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 nec- essarily 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, prob- lematized by rationing; initially, there were no provisions made for discretion- ary 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
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 dis- couraged their walking back and forth with meals and empty plates. The disor- ganized assembly camps had even worse problems of long lines, overcrowding,
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 dura- tion.” 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.
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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, occa- sionally 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, sleep- ing, dressing, work and study” as well as “easy clean-up for Mother.” This atti- tude of making the best of the incarceration imposes American home design standards onto an imagined average family of four, either a “young Nisei cou- ple 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 sug- gestion that this, too, can be easily carried on in camp and imply an imagi- nary 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 cafete- ria 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
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camps dubbed “assembly centers,” allowed limited experiments with “fam- ily-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 abro- gated 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 Ameri- cans of Japanese descent who were interned in the United States.17 Conversely, incarcerees cited anger over separated families in the camps as a primary rea- son that many refused to take the loyalty oaths. WRA staff members had to distinguish among “the No of protest against discrimination, the No of pro- test 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 suc- cessfully “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