Chapter Four
Welcome to Utah

The long trip to Utah in antiquated trains was an ordeal for young and old alike. Much about the journey reminded the Nikkei that they were prisoners. The trains, which took various routes over the Sierra Nevada, stopped once to let the travelers stretch their legs as they crossed the desert. Armed guards were posted every fifteen feet to keep them away from a narrow barbed wire barrier, hastily constructed next to the train. When they were underway, the curious peered out the windows despite the drawn shades, ordered closed from dusk to dawn, and the bleak vistas depressed them. Many became ill from the bumping and swaying. The journey took two nights and a day, time that passed slowly and uncomfortably despite the novelty of the experience. One traveler remembered being able to sleep only in "fits," about an hour at a time. In addition to the brief stop, they were allowed to move from car to car twice a day.^[1] Sixteen trains ultimately moved the population of Tanforan to Topaz.^[2]

Some Japanese Americans had vivid recollections of their journey. Kenji Fujii, appointed a monitor, remembered his train was called the "diarrhea train" for the illness that swept the inhabitants; one man was so sick he had to be removed in Sacramento.^[3] Yoshiko Uchida recalled how the restrooms soon became intolerable. Artist Miné Okubo had more pleasant memories of the trip, such as the fresh citrus fruit provided by the WRA to keep them healthy, a generous touch to offset the discomfort of the journey. Eating in the dining car and being waited on by black waiters were novel ex-

periences for her and her brother.^[4] Tad Fujita was appointed a car captain by the Tanforan administration since he had been a block manager. His job was to watch over the occupants of his car, to help them get seated in an orderly manner, and to provide for their needs. While Fujii found his task involved few duties (he was to compile a master list of passengers; seat them in the order of their numbers; warn them to go to the latrine before leaving; provide them with ashtrays, blankets, and pillows; and bring books and magazines for himself),^[5] Fujita remembered running from his car to others to take care of people's requests. Years later a man thanked him for bringing a blanket to his sick wife and arranging for her to sleep in a berth, but for the most part his efforts were soon forgotten.^[6] q

The advance contingent from Tanrotan arrived in Utah on September 11,1942. The first real group of evacuees reached Topaz September 17, and the last of the original residents came from the Santa Anita Assembly Center, arriving October 11. People filled the camp at the rate of five hundred new arrivals a day. The total population of Topaz in December 1942 included 550 from Santa Anita and 7,673 from Tanforan.^[7] Those traveling from Tanforan crossed the salt flats and passed the Great Salt Lake, turned south at Ogden, and eventually reached the town of Delta, a settlement of more than 1,500 people in Millard County and a railhead of the Union Pacific line. From there they were bused to the prosaically named Central Utah Relocation Center, located fifteen miles away from Delta, near the tiny settlement of Abraham. Most came to call the relocation center Topaz, after Topaz Mountain, a local landmark at whose base the semiprecious gemstones could be found. From the name "Topaz" it was an easy step to the sarcastic label "the jewel of the desert," a slogan proudly printed at the top of the camp newspaper. The camp was surrounded by mountains: to the northwest, the Drum Mountains, from which strange noises emanated at night; to the west, the House Range; and to the east across the valley, the Fishlake Plateau. Topaz Mountain was nine miles northwest of the camp's center.

To people whose homes had been in the moist, green Bay Area, central Utah was a shock. The first disturbing feature was the

desert, which seemed barren, with no water or greenery. Mormon pioneers had founded nearby Hinckley and Deseret in the 1880s, but the larger town of Delta had been settled by the railroad. It was a small farming community, created in 1907 under the Carey Land Act. Although it was a center of alfalfa seed production, the San Franciscans found it hard to believe that the drab surroundings could produce much of anything. Greasewood, a wiry gray shrub common to alkaline soils, was the dominant native vegetation that they saw, interspersed with carefully tended alfalfa fields. Then there was the weather. The evacuees arrived in the early fall, a dry time in Utah, and aridity coupled with wind produced dust storms. Morgan Yamanaka, a former student at San Francisco's Lowell High School who had come to Topaz from the Santa Anita Assembly Center, remembered, "There seemed to be a wall way out there; to see the blue sky and then the more you look at it, the wall seems to be moving. It was a dust storm rolling in, and it just engulfed you, and before you knew it, you could not see anything."^[8]

Many of the later arrivals were greeted by a brass band, former Boy Scouts from Berkeley; this anomalous entertainment must have intensified their sense of estrangement from their new surroundings.^[9] The band churned up irrepressible feelings of homesickness for Berkeley in Toyo Suyemoto Kawakami, who was one of the last of the Tanforan residents to arrive, entering camp on October 3.^[10]

Although Miné Okubo also remembered the band, she was more amazed by the dust, which made an indelible impression on all the inhabitants. She wrote that it was "impossible to see anything through the dust.... When we finally battled our way into the safety of the building we looked as if we had fallen into a flour barrel."^[11] Dave Tatsuno, whose father had owned a store in San Francisco's Nihonmachi, recalled it was like talcum powder, a white, fine film that was everywhere.^[12] Faith Terasawa remembered that the alkali in the dust made her skin itch as though she had been burned.^[13] The first task of the new residents was to clean their rooms, but the dust made this an almost endless occupation. Each barrack had only three brooms, and one layer of dust was quickly replaced by another.^[14]

The desert climate was one of extremes, and temperature fluctuations of as much as 50 degrees in a day were common. The temperature ranged from 106 degrees in the summer to 20 below zero in the winter. The first residents to arrive saw frost only days after they left the trains, and the first snow fell on October 28. Yoshiko Uchida was shocked to find ice on the water they had left in their room overnight. Faith Terasawa, who had to care for her eighty-five-year-old father and eighty-two-year-old aunt, worried about the cold; they went to bed with their clothes on, but sleep was difficult. Winter snow kept the dust down until the paths between the barracks could be graveled, but it soon melted into a gooey muck. The cold in the uninsulated barracks was extreme and the wind blew unceasingly, summer and winter, working its way through the poorly constructed walls and depositing layers of dust. The rainfall averaged only seven to eight inches a year, making the area a true desert. Since the soil was nonabsorbent, any moisture just turned the ground into sticky mud.^[15]

Even more important to the new arrivals were the facilities that awaited them at Topaz. The camp was constructed hastily between June 1942 and January 1943 by the San Francisco firm of Daley Brothers. The work was contracted by the Salt Lake District of the Mountain Division of the U.S. Corps of Engineers, and laborers came from the surrounding communities. The cost was $3,929,000; the WRA spent an estimated $1 million more for additional structures.^[16] George Gentoku Shimamoto supervised an advance party of three hundred Japanese Americans from Tanforan that arrived in early September to complete the project. The group first finished the barrack where hospital cases were to be housed, to protect the patients from the severe chill of winter. Then they began to complete and winterize other essential buildings and partition areas for privacy.^[17] But the camp was still incomplete when the evacuees from Tanforan began to arrive, and some barracks even lacked roofs.

