Infamy by Richard Reeves

racetracks, fairgrounds, livestock auction grounds, and one abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp.
    Inside the “War Zones,” villages, towns, and city neighborhoods were turned into subzones, where, each few days after March 24, all Japanese and those with some Japanese ancestry were ordered to bus stops and train stations. Surrounded by armed soldiers, the evacuees were loaded onto buses, trucks, and trains and taken to the assembly centers. They were unloaded at California centers in or near Fresno, Independence, Marysville, Merced, Pinedale, Pomona, Sacramento, Salinas, the Santa Anita racetrack in Los Angeles, Stockton, Tanforan racetrack near San Francisco, Tulare, and Turlock. Arizona residents were taken to Mayer. Oregonians were taken to the Pacific International Stock Exposition grounds in Portland. Washingtonians were divided between Puyallup and Manzanar, California, the only site to serve as both an assembly center and, later, a relocation camp.
    That said, the army or the WCCA—aided by the polite compliance of Japanese families—did a remarkably efficient job of the logistics of moving more than one hundred thousand people to the assembly centers and then on to far and barren relocation sites in six months. Among those who praised the logistics of the moves to the camps was Carey McWilliams, a liberal, even radical, author and California’s commissioner of Housing and Immigration.
    The “assembling” of Japanese and Japanese Americans continued through the spring and summer. The evacuation of downtown Los Angeles, where thirty thousand people of Japanese ancestry once lived, was completed on May 8. The Los Angeles Times reported on the closing of the last Japanese restaurant in the center of the city under the headline, “Japs Enjoy Their Last Meals in Café Before Internment—Beginning at 8 a.m. Today 2,200 Alien Residents of Colony Will Depart for Santa Anita Center.”
    The article began, “Today is the beginning of the end for the little Nipponese settlement just east of City Hall.… With their departure, Little Tokyo will become a ghost community.” The stores became ghost stores, closed and dusty, often with signs in the windows, like the one at an empty grocery in Little Tokyo, which said, MANY THANKS FOR YOUR PATRONAGE. HOPE TO SERVE YOU IN THE NEAR FUTURE. GOD BE WITH YOU UNTIL WE MEET AGAIN. MR. AND MRS. KISERI .
    In San Francisco, American Japanese found notes with very different messages slipped under their doors, like this one to the Tamaki family: “This is a warning. Get out. We don’t want you in our beautiful country. Go where your ancestors came from. Once a Jap, always one. Get out.”
    On that same day, in Seattle, Yoshi and Theresa Takayoshi, who had been given a surprise going-away party by Caucasian neighbors, sold their popular ice cream shop. For weeks, they had bought a classified advertisement in local newspapers: “Ice creamery, library lunches, residential spot, sacrifice, evacuee.” The shop had machines and inventory insured for $18,000. Dozens of people answered the ad, offering $100 or $200 for the whole thing. The Takayoshis finally settled with a Caucasian buyer for $1,000. They sold their 1940 Oldsmobile for $25.
    Theresa, whose father was Japanese and her mother Irish-American, was from New York. She had two sons and they did not find much more kindness after arriving at the Puyallup Assembly Center. The younger one, Thomas, was diagnosed with mumps when his throat began swelling. For six weeks, the growth swelled, turning red. Finally, Theresa’s cousin, a registered nurse, came around and then persuaded a physician to come to their stall and he quickly found that the boy had a swollen lymph gland. Then when her older son began vomiting—it was ptomaine poisoning, common in the camps—the same doctor ordered him taken to a hospital in Tacoma. An army car, with a security guard, took mother and son there. Nurses met her with a wheelchair for the boy,