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CO: Professor Miyamoto, tell us about this study and what you did in the study.

FM: The study was organized by Dorothy Swaine Thomas at the University of California in Berkeley, mainly because she had a student, Tomotsu Shibutani, who is now a professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara in the sociology department. Shibutani was at that time a student in her class, and I think she also had some other students like Jim Sakoda, who went into psychology, and Charles Kikuchi. In any event, these students of hers became interested in the reaction of the Japanese right after the outbreak of war in Pearl Harbor. Shibutani, for example, asked Thomas if being in her class, he asked if she might, he might write a term paper on the subject, which she encouraged. And once he got into this thing and sought Thomas's advice on the kind of research he was doing, she herself became interested in the possibility of doing a study of this subject. The reason she got into it, I would say, is because she is a migration, she was a migration specialist, a demographer, well-known in the country for her work on, for example, Swedish migration. And she saw the evacuation -- which at this point had become a very real possibility -- as a situation of migration and she saw it as a possible topic for her research. Thomas was a, not only a prominent, but fairly powerful person in the field, social science field, with strong connections with the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. And she therefore got ready financial support for this project which she proposed to them. She was able to get some of the most prominent social scientists on the Berkeley campus to join her in undertaking this project, and therefore launched the project almost as the evacuation became a reality and began to develop. It was at this point that I got into it, as did several others from the Berkeley campus, as members of the research staff.

The main staff was gathered at the Tule Lake center, which is in northern California, because as I said, it was close to Berkeley and she could most readily supervise it there. And there was a question from the outset as to how she would deal with this kind of project inasmuch as the situation was totally unlike that, the situation of doing a study within a detention center was totally unlike that of any other research that was familiar to us. And her inclination was to simply start in without a clear definition of problem or method as most studies would have required, and rather start in and look for what in fact would prove to be the most important problems, study the situation in general, and develop the project as it went along rather than to do it the other way -- define a problem and then so on and develop a project on paper before going into the field. So when the group of us assembled at Tule Lake and I became acquainted with my new colleagues at the center, we agreed that we should maintain a kind of daily journal of our activities and observations and Dorothy Thomas then wanted us to ship in to her these daily accounts, kind of diary, so that she would be able to sense what was developing in the center as we observed it. From the daily accounts, she then led to a question of our developing a summary report of the main features of the community structure, such as the employment structure, the political structure, and so on... of the community. And then fill in the daily life activities, which seemed to take place within this organizational feature of the Tule Lake Center.

The project was handicapped throughout by a number of problems. First, it was a large community, 14,000 or more people in one place, in one center. People who were having to make adjustments totally new and unforeseen by them and therefore who were not structured in their behavior as they might have been within their own communities. And people who were not only upset by what had been imposed on them but who were extremely suspicious of anyone who would come in and try to investigate them in these circumstances. And therefore who were reluctant, in a sense, to participate in anything like a social science research field study in the usual way. So, from the outset, Dorothy Thomas had problems in organizing the study and we had problems in carrying out our interviews. But as I have indicated, the study was not so much planned as that it grew out of the kinds of observations which we made and the kinds of events which tended to develop with, within the center.

CO: So what did develop that you felt were worth...?

FM: The main developments were -- the main focus of the study, came to be the protest that emerged, at least at Tule Lake, within the evacuee population at the, what they felt was the kind of mistreatment to which they were being subjected, both by the evacuation and by the project administration. And ultimately then, the studies of the evacuation resettlement study came to focus on the political issues which developed between the evacuees and the administration over innumerable problems which existed within the centers. As you might imagine, there were many, many problems in the centers for the reason which I have mentioned.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.