George Takei, best known for playing Mr. Sulu on Star Trek, is one of the most famous of the World War II Japanese American incarcerees. His autobiography To the Stars, little known except among Trekkers, begins in the camps when he was four and might well be his first memory. Then, when the camps were being closed, Takei’s father left his family temporarily to see whether Los Angeles was still too hostile an environment for Japanese Americans. With the family separated, Takei’s child memory suddenly fails completely.
Mama says she decorated a tumbleweed with fruits and candies. She says we opened presents on Christmas morning, and she made hot chocolate for us. I remember none of that. I don’t even remember the fact that we had a Christmas without Daddy. Somehow, Christmas 1945 has completely vanished from my memory.
It seems quite reasonable for a young child not to remember one quiet Christmas, but Takei makes this a lost piece of family history. His literary amnesia skillfully uses the image of a pitiful but loving Christmas as something stolen from him by his unjust incarceration, encompassing not only his father’s absence but also these forgotten luxuries.1
Takei’s concern about his family’s separation, centering on a moment of consumption at “home,” employs one of the chief rhetorical devices used in narrating the Japanese American incarceration. The incarceration was one of the greatest violations of civil rights in American history, based on nothing more than fear and suspicion. Japanese Americans within a hundred miles of the West Coast—regardless of age, citizenship, or even prior military service—were forcibly removed by military orders starting in 1942. How the 120,000 incarcerees ate, as well as what they ate, proved to be a particular concern throughout World War II for both those incarcerated and the War Relocation Authority (WRA) administrators in charge of the eleven incarceration camps specifically for Japanese Americans.2
The mess hall became the demonized cause of Japanese American family breakdown, starting with the sociological studies of the incarcerees and their own complaints in camp papers. Anthropologist Jane Dusselier’s study of the foodways in the camps reveals the extent to which food became a battleground for Japanese American political agency and survival, most famously in the riots at Manzanar. However, she briefly notes, the mess halls were a more contested and resented site because of their threat to the family.3 As I argue, an examination of the lasting discussion of the mess halls shows that they were battlegrounds of Americanization and public relations. There was an extraordinarily cohesive discourse about the dangers of nonfamilial eating, a sentimental narrative that started immediately and was given renewed force in the activism and governmental redress movement of the 1970s and 1980s. With their bad food and worse facilities, mess halls served as potent reminders that family life and tradition had been torn apart. As the Congressional Committee on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) concluded in the 1980s, “The community feeding weakened family ties. At first families tried to stay together; some even obtained food from the mess hall and brought it back to their quarters in order to eat together. In time, however, children began to eat with their friends.”4
Recollections and descriptions of the mess halls are, thanks to oral histories, now legion. Some of the cohesion of mess hall discussions is unquestionably due to the uniformly poor conditions and food from camp to camp. What has been less studied and credited because of the tacit acceptance of the mess hall as a universal evil, however, is how the dialogue regarding the mess hall in turn enabled and threatened the use of family life, especially nuclear family life, to project a public image of assimilation and Americanization. Against the image of yellow peril—in wartime, that of Japanese military hordes—the image of the family was wielded by sympathizers, administrators, and incarcerees in a number of contradictory directions to direct both outward opinion and Japanese American behavior. The mess hall served rhetorically as a euphemistic origin story for the disintegration of the family, shifting the focus away from the government’s actions. At the same time, its chaos and the juvenile delinquency it supposedly bred fed racist fears.
The mess hall was instantly caught between competing public images. Though the nuclear family and family table proved to be the images of choice to display Americanness, communal living and eating was the image that proved that these dubiously regarded Americans were not being “pampered” at a high cost to the taxpayer, a rumor that plagued the WRA, particularly in 1943. In publications ranging from pamphlet to film, the WRA notes that meals generally cost much less than the allowed forty-five cents per head and were served economically “cafeteria-style,” meaning that just as in schools, factories, and other large institutions, individuals lined up to obtain food from servers and carried their trays to long communal tables.5 The “cafeteria-style” meals, portrayed to outsiders as a financial compromise that still allowed families to eat together, were seen as the heart of the camp problem for incarcerees and the WRA administrators and sociologists, as well as sympathizers.
The WRA strove for a uniform mess hall organization within the incarceration camps. Most mess halls were built to serve three hundred people and featured standard tables and benches as well as plain institutional tableware. Each hall had a dedicated cooking and dishwashing staff of incarcerees, most of whom were paid the standard $16 (skilled) or $12 (unskilled) rate per month. Incarcerees lined up at mealtimes, even in inclement weather, and, according to most accounts, ate quickly and departed as soon as possible. The crowds—particularly before the incarcerees developed habits and schedules—were the chief obstacle to family dining, as the mess halls at various times were serving far more people than they had been designed to do. In her famous memoir Nisei Daughter, published in 1953, Monica Sone describes her first meal at the camp in typically quasi-comic style:
Our family had to split up, for the hall was too crowded for us to sit together. I wandered up and down the aisles, back and forth along the crowded tables and benches, looking for a few inches to squeeze into. … My dinner companion, hooked just inside my right elbow, was a bald headed, gruff-looking Issei man who seemed to resent nestling at mealtime. Under my left elbow was a tiny, mud-spattered girl.6
Mess halls in the assembly camps were generally larger, more chaotic, and dirtier.
