Santa Anita in Arcadia, California, was the most-populated assembly center, holding 18,937 people by official figures. The first evacuees began arriving on April 3, Good Friday, and continued coming throughout the week. Upon entry, their luggage was checked for “contraband” and each person received a medical examination for contagious diseases. Most of them arrived from Los Angeles as one historian described the evacuation scene:
Santa Anita
On Easter Monday in April 1942, evacuation from the area around St. Mary’s [Episcopal Church in Los Angeles] found [John] Yamazaki Jr. accompanied by his new bride. . . . A newspaper photo portrayed a sad caravan of “66 small trucks and cars, 6 large trucks, and 13 public (Pacific Electric) Busses” conveying 700 people from St. Mary’s departure point, “pretty much emptying out the neighborhood of Mariposa Avenue and Olympic boulevard.” The caravan landed some 18,000 internees at an assembly center housed at the Santa Anita racetracks, in suburban Los Angeles.[1]
Residents crowded into close quarters. Chiaki Kuzuhara, for example, remembered how his family of ten crammed into a room twenty by fifteen feet.[2] Several thousand others were housed in horse stables, even though “there had been only a four-day interval between the hurried evacuation of the horses and the arrival of the people.”[3] “The horse stalls had been whitewashed,” one internee recalled, “but they still had straw and horsehair between the planks of the walls, and they maintained the smell of the animals throughout.”[4] Another added, “We are infested with tiny fleas that bite like hell. They must be horse fleas or something that come from the old stables. Gods, they certainly make life miserable.”[5] In addition, there was very little privacy in the stables because the “walls” between the “rooms” were, of course, only “horse-high.” Margaret Ishino recalled her baby brother sleeping in a trough where the horses used to drink water.[6] June Nakamura, then a teenager, remembered community toilets and showers as an even greater assault on her senses than sleeping in horse stalls. Embarrassed to be naked in relatively public space, she claimed, “I could barely let the water touch my skin.”[7]
Not all their memories, however, were negative as Mary Oyama, her husband Fred, and their two small children nicknamed their new home, Valley Forge, and hung an American flag outside. The Oyamas were also thankful for friends who visited: “They laughed, they cried. They brought fruits, cookies, candies, books, magazines. In the thick dust and sticky summer heat, above the dinning babel of voices, old friends jammed up tightly against the wire fence, shocked to see their Nisei friends ‘caged in.’”[8] Ren Kimura also described how his parents, long-time members of the Los Angeles Holiness Church, courageously lived out Romans 8:28,
All during those tumultuous war years, I closely observed my parents—how they reacted to events, how they coped with frequent visits by the police and federal agents. To my amazement, I observed a calm serenity. Maybe it was the fabled Japanese stoicism: inward storm and outward peace. But more likely it was their unwavering religious conviction. They frequently assured me, “Do not fear, for God is with us. He will guide us wherever and whatsoever. Keep hoping and praying.”[9]
As residents settled into their new homes, ministers then began to address their spiritual needs as well. Rev. Lester Suzuki made pastoral calls to the stable area on a bicycle which friends had given him. Cycling would become the most common means of travel for ministers within the camps. In addition, the youth ministry thrived since almost half of all the evacuees were between the ages of 10-29. Ministry to the older Japanese-speakers “was in the form of Bible study, prayer groups, hymn singing, along with the regular divine services.”[10]
A Federated Protestant Church was soon organized, consisting of most of the major denominations (except the Seventh Day Adventists, Holiness Association, and the Catholics).[11] The English services could reach 2,000 worshipers at their peak and about 1,000 at the Japanese services.[12] They met on Sunday mornings in the grandstands and hymns were played on a portable organ. One internee recalled the day her family first arrived at Santa Anita:
Church services were already being held, and Sunday-school classes were held with the help of Bibles, hymnals, and other teaching materials donated by local churches. Our fifty-person choir was led by Carl Izumi, a talented director. The Santa Anita stadium, which once seated screaming horse-racing fans, was now echoing the songs in praise of God lifted up by our young voices.[13]
