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SF: So this probably for most people was the most difficult period, compared to the WRA phase?

FM: Yes, I would think so. In fact I can tell you that when we went to WRA camp subsequently, there was a group of people whom I encountered -- who as it happened, I knew -- who felt that they needed to express gratitude to the WRA for treating them as they were being treated, after the experience in the Assembly Center. The feeling was, "We could have been forever driven like cattle in the circumstance that we found ourselves in the Assembly Center. Lo' and behold, we come to this WRA Center, and these people, the administrators from the director down, are sympathetic, warm people, who are trying to do things for you in the best fashion possible." They wanted to express gratitude to these WRA administrators for the kindness they were rendering. This is the kind of reaction that at least some of the evacuees felt subsequent to their initial experience with the Assembly Center.

SF: Was the difference between the way the WCCA, I guess, versus WRA rantings, does that have something to do with the military, the Army connection with the WCCA, or the civilian Federal bureaucracy with the WRA, is that a major factor?

FM: Yes, I think there was a very definite difference of that kind. The military was oriented towards getting the evacuees out of the exclusion zone as rapidly as possible. And their concern was not to be necessarily unkind to the Japanese people, but they had no -- they were treating the Japanese people essentially as objects that needed to be gotten rid of, out of a military zone. This was the attitude, I'm sure, that the military were functioning under, and they didn't care just exactly how they did it. The assumption was that there was a military emergency, and that there was a necessity for evacuating the Japanese population as rapidly as possible from this exclusion zone. Now, in the light of our knowledge today, why, there's clear evidence that there was no reason to, in the first place, to exclude, to evacuate the Japanese people. But the military mind functions in that way, I think. They assume that military orders have to be executed immediately so to speak, and without any great concern as to how it affects people and humanity, and that's how they reacted. Now the WRA was established as a separate Federal agency, and in lieu of other possible ways of organizing it, they organized the WRA essentially as the Indian Affairs Commission had been organized in the Department of Interior. So, the attitude is of a radically different and socially-minded orientation. Still people dealing with people as if they were dependents rather than as independent individuals. But, of treating them as people who might be held in a -- what are these Indian camps...?

SF: Reservations.

FM: Reservations, yeah. People who would be held in reservations, rather than prisoners in a detention area. I think the evidence is clear that the WRA was oriented in that direction. Once they get the evacuees into the centers, why, they no longer are able to function exactly in that, within that kind of an orientation. But WRA orientation was more humane than, certainly than that of the military, and there was a difference of that kind.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.