Moab/Leupp Isolation Centers (detention facility)

In the wake of the so-called Manzanar Riot of December 5-6, 1942, at the Manzanar concentration camp in eastern California, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) established a "temporary" isolation center for "troublemakers" at a recently shuttered Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) facility in southeastern Utah at some remove from the miniscule Colorado River town of Moab. After functioning from January 11, 1943, to April 27, 1943, Moab's entire captive population (which peaked at 49) was transferred to a "permanent" isolation center located on a Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona's Painted Desert, near the town of Winslow, at the site of the former Indian boarding school of Leupp. Larger, more heavily fortified, and affording better facilities than its Moab precursor, the Leupp Isolation Center altogether imprisoned a total of 80 prisoners, though its population typically fluctuated between 50 and 60. Upon its official December 2, 1943, closure, the WRA transplanted Leupp's 52 residual inmates to northern California's Tule Lake Segregation Center . Although Leupp's administrative and operational conditions represented an improvement over those at Moab, both lockups permitted the WRA leadership at the national and camp levels to arbitrarily brand its impounded Japanese American citizens as incorrigible instigators of upheaval and, in the guise of law and order, quarantine them for an indefinite period in desolate high-security pens of perdition without tangible recourse to fairness or correction.

Background

In the waning months of 1942 inmates in the ten detention facilities administered by the WRA mounted spirited resistance against its policies, practices, and personnel. Most notable was a protracted strike in mid-to-late November at the Poston (Colorado River) concentration camp in southwestern Arizona and a bloody rebellion in early December at the Manzanar concentration camp in eastern California. In response, the WRA's national office felt impelled to devise a special kind of jail to incarcerate those American citizens of Japanese ancestry (i.e., Nisei and Kibei-Nisei ) deemed "troublemakers" by the ten WRA concentration camp directors. Having already gained the power to banish uncooperative Issei in their charge to one of a medley of Department of Justice (DOJ) internment camps, these directors now determined to clamp similar social control upon their citizen counterparts.

It was the Manzanar Revolt of December 5-6, 1942, that provided the impetus for the WRA's newest facility, the Moab Isolation Center. This "incident" was sparked on the evening of Saturday, December 5, with the beating of one Nisei inmate, Fred Tayama , by six other masked prisoners. The thrashing of Tayama, formerly a Los Angeles restaurateur, chair of the Southern District Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), and a purported FBI informer ( inu , or "dog"), hospitalized him and prompted Manzanar authorities to arrest three Kibei suspects. Two were released, but the third— Harry Ueno , the Hawai'i-born head of the Kitchen Workers Union, whom Tayama positively identified—was removed from the camp and jailed in nearby Independence, California. Many inmates, convinced of Ueno's innocence, charged that he was being victimized due to his recent allegation that select Manzanar officials were appropriating inmate supplies to sell outside the camp for profit.

On Sunday, December 6, a series of public meetings were held to achieve Ueno's return to Manzanar. The first meeting deliberated a center-wide strike of kitchens. The second meeting, after some fiery speeches, culminated in the selection of a Committee of Five to negotiate Ueno's reinstatement. Its principal spokesman was Joe Kurihara , a Hawai'i-born Nisei and World War I veteran who, while Ueno's friend, was not Union-affiliated. The Committee demanded Ueno's immediate return to Manzanar. Merritt initially refused this demand, but to avoid bloodshed informed the Committee that Ueno would be returned to the Manzanar jail if the Committee agreed to certain conditions. Merritt then notified the Committee that at six o'clock that evening he would make a statement pertaining to Ueno's return at his block's mess hall.

