Densho Digital Archive - Sue Kunitomi Embrey Interview (denshovh-esue-02-0010)

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JA: You had just mentioned tensions.

SE: Uh-huh.

JA: What kind of tensions developed, what caused tensions, and what, what was the nature --

SE: Well, as the camp was being organized and developing into a city, there were also divided loyalties among different people. There was a group of very progressive second generation Nisei, and there were some who were considered pro-administration. Then there was a group of men who were raised in Japan, they were American citizens, but part of their childhood was in Japan and they came back, and they were kind of not really part of a community because they had just come back just before the war started and hadn't really been able to, you know, get integrated into the community. So there was a group of them that were very anti-administration. And then there was a JACL group, the Japanese American Citizens League group, which had cooperated from the very beginning with the government, and a lot of people felt that they were spying on the community and turning people's names in because they felt they were not loyal Americans. So all of these tensions began to boil.

There was a, an attempt to form a Manzanar mess hall workers union by a man who worked in the kitchen, and he was going around checking on the supplies that were coming into the camp, and he found that the sugar ration that came to each kitchen was much less than what they had originally started with, and that a lot of the meat that was going for young children and elderly was missing also. He reported that, after making an inventory he reported that to the administration and said that if they didn't do anything about it he was going to report it to the FBI. And so he got petitions signed by people to form this mess hall workers union, and the JACL group was trying to form a citizens group to govern the Manzanar site. And so they were all kind of competing with each other. And the JACL group was considered the ones who were too administ-, pro-administration. Too many people who -- people looked on them as inu, or informers. So when the JACL representative who had been allowed to go out to a national conference in Salt Lake City came back, a group of people went into his barrack room and beat him up, and he ended up in the hospital. And a man named Harry Ueno was arrested as a gang -- as one of the leaders of the group, and, although he was not well-known in the entire community, because he had started the mess hall workers' union, he was supported by a group of kitchen workers, and they went to the administration and asked that he be returned to Manzanar. He was in the Lone Pine jail.

And out of that -- there was some miscommunication between the director, Ralph Merritt, and the group that was demanding Ueno's release. They ended up in front of the camp entrance and the director called out the military police. And I guess the group started to chant and sing and the MPs became worried that they were going to be rushed, and so a couple of them shot their rifles into the crowd. Two young men who were just watching got pushed forward and they were shot and killed, and there were about seven or eight who were wounded. So that night, all the kitchen workers went out and rang the kitchen gongs, and they rang them all night long. Most people didn't really know what was going on because this affected only about 200 people of the entire camp, but Monday morning -- it happened to be December 5th -- and the newspapers played up that this was a group of pro-Japan people celebrating Pearl Harbor anniversary, which wasn't true at all. But it just happened to be a coincidence that it happened a year later.

So, they sent in a crew, MP detachment from Las Vegas to reinforce the others, and the jeeps were, they went back and forth on the streets all night long, and the following day nobody went to work. I guess the word got out that these young men had been killed, so people just stayed in their room in the barracks and would not go out. That went on until almost Christmas and they suspended the newspaper so we couldn't go to work. And I remember the night of the, Saturday night it was, a group of men were walking down our block and it was very dark and they were all wearing their navy blue peacoats, and the only sound you heard was the trampling of their feet on the gravel. And my mother said to me, "You better hide because they might come after you, too, because you're working for the paper." But they didn't, they didn't come there, but they were looking for some other people that they wanted to beat up again, and that ended up in the riot there, and I guess we didn't go to work 'til after Christmas.