<Begin Segment 7>

FM: As I said, we came to focus on the protest activity that developed at the Tule Lake relocation center because that was obviously the major concern among all evacuees within a couple of months of their arrival at the center. In a period when we first got there, the center had barely opened, and people were coming in in daily groups of about five hundred from the assembly centers, and very soon there developed problems about the hot water boilers breaking down in many of the blocks. Apparently these hot water boilers had not been properly tested for usage under the conditions of the center. And very soon then the boilers were breaking down in all the blocks... people were unable to bathe or launder and the like, and as you can imagine this led then to a great deal of concern on their part about this everyday requirement of life. And very soon thereafter, food became a source of concern to the evacuees and this then was for a time a focus of their protest.

But the initial reactions of the evacuees were disorganized. That is to say, they were rather unorganized; there was no mobilized protest. But by the second month -- no, third month we were there, people began to get organized in their reaction and the, perhaps the most striking thing that initially happened which started the mobilization was a wildcat strike of the farming group at Tule Lake. This strike occurred on, as I vividly remember, August 15th, Friday morning, because the evacuee workers on the farm, who were being transported from the center to the farm area, which was outside the center... they would load up fourteen, fifteen trucks and then ship the, transport the workers out. Because the farmers who gathered at the dispatching station suddenly began to murmur and then have severe... became involved in a sharp protest about the kind of food they were getting in the morning. The declaration that was, "We had only tea and toast this morning and a farmer cannot work on that kind of breakfast." And this outcry from Block 6 then was picked up by workers from Block 14 and down the line and presently you had a wildcat strike suddenly emerging at the scene.

Incidentally, as I indicated previously, my role in the center was a dual one. I was a participant as an evacuee but also I was an observer. And much of what we did, that is, people like Shibutani and Sakura and I, did at the center was to carry on observations of events which were occurring. And on this particular morning when the farm strike developed, Shibutani came and banged on my door and told me that something was up, we should hurry over to see what was taking place, and he told me that his friend, Najima, who was in the farm crew and had told him about the strike developing, had also warned that we should not come out there looking like sore thumbs sticking up by virtue of not fitting into the group. So I put on what I thought were my work clothes to mingle in this mob and later I was told that I still looked like a researcher with my nose into other people's business. In any event, the strike developed over the food issue and immediately it became apparent that there were so-called "agitators" in the community who were ready to pick up this kind of an opportunity and make the most of the demands which they felt they had to impose upon the administration for their shortcomings.

The farm strike, which occurred on that occasion, lasted over the weekend and because it was a wildcat strike and was not well-organized, it didn't last very long. But as far as my interest in the sociological study of what I call collective behavior goes, I learned more from that kind of an incident than I ever learned from books. It was a most illuminating experience to see people suddenly join together in protest and then break up simply because they were not sufficiently organized in order to maintain their protest. The details of that event are such that I can't go into it in a short situation like this, but you had people shouting, "We are citizens of imperial Japan," and this sort of thing on the one hand, and the larger masses of people feeling that that kind of.... these, the main issue had to do with the kind of clothing, the lack of food, the lack of work clothing, to work out in the farms and the like... so there were mixtures of feelings and attitudes expressed in all these protests that emerged at this time. I should add that from that strike of the, August 15, there then transpired in the next month or month-and-a-half, ten major revolts within the community. And these incidents, which entailed the entire community -- 14,000 or more people, 15,000 people -- laid the basis, ultimately, for the kind of reaction which developed in the later history of Tule Lake in much more significant protest activity.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.