Although the Japanese Americans were depressed by what they saw, Topaz was in many ways an improvement over Tanforan. There were no horse stalls, and thus no manure. The camp consisted of tar paper barracks, twelve to a block; there were thirty-four

4.
The Central Utah Relocation Camp Reprinted 
by permission of the artist, Miné Okubo.

blocks for housing and the remainder for administration. At its high point there was a total of 408 buildings at Topaz. The construction was pine board sheeting covered with tar paper. Even the Deltans noticed the shoddiness. "The sheeting had cracks at least a quarter of an inch between each board.... No insulation whatsoever.... There were bare [light] bulbs, eight to every hundred and twenty feet [in length], and that's all the wiring was. Just one wire down the length and a switch over by the door . . . one per apartment.... There were no concrete foundations under the barracks," recalled Roger Walker, a former serviceman who worked at the camp during its final year. He wondered at the minds of the

people who had built such structures in the desert, where the wind would blow under them all the time. "It is really difficult to see how they survived."^[18] Fujii remembered putting a sheet on the floor to stop the wind from blowing through the cracks and seeing it puff up like a balloon when anyone opened the door.

Each barrack was divided into very small rooms, each intended for a family or four or five unrelated individuals. The rooms had no inner walls, although later, in December, they were finished with gypsum board.^[19] Although the area was frequently plagued by mosquitoes, there were no screens.^[20] There also were few window panes. During the construction phase, the first six weeks or so, two families or as many as eight bachelors were crowded into a single room. Ultimately each barrack was divided into six rooms, which ranged in size from 16 by 20 feet to 20 by 25 feet. The new arrivals found that their quarters were furnished only with cots. At a central location they obtained tick bags (which were soon exchanged for cotton mattresses) and two blankets apiece, insufficient for the winter's cold, and even in early October the nights were chilly. To obtain a little privacy the residents fashioned partitions from sheets or blankets. They were provided with pot-bellied stoves for the rooms, which were unloaded from trucks in front of the barracks and had to be hauled inside. Everyone had to grab what coal they could from a pile occasionally deposited outside on the road. The latrines and the bathing and washing facilities were located in a separate central building in each block, but they too were unfinished; the toilets lacked seats and often doors. There were to be four bathtubs for the women and four showers for the men in each block, but these were not immediately available. For older residents, learning to use a shower was an unpleasant experience. The first residents nonetheless fared far better than the later arrivals, who found no rooms remaining and had to sleep on cots in empty mess halls, laundries, and the corridors of the hospital until the work on the barracks was completed. Yoshiko Uchida recalled that "one unfortunate woman received second degree burns on her face when boiling tar seeped through the roof onto the bed where she was asleep."^[21]

Creating individual living space was an immediate necessity for the newly arrived residents, at least a third of whom received unfinished quarters. Dave Tatsuno recalled having to help complete the installation of the gypsum board. Roscoe Bell, chief of the agricultural division, described work parties held by the residents, but even after the plasterboard was in place there were still many air leaks.^[22] Mel Roper, a teacher from Delta who watched the construction of the camp, thought it shoddy and "very inappropriate for the type of weather that these people were to live in."^[23] The temperature dropped below zero on several occasions that first winter, and the barracks were not insulated. The pot-bellied stoves provided some heat, but much of the warmth escaped up the crude chimneys. Ill health was a constant companion to all residents, Nikkei and Caucasian alike, recalled Eleanor Gerard Sekerak, one of the teachers at Topaz High, who, like many of her students, had come from Berkeley. One early arrival commented on October 3 that "everyone seems to have diarrhea, heat exhaustion, or colds."^[24] q

Residents had to build chests or shelves for their possessions from scrap lumber, some of which the administration provided; the inhabitants pilfered the rest of what they needed as internal security looked the other way. This became a veritable sport for the men and boys. Tom Kawaguchi recalled how he and his brother would "sneak out at night and steal scrap lumber.... Everybody was doing it," a proposition seconded by Ken Fujii and others. The director of internal security, Ted Lewis, told his future bride that he allowed the residents to take boxes and lumber to divide their rooms because "the sexes and ages were all mixed inside."^[25] Obtaining nails was more difficult; they had to be saved from any boxes that came into camp.^[26] Toyo Suyemoto Kawakami remembered that her father "made a table and stools of varying heights from scrap lumber."^[27] Maya Nagata Aikawa, whose father had died before the evacuation, never forgot how difficult it was for her, her mother, and her sisters to obtain such amenities. She recalled, "We didn't have any [shelves]. We used the two-by-fours which were a part of the framework of one room." Boxes became their tables until friends built them some furniture.^[28]

Obtaining lumber for furniture was not without its perils. Lee Suyemoto, who was a teenager in Topaz, remembered that when he and a friend went out to find wood, a guard pointed his rifle at them and shouted, "Stop!" Lee continued the story, "And we stopped and he clicked his rifle at us and said 'Get the hell out of here.'" The guard, probably a civilian since the boys were inside the fence, sounded drunk to Lee, but whatever his condition, the two frightened youths ran away. Many later asked just what kind of people the guards were.^[29]

All meals were in a central dining hall, one for each block. (The camp director told the residents that they were no longer to refer to it as a "mess.") In time, the camp also included a community auditorium, a gymnasium, canteens, schools, libraries, churches, a post office, and a fire station. There were athletic fields near the schools and south of Topaz City and a fifteen-acre community garden plot. The cemetery was never used; instead the 144 people who died at Topaz were cremated and their ashes ultimately returned to the Bay Area after the war.^[30]

The food was sufficient for the adults, even if it hardly qualified as either typical Japanese or good American cuisine. The first meal for many was cauliflower, mashed potatoes, rice, stewed meat, bread, cabbage salad, milk, and an apple. Yoshiko Uchida reported that, because of a lack of refrigeration, many residents got diarrhea from eating spoiled food, but in her area meals were skimpy and the hungry residents were not too choosy.^[31] The WRA food allowance was 45 cents a day per evacuee, lower by a nickel than the military allowance, but it was reportedly cut down to 31 cents a day at Topaz, partly because of the cattle and hog raising at the center. Typically, food is a major source of complaints in an institutional setting, and at Topaz many were unhappy over the frequency with which liver, tripe, or other organ meat was served. These were considered inedible in Japanese culture. The residents sought to meet their own food needs by obtaining permission to open a plant to manufacture tofu; it was in operation by the end of February

