Densho Digital Archive
Emiko and Chizuko Omori Collection
Title: Frank Miyamoto Interview
Narrator: Frank Miyamoto
Interviewers: Chizu Omori (primary), Emiko Omori (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: September 28, 1992
Densho ID: denshovh-mfrank-05-0004

<Begin Segment 4>

CO: So, tell us about how you got involved in the J.E.R.S. study and what it involved for you.

FM: By the time of... by the late January/early February, when it became apparent that the evacuation was a real possibility -- oh, no, as a matter of fact, it was somewhat later than that. After the evacuation had been declared a military necessity, my wife and I briefly considered the possibility that we should evacuate voluntarily to the Midwest where I had friends, in Chicago particularly. On the other hand, immediately there was the feeling also that we should stick with our families because of the uncertainties involved in such a thing as the evacuation, that we would not want to leave them, and the latter was the thought that ultimately prevailed. In the middle of this kind of uncertainty, I had a telephone call from Dorothy Swaine Thomas of the University of California at Berkeley, Professor of Sociology there, whom I did not know personally but who was well-acquainted with members of the faculty at the University at Washington. And she called to ask if I would be interested in participating in a project studying the projected evacuation and the forced migration of the Japanese minority from the West Coast through the evacuation process. And she raised the question as to whether I would be interested in joining her staff. After quick discussion of this matter, my wife and I decided that it would be of interest for me to do so, to participate. She then proposed that in order to participate, I should seek a fellowship with the Rockefeller Foundation called the Social Science Research Council because that would help provide the means for me to participate in this project. And having gotten that fellowship, I then became a part of Dorothy Thomas's project.

CO: So you began this project at Puyallup?

FM: Well, no. Not strictly. We were evacuated, as were all the Seattle area people to Puyallup. And that, too, was a harrowing experience. More, perhaps more personally difficult to take than almost any other part of the whole evacuation process.

CO: In what way?

FM: Let me finish with the other question and then I'll get back to that. The, but, having been evacuated to Puyallup, Dorothy Thomas got in touch with me to say that she wanted all members of the project at the Tule Lake relocation center in northern California rather than my going on with the Seattle people to the Minidoka center because she needed to be close to her research staff and Tule Lake was the closest center to Berkeley. And therefore the whole project, at least initially, was located in the Tule Lake center, rather than somewhere else, mainly for the convenience of Dorothy Thomas.

As to the question of what my feelings were about Puyallup, I said that it was the most difficult experience I had during the war, partly because it was the immediate first experience following evacuation, and also because the Puyallup -- the assembly centers, of which Puyallup was one, were much more tentative, temporary arrangements than the relocation centers, which ultim-, later we went to. And therefore they were -- and also because the federal government was totally unprepared to undertake such a thing as an evacuation and a detention of the Japanese population -- the Puyallup center, or these assembly centers, were very poorly managed, makeshift affairs and very difficult to live within for a great variety of reasons. So my initial reaction to being forced to ride in buses which had screens lowered on them so that the outer public would not look at us, the feeling of being forced to leave a community in which I'd grown up, these kinds of feelings depressed me extensively, made me very unhappy because of the kinds of feeling of being unfairly, unjustly, considered disloyal. This sort of thing affected me very seriously. And then to go to, arrive at the Puyallup center, where we were forced to live under, in the dank and dark circumstances under the fairgrounds, in Puyallup was, I must say, an extremely difficult thing to put up with.

CO: People were fairly demoralized...

FM: Oh, I think they were extremely demoralized, by and large. For example, the toilets were inadequate. You had to line up in order to use the toilets, which is obviously a very difficult thing. Showers and facilities of this kind, laundry, were totally inadequate. The so-called apartments that we were housed in were simply very flimsy walls put up under the single lights in the dark areas under the fairgrounds. And my wife describes one funny experience in which she says she noticed that a, on one of the walls, a knot fell out of the wall on our side so she picked it up and put it back, fitted it back in the hole, and a finger came in from the other side to help put the knot back into the wall. These kinds of funny things tell you, however, that the walls were paper-thin, so to speak, and that people were living side by side, almost in pig-pen kinds of situations. There are even funnier stories about how people vied for horse stalls in Tanforan where it was status-building to have a stall that was formerly occupied by Whirlaway or some outstanding horse rather than some inferior one that others were assigned to.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.