The Politics of the Mess Hall in the Japanese American Incarceration
Heidi Kathleen Kim
Politics and Mess Halls
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 autobiog- raphy 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 Christ- mas without Daddy. Somehow, Christmas 1945 has completely vanished from my memory.
It seems quite reasonable for a young child not to remember one quiet Christ- mas, 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 sto- len 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
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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 govern- mental 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 univer- sal 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.