Conclusion

Social work equivocated. Social work organizations did not support mass removal, landing mostly on the stance that individual adjudication of loyalty rather than wholesale removal was the preferable course. But neither, on the whole, did they oppose wholesale removal, abdicating their right to and responsibility for contesting the wisdom of the government at war. Neither the disciplinary publications nor the archival records of workers in the field provide an unmitigated critique of the events. Even the YWCA, the best of social work in these events, followed the same racist schema that enabled the removal and incarceration. The history presented here is all the more disturbing because it is that of social workers doing what seemed to them to be more or less right and good.

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.

The Removal

In the so-called controlled phase of the removal of the Nikkei, social workers on loan to the Bureau of Public Assistance were responsible for the provision of “all necessary social welfare services for the individuals affected by the Exclusion Order” and on hand at all of the 123 Control Stations. Social workers interviewed, registered, and counseled all Nikkei; made recommendations for exemptions and deferments; organized family separations as well as unions and reunions; and tagged and eventually shipped all of them off to temporary detention camps, usually referred to as Assembly Centers. The case number assigned to each family by a social worker during this registration process was the one with which all individuals and accompanying luggage were tagged for removal and used to identify them throughout their incarceration.

Discursive Elusions

The “vexed problem of immigration,” as Jane Addams termed it in 1909, was a central issue for the emerging social work profession in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Work with immigrants, some of the poorest subsections of the growing urban population, shaped the nature and the direction of social work in the crucial early years of the profession. Social work’s attention, however, did not extend to Asian immigrants nor to the fact that all Asian immigrants had long been adjudged as a population racially unsuitable for full participation in U.S. society. The profession’s lack of contact with and interest in this population—excluded in immigration and blocked from naturalization—is an important context in understanding its response to the removal and incarceration of the Nikkei during World War II.

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.

Social Work in the Camps

That the “abnormal communities” of the concentration camps put great strains on family life was a conclusion universally agreed upon by all who had first-hand knowledge of the situation and had cause to comment. The “unendurable housing situation” was “a constant source of irritation and friction within these households,” said to be a factor in a host of issues, including juvenile delinquency and marital disputes. The Nikkei were trapped in a setting which not only exacerbated existing issues and propagated new ones that would probably never have arisen under normal living conditions, but they were also stripped them of any control over the care of their most vulnerable members. Social work departments, simultaneously, held a great deal of power over the lives of men and women who found themselves in these difficult circumstances and had few resources with which to effect solutions.

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.

The Start of War

Prior to the War, few social workers in the coastal states, including state and county welfare workers soon to be confronted with the massive task of facilitating the forced removal of an entire population, had any significant contact with the Nikkei. As West Coast social work began preparing for the fallout from Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of War on Japan, therefore, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and its offshoot organization, the International Institutes, were the only social work organizations with both knowledge of the community and contacts within it. This chapter, focused on the so-called voluntary period between mid-February 1942 and March 29, 1943, outlines the beginnings of social work’s equivocal role as both the protector of the Nikkei and the instrument of their delivery into incarceration.