Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Frank Miyamoto Interview III
Narrator: Frank Miyamoto
Interviewer: Stephen Fugita
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: April 29, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-mfrank-03-0024

<Begin Segment 24>

SF: So most of you got pulled out of the, off the project. And you went back to -- you went to Chicago at this point?

FM: Yeah, Dorothy Thomas, as I told you, was a migration specialist interested in the question of what would happen to the evacuees. And so, as the evacuee population was then increasingly, or more and more rapidly, moved out of the centers into places like Chicago, Cleveland, New York and so on, she was interested in following that population of the resettled, so-called resettled population, and that's what we were pulled out to do.

SF: But what kind of things did you do to gather data...?

FM: Well, we went then to, our group went to Chicago and we carried out interviews of those who were now living in Chicago and -- interviews to find out what their background was like, what their experience in the centers was like, and what they were doing at, to resettle in Chicago, reestablish themselves in Chicago.

SF: How stressful do you think that initial resettlement period was for the average internee? I mean, here they had been stigmatized for months or years, and going back to an uncertain, unknown setting like Chicago...

FM: Uh-huh.

SF: ...for most of them, right? And the war's still going on.

FM: Yeah.

SF: What was their sense of things at that time?

FM: Yeah, I don't get the sense that it was extremely stressful. It had to be stressful in the sense that this is a totally new area into which they were drawn. Chicago is not, in my judgment, an attractive city. And because the evacuees were coming there without much means financially, it was hard for them to find decent housing and so on. However...

[Interruption]

SF: We were talking about, yeah, resettlement.

FM: Yeah, I think it was stressful in the sense that it was a totally new experience for most of them. Having to find housing, having to find jobs, and so on. But on the other hand, it was not a kind of stress that people reacted to with breakdowns of any serious measure, degree.

SF: How did the... how was Chicago in terms of discrimination and in terms of getting jobs and housing, and so forth?

FM: The... there was discrimination enough, I'm sure. That is, one couldn't always find... one couldn't always be sure that, for example, in looking for housing, that people wouldn't turn you down because you're non-Caucasian. I'm not sure that there was any great -- well, there was hostility against Japanese, or uncertainty about Japanese, persons of Japanese ancestry, to some extent. But my impression was that people didn't run into a great amount anti-Japanese feeling. One reason was that labor shortage, there was a shortage labor. And so anyone who would work was, in a sense, considered desirable. Japanese Americans were not getting the great, the really good jobs, but if it was, if they were filling in a niche that had come open because there were not enough workers, why people were -- the employers were glad to have them. And Japanese Americans were considered very good workers, by and large, and therefore... So the evacuee population was getting jobs and found, they found residences without great, grave difficulty, but their circumstances were still under, were those of people who were not in, in some kind of favored group of any kind.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.