Since sugar and meat were both in short supply, and since it was rumored that infants had died from saccharin mixed into formulas as a sugar substitute, these charges were widely believed. He had been trying to organize a Kitchen Workers' Union and had recently charged the camp's chief steward, a Caucasian, with stealing sugar and meat from the warehouses to sell on the black market. This was a young cook well known for his defiance and contempt for the authorities. Tayama couldn't identify anyone precisely, but the next day three men were arrested and one of these was sent out of the camp to the country jail at Independence, ten miles away. On the night of December 5, Fred Tayama, a leader in the Japanese American Citizens League and a 'Friend' of the administration, was badly beaten by six men and taken to the camp hospital for treatment. One group tried to burn down the general store. Some meetings turned into shouting sessions. They rang for higher wages, they rang for better food, they rang for open revolt, for patriotism, for common sense, and for a wholesale return to Japan. In the months before the riot the bells rang often at our mess hall, sending out the calls for public meetings. Some have called this an anniversary demonstration organized by militantly pro-Japan forces in the camp. It happened exactly a year after the Pearl Harbor attack. Looking back, what they now call the December Riot seems to have been inevitable. Some struck back.ĭuring that first summer and fall of sandy congestion and wind-blown boredom, the bitterness accumulated, the rage festered in hundreds of tarpapered cubicles like ours.

Some coped with it better than he, some worse. This kind of emasculation was suffered, in one form or another, by all the men interned at Manzanar. He had no rights, no home, no control over his own life. It brought him face to face with his own vulnerability, his own powerlessness. For a man raised in Japan, there was no greater disgrace. Not because of the physical hardships: he had been through worse times on fishing trips down the coast of Mexico.

Few men who spent time there will talk about it more than that. Papa never said more than three or four sentences about his nine months at Fort Lincoln. The following is an excerpt from the book Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Jeanne, the youngest of 10 children, was interned with her family in Manzanar, a bleak, barren camp of tar paper shacks in California's Owen Valley desert. Several months later, his family learned he was imprisoned in a federal prison in Fort Lincoln, N.D. Author Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston was 7 years old when her father, a fisherman in Ocean Park, Calif., was taken away without explanation by the FBI immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

In the book farewell to manzanar