Infamy by Richard Reeves Page B

Bainbridge Island.… The Japanese departed their homes cheerfully, knowing full well, most of them, that the measures were designed to help preserve the precious, kindly camaraderie among divergent races which is one of this country’s great contributions to humanity.”
    Thirteen of the marchers that day were seniors at Bainbridge High School, who had not been allowed to attend their senior ball the night before because of the 8:00 p.m. curfew for all American Japanese. Many of the white residents of the island lined the ferry road, some of them crying and calling out to friends in the march. Some of the spectators were holding the dogs and cats of the evacuees, who were not allowed to carry pets. Many of the dogs had stopped eating when they were taken from their owners and died within a week or two.
    The islanders traveled for more than two days in old railroad cars with curtains drawn to Manzanar, a barren, wind-whipped ghost town 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the eastern foothills of the Sierras, on the road between tiny places called Independence and Lone Pine. It was the first camp to open and would be the first camp under the stewardship of the new federal agency the War Relocation Authority.
    There was no music and no crowd of white residents waving and crying when the families of Bainbridge arrived at Manzanar. There were construction workers, some of them Japanese volunteers, banging together 504 tar-paper barracks, each barrack divided into six units of sixteen by twenty feet. The camp was surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guard towers with machine guns pointed in toward thirty-six blocks of barracks.
    One of the evacuees, Paul Ohtaki, had been a correspondent for the Bainbridge Island Review , which had strongly opposed the evacuation, and he filed an upbeat report of that thousand-mile trip from Seattle.
CAMP MANZANAR, Calif. Wednesday, April 1—Bainbridge Island’s evacuated Japanese residents, well and cheerful, arrived here at 12:30 o’clock this afternoon.
The last stage of the trip—which began in Seattle Monday morning—was accomplished by a fleet of busses that met the train at Mojave early this morning. Islanders were greeted by warm sunshine. They found the Owen Valley region to be level land, with high mountains nearby.
Everyone enjoyed the trip, but missed their Island friends. On the train there was group singing, card playing, and “chatting” with the soldiers who accompanied the evacuees. Islanders were treated “swell” by the Army.… From private to commanding officer, they extended help and kindness to the Japanese. Some soldiers wept as they guarded the move.
    Life magazine took the same tone in six pages of coverage published on April 6. The popular magazine emphasized the beauty of Mount Whitney towering over the horizon fifteen miles away, reporting that other “volunteer” evacuees drove the 240 miles from Los Angeles to Manzanar in a four-mile-long motorcade of their own cars with army jeeps between each ten vehicles. One unnamed evacuee was quoted saying, “We’re coming here without bitterness or rancor, wanting to show our loyalty in deeds and words.” Then the magazine did add, “Yet Manzanar, for all its hopes and assets, was no idyllic country club. Manzanar was a concentration camp, designed eventually to detain at least 10,000 potential enemies of the United States.”
    Most first impressions of Manzanar were a great deal more negative than Ohtaki’s. Jeanne Wakatsuki said after her first night in Block 16, “We woke early, shivering and coated with dust that had blown up through the knotholes in the floor and through the slits under the door.”
    Another early arrival, named Yuri Tateishi, had more personal troubles. As she and her children were leaving for Manzanar from the Santa Anita Assembly Center, her one-year-old broke out in measles—epidemics were common in the centers—and was taken from her and kept in a Los Angeles hospital for three