1943. Some 1,500 pounds of tofu were produced each week, supplying all the dining halls.^[32] Water was obtained from three wells, which produced an almost undrinkable alkaline beverage. The new residents were warned to eat a lot of salt with their food as a protection against heat exhaustion.^[33] There were the usual digestive problems associated with strange food and water: Kenji Fujii described the resulting complaint as the "Topaz trots."^[34] A local doctor made a concoction to counteract the affliction; it was sold at the drugstore in Delta until 1984 and called the "TT mix"—with the first T standing for Tokyo.^[35]

The camp was constructed to house 9,000 people, but its top population was only 8,232, still enough to make it the fifth largest city in Utah. A total of 11,212 people were admitted over its three-year history. There were 4,434 males and 3,798 females.^[36] Many things set the camp apart from the normal small town, but most noticeable was the surrounding barbed wire fence interspersed with guard towers. It was under construction when the first internees arrived. Residents were repeatedly reminded not to approach the fence, which was also patrolled. An enclosed area in one corner of the compound housed the military police. For most of Topaz's history there were 3 to 5 officers and 85 to 150 men stationed there. The guards checked the credentials of every person entering or leaving the camp. Every quarter of a mile, searchlights were set in the guard towers, where squads or detachments of armed men were positioned.^[37]

The administration ultimately occupied eight blocks located some distance away from Topaz town, where the internees were held. The administrators resided in barracks in this compound: the senior officials on one side of a barrack; the more junior people, such as teachers, on the other. The main administration building initially contained offices for the mail service, files, transportation, personnel, food service management, the carrier service, Western Union, the switchboard, and the deputy and the assistant director. Another building housed the project director and his assistant, the

attorney, and offices for community services, project reports, community welfare, education, and statistics. The relocation and employment officer was in an annex that joined these two buildings. There were separate buildings for the post office and the fire department, the fiscal offices, and relocation and placement. Approximately two hundred Caucasians supervised and staffed the various divisions; about half came from nearby towns, while the remainder lived at the relocation center. Some sent their children to school in Delta, and others educated them with the Nisei. Many attended religious services at the camp's Protestant facilities.

Roscoe and Gladys Bell came to Topaz from Berkeley, California, where he had worked for the State Agricultural Board. At first they lived in Delta, since they had four children and could not be accommodated at Topaz. The Bells' eldest son, Paul, attended Delta High School for a year before the family moved to Topaz. Roscoe Bell described their Topaz housing in a memoir he wrote years later. Since they were a large family, they were assigned a suite of three rooms, with a stove, a picnic-style table, and beds. In 1944 staff apartments were completed on the grounds, and they then had a suite of very small rooms composed of a kitchenette, a furnace room, a living-dining room, and a small bedroom, plus a "passageway" bedroom and a bath. The two older boys had to room in the bachelor's quarters nearby. Paul attended Topaz High School, his brother Earnest the junior high, and Gordon and Winifred the elementary schools. The Bells, who had known and liked Japanese Americans when they were in California, had been horrified as they watched the evacuation and felt they could best help by taking employment in the relocation camp.^[38] They became friends with many of the internees, in part because they were involved in religious activities in camp. Bell described the services as "very meaningful to us because of the enthusiasm and meaningful Christianity that was practiced by the church members."^[39] One of the best-liked administrators, he directed agricultural activities and later became assistant director, and his wife Gladys taught music and helped found a USO group at Topaz.

Eleanor Gerard also came to Topaz from California. She recalled that she had been forewarned by Lorne Bell (no relation to Roscoe)

not to expect much of the physical arrangements at Topaz, for it was after all an internment camp. She did not complain about her quarters, but she never did get used to the "dust storms and the sticky, slippery mud that followed rain." She soon met Emil Sekerak, who was a conscientious objector from Ohio and—unlike her and the Bells—had never seen a Japanese American before. As single people (they married after the war), they shared housing with roommates. Emil, who organized the camp cooperative and later headed the relocation office, had the singular distinction of being the lowest-paid employee at camp. As a CO, he earned $5 a month.^[40]

There were twenty-nine Caucasians in place as of October 1, 1942.^[41] Unlike the transients who directed Tanforan, many of the white staff members remained throughout most of the camp's life although the teaching staff did have a high turnover. There were two directors, first Charles Ernst and then Luther T. Hoffman, who replaced Ernst in 1944. The War Relocation Authority, which administered the camps, noted that selecting key personnel was "something like the paneling of a jury." The agency sought to find men who had not formed opinions on the major issues of the program, who did not have "marked antipathies against all persons of Japanese descent" but were not what they termed "overly emotional" about the "plight of the evacuated people." The WRA historians noted the difficulty of that task; many of the administrators had never known Japanese Americans before, and those from the West Coast who did had already formed opinions about them.^[42] Everyone remembered Pearl Harbor. It was easy to confuse Japanese Americans with the Japanese enemy, but it was also hard not to learn to like the people with whom one worked. The WRA's success in picking the right people for this unparalleled task was at best mixed. Some administrators who began as dispassionate bureaucrats came to sympathize with the plight of the evacuees. Others found it difficult to overcome their racial attitudes, and still others found the harsh desert environment itself hard to accept. Paul Bell described the administrators as running the "full spectrum" from very racist to extremely empathic, but he remarked that the real racists did not last long. Many of the Cau-

casians debated heatedly with one another whether the evacuation was an unchallengeable "military necessity"; to Roscoe Bell it was just the result of economic greed on the part of the Californians. Working at Topaz was for such people "doing their part" in the war effort.^[43]

Many Utahns at Topaz had not known Japanese Americans before the war, and they approached their jobs with apprehension about working with this apparently dangerous minority group. Claud Pratt, head counselor of the welfare section and later assistant director of relocation services, was one Utahn sensitized by the camp experience. He described how he and his wife "had somewhat ambivalent feelings about the work. We tried to feel comfortable about the decision of our government to remove these people from their homes on the West Coast. But we could not help feeling a great sympathy and empathy for them." He became friends with the people with whom he worked, attending their weddings and, like the Bells and the Sekeraks, keeping in touch with them for years after the war. Although the Pratts did not believe there had been any military necessity for the evacuation, they differed sharply from most Utahns, including Governor Herbert Maw.^[44]

