Densho Digital Archive - Jane Wehrey Interview (denshovh-wjane-01-0002)

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JA: What was the reaction of your family or people in general in the valley when they learned that there was going to be a relocation of people of Japanese ancestry and it was going to happen there?

JW: My understanding, based on what my parents have told me and what I've heard from other people and what I've read of the newspaper accounts of the time, was that it all happened extremely quickly and people at first were very alarmed by it. They, they were concerned at the large numbers that they were talking about because I believe originally they were talking about up to 20,000, and at that time the population of the Owens Valley was, I don't know, somewhere around 7,000. And then they, they began to hear about some of the things that might happen as far as the camp, how the people would be used as labor for some of the public projects in the valley, and this kind of helped to turn the sentiment a little bit towards the idea that, "Well, maybe this wouldn't be so bad for us after all." The people also there were very... I don't know if conservative is the right word, but they were, they understood that the government was, was usually right, even though they rebelled against the government in terms of like, the City of Los Angeles and some of the things that the government came in and imposed on them but they were still very respectful of the government. And this was a case where they realized that, well, this has to go somewhere so it might as well be here and we'll do what we can to make it, to make it work. I think overall it was just the idea that there was very little they could do about it anyway and so they just had to learn to accept it. As time when on, or after the internees started arriving, I think there were still a large number of people who were very, very opposed to it. They, my father talked about one person in Independence who slept with a shotgun next to his bed and called them the "dirty" you know what, and was very, very hostile. Their feeling that I've gotten from my father and from my mother was that people felt very sad and very... perhaps not sympathetic, but just that this was a bad thing in many ways. They didn't, they were sad to see these people confined this way. They knew that many of them were American citizens and that was... so in some ways they felt this kinship with them, they saw this on a daily basis and they, they saw this confinement and that was disturbing to them.