Kiyo Sato on Japanese American Incarceration’s Language of Dehumanization

Our camp, they tell us, is now to be called a “relocation center” and not a “concentration camp.” We are internees, not prisoners. So now we are “relocated” into a relocation center!

I live in an apartment in a relocation center. I am fed three meals a day. If I don’t want to I don’t have to work. I am an internee.

Here’s the truth: I am now called a non-alien, stripped of my constitutional rights. I am a prisoner in a concentration camp in my own country. I sleep on a canvas cot under which is a suitcase with my life’s belongings: a change of clothes, underwear, a notebook and pencil.

Why?

I am elated, not only to have a job but to have some spending money. Now I can order burlap from Sears & Roebuck for our windows. I’d like to have something bright. Green? Blue? The problem with colored burlap is that it fades in no time where the sun hits. Maybe with my second paycheck I will have enough to replace my army blanket partition with burlap.

First things first: we need some toothbrushes. Mama cleans her teeth with a washcloth wrapped around her finger. And I’ve got to get some monthly needs. Mama showed me how to fold a piece of a diaper and pin one inside my underwear. I don’t like having to change behind my blanket partition, which Tochan hung from the rafters for my privacy. I never know who’s going to come looking for me, like my little brother, for instance.

I miss my room where I can read and write and watch the moonlight through my window and hear the symphony of frogs down by the creek. Right now I hear the Sueokas on the other side of the thin wall, and more garbled sounds from three and four walls down. The only privacy I have is inside my small suitcase under my cot.

The government reclassified my brothers and sisters and me from “citizen” to “non-alien,” whatever that means.

Here, I shower with a half a dozen people, eat with two hundred and fifty people, and sit in the community latrine with people I don’t even know.

To wash out my monthly personals without being noticed, I wrap the soiled diaper squares with my clothes and take them to the laundry room and wait in line with mothers shuffling huge bags of dirty clothes wrapped furoshiki-style with sheets. I carefully unwrap my blouse in the bottom of the deep tub and do my washing. Everything dries up in no time, even inside our rooms, so two sets is all I need. Within an hour I fold the diaper squares and put them inside my suitcase under my cot.

Everybody knows everything about everybody—when you go to the latrine, when you go to the shower room, and on and on. But hardly anyone pays any attention to what one wears. We all came with what we could carry and that’s what we wash and wear and mend. The laundry room is never empty. We look so fresh and clean in the mornings, but by mid-afternoon the desert dirt permeates our clothes and body.

Mama mends constantly. No matter when I come in, she is sitting on her cot with her needle and thread. No doubt she wishes she had her old Singer sewing machine. With only a change or two of clothing for each of her eight children, the washing and the mending pursue Mama.

Occasionally I see her take out the few yards of bright green corduroy she brought with her.

“What are you doing with that, Mama?” I ask.

“I think this might fit Tomoko. Maybe a skirt and a vest.”

I live in Block 229, Apartment 11- B in the Poston Relocation Center in Poston, Arizona. With such an address, who can tell that my order from Montgomery Ward is being delivered to prisoner #21716- C? My father is #21716- A and Mama is #21716- B. I am C and down the line to Masashi, who is #21716-K. The government reclassified my brothers and sisters and me from “citizen” to “non-alien,” whatever that means.

Soon, with my first month’s paycheck of twelve dollars, I plan to decorate our “apartment” windows.

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From The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, edited by Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung. Copyright © 2024. Available from Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.