That afternoon Ueno was duly returned to the camp jail. But when the Committee appeared at a pre-arranged meeting to affirm this fact, it encountered a crush of 2,000-4,000 inmates. The crowd declared that Ueno should be unconditionally released, even if doing so necessitated his enforced jail removal. They also demanded that "informers" like Fred Tayama be killed. Now a mob, the inmates split into two main groups, one going to the camp hospital to finish the previous night's attack on Tayama, and the second to the jail to liberate Ueno. Unable to find Tayama, the first group splintered into sub-groups bent on ferreting out and killing two other reputed JACL "stooges," Tokutaro "Tokie" Slocum and Togo Tanaka . Merritt then authorized the military police to enter Manzanar and interpose a barricade between the crowd and the jail. When some of the amassed inmates hurled missiles at the MPs, their captain ordered them to tear gas the demonstrators. Then, for unknown reasons, several soldiers fired into the crowd, killing a teen-aged Nisei and wounding nine other Nikkei , one of whom died a few days later.

One consequence of this violent disruption was that those inmates whose names appeared on dissident-compiled black and death lists were removed first to the nearby MP encampment for "protective security" and later transferred to an abandoned Death Valley CCC camp until they could be resettled into free-zone America residential and employment slots. As for the 16 dissident "troublemakers" whom Manzanar authorities presumed chiefly responsible for the disruption, they were straightaway imprisoned within surrounding Owens Valley town jails. After languishing there for over a month without being charged with a crime or granted a hearing, these men were transported east by bus, train, and truck to a tightly guarded former CCC camp in Moab, Utah, that the WRA characterized as a temporary isolation center for noncompliant citizen Americans of Japanese ancestry.

US Gov Name Moab Isolation Center
Facility Type Citizen Isolation Center
Administrative Agency War Relocation Authority
Location Dalton Wells, Utah (38.5667 lat, -109.5333 lng)
Date Opened January 11, 1943
Date Closed April 27, 1943
Population Description Nisei and Kibei men designated "troublemakers" by War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp directors were imprisoned at Moab. (U.S. citizens could not be sent to the Department of Justice or U.S. Army internment camps.)
General Description Located at Dalton Wells, 13 miles north of Moab in southeastern Utah. Summer temperatures reach the high 90s. Vegetation included sagebrush, tumbleweed, cottonwood, and tamarisk trees. The drab and desolate area was used for stock grazing.
Peak Population 49
Exit Destination Leupp Citizen Isolation Center
National Park Service Info

Moab Isolation Center

Upon arriving at the federally-owned Moab site on January 11, 1943, the camp's original population of 16 prisoners―12 Nisei (of whom 10 were Kibei-Nisei) and 4 Issei (later removed to DOJ camps)―guarded by a military police detachment numbering 150, was confronted by the deserted CCC camp of Dalton Springs (1935-1941), which was "about as far from civilization as one could get at the time, perhaps the American equivalent of Siberia." [1] The new WRA isolation center was situated in Southeast Utah's Grand County off a narrow graded road connecting the sleepy county seat of Moab (population 1,200), 13 miles to the south, to the sparingly populated railhead community of Thompson, 22 miles to the north. The campsite, which occupied the western edge of a wide, sandy flood plain, was located within a mile-wide valley flanked on its east and west sides by barren hills and cliffs, with the majestic snow-capped La Sal Mountains prominently visible on the southern horizon.

Because the Dalton Wells CCC Camp, one of four such facilities in the Moab area, had closed only 15 months earlier, the WRA was able to make the camp serviceable for its penal purposes with only limited repairs to the built environment. It consisted of some 18 wooden structures, constructed, as with many CCC camps, typically army style: simple, gable-roofed edifices with board and batten walls, tarpaper or composition roofing, wood panel doors, and top or bottom hinged windows. These buildings were customarily 20 feet in width, with lengths varying between 30 to 100 feet to accommodate variable needs. Whereas the barracks were located at the camp's southern end and the headquarters buildings grouped at the northern edge of the main access road, the support, storage, and supply buildings were placed at the camp's eastern edge. According to local historians Bruce D. Louthan and Lloyd M. Pierson, "there are unconfirmed reports that at this time [1943], a fence was put up around the camp," although they add that, according to one inmate, "the desolate setting was enough to keep the prisoners in camp." [2]

