Research Note : Recovering Vernacular Landscapes in World War II Incarceration Camps Through Japanese American Newspapers

Abstract

abstract: In February 1942, an estimated 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in the United States were forced to move into seventeen temporary holding camps formally and euphemistically named reception or assembly centers, and later were removed to ten semipermanent relocation centers. This Research Note seeks to demonstrate how knowledge about the ephemeral and lost assembly center landscapes may be recovered by critically examining reporting about carceral conditions in government-censored incarceration camp newspapers, using the Tanforan Totalizer , a prison camp newspaper published at the Tanforan Assembly Center, as a methodological case history. It takes into account the trauma and oppression the imprisoned population was experiencing at Tanforan Assembly Center, a racetrack in San Bruno, California, that was repurposed to serve as an assembly center. This article demonstrates the ability to recover substantial information about Tanforan landscapes in the Totalizer as well as the humor its journalists used as a strategic mode to evade censorship. Given that the newspaper was subject to extreme censorship, I evaluate it as a filter for what could be revealed about the landscapes at Tanforan Assembly Center and the prisoners' building practices at this temporary site of the incarceration. The prisoners' resilience in dealing with their oppressive living conditions is conveyed in this journalism along with the gravitas and poignancy of their agency, leavened with ironic humor and cooperative community efforts. This article also explores the embodied spatialized experience of Taro Katayama, editor of the Totalizer , as he moved from the Tanforan Assembly Center to the Central Utah Relocation Center at Topaz, Utah, where he was managing editor of the Topaz Times and an editor of the art journal Trek .