Among the favorites was John Bowring’s hymn:
God is love; his mercy brightens
All the path in which we rove;
Bliss he wakes and woe he lightens:
God is wisdom. God is love.”[14]
Another was by Joseph Swain:
O Thou in whose presence my soul takes delight,
On whom in affliction I call;
My comfort by day and my song in the night,
My hope, my salvation, my all.[15]
As Rev. Suzuki wrote, “During the three or four years the people were in the centers, they were privileged to do a lot of singing, singing that lifted their souls and lightened their burdens.”[16] The church also practiced the regular ministry of preaching God’s Word with such sermon titles as, “The Will of God,” “Peter the Rock,” “Seasons of the Soul,” and “Going into God’s Gold Mines.”[17] On May 17, “I Am An American” Sunday, Raymond Booth preached on “Things I Know About God.”[18] Mary Y. Nakahara taught Sunday school for Junior high-aged Nisei girls and helped to form the Crusaders, “a service organization providing, among other things, correspondence to Japanese American soldiers—a wartime pen-pal association generating hundreds and, then with the aid of mimeograph machines, thousands of letters per month.”[19] By the time, Nakahara transferred to the Jerome Relocation Center, the Crusaders had “developed a Nisei soldiers list of 1,300 names.”[20]
Many lives were eternally changed because of the church at Santa Anita. Mitsuno Okubo, for example, shared her testimony about how she became a Christian:
At Santa Anita, I attended an English class and met a keen Christian lady whose name was Mrs. Hide Okada. She taught me about Jesus. Soon, I started to attend a Bible class which was led by one of the Holiness ministers, Rev. Tameichi Okimoto. He gave me a handy Bible in which he wrote the verse from Colossians 2:3, “In Christ are hid the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” I was afraid of evacuation life at first, but I soon found myself happy because of my contact with such nice and friendly people as Mrs. Okada. On October 6, 1942, I finally surrendered to Christ and was baptized by Rev. Sadaichi Kuzuhara. Although I did not know how to verbally express my gratitude, I nevertheless cried tears of joy, knowing that I had become a child of God.[21]
In deference to their Nikkei brothers, the Methodist annual conference was held on July 2, 1942, at the Santa Anita Assembly Center with Bishop James C. Baker presiding.[22] The entire conference was conducted under military surveillance, yet still it was a joyous occasion. From its opening hymn, the conference offered comfort to many:
Jesus, keep me near the cross
There is a precious fountain;
Free to all, a healing stream,
Flows from Calvary’s mountain.[23]
Bishop Baker then read from Romans 8:35-39 (RSV):
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, “For thy sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
According to Rev. Suzuki,
The prayer that followed was a prayer for peace, for love to be made alive even in the midst of war; it was a prayer of thanksgiving for shelter and food, even though they were not of accustomed variety; it was a prayer for all the absent brethren and lay people who were in the other centers. It was a prayer for guidance and light, in abundant measure, for the difficult road that lay ahead. Bishop Baker in his masterful and sensitive way lifted the congregation out of the drab and harsh surroundings and made the people feel the presence of God.[24]
Guests were only allowed to visit the assembly center if they received permission in advance, so many non-Japanese brothers and sisters in Christ would wait for hours under the hot sun to see their friends. Rev. Harper Sakaue remembered those visits with gratitude as his church prepared to be scattered among the different relocation centers: “As we get ready to leave, I want to express my appreciation and gratitude to all Caucasian Christian friends who have visited us in camp. You do not realize how much you have helped to keep up morale. . . . Your Brother-in-Christ, Kazuo Harper Sakaue.”[25] For some, these visits would be the last time they ever saw each other face-to-face as the relocation centers would be situated in much more remote locations.
Mayer
The Mayer Assembly Center in Arizona (75 miles northwest of Phoenix) was only occupied for twenty-six days and contained the smallest population of 245 people. Even still, “members of the Phoenix, Arizona, Free Methodist Church, and the Mesa, Arizona, Japanese Methodist church members carried on weekly services, prayer meetings, and memorial services within that short time.”[26]
[1] Gillespie, “Japanese-American Episcopalians,” 146-47.