As for the Moab site's magnitude and landscape, these perhaps were best captured by Joe Kurihara and Harry Ueno. These two inmates not only had been fast friends at Manzanar, but also—leastwise in the minds of that camp's appointed personnel and the JACL leadership—were primarily responsible for sowing the late "trouble" that had overwhelmed it. Moab, submitted Kurihara, was merely "the size of a single block at Manzanar," while Ueno bemoaned that "all around [the barracks there was] nothing but sagebrush, not even trees." [3]

When it came to Moab's director, Raymond R. Best —a southern Californian Republican educated in Los Angeles and a World War I Marine Corps veteran who was afterwards a Soil Conservation Service official [4] —the assessments by Kurihara and Ueno were sharply at odds. Whereas Kurihara reported in January 1943 to the "People of Manzanar" that "Mr. Best . . . is the best of all the Project Directors I have met," [5] Ueno later recalled that in March 1943 Best had sought to intimidate him and seven other disgruntled cohorts with this ominous threat: "You know this place is wide open country. Nothing but sagebrush. Anybody could die in here, and they will never find his body." [6]

While Best was Moab's director throughout its operation, he was frequently away from the site on business. In his absence, the camp's "top dog" became Francis Frederick. A former New York penitentiary guard, Frederick had come west in 1942 to work at the Alcatraz federal prison in San Francisco, but instead filled the associate chief of internal security opening at the WRA's Gila River concentration camp in south-central Arizona. After serving in this capacity for six months of service, during which he became an informant for the U.C. Berkeley-based Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study through Robert Spencer , its field anthropologist at Gila River, Frederick "had run afoul of his immediate superior, W. E. Williamson, and of the Gila River director, Leroy H. Bennett." As a result, Frederick was transferred to the Moab facility to be acting head of its small and scruffy internal security forces. [7]

Upon Frederick's arrival at Moab on February 18, 1943, he was accompanied by thirteen Gila River inmates. Then, on February 24, the Moab camp population was swelled by ten more prisoners from Manzanar. Two months later, on April 2, fifteen inmates from the Tule Lake concentration camp were added to the mix of Moab's population of "troublemakers." Virtually all these men were exiled to Moab because of alleged interference with the registration program that the WRA and the army undertook jointly in February 1943 to ascertain the "loyalty" of adult inmates and establish their eligibility for military serve and/or resettlement outside the detention centers. [8]

Although privately Frederick lamented to Spencer that WRA camp directors were using lame pretexts to dump "disturbers of the peace" into his remote Utah outpost, Frederick himself daily harassed those under his command, particularly an assertive cadre of the original Manzanarian cohort unit, [9] by a combination of bullying tactics and legalistic pettifoggery. In mid-April, for example, he cruelly maneuvered 21 prisoners into protesting a capricious regulation and then arrested the protesters for unlawful assembly. After presiding over their "trials," Frederick sentenced eight "violators" to three-month jail sentences and immediately thereafter rescinded the very law that they had transgressed. [10] Seven of these men, including Harry Ueno, were penned up in the Grand County Jail in the city of Moab, and remained there until April 27 when almost all of the Moab prison colony population was relocated by bus to the larger isolation camp at Leupp, Arizona. However, Frederick sadistically arranged to have Ueno and four other of the jailed dissidents in Moab transported to Leupp on the back of a flat-bed truck in a coffin-like box in which, wedged together in a five-by-six-foot space with only a small hole in back for air, they nearly suffocated during the thirteen-hour drive. [11]

US Gov Name Leupp Isolation Center
Facility Type Citizen Isolation Center
Administrative Agency War Relocation Authority
Location Leupp, Arizona (35.2833 lat, -110.9500 lng)
Date Opened April 27, 1943
Date Closed December 2, 1943
Population Description A separate detention facility set up by the War Relocation Authority to isolate "troublemakers" removed from its other camps.
General Description The Leupp camp, in the high desert of northeastern Arizona about 30 miles northwest of Winslow, was located at an abandoned Navajo Indian Reservation boarding school.
Peak Population
Exit Destination Tule Lake Segregation Center
National Park Service Info

