IDAHO JAP PAPER DEPLORES RIOTS

Organization of controls to prevent further pro-Axis outbursts in Japanese relocation projects is asked in an editorial in the Christmas number of The Minidoka (Idaho) Irrigator, mimeographed news sheet of the Japanese colony there.

Written by Dyke Miagawa, the editorial reads in part: "The late lamented disturbances at Poston and Manzanar -- dramatizations once again of the chronic, violent ugliness of the fascist temper -- are no longer news. The issues brought into the sharpest possible focus by the two 'incidents,' however, are still very much with us, and can no more be ignored than the war or the rains that are making this project a quagmire...

Pro-Axis Group Rapped

"Editorial writers of other center publications were quick to deplore then occurrence of political violence among evacuees, but there is further need for realistically placing a finger on the existence of a residue of pro-Axis sentiment in every center. It can easily and often enough be said that evacuees from Southern California seem, for this or that reason, to be peculiarly inclined to settle accounts through violent means, and that people from other sections of the Pacific Coast are not as bellicose.

"But, explanations of that order, aside from being evasive, are about as satisfactory as a Southern bourbon politicians explanation for the low income of the Negro, and certainly do not rule out the possibility of repetitions in some form of the Manzanar and Poston riots...

"So it is time, some of us think, that we begin developing controls through organizations, and examine closely every center issue and sign of ferment behind which may exist the machinations of a small but persuasive body that stands with the Tojo-Hitler combine.

"This is said because there are enough among us who see no bona fide cause for a transfer of allegiance. Also, because there are enough who experience no difficulty in realizing that the W.R.A.'s relocation program makes these centers mere stations -- irritating but temporary -- on the road to a place in the American sun where we, if we have any capacity for adjustment, will be free of the stifling provincialism and the 'ghetto' sights and smells that prevailed in the '[Little] Tokyos' of the Coast.

"Neither pro-Axis melodramatics nor schoolboy recriminations and legalistic hair-splitting over the now purely academic aspects of evacuation should divert our attention and energies from the supremely important goal of relocation."