Within the camps, Japanese Americans tried to maintain a semblance of normal social structure through community organizations such as baseball teams, newspapers, and churches. But the physical structure of the camp necessarily meant that parents had less control over their children, who in some cases were sent out into the local community for school and returned home to a communal camp with multiple outside influences rather than a protective family home. As a source of community, food became a rare privilege, problematized by rationing; initially, there were no provisions made for discretionary food for large parties, and these had to be specially approved. The WRA stressed the political cohesion of the “blocks,” units of barracks that had a common mess hall and bathroom facilities, but few of the incarcerees recollect any block identity.7
Figure 6.1. Santa Anita Assembly Center cafeteria. An original government photograph by Clem Albers showing a full mess hall in an assembly camp. WRA mess halls had similar designs. Original caption: “Lunch time, cafeteria style, at the Santa Anita Assembly Center where many thousands of evacuees of Japanese ancestry are temporarily housed pending transfer to War Relocation Authority Centers where they will spend the duration.” Dated April 6, 1942. It is important to note that these government photos were often posed, sanitized, or censored. Many were never widely circulated. From the collection of the University of California at Berkeley, Bancroft Library, accessed through Calisphere website at http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft958008z9/?order=1.
The deterioration of family structure caused by communal eating was partly due to the poor management of the camps and the needs of different family members. The walk back and forth, sometimes considerable for small children or the elderly, forced families to eat separately if someone stayed behind, or discouraged their walking back and forth with meals and empty plates. The disorganized assembly camps had even worse problems of long lines, overcrowding, and food mismanagement, and occasionally children ran around the camps to several different mess halls.8 Eventually, sociologists found, “Groups based upon age and sex differences replaced the family as the traditional meal-time group, and became a set pattern in several centers.”9 They also became the organizational modes of social life.10
The emphasis on proper nuclear family living, even inside the camps, occasionally led to somewhat overstated ideals. In the Pacific Citizen, the official newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League, columnist “Ann Nisei” offered suggestions for setting up a barrack apartment with sofa/bunks and dressers for a family of two parents and two children in a “quite large” room, 16’ × 24’. The design allowed for the typical activities of “living, eating, sleeping, dressing, work and study” as well as “easy clean-up for Mother.” This attitude of making the best of the incarceration imposes American home design standards onto an imagined average family of four, either a “young Nisei couple and their youngsters, or … an Issei couple and their teen-age children.” Extended families or the all-male barracks of several camps are ignored in favor of the nuclear structure.11 The “typical” activities include “eating,” a suggestion that this, too, can be easily carried on in camp and imply an imaginary family table in this perfectly designed apartment, which notably does not include one, for most of the small space is occupied by beds and storage.
Throughout the war, there were constant pleas and talk of starting family-style dining—still in the mess halls but with guaranteed space together—some of which came to pass to an extent in certain camps. The finance and logistics of this were difficult, however, particularly with food rationing in effect. Fred J. Haller, the steward of the Heart Mountain camp, wrote in a report to Dillon Myer, head of the WRA,
From my experience cafeteria style service is the most economical for large operations. The defense plants, the army and other large operators all use cafeteria style service. Also with the present rationing of meat and other items family style service would be most impractical as it would be impossible to insure a fair distribution. There is a certain amount of waste in both operations but it has been proven that this waste is considerably less in cafeteria style service.12
What even Haller, a tolerant and compassionate steward, glossed over was the spurious nature of a comparison of all-adult worker (some single-sex or day-only) facilities with facilities that for every meal had to serve people of all ages and health conditions.13 The incarcerees’ social and emotional needs thus ranked a distant second to economics. Stockton, one of the initial temporary camps dubbed “assembly centers,” allowed limited experiments with “family-style service,” but only for “children 6 years younger and their mothers.” This concession was made more to address the difficulty of a mother carrying multiple trays, and in any case, these were the only family units that were likely to manage to eat together in the mess halls.14
Attempts to control the initial traffic at mess halls, which ranged from assigned shifts to ticketing to ushers, only exacerbated the problem. Kenneth Tashiro, then a teenager, vividly remembered his first meal in Gila River: “I walked down the aisle between the rows of tables and a pretty young woman directed me toward a table at which there was one space left. I hesitated, then I heard my dad say, ‘Can we sit together as a family?’” The woman assented, and they were redirected to another table.15 It seems astonishing that it was not the common practice even to attempt to send families to sit together, but such seems to have been the case. Another similarly disgruntled incarceree wrote to the Gila newspaper, “May I ask that somebody have something done about the traffic directing system now used in the various dining halls. It seems to me that this method only tends to separate families who desire to have their meals together.”16
The WRA administrators, while relying on the nuclear family as a unit of management, admitted its sacred status at their own discretion. Family camps and family transfers took months or, in some cases, years. One woman from Hawai‘i was denied the right to have her unincarcerated eleven-year-old son transferred to her care in the camp because her parental rights were abrogated by the internment. Historian Stephen Mak has shown that invocation of the unity of “family” became a tool used in the construction of incarceree/internee rights for Japanese Americans, and even more for the Latin Americans of Japanese descent who were interned in the United States.17 Conversely, incarcerees cited anger over separated families in the camps as a primary reason that many refused to take the loyalty oaths. WRA staff members had to distinguish among “the No of protest against discrimination, the No of protest against a father interned apart from his family … the No of felt loyalty to Japan,” to name only a few.18 Once a number of incarcerees had been successfully “resettled” away from the coast, the WRA even restricted visits to family members still in the camps, worried about excessive administration and traveling. But when the camps were closing and some older incarcerees were afraid to leave, having lost their homes and livelihoods, the WRA forced them out, citing as one reason: “These people would have been maintained in an institutional environment which, practically all welfare students agree, is much less desirable than a system of maintenance in private homes or normal family surroundings.”19 Suddenly, it had become essential to maintain a proper familial way of life rather than an institutional one.