Leupp Isolation Center

Located 18 miles from the town of Winslow on the Navajo Indian Reservation, the Leupp Isolation Center was situated on the flood plain of the Little Colorado River. On March 24, 1943, the U.S. Department of the Interior turned over control of the compound to the WRA, which subsequently repurposed its abandoned structures―two red sandstone buildings, a mess hall, and living quarters, plus a three-bedroom home―originally constructed in the 1920s as a school for 500 Indian children and their superintendent into a penal colony. Named in commemoration of Francis Leupp, President Theodore Roosevelt's commissioner of Indian affairs, the school had closed in early 1942. Initially intended by the WRA as a camp that could accommodate both "refractory" inmates from the ten WRA "relocation" camps and their families, this plan was scrapped in favor of a garrison strictly for the former population, who were duly penned up "behind the customary props―barbed wire, guard towers, and . . . 150 military police to watch over less than half that number of unarmed outcasts." [12]

For the first three months of Leupp's revamped operation it was headed up by Raymond Best, but upon his being transferred in late July 1943 by the WRA to direct the Tule Lake Segregation Center, he was supplanted as director by Paul Robertson. Raised a Methodist and schooled in architecture at Yale, it was as a California state agricultural official with wide and varied contacts among the Japanese American farm population that Robertson captured the attention of the WRA's San Francisco regional office, which in 1942 appointed him to a staff position. Then, with the WRA's increasing commitment to resettlement as against detention, Robertson was assigned to the national WRA office Washington D.C. "Within the limits of the circumstances at Leupp," writes Eileen Tamura, "Robertson was fair and humane, an official who worked for the best interests of the inmates." [13] Also, as one Kibei-Nisei Leupp inmate, Frank Ego, would later recollect, "[unlike Best] who thought everyone had to obey him automatically, Robertson listened to you." [14]

Although documentation covering the interval in which Best ran Leupp is limited, one notable development was that the isolation center gained more inmates from the WRA camps of Tule Lake and Topaz ―none of whom (in Best and Frederick's shared opinion) were actually charged with anything serious enough to justify their being incarcerated in a remote desert high-security prison ringed by a man-proof fence. On June 5, 1943, WRA Director Dillon S. Myer had superseded his original (and confidential) instructions of February 16 governing "the removal from relocation centers of aggravated and incorrigible troublemakers" with a more explicit edict calling for inmate hearings prior to transfer to Leupp. [15] However, even this new policy allowed for emergency transfers to be made on Myer's telephonic authority alone. This proviso's promiscuous use so bothered the enigmatic Frederick (and, presumably, Best as well) that he began compiling detailed "case studies" for each of Leupp's incarcerees.

A month after Robertson had replaced Best at the helm of Leupp, Frederick enthused in a letter to Spencer (who recently had resigned his Gila position but remained affiliated with JERS through its project office on the U.C. Berkeley campus) that his new boss "was the finest guy I have ever met yet in WRA. Honest, sincere, law trained, capable, and likes Japanese." [16] At about that same time, Frederick plopped his now weighty pile of inmate case studies on Robertson's desk and, employing delicate rhetoric, asked his devout superior the same question he had profanely raised in an August 30, 1943, letter to Spencer: "How in hell can you Americanize the Japs when Gestapo methods are used in sending them to Leupp―no warrants, no trials, no sentence, separated from their families, etc?" [17] Aroused to action by Frederick's dossiers, Robertson, on August 11, 1943, wrote Myer expressing astonishment about the woeful lack of substantial evidence WRA detention center directors were using to deport inmates to Leupp. He also informed Myer that he would be in Washington D.C. later that month and desired a private conference to discuss possible legal consequences of the deplorable situation.

