Social Work in the Camps

Welfare programs took months to develop in the War Relocation Authority camps. When aid finally reach the impoverished, it proved not only inadequate, but delivered through a Kafkaesque system designed to uphold the “radically abnormal” economic structure of the camps. Many conflicting factors were at play. Public assistance was a new phenomenon for the Nikkei; the deep reluctance to accept aid was slow to ebb and never entirely jettisoned. The concentration camps were, however, costly places to live; while subsistence food, shelter, and basic medical care were provided, private funds were necessary to purchase all else required for daily living. While the Nikkei Welfare Section workers believed public assistance was necessary reparation rather than unearned charity, a deeply held censure of aid—lest it breed dependency, fund the undeserving, coddle the enemy—existed on the part of the Caucasian administrators. Even the begrudgingly doled and unequivocally insufficient aid was difficult to obtain.

Resettlement

Mere months after the opening of the camps, the War Relocation Authority instituted a scheme for the “permanent relocation” of the Nikkei outside the camps. Henceforth, all social work in the camps became oriented toward this end goal. Resettlement, actively supported by the YWCA and a host of social welfare organizations, was a project that provoked profound dread and anger in much of the incarcerated Nikkei. Social work agencies involved were cautioned to work quietly and inconspicuously to avoid public attention which would inevitably incite opposition from local populations. Resettlement was an assimilationist project, explicitly designed for the “decentralization” of the Nikkei to aid in their Americanization. Such goals of integration and assimilation were promoted in the camps through group work program designed to “counter Japanizing influences” of the Issei and “extend the Americanism” of the Nisei.

The Emotional Crisis of Registration

Among the sea of institutionally created troubles that befell Nikkei families in incarceration, arguably the most catastrophic was the family conflict and separation generated by the “loyalty questionnaire,” an administrative debacle which churned violently through the ten camps, splitting apart families and communities for generations to come. Like so many programs of the War Relocation Authority, registration was hastily conceived, inadequately planned, and poorly executed. The fear that they would be forced out of the camps empty-handed into resettlement in unknown and likely hostile locales was a primary reason for many choosing segregation, a choice that should be understood not so much as the Nikkei’s rejection of the United States as the Nikkei’s appraisal of their rejection by the United States. Social workers were involved in all aspects of the registration and the subsequent segregation program, responsible for interviewing all those who opted for segregation and organizing their transfer.

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.

Incarceration

Hastily built on existing sites such as race tracks and fair grounds, the temporary Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) detention camps in which the Nikkei were first incarcerated were unfit for human habitation. Given the economic devastation wreaked by the removal, the need for financial and other types of aid soon became obvious, but no system of aid had been established at the centers. The more permanent War Relocation Authority camps to which the Nikkei were then transferred were no better in facilities or services. Social work departments in camps were ill-planned, underfunded, poorly staffed, and inconsistently administered. Recruiting trained social workers to staff the remote and inclement camps was a constant problem. The complicated and conflicted role of the Nikkei workers who comprised the bulk of the social work staff should be understood in the context of the generally fraught dynamic that existed between the Nikkei inmates and the Caucasian staff.

Entangled Histories of Assimilation: Dillon S. Myer and the Relocation of Japanese Americans and Native Americans (1942–1953)

Dillon S. Myer (1891–1982) has been framed as the lone villain in incarcerating and dispersing the Japanese Americans during WWII (as director of the War Relocation Authority) and terminating and relocating Native American tribes in the 1950s (as Commissioner of Indian Affairs). This view is almost solely based on the 1987 biography Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism by Richard Drinnon. Little more has been written about Myer and his views, and a comprehensive comparison of the programs is yet to be published. This article compares the aims of the assimilation and relocation policies, especially through Myer’s public speeches. They paint a picture of a bureaucrat who was committed to his job, who held strongly onto the ideals of Americanization and assimilation, and who saw “mainstream” white American culture as something for all to strive after, but who was hardly an utter racist.

Nature Behind Barbed Wire

The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in US history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in ten desolate camps in the nation’s interior. Although scholars and commentators acknowledge the harsh environmental conditions of these camps, they have turned their attention to the social, political, or legal dimensions of this story. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the natural world and explores how it shaped the experiences of Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA’s power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, they also learned that their willingness (or lack thereof) to transform and adapt to the natural world could help them endure and even contest their incarceration. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world.