It is difficult to summarize all the ways that the incarceration fragmented the Japanese American nuclear family structure. Some families were sent to different camps and had a lengthy wait before reuniting, as when the husband/father of the family was imprisoned first or an ill or pregnant family member was kept in a hospital temporarily while the rest of the family was incarcerated. Many nisei volunteered or were drafted for military service when the ban on Japanese Americans was lifted; 30,000 Japanese Americans from Hawai‘i and the camps eventually served, and the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which served in Europe, still remains the most highly decorated unit of its size in U.S. history. Volunteer work and contract farmwork, also depicted as patriotic by the WRA and the press, occasionally employed families or couples but tended to take men away from their families. The “resettlement” project sent many young college or work-aged nisei to the Midwest and East, away from family and friends. Finally, the disagreement among family members about what to do about repatriation and the infamous loyalty oaths led to deep fissures.20
At the same time that camp administrators worried about the destruction of family structure by the mess halls, they also encouraged enlistment, farm-work, and resettlement, which often separated families as well. In a curious reversal of the conception of the nuclear family as keeping danger contained, these family-splitting endeavors were portrayed as useful and patriotic. Military service took older nisei away from wives and children and younger nisei away from dependent elderly parents. Farmwork was needed in order to make the camps self-sustaining, since early (spurious) criticism of the Japanese Americans being fed and kept idle at taxpayers’ expense made the WRA doubly determined to promote the agricultural division. Calls for workers and volunteers appealed to a sense of duty. “America’s call for food to feed her people and her Allies becomes louder and louder. … By [working], you will not only be helping the people in this community, but your fellow evacuees in other centers where vegetables are not being produced,” proclaimed the newspaper at the Gila River camp, where the farms’ abundance sometimes outran the manpower, though not the administrators’ ambitions.21 Outside farmwork was also seen as patriotic, but the separation of family was not prominently featured in calls for it. The Hirabayashi family illustrates this dispersal, son by son: Gordon, plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case Hirabayashi v. United States testing the legality of the military orders that applied only to Japanese Americans, was in jail; Ed went to work on a farm, then in a restaurant, then to a college in North Carolina; the parents were escorted to Seattle for Gordon’s trial; and in their absence, Jim left for Idaho to do farmwork. Obviously, the Hirabayashi family had a somewhat exceptional source of separation in Gordon’s imprisonment and trial. But the other children were widely scattered by the government’s purposeful encouragement of farmwork and resettlement, something that would have been hard to imagine before the war.
Other internal demands, such as the mess hall itself, demanded the separation of families. As May Sasaki recalled,
My mother took on the waitressing at the mess hall because they wanted a lot of help there, and they asked the camp internees to take those roles. She eventually became a head waitress, which meant she spent more hours away from home. … But we never could eat with family because my dad became a block manager, which then took him away to other responsibilities. So both my parents were no longer always around as they had been, and now my brothers and I were kind of left to our own devices.
Sasaki cites her family’s long-standing ethic of service and patriotism, which impelled her parents to perform these thankless, ill-paid jobs even at the cost of leaving their children alone for long hours.
This fracturing was dangerous because it denied Japanese Americans one of the main available ways of demonstrating proper assimilation: the idyllic nuclear family structure. In Caroline Chung Simpson’s reading of gendered narratives in and after World War II, she uses as an example Carl Mydans’s feature article and photos in Life magazine, “the first feature article on Japanese American internment to appear in a major publication,” at the late date of March 20, 1944. Simpson traces Mydans’s confused rhetoric of male troublemakers and aliens versus a “muted liberal critique” of the infringement of civil rights. The former wins in Mydans’s slightly menacing lead photograph of a line of unnamed Japanese American men at Tule Lake, reminiscent of the yellow peril. The second part of his article switches away from these potentially treacherous figures to the other camps, which he portrays as unabashedly wholesome. One photo shows an “idyllic scene of a middle-class American family,” the nine-person Manji family cheerfully reading and playing in their cramped quarters. As a corrective to the Tule Lake rebels, Mydans “implies that … the wholehearted pursuit of middle-class domestic ideals impossible to achieve in the camps” will help them escape the rigid past maintained by the patriarchal structure of Japanese society.22 As Simpson notes, the family image was—as evidenced in later memoirs—a key method of stabilization for Japanese American identity during and after the war.
Countering past images of yellow peril and perversely large families taking over farms, the nuclear family was portrayed as a thoroughly American, wholesome image. The official WRA definition of a family unit was “father, mother, and unmarried children living with the family.” Widows and widowers with children, for example, were considered separate even if they were living with other relatives.23 Mydans’s Manji family portrait, which, the caption notes, is missing two sons who are in the military, presents the Japanese American family at its most Americanized and palatable, looking like any middle-class family (albeit in a smaller space). Such photos also reassured the public that the government was being compassionate, allowing American citizens to live acceptable American lifestyles. Japanese Americans thus had to demonstrate both their own Americanness and the government’s upholding of that Americanness, a precarious position indeed for people forcibly segregated and incarcerated.
Wartime films and other visual media showed frightening images of masses of Japanese that bled into depictions of Japanese Americans; Frank Capra’s film Prelude to War showed a Japanese army marching through Washington, DC, and Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, drew a cartoon showing a fifth column of Japanese stretching all the way up the West Coast states. The fear of not being able to distinguish loyal from disloyal, given as an excuse for the incarceration, further created the image of identity-less, indistinguishable Japanese masses. Written publications evoked these images as well, both during and after the war. General John L. DeWitt’s final report, “Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast,” described a “tightly-knit racial group,” held together by “ties of race, the intense feeling of filial piety and the strong bonds of common tradition, culture and customs.” Perhaps DeWitt’s most telling descriptor is “homogeneous,” a word employed to condemn the entire population. Mydans’s Life article exemplifies this attitude, with the Tule Lake “rebels” given no names but left as an anonymous column.24
The mess hall thus was also a troubling site within the camps, where the incarcerees blended into an unidentifiable mass. Under its pernicious influence, the incarcerees ran the risk of familial fragmentation, which in turn risked the creation of delinquency and violence. The high volume of negative coverage of the 1943 Tule Lake riots described “an unruly mob of Japanese” nearly committing arson and murder, even though, as the WRA acknowledged, it had lost control of its press relations at this time and could not persuasively counteract these stories. “The events which took place were not anywhere near as violent or dangerous as they were commonly represented in the press,” Myer of the WRA insisted, but it was too late to remove the impression that had been left. Afterward, the WRA was doubly aware that such behavior had to be carefully controlled.25 With the cooperation of Japanese Americans in positions of influence (such as the Japanese American Citizens League [JACL] or the camp newspaper staff), the WRA saw the maintenance of a strong family structure as an effective antidote to the threat of large, discontented groups.