Coincident with Robertson's missive to Myer, WRA Acting Solicitor Lewis A. Sigler had learned through the agency grapevine that "the Project Director at Leupp does not know why some of the men were sent there [to Leupp], the men themselves don't know why they were sent there, and that requests for information go unanswered." [18] He therefore mailed his boss, Solicitor Philip M. Glick, a memorandum containing this smoldering message: "I should like to see a reexamination made of the advisability of continuing the Leupp Center. I think it is an un-American institution, corresponds to and is premised on Gestapo methods." [19] Loaded down with Frederick's incendiary case studies, Robertson left for the nation's capital to confer with Myer. Slightly over a month later, the Leupp Review Committee, which included Glick, formally recommended to the WRA director that the Leupp Isolation Center should be liquidated―which it ultimately was, on December 2, 1943, when its remaining 52 inmates were taken to Tule Lake Segregation Center. Truly, then, by putting the WRA legally on the spot, Frederick (via Robertson) had, in Richard Drinnon's measured words, "changed history―a little bit." [20]

According to Tetsuden Kashima, even after the transfer of the Leupp population to Tule Lake, where they were promptly placed by Director Best into the segregation center's internal (and severely punitive) stockade, the WRA retained the Leupp camp intact under minimal maintenance lest its use should be again deemed necessary. Indeed, throughout 1944 several plans for reuse of the site were contemplated before the WRA finally closed Leupp and returned it to Interior Department control on September 20, 1944. [21]

Postscript

In 1994, two Moab-area community historians, Bruce Louthan and Lloyd M. Person of the Grand County Historic Preservation Commission, assisted by preservation intern Kurt Wall of the Utah Division of State History, Office of Historic Preservation, submitted a registration form to the National Park Service to include the "Dalton Wells CCC Camp/Moab Relocation Center" on the National Register of Historic Places. This nomination for NRHP status was approved in that same year. Although there is no NRHP marker at the site, there is a historical information plaque at the entrance of the former CCC/WRA camp site located 13 miles north of the town of Moab on Route 191. [22]

Presently there is no historical marker identifying the Leupp Isolation Center. However, the site's World War II history has been and is now the focus for interracial/intercultural study. [23] Hopefully, this activity will lead to public recognition of the Leupp facility such as that accorded at its Moab counterpart.

Authored by Arthur A. Hansen , California State University, Fullerton

For More Information

Leupp/Moab Isolation Centers

A Bitter Legacy . Produced and directed by Claudia Katayanagi, 2016. 70 minutes. [On the WRA prisons at Moab , Utah, and Leupp, Arizona.]

Burton, Jeffery F., et al. "Citizen Isolation Centers." Chapter 14 in Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites , rev. ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.

Day, Takako. Show Me the Way to Go Home: The Moral Dilemma of Kibei No No Boys in World War II Incarceration Camps . Middlebury, CT: Wren Song Press, 2014.

Drinnon, Richard. "'Troublemakers.'" Chapter 6 in Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Embrey, Sue Kunitomi, and Arthur A. Hansen. "Harry Yoshio Ueno." Oral history interview (October 30, 1976) in "Resisters," Part IV of Japanese American World War II Evacuation Oral History Project . Edited by Arthur A. Hansen. Munich: K. G. Saur, 1995. 3-70. Online transcription available through Online Archive of California (OAC): http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft1f59n61r;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=d0e336&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=calisphere&query=Japanese%20American%20Oral%20History%20Project .

Embrey, Sue Kunitomi, Arthur A. Hansen, and Betty Kulberg Mitson. Manzanar Martyr: An Interview with Harry Y. Ueno' . Fullerton, CA: Oral History Program, California State University, Fullerton, 1986.

Kashima, Tetsuden. "The Arbitrary Process of Control." Chapter 7 in Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.

Ng, Wendy. "Harry Y. Ueno." Oral history interview, January 23/May 9, 1998. In Regenerations Oral History Project: Rebuilding Japanese American Families, Communities, and Civil Rights in the Resettlement Era , Volume 4 (San Jose Region). Edited by Darcie C. Iki (Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, in conjunction with the Chicago Japanese American Historical Society, the Japanese American Historical Society of San Diego, and the Japanese American Resource Center/Museum of San Jose, 2000), 457-530. Online transcription available through Calisphere: http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft600006bb;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=d0e26375&toc .

