Keep the Children Safe: Resettlement as a Means to Avoid the Mess Hall
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 young- sters 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 influ- ences 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 administra- tion—this article did not probe the reason behind this “community exis- tence” 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
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Japanese American newspapers continued the theme of personal respon- sibility that decades later plagued memoirists. “Ann Nisei” advised parents to discipline their children through proper educational stimulation and struc- ture. “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 chil- dren, the tone of the entire column suggests acute anxiety about child devel- opment 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 chil- dren 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 fam- ily life gone wrong, describing one mother’s experience with her small daugh- ter 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 man- ners. 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 diffi- cult 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
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does not beg everyone else to set a good example for her daughter and other chil- dren, 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 Jap- anese Americans away from the still-proscribed military area. The WRA was strongly encouraging it, but it was not progressing at the speed the adminis- trators 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 mislead- ing.) 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 cre- ate 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, per- haps 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 Chris- tian groups supported resettlement, and the appeal to a wide Christian audi- ence 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.