Confidential

The Hawaiian Groups

I was fortunate in being invited to a really swank dinner party at the home of one of the Hawaiian evacuees. This came about accidentally through my having made an appointment to meet one of the councilmen for an evening's discussion, and being wangled into the party to which he was later invited. The occasion of the celebration was the return of the host from a visit to his brother in Louisiana internment which had given him an opportunity to purchase supplies - meat, vegetables, etc. The councilman had been invited partly as a gesture of thanks for some of the services rendered to the Hawaiians on their first arrival at Jerome when they had had insufficient clothing, a drenching rain to contend with, as well as a long trip from Hawaii behind them.

In general, the three groups of Hawaiians who had come to Jerome may be characterized as follows:

(1) The first group was composed largely of women and children whose husbands and fathers had been brought to the mainland for internment.

(2) The second group was composed largely of former internees from Sand Island who had been reunited with their families on the ship which evacuated them from Hawaii.

(3) The third group was made up largely of unattached males who had formerly been interned in Hawaii, a great many of whom were said by the host to be Kibei.

These people were housed principally in Blocks 38, 39, and 40 although some few had been scattered throughout the center to vacant apartments. My hose was thus a neighbor in an adjacent block since 38 lies immediately west of 36 in which I was living.

Material Culture and Manners. The Hawaiians have perpetuated in Jerome some of the material traits brought from the Islands and some which date back to Japan. Geta and Hawaiian-Japanese type clogs are worn occasionally by many in Jerome but their use appears to be particularly frequent among Hawaiians of all ages - at least in their day-to-day living within the block.

Gay print shirts of what I would characterize as a typically Hawaiian or Pacific island pattern are frequently seen in the vicinity of the Hawaiian blocks.

The two homes of Hawaiians which I visited were provide with an "entry hall" marked off by 2 x 4's nailed to the floor behind which the geta or clog-wearing members of the family deposited their shoes on entering. At the dinner party all guests, including myself, removed their shoes at the entrance.

The meal was served on a low table Japanese-style, the guests sitting on blankets spread on the floor beneath the table.

A kimono was worn by the wife of one of the guests who assisted in the preparation of food along with the host's wife.

The meal, I judge, was as nearly Japanese as could be arranged although my ignorance of Japanese food makes this somewhat uncertain. It was cooked at the table in two aluminum frying pans heated by means of electric hot plates. It included sukiyaki; a special egg rice; an egg and oyster soup, pickled cabbage, much beef fried in small strips with onions and other vegetables; a salad composed of various green vegetables and including something which looked like seaweed and was obtained, I was told, from the swamps behind the center; dried shrimp; and dried ground shrimp for use on the chizuke (tea and rice). The tea was said to have come from Japan and was a mild green tea. For some reason unknown to me the California councilman and myself were served with a small dish of canned grapefruit for dessert. I wasn't sure whether this was a signal honor or a concession to the frailty of American taste.

The meal was eaten with chopsticks by all, including myself, although I had to resist vehemently the host's efforts to provide me with a fork. Some beverages were also served during the meal which went on with occasional pauses for rest or a smoke for two or three hours.

The lady in the kimono, wife of one of the guests, took over the management of one of the cooking utensils part way through the evening and later sat down with her husband to participate in the feast. The host's wife, however, remained in the background, passing up large trays of food for preparation and being provided herself with food to eat only well along in the evening.

In the corner of the apartment to the left of the door was built a platform about six or eight inches high covered with straw matting which was used during the meal as a kind of sideboard but it was apparently constructed as an item of furniture. It was about six feet square. Conversation was partly in English, mostly in Japanese.

Evacuation and Internment Experiences: Attitudes. One of the guests apparently had had too much to drink and during the course of the evening he became quite vociferous and in fact, as he put it, made a speech. The theme of the speech was that the difference in response to the Army's request for volunteers in Hawaii and in the relocation centers was due entirely to the injustices suffered by the Japanese who had been evacuated. He developed this theme, advancing the usual arguments that evacuation was unconstitutional, unjust, contrary to the American spirit, and insisted firmly that had the Nisei on the West Coast not been evacuated they too would have volunteered for the Army in large numbers when given an opportunity.

