Appendix 3: A Photographic Sampler

Although the camps were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards in guard towers, they functioned more like closed towns than like prisons. No doubt the residents felt themselves to be imprisoned, as they were. But we should not in consequence of this fact formulate in our minds images of American penal institutions as our idea of what the camps looked like and how they functioned. Perhaps the best analogy would be to something like house-arrest, although even here, the parallel is frightfully inexact. In a sense, the camps were like little towns which ran very much like ordinary little towns, internally, but which were surrounded in this surreal circumstance by a barbed-wire fence and armed guards.

Within the camps, some semblance of ordinary life still obtained. Families were kept together; children in the camps attended school; wholesome food (although not always to cultural tastes), clothing, and primitive shelter were provided; internees were permitted to worship freely, and to form civic organizations--even to the extent of Boy Scout troops, marching bands, glee clubs and community playhouses. While confined to the camps in general, some internees were actually permitted to freely come and go (with passes) to take employment in nearby communities. Some were permitted to take temporary leave for weeks or months at a time. Student-age internees were even placed on leave to attend college in distant cities. Internees were actually encouraged to leave the camps as soon as possible if they could resettle somewhere outside the restricted zones on the west coast. Within the camps, the internees ran much of the day-to-day operation of the facilities.

So it was, in many respects, a highly unusual, even unique, form of imprisonment.

Much is made by historians of the relatively primitive conditions of the accommodations in the camps--tar-paper barracks, bare light bulbs, common toilets, etc. The accommodations were indeed poor, as can be seen in the photographs; and many of the displaced Japanese came from relatively prosperous circumstances in their life prior to the camps. For these individuals in particular, the camps were indeed a dramatic decline in living standards (beyond the matter of loss of freedom). However, we should keep in mind here the era in which the internments occurred and the prevailing standards in American society at large. One would not have to travel far outside America's major cities in 1942--or delve too deeply into the inner core of many of those cities--to find ordinary Americans living in circumstances very similar to those seen in the internment camps. The equivalent of tar-paper shacks--often without any running water and often without even bare light bulbs--were the common living conditions in much of poor and rural America in the 1940s. So while we look at the photographs in this Sampler and see how primitive conditions appear, we should not look at them with 2004 eyes, so to speak. We need to appreciate the prevailing standards of the early 1940s to appreciate how far conditions in the camps really differed from those standards. Indeed, in some respects we would have to admit that conditions in the camps surpassed those in some impoverished areas of the U. S. in the 1940s. The internees almost certainly had better health care, better nutrition, more cultural opportunities (in terms of community playhouses and the like), and better educational opportunities, than the residents of Appalachia, or than African Americans in much of the South, or than recent immigrants in the ethnic enclaves of such cities as New York and Chicago. None of which is to say that there was anything admirable in the circumstances of the internments. It is only to observe that we do not benefit in our historical understanding of these events if we construct a mental image of the circumstances of the internments which is more anguished than perceptive.

The main source of photos of the Japanese internments is the War Relocation Authority, which produced a massive photographic record of the operations of the relocations and internments. The WRA invited renowned photographers such as Dorthea Lange and Ansel Adams into the Centers to create a photographic archive of their operations. This collection is housed in the National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland. Many of the images from the WRA collection are available online via the National Archives website. ⁽²⁾ Ansel Adams photographed a single Relocation Center, the Manzanar Relocation Center in California, in 1943. Adams' photographs are also available online, from the Library of Congress' American Memory website. ⁽³⁾

One of the ironies of the documentation of the wartime internments is that because the caretakers of the Enemy Alien Internment Program were more secretive than the WRA, there is no equivalent photographic record of the European internments. Most of the few photos known to exist were taken by inmates, guards or other private parties. This has no doubt contributed to the relative lack of awareness of the European experience.

In all instances, the captions I present for the photographs have been drawn from the captions prepared by their original creators. So the WRA photographs are captioned based on the captions by the WRA photographers, and the Ansel Adams captions are based on those originally provided by Adams, as preserved and reproduced by the Library of Congress. In some instances, I use the WRA and Library of Congress captions in full, as indicated.

The photographic sampler presented here cannot aspire to be a complete or even representative sample of the conditions experienced in the relocations and internments. Most of the photos were, in the first instance, posed and produced by the War Relocation Authority. In the second place, I have selected a handful of photos from the thousands in the WRA archive. I have chosen photos based on two traits: their intrinsic interest as images, and the fact that they exhibit some aspect of the routine, almost ordinary, aspect of day-to-day life in the camps.

Even though this photographic selection cannot be presumed to be representative of the complete experience of the relocations and internments, a couple of salient points seem fairly clear. The first is the groaning absurdity at the heart of the entire enterprise of the internments, which is the generalized assumption that these individuals were somehow potential threats to the national security. Looking at the faces and demeanor of the children and families swept-up in this dragnet, we cannot see this assumption of collective guilt as anything other than ludicrous. We find ourselves wondering--looking at the photographs of these ordinary people going about the ordinary business of life--how the people responsible for the internment policies could not simply see how ridiculously absurd the whole idea was. But the photos also reveal the equal absurdity in the use of overwrought terms like "concentration camps" when describing this episode of America's history. It is to distort reality in the opposite direction to suggest that what happened to the internees can be accurately described by using terms from the European Holocaust, or even from the imprisonment of criminals. In a limited way, the photographs help us construct in our minds a more accurate set of images, providing some dim reflection of the reality of this episode in America's past.

1. For a detailed look at how the camps functioned there is no better source than one of the final reports of the WRA staff. In 1946 the WRA published a sort of behind-the-scenes review of their experience of operating the camps. It was not a self-serving account and it is candid and insightful in many ways. The full report was republished in 1969 as: Impounded People: Japanese-Americans in the Relocation Centers, Edward Spicer, et. al. (eds.), Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1969.

2. Go to the NARA website's Archival Research Catalog at: http://www.archives.gov/research_room/arc/ Enter "War Relocation Authority" as the search term, and select "Photographs and Other Graphic Materials" as the Type of Archival Materials.

3. Available at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aamhtml/aamhome.html