One Nisei student described the first group of administrative arrivals for the JERS records. Foremost in the Topaz administration was Director Charles F. Ernst, a Harvard graduate from Boston who had begun his career in settlement house work. He had worked in unemployment relief in Seattle, a center of the West Coast Japanese American population, then had gone to Chicago, and finally to Washington, where he was employed by the American Red Cross. Ernst joined the War Relocation Authority in August 1942, when he was in his mid-forties; he was assigned to Topaz. The director impressed the JERS informant with his "sincerity and caring attitude" and seemed to have been well-liked by the residents, at least at the outset.^[45] Yoshiko Uchida described him as a "kind and understanding man of considerable warmth," who wel-

comed the evacuees (whom he insisted on calling "residents") to Topaz.^[46] The Nikkei appreciated it when Ernst ordered the staff to drive the thirty-mile round trip daily from Delta instead of preempting the limited housing.^[47] Eleanor Sekerak remembered him and his wife as "typical Bostonians, very dignified." His wife always wore a hat and gloves, and he was a "perfect gentleman," who roundly criticized any Caucasian who called the residents "Japs."^[48]

Not all of the staff members shared this admiration for the director. Roscoe and Gladys Bell remembered that he kept a garden in front of his residence filled with cacti to keep the children and Japanese Americans out. He was, they recalled, very status-conscious and preserved a distance even from the whites who reported to him. Ernst resigned in 1944 to take a position with the United Nations Relief and Administration. Oscar Hoffman, the community analyst, believed that Ernst's arrogance and aloof attitude had created a "caste system... between the administration and the residents." Hoffman, a native of Kansas, had studied for the ministry before switching fields and earning a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was too old for the draft and took the position of community analyst in 1943 because he needed a job and that one sounded interesting. He moved his family to Topaz, replacing Weston LaBarre, an anthropologist who was drafted after a few months of work at the camp. Hoffman's dislike for Ernst began virtually the day he arrived. The director had seen no need for an inquisitive social scientist on his staff and did not want LaBarre's position to be filled. According to Hoffman, Ernst feared that the analyst's reports to WRA headquarters in Washington would challenge his own interpretation of his administration. Hoffman also felt that the proper Bostonian did not have sufficient empathy with the plight of the internees; years later he still found Ernst "weak... in his sensitivity to a sorely wounded people." Whereas Eleanor Sekerak thought Ernst even-handed and cordial toward residents and staff alike and caring toward the Japanese Americans who worked for him, Hoffman and Bell considered him cold and standoffish. The residents who did not have personal contact with the man seemed to have been simply indifferent to him.^[49] Ernst's successor, Luther T. Hoffman, was a

career bureaucrat who had worked in the Bureau of Indian Affairs before the war. He had been the assistant chief of the WRA relocation division in Washington before coming to Topaz.^[50] Oscar Hoffman recalled him as an administrator who had "pets" among the staff and gave great power to those few he liked. Eleanor Sekerak typified him as a bureaucrat who saw Topaz as just another Indian reservation to be pacified. The residents were indifferent to him as well, especially since his tenure coincided with their final year in camp, when they were overwhelmed with concerns about their future in the outside world.^[51]

The other administrators received mixed approval ratings. James F. Hughes, the first assistant director, opposed Ernst's decree that some whites should commute from Delta until the housing shortage abated, implying that he placed the needs of Caucasians first. Lorne Bell (no relation to Roscoe) was from Los Angeles and had worked for the YMCA before coming to Topaz. He supervised welfare, camp self-government, religious activities, education, the library, and recreation. He impressed the residents with his competence and piety; one of the JERS recorders noted that Bell, like the Roscoe Bells and the Sekeraks, attended Protestant services with the Japanese Americans. Lorne Bell returned to YMCA work after a few years at Topaz. Eleanor Sekerak recalled that Ernst, Roscoe Bell, and Lorne Bell made a "great team." Another whose kindness prompted fond memories from some of the evacuees forty years later was George LaFabreque, a former resident of Sacramento who directed welfare. He was described as "full of energy; he [had] a fair and unselfish attitude with a tolerant understanding of his job."^[52] Claud Pratt also worked closely with the families of Topaz and was sympathetic to them.^[53]

Several of the initial appointees could not tolerate the circumstances at Topaz and soon left; the draft took others. Another Berkeleyan, Arthur Eaton, was a University of California graduate and had known many of the evacuees in college. He headed housing, a sensitive position and already a problem area when the first residents arrived. The JERS reporter noted he was "likeable, but a little young for his job." His arrival a week late "accounted for all the trouble at housing," the observer added. The draft ended

Eaton's brief tenure. The chief steward, Brandon Watson, also started off badly. He did not take suggestions well, and in the first few days a strike occurred in food service "because people did not like him."^[54] He also did not last long.

Oscar Hoffman occupied an ambiguous position. His job description required him to report to Washington on the nature of the Nikkei and their reactions to internment, and this necessitated his getting to know them as individuals. He prepared detailed reports that he sent weekly to Dillon Myer's office, as well as special studies on topics of concern to the camp administration. Although his academic background qualified him to be an objective and dispassionate observer, his religious training sensitized him to the tribulations of the people around him. Fumi Hayashi remembered him as one who always watched them, as indeed he did. However, Michiko Okamoto, who briefly worked for him, felt he was a considerate and well-meaning man, and she never forgot how he urged her to relocate and leave the camp, an action that helped her to break a cycle of depression. As he recalled at the age of ninety-two, "I was convinced beyond any doubt that evacuation and internment were uncalled for. There was no military necessity. I have never thought there was." He held a difficult and controversial position and tried only to do his best, and his reports on camp life are a valuable and perceptive source for the scholar, whatever their original purpose.^[55]

As the months passed the relationship between administrators and evacuees became established. The Caucasians made friends or kept their distance, as they saw fit. The Japanese Americans for their part rated each new administrator according to his or her degree of "Jap-hating" or friendliness. The ideal was a Caucasian who was empathic, humanistically inclined, aware of but not identified with any particular clique, yet attuned to the differences between the governors and the governed.

The handbook Welcome to Topaz , prepared by the early evacuees for incoming residents, informed them that the residents were

mainly urbanites from the cities of the Bay Area, San Francisco and Oakland, and the small communities of the East Bay and the peninsula as far south as Menlo Park. Only 248 were farmers; the rest were professionals, semiprofessionals, managerial and office workers, nursery workers, fishermen, and forestry and unskilled workers.^[56] This community of city dwellers from the lush Bay Area was now to attempt to create a farming community in the desert.

