Yellow Peril versus All-American Families
It is difficult to summarize all the ways that the incarceration fragmented the Japanese American nuclear family structure. Some families were sent to dif- ferent camps and had a lengthy wait before reuniting, as when the husband/ father of the family was imprisoned first or an ill or pregnant family member was kept in a hospital temporarily while the rest of the family was incarcerated. Many nisei volunteered or were drafted for military service when the ban on Japanese Americans was lifted; 30,000 Japanese Americans from Hawai‘i and the camps eventually served, and the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimen- tal Combat Team, which served in Europe, still remains the most highly dec- orated unit of its size in U.S. history. Volunteer work and contract farmwork, also depicted as patriotic by the WRA and the press, occasionally employed families or couples but tended to take men away from their families. The “resettlement” project sent many young college or work-aged nisei to the Mid- west and East, away from family and friends. Finally, the disagreement among family members about what to do about repatriation and the infamous loyalty oaths led to deep fissures.20
At the same time that camp administrators worried about the destruction of family structure by the mess halls, they also encouraged enlistment, farm- work, and resettlement, which often separated families as well. In a curious reversal of the conception of the nuclear family as keeping danger contained, these family-splitting endeavors were portrayed as useful and patriotic. Mili- tary service took older nisei away from wives and children and younger nisei away from dependent elderly parents. Farmwork was needed in order to make the camps self-sustaining, since early (spurious) criticism of the Japa- nese Americans being fed and kept idle at taxpayers’ expense made the WRA doubly determined to promote the agricultural division. Calls for workers and volunteers appealed to a sense of duty. “America’s call for food to feed her people and her Allies becomes louder and louder. . . . By [working], you will not only be helping the people in this community, but your fellow evacuees in other centers where vegetables are not being produced,” proclaimed the news- paper at the Gila River camp, where the farms’ abundance sometimes outran the manpower, though not the administrators’ ambitions.21 Outside farmwork was also seen as patriotic, but the separation of family was not prominently featured in calls for it. The Hirabayashi family illustrates this dispersal, son
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by son: Gordon, plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case Hirabayashi v. United States testing the legality of the military orders that applied only to Jap- anese Americans, was in jail; Ed went to work on a farm, then in a restaurant, then to a college in North Carolina; the parents were escorted to Seattle for Gordon’s trial; and in their absence, Jim left for Idaho to do farmwork. Obvi- ously, the Hirabayashi family had a somewhat exceptional source of separation in Gordon’s imprisonment and trial. But the other children were widely scat- tered by the government’s purposeful encouragement of farmwork and reset- tlement, something that would have been hard to imagine before the war.
Other internal demands, such as the mess hall itself, demanded the separa- tion of families. As May Sasaki recalled,
My mother took on the waitressing at the mess hall because they wanted a lot of help there, and they asked the camp internees to take those roles. She even- tually became a head waitress, which meant she spent more hours away from home. . . . But we never could eat with family because my dad became a block manager, which then took him away to other responsibilities. So both my par- ents were no longer always around as they had been, and now my brothers and I were kind of left to our own devices.
Sasaki cites her family’s long-standing ethic of service and patriotism, which impelled her parents to perform these thankless, ill-paid jobs even at the cost of leaving their children alone for long hours.
This fracturing was dangerous because it denied Japanese Americans one of the main available ways of demonstrating proper assimilation: the idyllic nuclear family structure. In Caroline Chung Simpson’s reading of gendered narratives in and after World War II, she uses as an example Carl Mydans’s feature article and photos in Life magazine, “the first feature article on Japa- nese American internment to appear in a major publication,” at the late date of March 20, 1944. Simpson traces Mydans’s confused rhetoric of male trouble- makers and aliens versus a “muted liberal critique” of the infringement of civil rights. The former wins in Mydans’s slightly menacing lead photograph of a line of unnamed Japanese American men at Tule Lake, reminiscent of the yel- low peril. The second part of his article switches away from these potentially treacherous figures to the other camps, which he portrays as unabashedly wholesome. One photo shows an “idyllic scene of a middle-class American family,” the nine-person Manji family cheerfully reading and playing in their cramped quarters. As a corrective to the Tule Lake rebels, Mydans “implies that . . . the wholehearted pursuit of middle-class domestic ideals impossible to
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achieve in the camps” will help them escape the rigid past maintained by the patriarchal structure of Japanese society.22 As Simpson notes, the family image was—as evidenced in later memoirs—a key method of stabilization for Japa- nese American identity during and after the war.
Countering past images of yellow peril and perversely large families tak- ing over farms, the nuclear family was portrayed as a thoroughly American, wholesome image. The official WRA definition of a family unit was “father, mother, and unmarried children living with the family.” Widows and wid- owers with children, for example, were considered separate even if they were living with other relatives.23 Mydans’s Manji family portrait, which, the cap- tion notes, is missing two sons who are in the military, presents the Japanese American family at its most Americanized and palatable, looking like any middle-class family (albeit in a smaller space). Such photos also reassured the public that the government was being compassionate, allowing American cit- izens to live acceptable American lifestyles. Japanese Americans thus had to demonstrate both their own Americanness and the government’s upholding of that Americanness, a precarious position indeed for people forcibly segregated and incarcerated.