Fears expressed about young male resettlers reveal that the WRA believed that releasing a horde of Japanese Americans back into society without the containing family unit could be a destabilizing force. Historian Ellen Wu’s in-depth study of the “resettlement” project shows that these young men, often zoot-suiters associated with violence in camps and resettled communities, greatly angered and troubled administrators.26 The rise of juvenile delinquency was a particular fear in the camps. Reflecting fears of yellow hordes and mirroring depictions of the mostly male “pressure boys” at Tule Lake, male violence was a source of not only inconvenience and unrest but also unfavorable publicity. Thus, its transformation into favorable press by sympathizers writing about inevitable familial disintegration was crucial. As one father observed in an article in the New York Herald Tribune that stressed the rise of juvenile delinquency at the Rohwer camp, “I no longer provide the bread for their table and the roof over their heads. So, they say, ‘why should I respect what you say and obey your word?’”27 His feeling of inadequacy stems from his abrogation of financial responsibility, with food and the family table at the metaphorical center. Having lost control of his livelihood and physical home, his two sons, aged seventeen and nineteen, had passed completely beyond his control. Sociologists pointed out that the mother’s authority had also been undercut. “Mass feeding in the mess halls eliminated the role of wife and mother in the preparation of food for the family and lessened the controls of the parents exercised at the time of the family meal.”28 Focus was thus shifted away from a violent mass identified with Japan and onto the wayward children of helpless parents.
Modern oral histories of incarcerees reflect these accounts of behavioral change, especially in male teenagers, but tend to downplay the “delinquency” and tragedy, concentrating more on survivorship. Jim Hirabayashi spoke of his meals as a pivotal experience. “I no longer ate with my parents; I ate with my peers. And so I spent most of my time outside of the family circle. And did a lot of things that I didn’t normally do and wouldn’t have done had the family stayed together.” This resembles the start to many accounts of delinquency, but Hirabayashi does not specify what these “things” are, and his account implies that they were not grave. Bo Sakaguchi, also a teenager at the time, was even more vague about any problems.
Families were all separated now because you went to the mess hall with your friends, your school friends. So, but because we were already teenagers, it wasn’t so bad. I felt sorry for the younger kids who had, who also did the same thing, so they weren’t having their meals with their parents. But for us, we were adult—well, we were young, seventeen, sixteen, seventeen, it didn’t matter that much.
His nonchalance is decidedly different from the dramatization of familial separation, and the interviewer follows it up, asking, “Did this separation of families relative to meals and things, was that upsetting to the parents in families?” Sakaguchi did hesitate at that, saying, “I, I don’t know. I don’t know,” but maintained that it was harder for those with small children who, despite their ages, were still eating apart. He then repeated a more standard depiction of the familial problems, saying, “I’m sure it didn’t help the family unit per se over the long term, though I don’t believe they caused problems while we were in camp themselves, maybe postwar.”29
Incarceree May Sasaki actually got into an extended discussion with her oral history interviewer about the extent of her brother’s bad behavior:
My oldest brother loved this freedom, and he felt that now he could do what he wanted with his cohorts, and they became kind of like a gang in camp. They were not bad boys, but they certainly liked to do things that were not always things that their parents wanted them to do.
The interviewer asked for clarification, saying, “By ‘gang,’ nowadays we understand ‘gang’ to mean something where maybe young men are causing mischief and maybe criminal acts.” Even though he was describing a modern understanding, this was likewise the picture in the 1940s of the unruly young men in camps, particularly Tule Lake. Sasaki hastened to dismiss the idea of criminality:
Oh no, this wasn’t anything of that. I guess you’d just call them boys sticking together, then, maybe. But in their minds they were this gang. And there were often many little gangs that sprung up, and they would have their own meetings and their own kinds of things, rituals that they would go through. … And yes, he wasn’t as obedient. I remember him talking back to my dad which he never did before.
