<Begin Segment 7>

TI: During this time, there were articles in the media and reports that Japanese Americans were given a free ride. The government was sort of coddling them, that they were given food, shelter, and that life in camp was, they were being coddled, essentially. How would you respond, given that you had a firsthand viewing of this?

GH: Well, I think on behalf of those running the camps, WRA, War Relocation Authority, they had to play the politics between two types of population. One, the inmates, and they had to have them accept the meager supplies and the circumstances. And then the, whatever they ate, there was a certain budget they had to follow which was less than the army on a per, per capita budget. And then supplies would vary. There'd be more rice than in the regular army supply, and things that Japanese would be able to make as counterparts to the rice they would use. But they'd have to, they'd have to try to get the victim population accepting the fare. Plus, the picture they were giving the outsiders, they were being treated as well as anybody could under the circumstances, but they were not being coddled. They were, they were, they had to be austere about it. However, the picture got out that these people, they're being fed at government expense, and the, they only have to do their own clean-up and so on. So that there was a picture that was too rosy to the general public, and to the population themselves, that they were really being treated like prisoners. I think probably the per-capita thing was less than in prisons as well. I mean, you could compare these things and find out, and I think the fare was pretty, pretty low. That's about, I'm only giving you what I experienced going in cold without any kind of build-up. I just picked up certain kinds of what might be possible there, knowing that it's a population that had to settle in, largely with whatever they could carry and then issue of some blankets, and sometimes the mattresses were, they had to make the fillings of the mattresses.

TI: Yeah. One of the reasons I'm curious about this is because here you were, you had a mission to essentially help relocate people from the camps to Spokane. I'm curious in terms of from the inmate population, what they were thinking, reasons why they wouldn't want to go Spokane or would want to go to Spokane. I mean, just sort of understanding where they're at, the conditions, and perhaps their reluctance to relocate to a place like Spokane.

GH: Yeah. Well, my picture was, you know, I'm new. I don't know what, what we could offer them or what the opportunities were. All we could say was Spokane was not part of the uprooted part of the state. It was a possibility to have been included. I had one professor who was, did demographic work for War Relocation Authority and the Western Defense Command, working in, in San Francisco headquarters. And he told me that just like the state of California, all of California was included. California had a sort of a theoretical eastern-western half of the state, too -- but both sides were included. Whereas Oregon and Washington, the Columbia River going up was used as a theoretical boundary. And so east, east, somewhat east, further east from Yakima into Wenatchee area -- and east was the eastern section, and that was talked about as eventually will be included, but it never was. So that part was open for settlement. And knowing that it was a western, part of the west, and the propaganda -- propaganda was pretty vicious. And the persons of Japanese ancestry, guys with buck teeth, and, with, we didn't have horns sticking out, but they were, they were very one-sided in terms of types of people that were being moved out, dangerous people were moved out. So a lot of, lot of population had certain kinds of fears about large numbers of Japanese being settled somewhere, whether they would be safe neighbors or not.

TI: And as Japanese Americans in camps, they understood that, so that perhaps was a reluctance on their part to go into these communities?

GH: Well, I think there was some fear how, how the reception would be out there. And you could, and you get letters back. And so that, that sort of thing was already in process.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.