The parameters of the town of Topaz were already being defined, and Oscar Hoffman attempted to describe them. He noted that the Japanese Americans were incarcerated in Topaz, but it was a unique form of captivity and they were anything but typical prisoners. The Nikkei were not people who would submit passively to the whims of a white administration, even if they had accepted relocation itself with minimal objections. They were well educated, mostly successful businesspeople who had done well by asserting themselves. They would "bitterly resent what they called being 'pushed around,'" Hoffman told Myer, and he noted with unconscious irony that the Topaz Nikkei would demand "more of relocation than [would] most other elements of the population." (Since he only worked at the one camp, he really was not in a position to compare its residents with those of other camps.) The Nikkei had identified and obtained rights at Tanforan that they did not intend to lose. They would not work at tasks that were "subject to the will and whims of an employer," for they were used to being independent entrepreneurs. No matter how much such people wanted to start again outside camp, wartime conditions (not to mention discrimination) posed so many obstacles that they "often despaired of resettlement." Such "proud and confident" individuals would insist on more competent administrators than would Japanese Americans "less experienced in the ways of urban America" or not as well educated. They would, consequently, demand a good school system, for they valued education highly.^[57]

One can deduce from Hoffman's notes that the community of Topaz differed from the other nine relocation centers in some specific ways. Dave Tatsuno commented, "They said that we were put into camp for our own protection, but the machine guns and

army rifles were turned not out, but inward."^[58] This description was true of all the camps; nevertheless, the great majority of Topaz's inhabitants did not at the outset resist their incarceration but resolved to make the best of it. The Reverend Joe Tsukamoto told a group that they could either accept internment as part of the experiences of wartime, or they could turn Topaz into an Indian reservation and just sit around. There was never any question of their choosing the second option.^[59] But neither would they respond passively to arbitrary actions on the part of the administration.

The Topaz manner of resistance was rarely violent, as its history was to show, but it did include opposition to what was perceived as unwarranted authority. The community forged by the Japanese Americans at Topaz was a peculiar blend of self-government and individual initiative coupled with submission to a Caucasian authority that was, if ultimately absolute, rarely dictatorial or coercive. The morale was never high and it declined with time, but most never gave in to total apathy. The rulers ruled with the cooperation of the ruled except in one matter—the insistence of the administration that they should leave camp for the outside world. Topaz became such a secure environment that it was, for many, home.

Japanese Americans had lived in Utah long before the establishment of Topaz, a small minority in a predominantly Caucasian and Mormon society. The first Japanese were temporary residents, prostitutes brought in during the early 1880s to serve Chinese and Caucasian railroad workers. Men came later in the decade to work on railroad gangs. One of the first permanent arrivals was Y. Hashimoto, a labor agent sent to recruit railroad workers; he brought along his nephew, Edward Daigoro Hashimoto. The younger Hashimoto founded a company to supply section gang workers for the railroads, and he also provided them with Japanese food and helped them with their other needs. By 1904 the Salt Lakers were calling him the city's Mikado.^[60]

Most Japanese who lived outside Salt Lake City worked either in farming or as railroad section hands and laborers. By 1909 the

Report of the Bureau of Immigration, Labor, and Statistics determined that there were 1,025 Japanese farm workers in Utah, mostly laborers who had turned to that occupation in preference to railroad work; the majority of the Japanese immigrants still remained in railroading. Hashimoto, in addition to his activities as a railroad labor agent, owned several farms where he employed other Issei to raise sugar beets. Issei farmers produced celery and strawberries as well.^[61]

Utah's Nikkei were urban as well as rural; a Nihonmachi was established in Salt Lake City in the late 1880s, with shops, boarding houses, and restaurants. The community had its own newspapers, the Rocky Mountain Times (founded in 1907) and the Utah Nippo (founded in 1914). The Issei and their children lived in a close-knit Japantown with their own places of worship, groceries, Japanese-language schools, and a tofu factory. There were 2,936 Japanese American residents in 1920.^[62] However, the community lost 1,059 people during the interwar years; many returned to Japan, while others went back to California.^[63] Utah offered limited agricultural opportunities, and its small Nikkei community had fewer employment possibilities than the larger Japanese settlements in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Seattle could provide.

The Salt Lake Nikkei did not mingle with the surrounding Caucasian community except for business dealings, and they apparently met with far less harassment than other immigrant groups did. Hashimoto, by 1920 an established businessman with many interests, was well known. Another Issei leader, Henry Y. Kasai, worked to abolish discrimination in Salt Lake's restaurants and swimming pools. Although most Nikkei residents were Buddhist, a Japanese Church of Christ was established in 1918, and some Japanese Americans converted to the relatively tolerant Mormon faith, like the man who became the community's most well-known product, Mike Masaru Masaoka. Masaoka's work with the JACL helped bring other members of the Salt Lake Nisei community into the fledgling organization.^[64] (After World War II there were two branches in Salt Lake City, one Mormon, one not.)

Delta, the future site of Topaz, also had some limited experience with Japanese Americans before the war. Daigoro Hashimoto

briefly owned a sugar beet farm there. The Imai family resided in Delta at the time of the evacuation; daughter Masi and her siblings attended the local schools while their father worked for the railroad (they were, of course, not interned).^[65] Other small towns where Japanese Americans lived included Price, where many worked as coal miners, and Ogden.

The outbreak of World War II brought fear to Utah's small Japanese American community as it did the West Coast; they did not know what to expect of their Caucasian neighbors. Dr. Edward I. Hashimoto, son of the Issei businessman Daigoro, told the students of his anatomy class at the University of Utah on the day after Pearl Harbor not to stare at him; wearing a tam o'shanter, he joked that "I'm Irish. I was home in Dublin at the time!" The popular professor encountered no problems.^[66] But few had as much courage as he did, and most kept a low profile. The Caucasian population's reaction was mixed; there were incidents of kindness on a personal level as well as discrimination in the economy at large. Railroads and mines were classified war industries, and Japanese American laborers lost their jobs. Henry Kasai was termed a "dangerous" community leader and interned with other prominent Issei, first in Montana and then in New Mexico; he left his wife Alice and six children to fend for themselves, a task made even more difficult by the freezing of their funds in a Japanese-owned bank.^[67]

Fred Wada's Keetley colony was a unique success story. In addition, many families, like Nobu Miyoshi's, made the trek individually. Both the Miyoshis and the Wada group found the Mormon people courteous and friendly once the initial barriers had been broken. The state government began to relax its hostility toward the voluntary migrants as they gained a reputation as good workers.