These “little gangs” that Sasaki characterizes as bad boys doing silly things together were, in the wake of the Tule Lake riots, portrayed as violent, disaffected youth. Sasaki then proceeds to take this story about her brother’s teenage rebellion into a perceptive analysis of the issei-nisei generational conflict as a central problem of incarceration itself, whereas complaints of juvenile delinquency at the time shifted blame to the mess halls and other evil influences of communal life.30
The immediate result of separating families at mealtime was supposedly child misbehavior, ranging from poor table manners to the more feared juvenile delinquency. In one of the earliest published memoirs of the incarceration (1946), Miné Okubo wrote, “Table manners were forgotten. Guzzle, guzzle, guzzle; hurry, hurry, hurry. Family life was lacking. Everyone ate wherever he or she pleased. Mothers had lost all control over their children.”31 Camp papers started reporting this phenomenon early, advising parents to restrain their children and set the example themselves. As early as September 1942, the Gila News-Courier reported,
Remonstrations of abominable table manners used in the dining halls of youngsters and adults during meal hours have been heard here and there each day. Misplaced elbows, seats used as foot-rests, loud talk with a full mouth, covered heads. … Is this one of the demoralizing indications of the camp life? It seems so. It seems that we evacuees are doing less than we can to combat the evil influences of our community existence.32
Since the newspapers did not tend toward the radical—hardly surprising, given the necessity of at least some cooperation with the camp administration—this article did not probe the reason behind this “community existence” or even call for a better system of dining. It was not until May 1944, at which point the incarcerees must have felt that they had put up with this system quite long enough, that “organization of a Family table system in mess halls to encourage family ties and discourage juvenile delinquency was recommended by the Butte Community Council,” one of the internal camp self-governments.33
Japanese American newspapers continued the theme of personal responsibility that decades later plagued memoirists. “Ann Nisei” advised parents to discipline their children through proper educational stimulation and structure. “Never miss a meal with your children, even though you know they can take care of themselves. Keep the family unit together for all meals.” While this particular advice was framed as a way to model good table manners for children, the tone of the entire column suggests acute anxiety about child development as a whole away from the normal influences of the family home, such as “pets, picture magazines, toys, playmates, and all the objects in the home.” Another exhorted incarcerees to create a colorful play and work area for children in the camp in order to eliminate the influence of the “concentration camp” and the “bareness and bleakness of the barrack.”34 As usual, though, the columns passed over the reasons for these absent influences, instead focusing on coping mechanisms. Likewise, deeper anxieties about the cumulative effect of these individual lapses went unspoken. As modern anthropologists observe, traditional family mealtimes serve as places to acculturate children, teaching not simply etiquette but morals, gender roles, and narrative/linguistic skills as well.35 Yet the effect on the community as a whole was not discussed openly.
An article in the Pacific Citizen offered an even more vivid depiction of family life gone wrong, describing one mother’s experience with her small daughter and ending by using this disturbing image to suggest an entirely different course of action.
Dining in community mess halls taught her to squirm out of her seat and reach in front of anyone for whatever she wanted. The dessert on the table disappeared early so she got in the habit of helping herself quickly to generous portions before the others. She got in the habit of gulping her food wolfishly—we all had to almost bolt our food. … I couldn’t teach Haruko to beg anyone’s pardon or to use knife and fork correctly—everyone seemed to be violating good table manners. Once when I scolded my child and she cried, every baby in the mess hall seemed to pick it up and cried. The looks I got from the other fretting mothers stopped me from ever doing it again.36
Like the articles discussed earlier, this one stresses the bad atmosphere of the mess hall and its deleterious effects on children, especially with regard to table manners but also the greater evils of greed and disobedience. This woman’s difficult experiences are aimed at an audience of fellow fretting mothers who would commiserate with her. The details, probably unnecessary for fellow incarcerees, add up to total agreement. Unlike the mothers in previous articles, this mother does not beg everyone else to set a good example for her daughter and other children, nor does she place blame. Instead, the article subtly offers the solution to all these problems in a revealing last sentence: “I wish I had come out a year ago.”
“Coming out” of the camps refers to resettlement, a policy of dispersing Japanese Americans away from the still-proscribed military area. The WRA was strongly encouraging it, but it was not progressing at the speed the administrators had hoped. The article about Haruko appears in the JACL news section under a column entitled “Colorado Calling!” about the fertile land of Utah Lake. (Since Utah Lake is in Utah, not Colorado, the title is a little misleading.) Written by Joe Masaoka, the Denver JACL chapter leader and brother of Mike Masaoka, the national JACL president, this article’s opening lines about Brigham Young and the comparison of Utah Lake with the Sea of Galilee create a call for a new exodus. Masaoka does not refer directly to resettlement, but he skillfully deploys a rhetoric of abundance and idyllic family life to extol the virtues of life on the shores of the new Sea of Galilee. He describes Utah Lake’s “fruitful orchards and cultivated acres,” with “children romp[ing] under shady trees,” appealing to farmers and parents. Privacy and masculine dignity can also be regained, as “men build their houses nearby and life is stimulating.” In contrast with the story of Haruko’s misbehavior, Masaoka’s utopian vision implies that refusing to resettle means damaging children’s socialization, perhaps permanently, whereas a move to Utah is a move to familial paradise.37
Sympathizers also used the imagery of the mess hall to drum up support for resettlement. An article in the magazine Christian Century, which frequently featured sympathetic articles about the incarceration, noted in a familiar tone, “The usual practice is for 200 to 300 persons to eat together in a large mess hall. Thus the significance of the family is broken down.” Later, the author concluded, “Parental influence is diminishing with the steady breakdown of the family.” But following the standard line, this article, entitled “Empty the Relocation Centers!” exhorted readers to support the WRA in order to create more opportunities for “resettlement” in “desegregated” areas.38 Many Christian groups supported resettlement, and the appeal to a wide Christian audience rested on sentimental family values rather than dry theories about proper minority assimilation.39 But the idea of releasing Japanese Americans to their homes or protesting the mass incarceration still was not even entertained.
The popularity of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s 1973 memoir, Farewell to Manzanar, written with her husband James D. Houston, regenerated the story of the Japanese American family for the political activism of the 1980s. Although Houston’s memoir poignantly tells a tale of familial decay, she also explicitly reflects at some length on the question of agency, blaming teenage willfulness as well as the incarceration for the Wakatsukis’ unraveling.
You might say it would have happened sooner or later anyway, this sliding apart of such a large family, in postwar California. People get married; their interests shift. But there is no escaping the fact that our internment accelerated the process, made it happen so suddenly it was almost tangible.
Using language found in later accounts, Houston starts with the destruction of domesticity: “It began in the mess hall. Before Manzanar, mealtime had always been the center of our family scene. … Now, in the mess halls, after a few weeks had passed, we stopped eating as a family.” Her mother, valiantly trying to fulfill her appropriate domestic role, “tried to hold us together for a while, but it was hopeless.” At home, Papa had been the one who headed the table. The children, however, enjoyed their new freedom.