Tamura, Eileen. "Isolating Citizen Dissidents." Chapter 6 in In Defense of Justice: Joseph Kurihara and the Japanese American Struggle for Equality . Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

Ueno, Harry, interview by Emiko Omori, February 18, 1994, Emiko and Chizuko Omori Collection, Densho Digital Repository, http://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-1002-7/ .

Moab Isolation Center

Louthan, Bruce D., and Lloyd M. Pierson. "Dalton Wells CCC Camp/Moab Relocation Center." Site preservation nomination of the Grand County Historic Preservation Commission [Moab, Utah] to the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, March 1994. Nomination available online: http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/Text/94000366.pdf .

---. "Moab Japanese-American Isolation Center: The Dark Postlude in the History of the Dalton Wells CCC Camp." Canyon Legacy: A Journal of the Dan O'Laurie Museum—Moab, Utah , No. 19 (Fall/Winter 1993): 28-31.

Pierson, Lloyd. "The Moab Concentration Camp." Zephyr (July 1989): 20-21.

Taniguchi, Nancy J. "Japanese Americans in Utah." Discover Nikkei , February 27, 2008. Available online from the Japanese American National Museum: http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2008/2/27/enduring-communities/ .

Leupp Isolation Center

Hansen, Arthur A., and Reagan J. Bell. "Paul G. Robertson." Oral history interview (August 12, 1987) in "Administrators," Part II of Japanese American World War II Evacuation Oral History Project . Edited by Arthur A. Hansen. Westport, CT: Meckler, 1991. 205-84. Online transcription available through Online Archive of California (OAC): http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft7199p03k;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=Paul%20G.%20Robertson&toc.depth=1&toc.id=0&brand=calisphere

Leong, Karen J., and Dan Killoren. "Japanese Americans in Arizona." Discover Nikkei , May 30, 2008. Available online from the Japanese American National Museum: http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2008/5/30/enduring-communities/ .

Lynch, Karen. "Japanese at Leupp Camp Befriended Diné." Navajo Times , July 24, 2008.

Negri, Sam. "Forgotten Arizona Compound Housed Japanese -American 'Troublemakers.'" The Arizona Republic , August 4, 1985.

Niiya, Brian. "Leupp Isolation Center." Entry in Encyclopedia of Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present , rev. ed. Edited by Brian Niiya. New York: Facts on File, 2001. 258.

Redsteer, Debra. "Leupp, Arizona: A Shared Historic Space for the Navajo Nation and Japanese Americans." Discover Nikkei , June 28, 2008. Available online from the Japanese American National Museum: http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2008/6/28/enduring-communities/ .

Manzanar Riot/Revolt

Hansen, Arthur A., and David A. Hacker. "The Manzanar Riot: An Ethnic Perspective." Amerasia Journal 2 (Fall 1974): 112-57.

Hansen, Arthur A., Betty E. Mitson, and Sue Kunitomi Embrey. "Dissident Harry Ueno Remembers Manzanar." California History 64 (Winter 1985): 58-64; 77.

Kurashige, Lon. "War and the American Front: Collaboration, Protest, and Class in the Internment Crisis." Chapter 3 in Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival in Los Angeles, 1934-1990 . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Niiya, Brian. "Manzanar Incident." Entry in Encyclopedia of Japanese American History: An A-to Z Reference from 1868 to the Present , rev. ed. Edited by Brian Niiya. New York: Facts on File, 2001. 267-8.

Unrau, Harlan D. "Operation of Manzanar War Relocation Center—March-December 1942" and "Violence at Manzanar on December 6, 1942—An Examination of the Event, Its Underlying Causes, and Historical Interpretation." Chapters 10-11 in The Evacuation and Relocation of Persons of Japanese Ancestry during World War II: A Historical Study of the Manzanar War Relocation Center . 2 vols. Manzanar National Historic Site, California: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1996. Available online: http://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/manz.hrs.htm .

