Jim and Jap Crow by Briones Matthew M

Author:Briones, Matthew M. [Briones Matthew M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400842216
Publisher: Princeton University Press

“A Process of Education”

When the Kikuchis left the Tanforan horse stalls behind at the beginning of September 1942, they were also leaving behind a more cosmopolitan group of evacuees, all of whom had lived in the Bay Area. The Gila River Relocation Center, on the other hand, housed a cross-section of diverse groups of Japanese descent from the West Coast: rural and urban, older Issei bachelors and Nisei families, Kibei, some Hawai‘ian Nisei, worldly Angelenos, Berkeley academics, and San Joaquin Valley farmers, among many others. The center was located on land belonging to the Gila River Indian Community, comprising the Pima and Maricopa tribes. The reservation never authorized the building of a prison camp on its sacred land, but the federal government never asked for permission: Milton Eisenhower, the head of the WRA, did not want to relinquish control of the center to the Office of Indian Affairs, because of the camp’s potential for profitable agricultural production. Hence, the Office of Indian Affairs simply gave the WRA a five-year lease on 16,500 acres of land (as a quid pro quo, many of the camp’s administrators were Indian Affairs employees). The center opened on July 20, 1942, and closed on November 10, 1945. Two different camps existed at the center, three and a half miles apart—Butte and Canal—housing 13,348 internees at their peak. Two camp factories completed projects for the military: one made camouflage nets and the other, model warships; the latter produced eight hundred models for the U.S. Navy. Although summer temperatures averaged an unforgiving one hundred degrees, two other features distinguished Gila from the other nine camps: internees tilled and cultivated seven thousand “profitable” acres of crops through a vast, labor-intensive agricultural program; and Butte touted the best baseball diamond in all the camps, designed by “the Father of Japanese American Baseball” and Fresno internee Kenichi Zenimura.

The Kikuchis ended up in Butte, the “more cosmopolitan” of the camps, according to Robert Spencer, who had already been in camp for JERS and helped the family move in. Sharing unit 65-9-B with a Nisei couple, the family took their time getting used to the cramped and dusty barrack in the desert. For his part, Kikuchi not only continued his diary keeping for Thomas’s study, but also took a position with the camp’s social welfare unit, a job that fit his graduate work and exposed him to the lives of all types of Japanese living in camp. As he describes it, Gila was much more a “process of education” than Tanforan had been.

Up until that time, the Nisei tο me was in a category that was more intellectual and academic. That started in the prewar situation and then also on the campus. Then making labels, “Nisei is this,” you know? And Ι think Ι continued some of that broad definition of categorizing Nisei, Japanese, country people . . . and it wasn’t until Ι got to Gila that Ι began to separate [out that] “this is an individual.”7

Instead of abstractions or theories

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