My older brothers and sisters … began eating with their friends, or eating somewhere blocks away, in the hope of finding better food. … Kiyo and I were too young to run around, but often we would eat in gangs with other kids, while the grownups sat at another table. I confess I enjoyed this part of it at the time. We all did.
By “confessing,” Houston takes some responsibility for familial breakdown; we didn’t resist enough, she implies.40
In her account, Houston notes, although she does not make much of it, that the camp administrators did worry about the effect on the family.
A couple of years after the camps opened, sociologists studying the life noticed what had happened to the families. They made some recommendations, and edicts went out that families must start eating together again. Most people resented this; they griped and grumbled. They were in the habit of eating with their friends. And until the mess hall system itself could be changed, not much could really be done. It was too late. (33)
Houston’s memoir, itself a mélange of the explanatory, condemnatory, and conciliatory, is at its most confused here, retreating to impersonal analysis to avoid talking any more about her family’s breakdown. Rarely is Houston’s tone scholarly; she almost never invokes sociologists or any other outside “experts” or sources on the incarceration. She also avoids the question of authority regarding this mess hall horde and does not mention who was sending out or loosely enforcing the edicts on families eating together.
Houston’s narrative does have another, more important beginning than the mess hall. Even though the abrupt arrest of her father, a fisherman on Terminal Island, breaks up the family before they even enter the camp, she does not even mention this. Instead, several days later, when her father is charged with delivering oil to Japanese submarines, she says, “This was the beginning of a terrible, frantic time for all my family.” (8) Nonetheless, she confines this “terrible, frantic time” to a finite and proportionally small section of the narrative, implying that other times, including the arrest itself, were less terrible and less frantic. When she says that her mother’s weeping was terrible or that her family’s disintegration “began in the mess hall,” it is a false, sentimental starting place with which her mainstream audience can identify. Beginning at the beginning would require a cross-racial identification with the loss of a father dragged off by police for being a dangerous enemy alien spy. Houston bleakly concludes this section with “My own family, after three years of mess hall living”—notably, not “camp living” or even “internment living” but specifically blaming the mess hall—“collapsed as an integrated unit” (33). Even though this time also included three years of her brother’s enlistment against her father’s wishes, her near conversion to Catholicism, and various hardships for her family members, the mess hall retains its rhetorical primacy. The fact that the bulk of Houston’s camp narrative does address her father’s tragic alcoholism, illness, and loss of patriarchy makes her rhetorical stress on the mess hall all the more curious a choice. Houston was either consciously or unconsciously drawing on decades of discourse about the breakdown of the family attributed to the mess halls, but Farewell to Manzanar’s success ensured its continuance.
Houston’s memoir is the best example of a post-incarceration adaptation of the sentimental novel’s depiction of family. As numerous scholars have argued, the classic American sentimental novel may have assumed that a conventional family structure existed, but it frequently depicted its heroines in unconventional scenarios and communities that break apart the family and sometimes demand the type of cross-racial identification that Houston’s narrative required of white American readers. Glenn Hendler writes, “Sentimental plots repeatedly transgress both the internal and the external limits of the family structure which domestic ideology held up as its overt ideal.” The incarceration memoir, however, generally depicts such transgressions in service of its larger mission and twentieth-century audience, to introduce Japanese Americans into mainstream American acceptance. Houston and other protagonists emerge from their unconventional camp situations with new bonds of sympathy connecting them to an outward society rather than to a restored nuclear family. The normative family, however, is still assumed as a function of sentimentality, even as it may be transgressed by the narrative.41
It matters little that—as Stephanie Coontz has most popularly argued—the idyllic nuclear family image most powerfully identified with the next decade did not actually exist as the American norm in the 1940s.42 Image was everything to the incarcerees who, judging from their own memoirs, might have been the only American population accustomed to dining family style. Far more likely, of course, is that sympathetic writers, both incarcerees and others, understood the power of family as a rhetorical device. The 1950s black-and-white television family, an image that undoubtedly also influenced Houston’s depiction of her family table, can actually be seen partly growing out of the depictions of incarceration. Girls in home economics clubs across the country were carefully instructed in creating proper nuclear family homes, with the camps’ “new type of community” held up as a sad counterexample. A 1943 magazine article asked them to consider the plight of fellow young American citizens who also liked jitterbugging and cokes. “Family life as known in the ordinary American home is largely absent. … As meals are served cafeteria style in mess halls, there is no dinner table around which the family can thresh out everyday problems.” Once again, the lack of a dinner table, and not the lack of civil liberties, is the sentimental tragedy. But homemakers have done wonders in these sad circumstances, and “evacuee girls find that home economics, more than almost any other subject, helps them improve life in the center and gives them a firm foundation for the future.” This future is one in which the “ordinary American home” can flourish for girls of all ethnicities, who will have the privilege of setting their own dinner tables.43
The fulfillment of this idealized image also appeared in mainstream film. In the 1960 black-and-white film Hell to Eternity starring Jeffrey Hunter and Sessue Hayakawa (and featuring George Takei in a supporting role), poor young orphan Guy Gabaldon is adopted by his Japanese American gym teacher’s family, an idyllic nuclear family of father, mother, and two sons, an image that was too sentimental for the New York Times reviewer.44 Mama and Papa Une welcome Guy kindly, and the only moment when he shows any uneasiness arises when his friend and new adoptive brother, George, jokes that they eat seaweed and octopus for breakfast; Guy is then relieved to find cornflakes and other familiar foods on a nicely set table worthy of any sitcom of the 1950s. The film takes the path of least resistance, not suggesting that Japanese food or customs can be genuinely American, but instead showing that Japanese Americans were fully “Americanized” in this area, sitting down together at the table until the incarceration breaks them up forever.45
While embracing the traditional depiction of the mess hall, more recent accounts of Japanese Americans’ incarceration also reveal new details of how families circumvented the rules and preserved themselves in unsanctioned ways. The mess hall story, effective as it was, mostly ended with the family’s destruction, creating a story of victimhood rather than survival. Tashiro, who had almost been separated from his family during his first meal in Gila River, writes an astonishingly frank account of his teenage years in the camp, full of pranks, name calling, sexual awakening, and friendship. Such frankness would have been unheard-of in the sentimental memoirs of the early years or in the era of redress. His recollections seem to be accurate, though, because his mother one day announced to him that he was becoming a “yogore”—an unsavory character, sometimes translated as a gangster—in the camp, and so his family was sending him to live with relatives in Minneapolis. Among other, more serious offenses, his mother tells him that the mess hall crew reported that he had loosened the caps on the salt and pepper shakers, causing people to dump the entire contents all over their food.