This man left shortly after delivering his speech because of overindulgence, I judged. While some of the others obviously felt that the speech maker was talking too much or too loudly, it was equally clear that they shared in most of his opinions.

The subject of internment experiences arose as a consequence of the discussion of evacuation experience stimulated by this speech, and the following assertions were made by one or another of the people present.

That during the early days in the internment camp the officer in charge had been extremely harsh. As an illustration of his technique, it was said that one day when a single spoon was missing from the mess hall he forced the entire group to stand at attention in the hot sun for two hours until the spoon was produced. During this ordeal one man, living at Jerome, had fainted.

Physical conditions in the internment camp were bad, the food at Jerome being superb by comparison and housing accommodations spacious.

That the interned men riding in trucks from the camp to the building in Honolulu where their hearings were conducted were forbidden to wave to their wives and children, in spite of the fact that members of their families had somehow received advance word as to when they were coming and were awaiting their arrival

across from the building in question.

Regarding the voluntary nature of the evacuation from Hawaii it was stated that the men in the internment camp and their families received very short notice and were given only a little while to discuss the desirability of evacuation. Pressure was said to have been brought on their families, in the absence of husbands and fathers, to evacuate to the mainland. It was also asserted that although the opportunity to evacuate was offered to many, some of those who had refused had been brought to the mainland anyhow and others who had requested evacuation had been left in Hawaii. (Note: some of these people may have been evacuated in later population movements. F.L.S.)

In connection with evacuation from the internment camps it was asserted that the men with families had been brought to Honolulu for embarkation and at that time, with their families awaiting them (they had not seen them for six months) and with their households dismantled, they were presented with a paper to sign waiving any claims of damages or indemnity against the FBI, the Army, or the Navy. They were told that unless they signed they could not be evacuated. "Naturally we signed."

Then after the ship was two or three days at sea the men who had been interned were presented with a formal "release from internment". This would, if given them prior to their departure from Hawaii, have entitled them to return to their homes. The citizens protested the language involved that while they might have been detained they could not have been interned: the protest was ignored.

In short, whether rightly or wrongly, the point of view expressed by the 6 or 8 men present was definitely that their evacuation from Hawaii had been under duress and was not in any sense voluntary.

Hawaiian Children in the Nursery School. Mrs. Sweetser spent several days with the Nursery School teacher and reports that the Hawaiian children there were much quieter than the Californian children and seemed to keep definitely to themselves. The Nursery School teachers told her that the Hawaiian children had kept together at first, probably out of shyness and strangeness; that they had later made tentative advances to the Californian kids but had been rejected; that for some time now they had been somewhat isolated from the Californian children. The Nursery School teachers were attempting to break down this isolation but were finding it a difficult task because of the mutual rejection of the two groups of children.

Should Hawaiians Be Separated From Californians? In conversation with a girl from California who had had two years in Japan

and worked in community welfare, the question as to whether the Hawaiians should be located in the same center as the Californians was raised. This girl suggested that because the Hawaiian group had had a quite different set of experiences than the Californian group, their presence made understanding of the center as a whole more difficult. She also felt that the Hawaiians were not very sympathetic to the Californians and that because the women and children had not gone through the assembly center experience they were incapable of understanding how the Californians felt. I suggested that possibly the experience of having one's husband or father interned, and of being evacuated from the Islands to the Mainland, might have been at least as bitter and difficult as though clearly different from evacuation from California.

This conversation is of primary interest because it reflects the attitude of some of the Californians toward the Hawaiians, and perhaps of the Hawaiians toward the Californians.

The California girl also asked whether the excessive bitterness of the Hawaiians might not be due to the recency of their evacuation: people from California, she said, had felt that way at first too, but were now somewhat reconciled to evacuation and were more willing to work for a relocated future. She suggested that after ten months in the center the Hawaiians might mellow a bit, too.