Wartime films and other visual media showed frightening images of masses of Japanese that bled into depictions of Japanese Americans; Frank Capra’s film Prelude to War showed a Japanese army marching through Washington, DC, and Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, drew a cartoon showing a fifth column of Japanese stretching all the way up the West Coast states. The fear of not being able to distinguish loyal from disloyal, given as an excuse for the incarceration, further created the image of identity-less, indistinguish- able Japanese masses. Written publications evoked these images as well, both during and after the war. General John L. DeWitt’s final report, “Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast,” described a “tightly-knit racial group,” held together by “ties of race, the intense feeling of filial piety and the strong bonds of common tradition, culture and customs.” Perhaps DeWitt’s most telling descriptor is “homogeneous,” a word employed to condemn the entire popula- tion. Mydans’s Life article exemplifies this attitude, with the Tule Lake “rebels” given no names but left as an anonymous column.24
The mess hall thus was also a troubling site within the camps, where the incarcerees blended into an unidentifiable mass. Under its pernicious influ- ence, the incarcerees ran the risk of familial fragmentation, which in turn risked the creation of delinquency and violence. The high volume of negative coverage of the 1943 Tule Lake riots described “an unruly mob of Japanese” nearly committing arson and murder, even though, as the WRA acknowledged,
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it had lost control of its press relations at this time and could not persuasively counteract these stories. “The events which took place were not anywhere near as violent or dangerous as they were commonly represented in the press,” Myer of the WRA insisted, but it was too late to remove the impression that had been left. Afterward, the WRA was doubly aware that such behavior had to be carefully controlled.25 With the cooperation of Japanese Americans in positions of influence (such as the Japanese American Citizens League [JACL] or the camp newspaper staff), the WRA saw the maintenance of a strong fam- ily structure as an effective antidote to the threat of large, discontented groups.
Fears expressed about young male resettlers reveal that the WRA believed that releasing a horde of Japanese Americans back into society without the containing family unit could be a destabilizing force. Historian Ellen Wu’s in-depth study of the “resettlement” project shows that these young men, often zoot-suiters associated with violence in camps and resettled commu- nities, greatly angered and troubled administrators.26 The rise of juvenile delinquency was a particular fear in the camps. Reflecting fears of yellow hordes and mirroring depictions of the mostly male “pressure boys” at Tule Lake, male violence was a source of not only inconvenience and unrest but also unfavorable publicity. Thus, its transformation into favorable press by sympathizers writing about inevitable familial disintegration was crucial. As one father observed in an article in the New York Herald Tribune that stressed the rise of juvenile delinquency at the Rohwer camp, “I no longer provide the bread for their table and the roof over their heads. So, they say, ‘why should I respect what you say and obey your word?’”27 His feeling of inadequacy stems from his abrogation of financial responsibility, with food and the family table at the metaphorical center. Having lost control of his livelihood and physi- cal home, his two sons, aged seventeen and nineteen, had passed completely beyond his control. Sociologists pointed out that the mother’s authority had also been undercut. “Mass feeding in the mess halls eliminated the role of wife and mother in the preparation of food for the family and lessened the con- trols of the parents exercised at the time of the family meal.”28 Focus was thus shifted away from a violent mass identified with Japan and onto the wayward children of helpless parents.
Modern oral histories of incarcerees reflect these accounts of behavioral change, especially in male teenagers, but tend to downplay the “delinquency” and tragedy, concentrating more on survivorship. Jim Hirabayashi spoke of his meals as a pivotal experience. “I no longer ate with my parents; I ate with my peers. And so I spent most of my time outside of the family circle. And did a lot of things that I didn’t normally do and wouldn’t have done had the family
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stayed together.” This resembles the start to many accounts of delinquency, but Hirabayashi does not specify what these “things” are, and his account implies that they were not grave. Bo Sakaguchi, also a teenager at the time, was even more vague about any problems.
Families were all separated now because you went to the mess hall with your friends, your school friends. So, but because we were already teenagers, it wasn’t so bad. I felt sorry for the younger kids who had, who also did the same thing, so they weren’t having their meals with their parents. But for us, we were adult— well, we were young, seventeen, sixteen, seventeen, it didn’t matter that much.
His nonchalance is decidedly different from the dramatization of familial sep- aration, and the interviewer follows it up, asking, “Did this separation of fam- ilies relative to meals and things, was that upsetting to the parents in fami- lies?” Sakaguchi did hesitate at that, saying, “I, I don’t know. I don’t know,” but maintained that it was harder for those with small children who, despite their ages, were still eating apart. He then repeated a more standard depiction of the familial problems, saying, “I’m sure it didn’t help the family unit per se over the long term, though I don’t believe they caused problems while we were in camp themselves, maybe postwar.”29
Incarceree May Sasaki actually got into an extended discussion with her oral history interviewer about the extent of her brother’s bad behavior:
My oldest brother loved this freedom, and he felt that now he could do what he wanted with his cohorts, and they became kind of like a gang in camp. They were not bad boys, but they certainly liked to do things that were not always things that their parents wanted them to do.
The interviewer asked for clarification, saying, “By ‘gang,’ nowadays we under- stand ‘gang’ to mean something where maybe young men are causing mis- chief and maybe criminal acts.” Even though he was describing a modern understanding, this was likewise the picture in the 1940s of the unruly young men in camps, particularly Tule Lake. Sasaki hastened to dismiss the idea of criminality:
Oh no, this wasn’t anything of that. I guess you’d just call them boys sticking together, then, maybe. But in their minds they were this gang. And there were often many little gangs that sprung up, and they would have their own meetings and their own kinds of things, rituals that they would go through. . . . And yes,
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he wasn’t as obedient. I remember him talking back to my dad which he never did before.
These “little gangs” that Sasaki characterizes as bad boys doing silly things together were, in the wake of the Tule Lake riots, portrayed as violent, disaf- fected youth. Sasaki then proceeds to take this story about her brother’s teen- age rebellion into a perceptive analysis of the issei-nisei generational conflict as a central problem of incarceration itself, whereas complaints of juvenile delinquency at the time shifted blame to the mess halls and other evil influ- ences of communal life.30