Tashiro’s pleas and promise to behave in the mess halls did nothing to change his mother’s mind. Determined to save him from the lack of structured life in camp, his mother, acting as agreed by correspondence with his father serving in France with the 442nd, speedily packs him off. Significantly, their last act as a family was to buy a chicken from a Native American. They pluck it together—Tashiro still remembers the stench of the feathers—cook it on their little barrack stove, and make teriyaki chicken for his lunch on the journey. In this narrative, it is the Tashiros’ ability to buy food independently, cook it as a family, and pack it for a child that enabled him to escape the mess halls that were turning him into a delinquent. With his bento (lunch) box, Tashiro, escorted by his grandfather, heads out for his new life in the Midwest, leaving his mother and baby sister behind. Instead of a story of decay, it is the Tashiros’ enduring strength as a family unit that allows them to overcome all the obstacles of the incarceration, albeit at the price of the temporary separation that closes the memoir.46
The disintegration of the family structure in the mess halls three times a day, symbolizing the lack of both a family home and the freedom to choose and prepare food they liked, was certainly a source of great discomfort and emotional trauma for the incarcerated Japanese Americans, making their imprisonment even more difficult. Houston’s account, as well as other memoirs and testimonies, made the mess hall a subject of sympathy and interest, paving the way for the redress movement that further cast it as accepted fact. Ironically, the discourse on which the movement drew was, during the incarceration itself, much more politically double-edged. The mess hall imagery generated great sympathy from a mainstream audience and rallied the incarcerees to preserve what home life they could through a variety of methods, but for all audiences, it drew attention away from the causes and the legality of the incarceration, as well as the WRA’s plans to scatter the Japanese American community as widely as possible across the rest of the country. Substantiating historians’ claims that the nuclear family was not as sacred to Americans as the midcentury myth would have it, public outcries over cafeteria-style dining and familial separation came even from sympathizers only at strategic moments. The mess hall was not simply pitied, but feared. Pushing past the politics of this sentimental image exposes the depths of prejudice that caused the incarceration in the first place.
1. George Takei, To the Stars: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu (New York: Pocket Books, 1994), 62–63.
2. Following modern practice, I use the terms “incarceration” and “incarceree” rather than “internment” and “internee,” which imply alien status. I also use the term “camp” or “incarceration camp” instead of the euphemistic WRA term, “Relocation Center.” I refer to the “Assembly Centers” initially administered by the Wartime Civilian Control Agency as “assembly camps” to distinguish them from the WRA camps. There were other camps holding a smaller number of Japanese Americans, administered by other government entities, but I am not specifically discussing these, nor were they often spoken of publicly during the war.
3. Jane Dusselier, “Does Food Make Place? Food Protests in Japanese American Concentration Camps,” Food & Foodways 10 (2002): 153–55.
4. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied. Washington, DC: The Civil Liberties Public Educaion Fund (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).
5. “Relocation of Japanese-Americans,” ed. War Relocation Authority (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 5. “A Challenge to Democracy” [short film], War Relocation Authority with the Office of War Information and Office of Strategic Services, 1944.
6. Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), 176.
7. J. A. Krug and D. S. Myer, “WRA: A Story of Human Conservation,” ed. U.S. Department of the Interior (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 90; and John H. Provinse and Solon T. Kimball, “Building New Communities during War Time,” American Sociological Review 11, no. 4 (1946): 405.
8. For example, Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1946). 89.
9. Provinse and Kimball, “Building New Communities during War Time,” 404.
10. Leonard Bloom, “Familial Adjustments of Japanese-Americans to Relocation: First Phase,” American Sociological Review 8, no. 5 (1943): 559.
11. “Ann Nisei Says: Design for Center Living: Ideas for a Barrack Apartment,” Pacific Citizen, October 1, 1942, 2.
12. Fred Haller, “Statement of Fred Haller, Project Steward,” April 29, 1943, in Records of the War Relocation Authority, Headquarters Subject-Classified General Files, 61.620, Box 363 (Washington, DC: National Archives, 1943), 5.
13. Nor did Haller note that cafeteria-style service in other hastily constructed facilities was equally unsatisfactory. American war workers complained vigorously of the high cost and poor quality of unappetizing food at their factory canteens. See Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 422–23.
14. “Family-Style Meals for Stockton Center,” Pacific Citizen, July 9, 1942, 6.
15. Kenneth A. Tashiro, “Wase Time!”: A Teen’s Memoir of Gila River Internment Camp Days (Bloomington, IL: AuthorHouse, 2005), 28.
16. “Tom Tom: Letter to the Editor,” Gila News-Courier, September 23, 1942, 2.
