After Camp - Greg Robinson

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      Miné Okubo is another artist who will some day be well-known as the others. She was given a traveling scholarship for her fine work and spent time in Europe studying art. She returned to the University of California to learn that she had been offered another year of study in Italy, but could not return to that country because of the beginning of the war.11

      Meanwhile, the positive response to Okubo's drawing led the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle (a liberal newspaper whose editor, Chester Rowell, had opposed evacuation) to commission further illustrations from the artist. Okubo obliged by sending a set of camp sketches. These, along with Okubo's brief commentary, were published in This World at the end of August 1943 as “An Evacuee's Hopes and Memories.” In a prefatory note, the editors of the magazine explained that Okubo's “debut as a writer was accidental—her explanatory notes with her sketches were so much more THIS WORLD simply incorporated them into an article.” At the same time, the magazine undertook “to document her objectivity” by interpolating with Okubo's text a number of quotations from a speech that Dillon S. Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, had made earlier at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club.

      As a result of Myer's comments being interpolated with Okubo's observations, her article bore the appearance of an officially sponsored publication. Of course, even without the symbolic imprimatur of the WRA, Okubo's readers would have understood that she was speaking from confinement and was thus subject to official censorship. Although Okubo doubtless felt limited in what she could say, her text does not reveal particular reticence or sugarcoating:

      The train trip from Tanforan to Topaz was a nightmare. It was the first train trip for many of us and we were excited, but many were sad to leave California and the Bay region. To most of the people, to this day, the world is only as large as from San Francisco to Tanforan to Topaz. Buses were waiting for us at Delta to take us to Topaz. Seventeen miles of alfalfa farms and greasewood were what we saw. Some people cried on seeing the utter desolation of the camp. Fine alkaline dust hovered over it like San Francisco fog.12

      The appearance of Okubo's sketches in This World occurred at an essential turning point in the history of incarceration. During summer 1943 the WRA completed its program segregation of confined Japanese Americans into groups it adjudged “loyal” and “disloyal.” With segregation completed—at a high cost to thousands of inmates who were further arbitrarily displaced, and with the “no-no boys” confined in a high-security center at Tule Lake, California—the issue of winding down all the other camps became paramount. On September 14, 1943, just sixteen days after Okubo's article was published, the White House presented Congress with a report on Japanese Americans. In his transmittal letter, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated that with the successful completion of segregation, the WRA could now redouble its efforts to resettle outside the camps those Japanese Americans “whose loyalty to this country has remained unshaken throughout the hardships of the evacuation.” In particular, Roosevelt promised that the Japanese Americans could return to the West Coast “as soon as the military situation will make such restoration feasible.”13

      This presidential pledge helped mobilize the WRA, which had been badly buffeted by hostile press campaigns and congressional investigations, to refocus its attention on a task it had already undertaken on a small scale: planning resettlement. It also capped the gradual transformation the agency's mission had undergone during 1943 from constructing and managing camps in which to confine the excluded Japanese to the opening of regional resettlement offices and scouting out of areas for resettlement so that they could leave camp. This new mission did not consist simply of finding sponsors who would provide Nisei with jobs or education, or of helping migrants find housing.14 Rather, it amounted to implementing an overall quasi-official policy of dispersion of ethnic Japanese throughout the United States, and facilitating their absorption into the larger population.

      The WRA, the War Department, the White House (notably First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt), and liberal and “fair play” groups—along with many Japanese Americans—broadly agreed that, by retarding assimilation and/ or restricting economic opportunity, the prewar ghettoization of Japanese Americans in “Little Tokyos” had helped inspire the hostility that led to evacuation. Therefore, despite their continuing conflicts over the justice of removal and the morality of the government's operation of the camps, these disparate groups joined forces to facilitate the scattering of the Japanese American population across the rest of the country. This, they believed, would be the best solution to the “Japanese problem” as it had existed on the West Coast, and would ensure that the tragedy of removal would never recur. WRA director Dillon Myer expressed a widely held view when he claimed in 1946 that, on the whole, the Nisei were actually better off in the long run for their confinement experience and diaspora, since they could now establish themselves on an equal basis with other Americans.15 As harsh and punitive as the destruction of ethnic Japanese communities may sound to present-day ears, these Americans—including many Japanese Americans, and not just the JACL—looked upon the relocation process as a providential opportunity for the Nisei to enter the larger society and ensure that the tragedy of removal would never recur.16

      Government officials realized early that the key to opening the doors of the camps and ensuring the success of mass dispersal and resettlement lay in remaking the public image of the Nisei so as to reduce white suspicion and hostility toward Japanese Americans—a phenomenon for which the removal itself was largely responsible. Thus, although public relations figured only distantly, if at all, in the WRA's charter and initial mandate, the agency gradually shifted its program as the war proceeded. WRA staffers teamed up with colleagues from the Office of War Information (OWI) to produce an enormous pile of propaganda for public consumption, focusing jointly on the achievements of the WRA and on the loyalty and American character of the inmates.17 WRA efforts included informational pamphlets, documentary films, and speaking tours by WRA director Myer, former U.S. ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew, and Ben Kuroki, a Nisei war hero. The WRA and OWI also exerted pressure on publishers and film producers to promote responsible media images of Japanese Americans and avoid hostile depictions.18

      Liberal groups outside the government, especially those opposed to incarceration, gladly collaborated with the government's media campaign. Some of them may well have privately deplored the WRA's heavy-handed management of the Nisei's public image and suppression of internal dissent—certainly many supporters of Japanese Americans with experience of the camps considered the official picture excessively rosy—but they obviously felt that it was in the interest of all to downplay their differences in light of the enormous public opposition to Japanese Americans.

      It is not clear whether government censors ever vetted Miné Okubo's drawings or text before the piece was placed in This World. It is reasonable to assume as much, though, given the wartime restrictions on inmates and the interpolation of Dillon Myer's words into the text. Such review was in any case common practice. When Eleanor Roosevelt drafted an article in support of the Nisei for Collier's magazine, “A Challenge to American Sportsmanship,” she first submitted her draft text to Myer for comment.

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