Gila River Relocation Center

Hansen, Arthur A. "Cultural Politics in the Gila Relocation Center, 1942-1943." Arizona and the West 27 (Winter 1985): 237-62.

---. "Robert F. Spencer." Oral history interview (July 15-17, 1987) in "Analysts," Part III of Japanese American World War II Evacuation Oral History Project . Edited by Arthur A. Hansen. Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994. 3-147. Online transcription available through Online Archive of California (OAC): http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=ft0p30026h;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=d0e17093&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e17093&brand=calisphere .

---. "The Evacuation and Resettlement Study at the Gila River Relocation Center, 1942-1944." Journal of the West 38 (April 1999): 45-55.

Spencer, Robert F. "Gila in Retrospect." In Ichioka, Yuji, ed. Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study . Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989, 157-75.

Tule Lake Relocation/Segregation Center

Burton, Jeffery F., et al. "Tule Lake Relocation Center, California," and "Additional War Relocation Authority Facilities," Chapters 13 and 15 in Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites , rev. ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.

Collins, Donald E. "Tule Lake 'Segregation Center.'" Entry in Encylopedia of Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present , rev. ed. Edited by Brian Niiya. New York: Facts on File, 2001. 395-97.

Kashima, Tetsuden. "Segregation and Other Camps." Chapter 8 in Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.

Niiya, Brian. "Tule Lake 'Relocation Center.'" Entry in Encyclopedia of Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present , rev. ed. Edited by Brian Niiya. New York: Facts on File, 2001. 394-95.

Takei, Barbara. "Legalizing Detention: Segregated Japanese Americans and the Justice Department's Renunciation Program." A Question of Loyalty, Internment at Tule Lake: Journal of the Shaw Historical Library 19 (2005): 75-105. Available online from the Internet Archive Digital Library of Japanese American Incarceration: https://archive.org/details/questionofloyalt00shaw . Also available online from Discover Nikkei website sponsored by the Japanese American National Museum: http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2013/3/15/legalizing-detention-1/ .

Takei, Barbara, and Judy Tachibana. Tule Lake Revisited: A Brief History and Guide to the Tule Lake Concentration Camp Site . 2nd Edition. San Francisco: Tule Lake Committee, 2012.

Thomas, Dorothy S., and Richard Nishimoto. The Spoilage . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946.

Weglyn, Michi [Nishiura]. Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps . Updated Edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Additional War Relocation Authority Centers

Burton, Jeffrey F., et al. "Granada Relocation Center," "Heart Mountain Relocation Center," "Jerome Relocation Center," "Rohwer Relocation Center," and "Topaz Relocation Center," Chapters 5, 6, 7, 11, and 12 in Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites , rev. ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.

Niiya, Brian. "Granada," "Heart Mountain," "Jerome," "Rohwer," and "Topaz." Entries in Encyclopedia of Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present , rev. ed. Edited by Brian Niiya. New York: Facts on File, 2001. 178-79; 190-91; 230-32; 350-51; and 390-91.