17. Stephen Mak, “‘America’s Other Internment’: World War II and the Making of Modern Human Rights” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2009).
18. Quoted in Alice Yang Murray, Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 79.
19. Visit restrictions are mentioned in Krug and Myer, “WRA: A Story of Human Conservation,” 144; Bloom, “Transitional Adjustments of Japanese-American Families to Relocation,” American Sociological Review 12, no.2 (1947): 201–209, cites the actual WRA regulation in 1944.
20. Perhaps most famously depicted in John Okada’s novel No-No Boy, in which the son says “no-no” to the two famous test questions about swearing allegiance and willingness to serve in the armed forces, which sends him to jail and eventually breaks his family apart. See John Okada, No-No Boy (1957; repr., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979).
21. “Work to Eat-Eat to Work,” Gila News-Courier, October 10, 1942, 2.
22. Carolyn Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 32–33, 23; Carl Mydans, “Tule Lake Segregation Center,” Life, March 20, 1944.
23. “Rulings Clarify Basic Family Unit.” Gila News-Courier, December 15, 1942, 3.
24. Frank Capra, “Prelude to War,” in Why We Fight, ed. Frank Capra (U.S. War Department, Twentieth Century Fox, 1942); Theodore Seuss Geisel, “Waiting for the Signal from Home …,” black and white comic, PM, February 13, 1942; Lieutenant General J. L. DeWitt, “Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942: Final Report,” ed. Headquarters Western Defense Command and Fourth Army (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office,1943), 9, 15.
25. Krug and Myer, “WRA: A Story of Human Conservation,” 116–18.
26. Ellen Wu, “Race and Asian American Citizenship from World War II to the Movement” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006).
27. “Japanese Voice Resentment at Arkansas Camp,” New York Herald Tribune, July 18, 1943, n.p., from the American Civil Liberties Union Records, “The Roger Baldwin Years, 1917–1950,” Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.
28. Provinse and Kimball, “Building New Communities during War Time,” 404. Such discussions of the loss of parental control were repeated for decades. One of the major accounts of the 1980s redress and reparations campaign, Achieving the Impossible Dream, reads, “The influence of mess hall conditions led to the deterioration of the family structure. Mothers and small children usually ate together, while the fathers ate at separate tables with the other men. Older children joined peers of their own age group for meals.” The mess hall is thus placed as the primary cause for family fragmentation, but interestingly, the paragraph goes on to say, “Many husbands lost prestige, while many wives and some children gained more independence. The men were no longer seen as the financial heads of the household.” These considerable economic shifts are, somewhat perplexingly, relegated to an afterthought. See Mitchell T. Maki, Harry H.L. Kitano, and S. Megan Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 44.
29. James Hirabayashi, “James Hirabayashi Interview,” in Densho Visual History Collection, available at www.densho.org, 2008; Bo T. Sakaguchi, “Bo T. Sakaguchi Interview,” in Manzanar National Historic Site Collection, available at www.densho.org, 2002.
30. May K. Sasaki, “May K. Sasaki Interview,” in Densho Visual History Collection, available at www.densho.org 1997.
31. Okubo, Citizen 13660, 89.
32. J. N., “Table Etiquette,” Gila News-Courier, September 23, 1942, 2.
33. “Family Table System Urged,” Gila News-Courier, May 16, 1944, 1.
34. “Ann Nisei’s Column: Child Discipline Difficult to Maintain in Relocation Camps,” Pacific Citizen, November 6, 1943, 6; “The Children in the Centers: Should Not Be Subjected to ‘Concentration’ Atmosphere,” Pacific Citizen, July 9, 1942, 6.
35. Elinor Ochs and Merav Shohet, “The Cultural Structuring of Mealtime Socialization,” New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 111 (spring 2006): 35–49.
36. “Center Life Spoils Children,” Pacific Citizen, November 13, 1943, 6.
37. Joe Masaoka, “Colorado Calling!: Two Kinds of People in World,” Pacific Citizen, November 13, 1943, 6.
38. Kirby Page, “Empty the Relocation Centers!,” Christian Century, June 16, 1943, n.p., from the American Civil Liberties Union Records, “The Roger Baldwin Years, 1917– 1950,” Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.
39. See Stephanie Bangarth, Voices Raised in Protest: Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942–49 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), chap. 3.
40. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience during and after the World War II Internment (1973; repr., New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), 31–34. Page numbers of quotations from this book are in parentheses.
41. Glenn Hendler, “The Limits of Sympathy: Louisa May Alcott and the Sentimental Novel,” American Literary History 3, no. 4 (winter 1991): 686. As Hendler notes, one of the dangers of a novel that wields sympathy as a device to force the reader to identify with the heroine is that the sympathy can be misplaced. The example he gives is of the loss of self in scenes of excessive mourning, but this may also be one way to consider the displacement of sympathy on the reader’s part onto the mess hall.
42. See Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
43. John C. Baker, “The Relocation Center Home,” National Magazine of Home Economics Student Clubs, September 1943, 10, 18, in Records of the War Relocation Authority, Washington Office Records: Documentary Files: Magazine Clippings (Washington, DC: National Archives).
44. Howard Thompson, “‘Hell to Eternity’ Is Story of Marine Hero,” New York Times, October 13, 1960.
45. Phil Karlson, Hell to Eternity, DVD, Warner Home Video, 2007 (Allied Artists Pictures, 1960).
46. Tashiro, “Wase Time!” 143. The Tashiros were not alone in buying and cooking food as a family. Incarcerees in Gila River were allowed to go fish in the canal, and Manzanar incarcerees dared to sneak out of the camp in order to go fishing in the Sierras (as seen in the documentary by Cory Shiozaki, The Manzanar Fishing Club (From Barbed Wire to Barbed Hooks, 2011)). There also were stores in the camps, run by incarcerees.