Resettlement

While the War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp administrators had in-depth and often sympathetic knowledge of the losses suffered by the Nikkei as well as the difficulties they would encounter in resettlement, such knowledge was profoundly at odds with the organization’s primary mandate for clearing out the camps. The plight of the Nikkei was identified, therefore, not as displacement and poverty produced by forced removal and incarceration, but as a problematic rise in dependency and the erosion of self-sufficiency. To combat this culture of dependency, the WRA created the Family Counseling Program, a “massive persuasion program” in which social work departments at each camp were tasked to interview and counsel the reluctant. Various financial aid programs were created to incentivize resettlement, but they were as problematic and inadequate as all other social work program the WRA had devised and run in the camps.