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Just take a moment to imagine. You have moved from Japan and are now living in America – where all of your hard work is paying off – and you and your family have a home and friends and jobs. You know that not everyone in the country likes "your kind" but that is okay, because you are living the American Dream. Then, suddenly, you and your Japanese friends and family are rounded up like cattle and shipped off in smelly trains with hardly any belongings to one of ten 'relocation centers' in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, or Wyoming.
The Internment, or Relocation, Camps were more like prisons. They came complete with tar-paper shacks, means at one time in a mess hall, barbed wire fences, and armed guards in towers. The guards were given orders to shoot anyone that tried to escape over the fence. Most of the prisoners that ended up getting shot were thought of by other prisoners as having gone insane.
In Hawaii the fear was much stronger, for obvious reasons, toward the Japanese. The military made lists – secretly – of potential espionage suspects amongst Hawaii's large Japanese population. The citizens were forced to speak in English on long distance phone calls so that the military personal could understand what they were saying.
The people that were forced into the Internment camps were divided into three groups – Nisei, Issei, and Kibei. The Nisei group integrated people that were born in the United States but their parents had immigrated to the US The Issei group included the people that had themselves emigrated to the US from Japan. The third group, Kibei, was made up of people that were actually Nisei but had been educated for the most part in Japan.
Most of the camps were generally peaceful and quiet. The only camp with considerable problems was the Tule Lake Relocation Center; located at the California – Oregon border. Tule Lake was selected as a segregation center for those in the camps whom asserted their loyalty to Japan over the United States. The Department of Justice also placed several internees there that were considered disloyal to America. The army was forced to tighten control as the strikes and demonstrations grew in number.
Life at an Internment Camp was described as "hard and demeaning". The internees were forced to eat in mess halls, use community bathrooms, and live in 20-by-25 foot tarpaper barracks. In the barracks the families were given one army cot per person – only the early arrivals got mattresses, the rest had straw-filled ticks. Their heat came from a stove and a single, bare light-bulb provided the only artificial lighting while a single window provided the lone natural lighting. None of the barracks had running water. Guards banned internees from using razors, scissors, and radios.
As for the matter of privacy, that concept was almost unknown. None of the walls reached the ceiling – there was about a foot gap – so all the neighbors could hear every conversation and every crying baby. In the barracks themselves families had to hang blankets to divide rooms. Not even the bathrooms and showers had dividers until the internees built them – even then they could not build enough. To make the barracks feel more like homes some people drew and painted on the walls and hung curtains on their window.
Meals were served at specific time's everyday – breakfast was from 6:00 to 7:00 am, lunch was from 11:30 am to 12:30 pm, and supper was from 5:00 to 6: 00 pm Long tables and benches made it hard for families to talk closely with each other without others overhearing every word. Traditional Japanese food was substituted with Vienna sausages, bread, and stewed tomatoes. Later in the war, fresh fruits, vegetables, and traditional Japanese rice were served. In the spring of 1942 one of the camps opened canteens where the internees were allowed to purchase snacks, toiletries, magazines, and cigarettes.
The children all went to War Relocation Authority (WRA) schools. The schools – elementary through high school levels – frequently assigned papers on why the students were proud to be Americans. The courses were all previously planned out and the teachers were able to choose from a list each State's Department of Education had made – none of the lists allowed Japanese to be taught. Most of the teachers were chosen from among the internees.
The Japanese – American Internment Centers were made because of an overwhelming fear of the Japanese and what the general population thought they would do to the country. Some of the people kept in the Internment Camps would have probably tried to help Japan, but most of those people were in America by choice and loved the country. The Internment Camps were far from fair treatment of American citizens, but the government still felt locking people up was the only way to keep the nation safe.
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Source by Emily Kompelien