assembly Center witnessed a regular influx of visiting Christians who had developed relationships with their Japanese American brothers and sisters before the internment. Miss Isabel Gates from the YWCA was one such welcomed guest. On the night after Pearl Harbor was bombed, Gates had kept a previously-scheduled teaching engagement “to the Japanese young people at the Epworth (Japanese) Methodist Church. . . . [She had then] promptly organized a Friendship Committee . . . to help the Japanese people with a friendly hand as well as to prevent misunderstanding.[2] The spiritual care provided by such friends would ameliorate the appalling conditions of the camp. Min Yasui took one look at the place and dubbed it the North Portland Pigpen:
The North Portland Livestock Pavilion consisted of a large wooden building fronting one of the sloughs of the Columbia River to the north. It was surrounded by eight-foot-high, barbed-wire fences with watchtowers on the corners. There were also searchlights, sentries, and .30-caliber, water-cooled machine guns. . . . My lasting impression of the dining area was that it was festooned with yellowish, spiral flypaper hung from posts and rafters. Within a short time the flypaper would be black with flies caught in the sticky mess. There were horseflies, manure flies, big flies, little flies, flies of all kinds. I also remember there were fly-catching contests, and the winner was somebody who proudly proclaimed he killed 2,462 flies and had a gallon jug of dead flies to prove it. Flies, after all, usually inhabited livestock barns.[3]
Amidst these upsetting conditions, however, many converted to Christ. One man arrived in Portland distressed over losing his business to a dishonorable cheat who had promised him a considerable sum. Faced with evacuation, the man had no choice but to sell off his life’s work. In Portland, that man very nearly succeeded at suicide by cutting his own throat. He was in great despair, but a Japanese Methodist minister visited him in the hospital and spoke with him and his wife about the Christian faith. The man was converted and, like the Philippian jailer in Acts 16, insisted that his entire family be baptized immediately. He then spent the remainder of his internment in Portland and the Gila River Relocation Center seeking to convert his friends.[4]
Stockton
The Stockton Assembly Center at the San Joaquin County Fairgrounds consisted of a converted racetrack and vacated horse barns. As in the other camps, internees were afforded very little privacy. Ruby Hayashi remembered,
Five of us were squeezed into a room measuring twenty feet by twenty-five feet with no partitions, so I made a makeshift partition with a piece of muslin cloth and rope for some privacy. The next-door people were a bunch of issei bachelors who smoked a lot, and the smoke would seep into our room. We had to speak in low tones, because the walls were thin and we could hear everything said by the neighbors. The tarpaper buildings were so hot in the summer with no air conditioning that it’s a wonder we endured it. Moreover, the bathrooms were not completed, and the toilet stalls had no doors. My outspoken sister-in-law went to the project director and complained, “What do you think we are—animals?”[5]
The Revs. Shokichi Hata (Presbyterian), Yoshimatsu Oyama (Methodist), and Adjutant Takemaru Hirahara of the Salvation Army shepherded the Japanese-speaking church. “For the English-speaking and young people, Reverend Hubert Kuyper, a returned missionary from Japan, was very instrumental. . . . He made frequent trips to the center . . . to minister to the needs of the evacuees.”[6] The Stockton internees also received assistance from the College of the Pacific (now UOP), the YMCA, and many nearby churches. Of particular note were the Humbargar sisters. Catherine had taught mathematics while Elizabeth taught English and served as faculty adviser of the 400-member Japanese American student club at Stockton High. During the internment, they sought out college students who would be willing to teach classes at the assembly center, then loaded up a horse trailer with books and other materials, driving past hecklers and ignoring the taunts of protestors. Part of their daily routine, after teaching their regular classes, was to visit the Stockton Assembly Center and encourage their students detained there. They taught for two hours each day in a converted cow barn with sawhorses covered with butcher paper to serve as desks. Their students would soon be transferred to various relocation centers, but the two sisters would eventually provide over 500 students with recommendation letters for either work or college. Christian examples such as these helped to bolster the church’s faith in God and in the kindness of others.[7]
[1] Letter from Andrew Kuroda to friends (6 May 1942), Box 155/Fld 3, Kuroda Papers, JARP, cited by Allan Hunter in “Japanese Taken to Owens Valley,” Christian Century (15 April 1942), 510. He also called the “injuries” of the incarceration “the very essence of the Hitlerism we are fighting” and urged Americans to “steadfastly [remain] Christian and militantly [practice] Christian principles . . . to atone a little . . . for this mass injustice” (cited in Blankenship, Social Justice, 36).
[2] Suzuki, Ministry, 57.
[3] “Minoru Yasui” in Tateishi, Justice for All, 73. See also Lauren Kessler, Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family (New York: Random House, 1993), 184. Masaji Kusachi likewise recalled, “What really surprised me was to enter the Portland center which, you know, was a former stockyard. My family of ten was assigned a small room that had no doors—just curtains hung over the doorway. . . . The odor was so bad!” Kusachi added that lots of flies were attracted by the manure. (Linda Tamura, The Hood River Issei: An Oral History of Japanese Settler’s in Oregon’s Hood River Valley [Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993], 177).
[4] Robert F. Spencer, “Religious Life in the Gila Community,” JAER Records, BANC MSS 67/14C.
[5] Ruby Hayashi, “Memories of the Evacuation,” in Triumphs, 25.
[6] Suzuki, Ministry, 78.
[7] See Sugimura, Quiet Heroes, 122. In 1978, the Humbargar sisters received the “Fourth Order of the Sacred Treasure” as friends of Japan.