Footnotes

  1. Bruce D. Louthan and Lloyd M. Pierson, "Moab Japanese-American Isolation Center: The Dark Postlude in the History of Dalton Wells CCC Camp," Canyon Legacy: A Journal of the Dan O'Laurie Museum—Moab, Utah , No. 19 (Fall/Winter 1993): 29.
  2. Louthan and Pierson, "Moab Japanese-American Isolation Center," 29. However, social historian Tetsuden Kashima, in Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press: 2003), 145, maintains categorically that "Moab, like all the [WRA] camps, . . . had barbed wire fences." In contrast, the archeological historians Jeffrey F. Burton et al., in Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 325, write: "The Dalton Wells camp was used as-is, with no fence or other improvements."
  3. As quoted in, Eileen Tamura, In Defense of Justice: Joseph Kurihara and the Japanese American Struggle for Equality (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 82.
  4. Michi [Nishiura] Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997; updated edition), 158-9; Richard Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 100-01.
  5. Tamura, In Defense of Justice , 83
  6. Sue Kunitomi Embrey, Arthur A. Hansen, and Betty Kulberg Mitson, Manzanar Martyr: An Interview with Harry Y. Ueno (Fullerton, CA: Oral History Program, California State University, Fullerton, 1986), 89. Although Ueno maintains that during their common Moab and Leupp incarceration he and Kurihara "never had any friction," Manzanar Martyr , 81, evidence suggests that at Moab the men were at swords points; whereas Kurihara was among the original contingent from Manzanar electing cooperation with WRA administrators, Ueno was the leader among the faction who not only refused cooperation with the administrators, but also threatened violent punishment to those seeking to accommodate their orientation and actions. Thus, apparently, writes Tamura, "Ueno and Kurihara had once come 'virtually to blows' at Moab." ( In Defense of Justice , 87.) Later, however, when both men were imprisoned at the Leupp Isolation Center and the Tule Lake Segregation Center, they revitalized their Manzanar friendship while declining to participate in dissenting politics and cooperating with the WRA leadership.
  7. In the language of Frederick: "I have seven broken down Caucasian guards under me and no one I can depend on to leave for any length of time." See Francis Frederick, letter to Robert Spencer, 20 April 1943, Japanese [American] and Resettlement Study [JERS], Bancroft Library [BL], University of California, Berkeley. Between April and December 1943, 16 letters were exchanged between Frederick and Spencer, all of them preserved in the JERS collection at U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library. Unfortunately, only one of them, a letter from Spencer to Frederick dated April 29, 1943, is available on the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study Digital Archive Website, http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/jais . This situation exists because the Moab and Leupp Isolation Centers were not included as JERS research sites and also because Robert Spencer resigned his JERS position at the Gila camp in early May 1943.
  8. The specific charges governing the imprisonment at Moab of these groups, along with the problematic conditions attendant upon them, are detailed by Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps , 103.
  9. The composition of this cadre, which was spearheaded by Harry Ueno, and the precise nature of their assertive behavior are graphically depicted by Tamura in In Defense of Justice , 85.
  10. The most thorough and compelling of the various historical representations of this event is provided by Kashima in Judgment without Trial , 150-52
  11. For a retrospective victim-based account of this action provided by Harry Ueno, see Manzanar Martyr , 74-75.
  12. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps , 104.
  13. Tamura, In Defense of Justice , 89.
  14. As quoted in Tamura, In Defense of Justice , 89.
  15. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps , 105.
  16. As quoted in Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps , 101.
  17. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps , 102.
  18. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps , 106.
  19. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps , 106.
  20. Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps , 107.
  21. Kashima, Judgment without Trial , 158.
  22. See the following two sources for more information pertaining to the Moab site and its historical designation: Bruce D. Louthan and Lloyd M. Pierson, "Dalton Wells CCC Camp/Moab Relocation Center (Site preservation nomination of the Grand County Preservation Commission [Moab, Utah], to the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, March 1994)-- nomination available online: http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/Text/94000366.pdf , and J. Burton et al, "Citizen Isolation Center, Utah," Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites : http://www.southwestbrowneyes.com/2013/10/world-war-2-leaves-its-mark-on-moab.html .
  23. See Debra Redsteer "Leupp, Arizona: A Shared Historic Space for the Navajo Nation and Japanese Americans," Discover Nikkei (June 28, 2008), http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2008/6/28/enduring-communities/ and Karen Lynch, "Japanese at Leupp Camp Befriended Diné, Navajo Times , 24 June 2008, http://www.navajotimes.com/opinions/2008/072408japanese.php#.U0MMrfldV8E . Currently a documentary film centered on the Leupp site is being completed by Claudia Katayanagi: http://leuppcitizenisolationcenter.com/Bitter_Legacy__Stories_from_the_Leupp_Citizen_Isolation_Center_-_Documentary_Film/Directors_Statement.html .

Last updated Sept. 10, 2024, 4:50 p.m..