Governor Maw initially hesitated to let Japanese Americans move to Utah. In January 1942, when the "Japanese problem" was being widely debated in the nation, he convened a meeting of county representatives to discuss the matter of voluntary evacuees. He found that all but two of the officials opposed Japanese settlement; they passed resolutions expressing the fear that white-owned land might be confiscated by the federal government for

labor camps and the worry that the Japanese Americans might commit sabotage. The American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and other groups passed similar resolutions. Lacking any direct contact with the Nikkei, the white community feared that Utah would become a dumping ground for people the West Coast feared and disliked. Positive experiences gradually changed their minds.

Most citizens of Delta were too far removed from the problem to share the Salt Lakers' strong sentiments, but some found the establishment of a camp at Topaz suspicious or even frightening. LaVell Johnson, historian of Millard County, commented that "we were afraid of the Japanese in the camp. I don't know why. It seems strange now that we were." She was speaking more than thirty years later, when the Topaz site had been nominated for the State Register of Historic Sites.^[68] Others were not afraid to profit from the government's decision. Homer U. Petersen had been working with George S. Ingraham's agricultural interests in the Delta area since 1939. The two operated or sold 110-15 farms taken over from farmers who failed during the Depression. Petersen told Jane Beckwith, a Delta high school teacher whose father and grandfather ran the local paper, that the WRA had investigated sites in the Delta area in January or February 1942, looking for locations for possible relocation camps, but had rejected the area for fear the water supply was inadequate. The Millard County Chronicle reported the search in its May 28 issue, noting that the WRA had investigated the potential location and mapped it without even informing the owners. Petersen and his father, who held seven to eight thousand shares of water in the area,^[69] went to San Francisco to convince the WRA that they could deliver the amount necessary to plant a town. The Petersens had purchased most of the water around Abraham, Utah, for $7.50 a share, but the appraiser set the price at $20.00 a share and after much negotiation the government accepted that figure. The WRA ultimately acquired 20,000 shares of water; three deep wells were dug, producing water that was considered drinkable, and reservoir water was available to irrigate crops.^[70]

The land around Abraham consisted of some 1,400 acres that were in the public domain and federally owned, 8,840 acres of

county property, and 9,760 acres that were in private hands. Some had reverted to the county during the 1930s for nonpayment of taxes; several privately owned parcels had been acquired by a New York syndicate during the Depression for failure to pay interest on loans. The Central Utah site was selected in late June 1942. On June 25 the residents of Delta learned that a "Japanese Center of 10,000 people" was to be built on 19,000 acres in nearby Abraham. The government paid a dollar an acre for the land that it condemned for the camp.^[71] Some of the owners were pleased with what was a relatively good price for land that might, in good years, grow alfalfa or sugar beets, but one owner, Sherman Tolbert, complained that he had been "forced" to sell recently acquired farmland at a price so low that it was virtually being "confiscated" by the federal government. Tolbert remained embittered by the experience and believed ever after that the federal government "coddled" the people they incarcerated on his land.^[72]

Most residents of Delta were advised that even during construction the camp would be patrolled by jeep "to keep check on the people therein" and subsequently the army would provide armed guards for the internees, who would have little contact with the local people. All precautions would be taken so that no one could escape, although the Japanese would have maximum freedom inside the camp. Many jobs would be provided for Millard County residents during the construction of the camp, and the WRA would also rent necessary equipment locally. The WRA expected it would need 1,200 men to work twelve hours a day, six days a week, to complete the six hundred buildings deemed necessary. Although the cost was expected to be about $3 million, the money would not simply be wasted on the Japanese, because the government planned to use the camp after the war as a rehabilitation facility for returned soldiers and as a showplace to demonstrate the latest in agricultural methods. Topaz was expected to be ready for occupancy in sixty days. It was to be self-sustaining, with an economy based on agriculture and whatever industry could be done by hand. Since workers had been allowed out of some relocation camps and assembly centers to relieve the shortage of agricultural labor, the Delta residents were advised that this labor

might be available in Utah as well. In any case, the WCCA added, "The community has nothing to fear from the camp."^[73] Construction began in early July.

Although most Japanese Americans from the San Francisco Bay Area were moved first to Tanforan and then to Topaz, the army did not relocate all its charges so smoothly or simply. Some Bay Area Nikkei, like Charles Kikuchi, were sent elsewhere: Kikuchi went from Tanforan to Gila River, Arizona, a move he requested because of his work recording events for JERS. Others, such as the Kitano and Yamanaka families, went to Santa Anita. The Tanforan and the Santa Anita groups did not merge well at the outset, testimony to the strong sense of community identity each group developed during the six-month assembly center period. When the Santa Anitans arrived at Topaz, they too received unfinished housing. Their belongings were soaked in the rain while completed barracks designated as the high school lay vacant. This situation did not sit well with the Santa Anitans, some of whom "took crowbars and sticks and went after Art Eaton, the head of housing, for not providing them with finished rooms and necessities."^[74] Violence was averted, and a mass meeting was quickly convened to discuss the problem. Its tone gradually changed from anger to community spirit when the Reverend Taro Goto, the leader of the Japanese Methodist Mission Conference in America before the evacuation, rose to lead the group in song.^[75] Then the camp administrators were introduced and entertainment followed. The protest rally had by chance coincided with another meeting already scheduled to welcome the new arrivals.^[76]

Yet despite this appearance of unity, the two groups tended to remain separate communities. But they were closer to each other than they were to the group of a thousand Hawaiian Japanese that arrived at Topaz the next year, complete with ukuleles. The Hawaiians spoke their own pidgin dialect and appeared very "Japanesy" to the Americanized Nisei. Roscoe Bell recalled that the largely Kibei group had been interned at Sand Island, near Hono-

lulu, as "Japan sympathizers" before being moved to the mainland. (Only a very small portion of Hawaii's Japanese were interned.) Bell said, "They were viewed with suspicion by the others and were considered potential troublemakers."^[77] The treatment of the Hawaiian Japanese at Sand Island gave ample reason for those people to be depressed and angered; imprisonment there had been intended to break their spirits, and only the most resistant were shipped to mainland internment camps. Their treatment at Sand Island was far worse than the Nikkei had experienced at Tanforan, and their reaction to life in Topaz differed markedly as well.^[78]

The evacuees who were moved from Tule Lake to Topaz during the segregation crisis there fit in better than the Hawaiians: they were Nikkei who had decided to stay in the United States, and their attitudes were much more "American" than those of the islanders. The Hawaiians remained apart, and most of them eventually went to Tule Lake and from there to Japan after the war.

