Densho Digital Archive - Roger Daniels Interview (denshovh-droger-02-0007)

<Begin Segment 7>

Q: Could you describe what happened at Manzanar?

RD: Well, what happened at Manzanar, which is a relocation center like all relocation centers, put up in a place where nobody has lived before and nobody has lived since. There were the kinds of strains and stresses that you always get among people who are cooped up. There were food anxieties. Now, the food in relocation centers wasn't good, but there were more than enough calories. I mean, the notion that this was starvation... but there were certain things that were short, sugar, etcetera. There were, first of all, accusations within the camp that some people were selling sugar that should have gone to the camp. I mean, these were just symptoms. In addition, Manzanar had been staffed early by volunteers organized by the JACL. And there were, there was great resentment of this particular role. There were accusations in some cases, we now know quite well-founded accusations that some Japanese Americans had informed on other Japanese Americans, had told FBI and other security agencies that, you know, so and so is really pro-Japanese and cannot be trusted. So there were accusations over this, and eventually at Manzanar, there were beatings, one JACL leader was beaten badly by other Japanese American inmates. He was put in the hospital, and a group, some would say a mob, invaded the hospital looking for him. They didn't look very hard because he was hidden under a bed; I think this was really a demonstration. Then later troops were called in. The troops panicked and began firing apparently without orders to do so, and managed to shoot some of their own as well as shoot a number, we're not sure how many because, of Japanese American inmates, and that were, there were casualties and fatalities. At the moment, I forget the precise number. It was a small number, but people were shot, people were killed. This is, this was the worst of it. And of course, this kind of incident exacerbated the bad feelings. On the one hand, you have people who would say, the JACL are inu, that's a Japanese word which means "dog," but literally, it's rat fink, informer. The JACL people would complain about the pro-Japan people or for instance, when one gentle man, I mean really gentle man, a professor of art history at University of California, Berkeley, who was interned, a man named Obata, was, who was very, very pro-JACL, pro-U.S. government, he was badly assaulted. He was hit from behind by a lead pipe, by an unknown assailant, but there were people who said well, this was a typical Kibei attack from the rear like Pearl Harbor. So that it's nice to believe and it's nice to think that the victims of oppression are noble but that's not, that's not true. They're human beings like anybody else. They quarrel, they fight, there are good guys, there are bad guys, there are people who behave reasonably, there are people who behave unreasonably, and certainly when you're cooped up in a concentration camp by your own government for no good reason, the stimulus to less than noble behavior is greater than in ordinary life. And these echoes of these resentments continue to resonate in the community. You have to remember that still, although it's now more than forty years away, the relocation is the central event of Japanese American history. You know, you talk to people anywhere, two Japanese of a certain age meet, "What camp were you in?" Or in reminiscent conversation, the phrases "before the war," "after camp," these punctuate the Japanese American, the Japanese American experience, and this is as central to the Japanese American life as losing the Civil War was to some Southern Americans. And it's easier for the winners to forget something than the losers. And the Japanese Americans were, on the homefront, at least, the great losers out of the war.