[2] Chiaki Kuzuhara, cited in Tsukasa Sugimura, A History of the OMS Holiness Church of North America (Los Angeles: Education and Publication Committee, 1993), 172.
[3] Nicholson and Wilke, Comfort All Who Mourn, 85.
[4] Toyo Suyemoto, “Another Spring,” in Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans, ed. Erica Harth (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001), 23. “A widespread joke among Japanese Americans housed at the Santa Anita racetrack was to debate who had the honor of occupying the stall of the famed racehorse Seabiscuit” (See Gary Y. Okihiro, “Introduction,” in Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese Americans, ed. Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro [New York: W. W. Norton, 2006], x).
[5] Charles Kikuchi diary (7 May 1942), in John Modell, ed., The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle from an American Concentration Camp (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 60-61.
[6] Margaret Ishino, interview conducted by Joanne Oppenheim, cited in Oppenheim, Dear Miss Breed, 87.
[7] Personal recollection, cited in Gillespie, “Japanese-American Episcopalians,” 148. “The showers were just heads jutting out of the walls with no partitions. Delicate and modest ladies waited to take their showers until the wee hours when no one was around” (Jane Imamura, Kaikyo: Opening the Dharma, Memoirs of a Buddhist Priest’s Wife in America [Honolulu, HI: Buddhist Study Center Press, 1998], 14). Numerous women developed bowel disorders by avoiding the doorless latrines (Matthew Estes and Donald Estes, “Further and Further Away: The Relocation of San Diego’s Nikkei Community, 1942,” The Journal of San Diego History 39, 1-2).
[8] Mary Oyama, “My Only Crime is My Face,” Liberty Magazine (14 April 1943), 57.
[9] Ren Kimura, “According to His Purpose,” in Triumphs, 64.
[10] Suzuki, Ministry, 70.
[11] The Seventh Day Adventists held separate services in each of the assembly and relocation centers, however, the Holiness Church more commonly joined the ecumenical church.
[12] “Charles Reifsnider participated with Presbyterian missionary Ernest Chapman and a Congregationalist Japanese American pastor on an ecumenical worship service in Japanese and English at the Santa Anita camp in early April 1942. He noted that fifteen hundred of the forty-two hundred incarcerees at Santa Anita attended the service” (Hessel, “Conscience,” 206).
[13] Midori Watanabe Kamei, “He Leadeth Me,” in Triumphs, 61.
[14] John Bowring, God is Love; His Mercy Brightens (1825).
[15] Joseph Swain, O Thou in Whose Presence My Soul Takes Delight (1791). Music was a great ministry to the evacuees because music has a way of transcending history and culture for suffering people. Many of these hymns written in the 18th and 19th centuries are still sung today and sometimes even transcend language through the efforts of translation. For example, E. E. Hewitt’s, “Jesus Has Lifted the Load” was taught by Japanese language school teachers who had been detained in the prisoner of war camps. The first line reads: “Leaning on the Savior Jesus, there is no worry; at the foot of the cross unload them.”
[16] Suzuki, Ministry, 72.
[17] Ibid., 71.
[18] Japanese American Relations Committee, Pasadena AFSC Information Bulletin 6 (3 June 1942).
[19] Howard, Concentration Camps, 121.
[20] Yuri Nakahara Kochiyama, Passing It On: A Memoir (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2004), 13.
[21] OMS Holiness Church of North America, “Mitsuno Okubo” (30 June 1989), accessed at http://kuzuharalibrary.com/testimonies/okubo.html (also recorded in Sugimura, Holiness Church, 173).
[22] The Santa Anita Assembly Center retained the largest population and also the most Methodist ministers and church members.
[23] Fanny Crosby, Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross (1869).
[24] Suzuki, Ministry, 21.
[25] Kazuo Harper Sakaue, Clearwater Japanese Baptist Church Clarion Call 1.6 (21 September 1942), 1. Once they were scattered to different relocation centers, Sakaue exhorted his members to attend Sunday church school and worship services in whichever camp they were residing (Kazuo Harper Sakaue, Clearwater Japanese Baptist Church Clarion Call 2.3 [11 December 1942], 1).
[26] Suzuki, Ministry, 49.