The divisions between Issei and Nisei created a larger schism than the minor tensions between populations from differing assembly centers or Hawaii; the generation gap affected everything from food preference, language, and custom to attitudes about the war. These points of contention added to the difficulties of camp life, with its lack of privacy, social amenities, and relative poverty, and produced a community that was "a goldfish bowl with lots of stress and tension." Roscoe Bell recalled that many residents were admitted to the hospital with hypertension each time changes in policy occurred.^[79] A small number actually broke down under the stress of camp life. Faith Terasawa, who worked as an interpreter with the social worker in the hospital, remembered that "quite a few people went haywire." She and the social worker made home calls, and Faith recalled that occasionally they had to send people to the state mental hospital.

The administrators who arrived to direct the new community had high hopes for Topaz. They ordered 10,000 seedlings, 7,500 small trees, and 75 large ones, thinking that the foliage would eliminate

the dust clouds. Delta merchants also donated trees to the project. The dust eliminated the trees instead of the other way around, and almost none of them survived.^[80] They planned a skating rink for the winter, as well as a hardball diamond, softball grounds, and a football field, and they discussed landscaping for a miniature park.^[81] Many of the Caucasians viewed the camp as an experiment in applied democracy, a project that would teach the Nikkei about democracy by creating it around them. In October 1942 a high school and two elementary schools opened, signs of the ideal community they hoped Topaz would become. Yet at the same time placards were posted warning residents that they would be arrested if they crawled through or under the fence that surrounded the camp, and no one could ignore the presence of the armed guards, soldiers whose hatred of the "Japs" was all too evident. This was a barbed-wire democracy, a community under guard.^[82]

Compounding the fundamental ambiguity in the nature and function of the Topaz concentration camp was its purpose as the WRA defined it. The agency did not intend Topaz or the other relocation centers to be permanent prisons, and indeed many of the officials concerned with what they called the "Japanese question" saw the evacuation as an opportunity for a diaspora, a dissolution of the ghettos that would scatter the Japanese American population around the country.

The first resettling began even before the evacuees arrived in Topaz. The need for college students to continue their education produced the first opportunities for some Nisei to shorten their time of confinement. Leaders of the YMCA and YWCA and a few California educators, including University of California president Robert G. Sproul, did not want college students' education to be disrupted by the evacuation. Sproul contacted Representative John Tolan about the problem, and ultimately President Roosevelt allowed Nisei to move to willing institutions away from the West Coast. On May 29, 1942, the National Japanese Student Relocation Council was formed in Chicago by Clarence Pickett of the American Friends Service Committee and college and university educators from around the country.^[83] Relatively few students at Tanforan benefited from this program, since not many could meet

the educational requirements, acquire a sponsor, raise the funds for tuition and residence, and locate a college in a friendly community. About seventy-five students did resettle in the spring of 1942, under the auspices of the council and its West Coast predecessor, the Student Relocation Council.^[84]

More were able to leave from Topaz. The first brave souls left Delta on October 7, 1942., headed for the University of Nebraska, Union College in New York City, Huron College in South Dakota, and the University of Utah (the president of Utah State University, Elmer G. Peterson, refused them admittance).^[85] By June 1943 the council had sufficient contributions to provide financial aid to students with "reasonably good grades but no money." More than four hundred colleges and universities had been cleared by the army and navy to take eligible Nisei.^[86]

During the first week of October 1942, another group returned to the outside world. These young men and women were recruited for the sugar beet fields of Utah to help alleviate the war-induced labor shortage, and the Utah farmers welcomed their hands. Since few were actually from farms, the primitive conditions of rural Utah—no mattresses to sleep on and no showers—shocked them.^[87] Their exodus as seasonal labor was as important as the students', for both groups exemplified the goals of the WRA's resettlement policy: to move the Nikkei population away from the West Coast. The War Relocation Authority determined almost from the outset that resettlement, or relocation as the WRA termed it (the designation was confusing since the original movement from the coast to the camps was also termed relocation), would be its goal, but its method of implementation was devised slowly over several months. In July 1942. WRA director Dillon Myer announced that incarcerating the evacuees for the war's duration was neither "necessary, desirable, or wise,"^[88] and many Caucasians who needed workers agreed. Some Utahns would have preferred the Japanese American workers to be bound to them by some form of indenture for the war's duration, but they were willing to take them on any terms they could get. The WRA's first director, Milton Eisenhower, was apprised of the need for farm labor; when he resigned June 18, 1942, after only three months on the job, it was passed on to Myer.

On September 26 Myer announced regulations for the screening of people who wanted seasonal or permanent leave from the camps.^[89]

The regulations provided for loyalty investigations, hearings that "supposedly could not have taken place on the West Coast [before the evacuation] because of lack of time and because those rounded up all looked alike."^[90] In fact, loyalty checks conducted on the West Coast would have left most Nikkei there, something those responsible for the relocation wanted to prevent. Myer's plan accomplished two ends. It provided a relatively quick way out of camp for evacuees who wanted freedom whatever the risk. Nisei could move to virtually any location except their former homes. Ultimately more than three thousand people left Topaz under this program.^[91] It allowed the white population to utilize Nikkei labor, usually at very low wages, to take up the slack created by the draft, and it kept the Japanese Americans away from the West Coast until the final months of the war.

As the resettlement began, Bay Area Japanese Americans followed two paths, one that moved toward freedom outside and another that remained inside as long as possible—which for some meant until Topaz closed. Since this history is primarily concerned with the people who remained incarcerated, the story of those who departed can be told relatively briefly.

