Chapter 20

Nearly nine hundred of Poston’s young people were now in the armed services, and even as the casualty lists from France grew, more were signing up. Almost every week, friends and well-wishers gathered for farewell ceremonies at the Cottonwood Bowl. The new recruits left with a particular sense of pride. After three years, in spite of the heat, the dust storms, the monotony of mess-hall meals, and the degradation of confinement, the people at Poston, as at the other camps, had created extraordinary communities behind barbed wire, and they were justly proud of them. In the face of injustice and humiliation, they had stood tall. They nourished their spiritual lives, educated their children, found a refuge in creativity and productivity.

They dug irrigation canals from the Colorado River to the camp, and land that had been nothing but sagebrush and sand was now green. Vegetable patches flourished; tea gardens surrounded ponds full of koi and goldfish. Carefully transplanted cottonwood trees offered at least a bit of shade over barracks and walkways.

Some people wrote haiku and practiced calligraphy, or they carved ironwood and polished semiprecious stones into exquisite sculptures. Others crafted paper flowers from pages torn from mail-order catalogs and tissue wrappers from oranges and apples and used the paper flowers to create ikebana arrangements, adding seedpods, vines, and twigs they found in the surrounding desert.

The Cottonwood Bowl now hosted almost daily theatrical performances, ranging from kindergarten pageants to formal Kabuki productions. It continued to be used for memorial services, too, of which there were ever more as the 442nd’s casualties mounted.

Buddhist priests and Christian ministers tended to their flocks. Doctors, lawyers, architects, farmers, carpenters, truck drivers, florists, and electricians all brought their specialized skills to bear on improving the quality of camp life.

There were still many hardships and difficulties, though, and many disruptions to traditional family life. Young people now preferred to take their meals with their friends and not with their families. Those who had grown up on remote farms, observing their parents’ traditional ways, now mixed with young people who had grown up wearing the latest fashions and listening to the latest popular music.

Some young Japanese American women, flying in the face of traditional gender norms, were determined to serve in the military. In February 1943, shortly after Nisei men were first allowed to serve, the Army Nurse Corps began accepting Japanese American women. Then, in September, the Women’s Army Corps also began to enlist Japanese American women.

For the most part, the women found themselves doing clerical work, acting as typists, stenographers, and supply clerks. But forty-eight of them who had good Japanese-language skills were assigned to the army’s Military Intelligence Service Language School, to work as translators of intercepted Japanese communications.

Another 350 joined the Cadet Nurse Corps, a nonmilitary program designed to replace the thousands of nurses who left American hospitals to serve overseas. The program offered a rare opportunity for Japanese American women to pursue a career outside the home.

Many of the Nisei women who wanted to serve faced strong opposition from friends and family members. Those who persisted were largely motivated by the same reasons that had led Nisei men in the camps to enlist.

Some had brothers in the army and wanted to support them. Some wanted to get out from behind the barbed wire of the camps. Some saw an opportunity to acquire job skills they could use after the war. Most, though, simply wanted to show their loyalty to their country, to do what they could to serve it, and to help end the war as quickly as possible so they could all return home. For many, though, that dream was cut short when they found that accredited nursing programs more often than not refused to admit Japanese American students, on the basis of their race.

Then, on December 17, 1944, a front-page article in the Poston Chronicle sent shock waves through the camp. For months, the government had been quietly wrestling with whether to do away with the exclusion zone, close the camps, and end the incarcerations.

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had been urging the president to agree to a plan for resettling the “evacuees,” as the government called them, back on the West Coast. Even the army had concluded that there was no military necessity for keeping people in the camps. Through the summer and early fall, with his campaign for reelection underway, President Roosevelt was wary of giving the impression that he was easy on the Nisei and their parents. Three days after his reelection, however, he relented.

And now the news was out. In just weeks, most people of Japanese ancestry would be allowed to travel and live anywhere in the United States, including on the Pacific coast.

At Poston, as at all the camps, the news was met with a profound sense of relief mixed with an equally profound sense of anxiety. What might happen to them when they tried to return home? Would they even have homes to return to? Already there were disturbing reports of early returners being met by violence. Despite not knowing what they might face, the inhabitants of Poston began to leave, making their way back across the country, with no ceremony marking the end of their unjustified incarceration.