<Begin Segment 9>

Q: Could you tell us about how the camps affected people in a psychological sense? Were they driven to any desperate acts, were there any suicides or drastic action taken by some of the people?

RD: Yes, there were suicides. There were... it's very difficult, you know, to generalize. We're talking about the experience of a 120,000 people, from small children, and for a while, at least, some of the children, for instance, seemed to, to enjoy the relocation centers. Particularly since the structure of their lives was greatly reduced. Parents complained that it was hard to instill family discipline. The father, quite often absent in an internment camp, but was clearly no longer a father figure, he couldn't keep his family out of a, out of a concentration camp. Meals were eaten in the mess hall so the traditional, some of the traditional mother roles were taken away. Some children tended to eat away from their families, eat with their, eat with their peers. The strange thing about the relocation, from a social science point of view, is that if the relocation hadn't happened and you ask social scientists what will be the effect on a community of taking them up and throwing them into these god-awful places, describing, without mentioning ethnicity, the relocation, most social science theory would say, well, the result will be when you let these people out after two years, three years or whatever, that they'll be high indices of social pathology, deviants, crime, delinquency, non-achievement, etcetera. And of course, notoriously, that was not the case of the Japanese Americans. We're beginning to get another kind of story, however, from the epidemiologists, the people who take a look at what people get sick from, what people die from, certainly, and these are studies still in progress so one can't talk about them. But some scholars have told me that they're finding a great deal of evidence that, of shortened lives, of hypertension, of increased stroke and this sort of thing. When you compare Japanese Americans who were in relocation centers, either with Americans in general or Japanese in general, and no one can talk about what the psychic cost of this thing was. But certainly it was not what some would have predicted, although there were lives destroyed. There were several thousand Japanese Americans who became so disgusted with the United States that they renounced their citizenship and some actually went back to Japan where apparently we have very few studies, only one, really, of Japanese Americans who went to Japan or went back to Japan, the difference being, of course, most Nisei had never been to Japan before but who had either repatriated or expatriated and they had a very, very rough time in postwar Japan. Not only because it was rough being in postwar Japan, but because most Japanese didn't accept them as Japanese so they were really wound up between two worlds and belonging to neither. We'll never know what it was. The most poignant remark I know of the whole relocation, supposedly, and it's become part of folklore, we hear that it was said here, it was said there, was said another thing. But some small child, maybe seven, maybe eight, after a few weeks in an assembly center or a relocation center, said to his mother, "Mommy, when do we go back to America?"

[Interruption]

RD: Peter Irons and his fine book, Justice at War, shows that many of the democratic and New Deal lawyers thought that the evacuation was lousy, but nevertheless they followed orders, they said, jawohl, and went ahead and do so, and if you ever look at the relocation, by the standards that we ourselves established at Nuremburg, that this was a kind of war crime, not a crime that resulted in a lot of death, but certainly deprived people of life, liberty, of liberty and property. In one or two cases, life without anything even approaching due process of law. And that a large number of attorneys participated in this, knowing that it was wrong because the feeling in the '40s was, well, you do what's necessary to win the war, and that's very important. Also, we hadn't had the Civil Rights Movement of the '50s and '60s, and that's very important. Also we hadn't had the Civil Rights Movement of the '50s and '60s, we hadn't had Watergate, that's one of the excuses, you know, that some of the living New Deal lawyers say, well, Watergate hadn't happened yet. Elliot Richardson hadn't reminded everybody that even a government lawyer is first of all a lawyer, an officer of the court, and bound to obey his own conscience, not just the orders, proper or improper, of whoever is his boss. And I think that this is something that Americans needed to be reminded of. But in the '40s, we try to judge these things by the standards of the '70s or the '80s. It's not that. A wonderful little book, memoir, by a woman who was at Topaz, a Ms. Uchida, called Desert Exile, she talks about the tendency in the community for some young Sansei, third generation Japanese Americans who may be in their '20s or early '30s today to raise hell with their parents and grandparents and say, well, you know, why didn't you sit in, why didn't you raise hell? And Ms. Uchida reminds us that this was a different time and a different place and that's really a little bit unreasonable. It's almost as foolish as my children, who once when they were both very small, they're college-age now, discovered that I hadn't had TV and that there was no TV when I was a child and they said, "Well, Daddy, what did you do?" You know, they couldn't imagine at one age of their life, a life without television. Well, obviously, there was life before television, and there will even be life after television. Similarly, we can't judge people by the standards of the '70s and '80s. This is not to say that we shouldn't say, gee whiz, that's it. But rather than put the question, why were there so few resisters, why were there so many? This is a tremendous, I mean, not only the people who became the court cases, but the young men who resisted the draft. Well, draft resistance today is an in thing. It wasn't in the Second World War, yet hundreds of Japanese American men on principle said no, as long as we're in concentration camps, we shouldn't be subject to the draft, and they went to prison for it. They didn't get suspended sentences, they went to Leavenworth, to Fort Lewis and to other such places.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.