Myer wanted to resettle loyal Nikkei to other parts of the United States, permanently removing them from the Pacific coast. Despite some initial confusion over leave clearance regulations, which were complicated and slow to process, eligible Nisei who wanted to could soon depart on seasonal leaves. As a replacement for farm labor drained off by the mobilization and the lure of higher-paying war industries, Nisei labor quickly became essential to the war effort. Initially, the predominantly urban Topazeans were reluctant to take such jobs, but their desire to escape confinement and earn more money changed their minds. (Wages paid inside the internment camps ranged from $16 to $21 a month, depending on the level of skill required, plus camp lodging and

board. The low wages were to ensure that the Japanese Americans did not earn more than an army private.) People wishing to resettle had to fill out forms to establish their loyalty, which was then checked by the FBI, a process that took about a month. The first to depart were adult Nisei, since Issei were originally ineligible. Most Issei did not want to leave the safety of the camps anyway, but gradually the policy changed and some ventured forth. Many Nisei also feared a hostile reception outside and adopted a "wait and see" attitude toward the program.^[92]

Resettlement was a two-way street. Many employers were eager to meet their labor needs with the industrious internees and actively sought them out. Prospective employers were supposed to pay prevailing wages, maintain adequate living quarters at no expense to the evacuee, provide transportation from the center to the job site and back, and assure that employment of the Nikkei would not cause the displacement of local labor. State and local officials had to show that law and order would be maintained. All these stipulations were honored to a greater or lesser degree, but enforcement provisions were sorely lacking. The seasonal workers were valued; it has been estimated that they harvested enough beets to make nearly 300 million pounds of sugar.^[93] The more sugar, the more money for the growers and the more food for the army and the civilian population. The Topaz literary magazine, Trek , noted in June 1943 that three out of four internees going on seasonal leave were citizens; among those leaving "indefinitely," the percentage was slightly larger. The majority were young men between twenty-one and twenty-seven years of age, educated in the United States.^[94]

During the remaining months of 1942, a steadily increasing number of Japanese Americans left Topaz for northern and southern Utah, other nearby states, or even Delta. As early as September 22, 1942, Topaz's construction agent hired a Nisei as his payroll clerk. Soon others were being hired by the same construction firm, by Delta farmers, businessmen, and by individuals who needed domestic help. Frank Beckwith, the publisher of the Millard County Chronicle , hired Harry Yasuda to operate an intertype machine. (Beckwith explained to his readers that it would be "decidedly unpatriotic to hire a man from defense work when there is plenty

of stiltable help at the relocation center to fill our needs.")^[95] Yasuda was paid a wage by Beckwith but then had to pay rent at the camp.^[96] Considerable animosity was aroused by the wage differential between those privately employed but living in camp and those working for the WRA. One JERS recorder commented that he and his brothers were "classic examples." Two of his brothers were employed in Delta for $20.00 a day, and he earned $1.25 an hour working for a private construction firm in camp; they all resided in Topaz. The contrast between this income and that of an older Nikkei physician at Topaz was striking: this young laborer earned $300.00 in a month. The recorder was not troubled by the resentment this difference caused, as he planned to leave for college in Massachusetts soon.^[97] On September 24 the U.S. Employment Service established itself in camp to coordinate hiring, and representatives of three sugar beet companies and several turkey-processing plants came in to recruit. Seasonal labor peaked in October and declined as the weather grew bad in December. The local farmers were pleased and expressed regrets only that more workers had not volunteered.^[98]

The first seasonal laborers were people who had the courage to face the unknown, to take jobs for which they had no training or experience. They were generally young, with few dependents. Their reception in the towns and rural areas of the Intermountain West varied greatly. People who went to Provo, where a farm labor tent camp was set up to house four hundred laborers, found a populace generally hostile to Japanese Americans. Some Nisei reported that the local Woolworth and Penney stores would not sell to them, and others complained about segregation in the movie theater and the refusal of local restaurants to serve them. Small groups were mistreated and verbally abused on the streets, others were stoned while riding to and from work, and worst of all, the camp itself was fired on. Five youths were later arrested for terrorism, and the subsequent investigation determined that two buildings had been hit by fifteen to eighteen rounds of rifle fire. The residents hugged the floors and the camp manager, H. W. Bartlett, testified that the shots were aimed directly at them. The Japanese Americans refused to work the next day, a Sunday (October 3, 1943), but returned on

Monday. The Salt Lake Tribune admonished its readers to put aside their prejudices because the farm labor the Nikkei provided was necessary to the war effort. A group of local citizens adopted a resolution condemning the violence and pledging future law enforcement and "tolerant participation in the democratic spirit."^[99]

The Nisei surveyed by JERS representative George Sugihara blamed most of the violence against them on "hoodlums and drunks," and most rated their treatment while on seasonal leave as "fair." Some who remembered the experience, like Harry Kitano, a teenager at the time, were not so generous in their appraisal; to him the experience was very frightening.^[100] Sugihara found that seasonal workers considered Delta "fair" and Salt Lake "fair to good." He noted that large groups of Japanese together tended to make a "poor impression" and commented that their "moral standards have proven very low," a judgment that probably reflected more on his own values than on those of the group he surveyed. Most Nisei who went out blamed the hostility of the locals and cautioned others against resettling in Provo. An additional factor was the presence of large numbers of defense workers at the Geneva Steel Mill in nearby Orem, whose work made them exceptionally hostile to Japan. They "made it impossible to mingle with the local people."^[101]

By the end of 1942 the first Nikkei had begun to depart on permanent or indefinite resettlement. Like the seasonal workers, they had to satisfy the complex bureaucratic procedures of the WRA, which included an FBI security check and the approval of the camp director, who had to be satisfied that the area they intended to resettle in offered good work prospects and favorable community sentiment. Once they were out of the camps, the Japanese Americans were supposed to check back with WRA field offices located around the country to assure that all was going well, although few actually did.^[102] They took jobs in the Midwest, where Chicago, with its history of diverse ethnic groups, was the favored destination. Nikkei were well-treated there because local residents felt that

at least they were not African Americans. The Intermountain West was also popular. Salt Lake City was the most attractive nearby destination until it was closed to Japanese Americans because the local population claimed it had "too many." The East Coast also attracted a venturesome few. Many communities in the East and Midwest were eager to have them because of labor shortages; in areas where few Asian Americans lived, racial prejudice was minimal. Many Nikkei found permanent homes and employment there and never returned to the West Coast. Lee Suyemoto's family, for example, settled in Cincinnati, located jobs and schools, and encountered little prejudice; they had no desire to return to Berkeley. For most, however, San Francisco and the Bay Area were still home, and they owned property or possessions there that they hoped to reclaim when the war ended.

The pace of permanent resettlement increased by mid-1943 but declined in 1944, and it never achieved the popularity the WRA desired. Seasonal work leaves were a far easier alternative for those seeking extra money. People for whom resettlement was easy departed early, and those who remained had many reasons to keep them in camp, as succeeding chapters make clear. By early 1944 most people were no longer interested in resettling, partly because of the poor conditions Nikkei lived in outside. Some reported back they were put in "poor shacks [to] do the dirtiest jobs." As one man who refused to leave camp commented, "Here, there is little freedom; but we are not stared at. We do not get what we want here, but we live anyway and do not feel lonely."^[103] Many Issei believed that since the government had deprived them of home and livelihood, it was now the government's responsibility to care for them. There was a certain logic to their thoughts.