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（Excerpt）
“WHAT A PLACE! WHY, THERE Is NOTHING in the room but iron beds, mattresses and old blankets,” dejectedly said Robert as he sat down on the iron cot as soon as he entered the assigned apartment in Block 6. The other members of the family looked about the bare walls of the twenty by twent-five foot room. The floor was littered with lumber and shavings. Everywhere a layer of fine dust and sand covered the surface. There was a large pig iron stove in the center of the room with a chimney straight up through the roof. This heating device reminded them that in the winter the temperature was going to descend much more than at Sacramento.
Minoru Murayama looked out of the window which was six-paned and slid lateralwise to shut out the cold and sand. The construction of this center had been rushed day and night to meet a deadline and there was neither time nor manpower to tidy up the area. The rear of the barrack that confronted him was littered with odds and ends of lumber and tar paper that were used to cover the walls and roof. He had just arrived with his family among a group of vanguard workers from the Sacramento area to prepare this small city to receive the thousands of evacuees from Northern California, Oregon, and Washington that were to follow in a few weeks. A similar group of workers had arrived from the State of Washington about a week earlier and they had already begun organization work.
When the Sacramento train pulled into the railroad siding, trucks operated by the Washington men transported the new arrivals to a large warehouse in which desks and chairs were installed and young women from the north processed the families from California. The family was the unit, designated by a number. Each member was photo-graphed, like criminals for the rogues’ gallery, and fingerprinted.
In war time and for an emergency undertaking, such humiliating treatment could perhaps be condoned, but just the same there was a turbulent resentment in everyone’s heart. To be uprooted on short notice, labeled as a security risk just because of racial extraction, and now herded together in this bleak camp for the duration of the war, irrespective of how loyal a citizen may be to the country of his birth, was a fact not altogether easy to swallow. It might have been more gracefully accepted had other Americans of German and Italian descent been similarly treated as a warmeasure.
Evacuation from coastal areas of the Pacific slope for a distance of one hundred miles was imposed only on Japanese, irrespective of citizenship. The galling content of this edict lay in the realization that the governing body had no trust in Japanese-American citizens who were far more Americanized than was realized by the policy makers of the nation who were sorrowfully deficient in the knowledge of what Ameri-canization had accomplished, not only among the native born group, but even among the aliens that had found the American way of life preferable to the age-long habits handed down from their ancestors from time immemorial. “Once a Jap, always a Jap,” so had General De Witt stigmatized the persons of Japanese ancestry and put into motion an unprecedented mass evacuation of a race.
This movement could be compared to the displacement of the farmers of the Ukraine or Caucasus to the communes of Siberia by Soviet Russia. One less bitterly critical could find solace in discovering a counterpart in the romantic account of Longfellow’s Evangeline: the tragic forced emigration of the French settlers of Arcadia in Canada to Louisiana Territory. The former was condemned as brutality that could only be carried out by inhuman communist dictators, and the latter an inhumanity against fellow minorities prepared in the garb of sentimentality and romance to induce copious sympathetic tears of the adolescent, but the only difference was of scope and magnitude.
How historians would interpret this emergency measure and hysterical outburst against a helpless minority Minoru speculated, for eventually it had to be evaluated by more balanced and trained individuals in a more stabilized era, for such critical analysis constituted the backbone of American democracy. Like any society of peoples, America was full of crooked politicians and unscrupulous rascals in government places, but democracy was courageous enough to clear house in sober moments.
Be that as it may, Minoru was now mentally re-enacting the scene at the Sacramento Station when family after family was transported on military trucks, disgorged onto the platform with just handbags of clothing and boxes of minimum daily necessities. Forlornly waiting for the arrival of the remainder of the contingent that were to make up this vanguard unit, they presented a sorry spectacle. There were the aged and the sick and the maimed. The military was merciful in that it adhered to the rule: keep family members together as a unit. They sat on their luggage and boxes while the young and restless paced the platform.
Expressions of resentment were conspicuously absent; days of anger were past. Now there was complete resignation and they acted as automatons, like sheep driven to the market for slaughter. Where they were destined to be transported nobody knew. It was a “military secret.”
The non-commissioned officers and enlisted men of the military police were kind and helpful, assisting the women and the aged in alighting from the high trucks. Nevertheless, they were armed. With military punctuality the evacuees were brought to the station, counted, and loaded into the coaches. At the signal of a whistle, without fanfare and without anyone seeing them off, they left their homes behind.
The train headed north through the fat fertile farmland, crossing rivers, wheatland, and orchards. It wound and climbed its way among giant sequoias and pine trees to the plateau of the Oregon border. It traversed grazing land and finally crossed a lava-strewn district and came to their destination. The bare mountain to the left was no higher than a hill; only the proximity made it appear imposing. To the right in a vast compact area was an unmistakable town. There were rows and rows of black barracks in a bleak setting of desert land and in the distance, on a higher elevation, a solitary mountain shaped like an abalone stood like a landmark. There were high fences around the area with watch towers. The name of this camp was Tule Lake Center.
June the Second in Sacramento was already full summer and it was hot, but at this elevation of five thousand feet the evening was comfortably chilly. From a nearby hall metallic clanging resounded and without being told everyone knew that it was a summons to supper. Having nothing else to do the Murayama family of seven stood up to go to the mess hall.
In the course of twelve years, after completion of internship at Omaha, Minoru had married a girl born and raised in Sacramento and they had three children: Mary, Robert, and Russel. Both of his parents were still healthy. No longer did they toil on the delta farm, but lived with their eldest son. The other children had left home to begin their life in the vicinity of the capital of California.
The dining hall was a huge place and built to accommodate two hundred and fifty people, roughly the number that were to reside in each block. Cafeteria style serving was done and each had his tray loaded with sausage, sauerkraut, potatoes, bread pudding, and bread with oleomargarine. It was appetizing and each found that he was hungry after the long hours of jolting in the springless railway coach. When the early diners were finished an intelligent looking young man appeared and spoke to the assembly.
“My name is Kubo. I’m from the Puyallup Center and formerly from Seattle, Washington. Welcome to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center. We have been here a week trying to get this center organized. As you have seen since your arrival, everything has to be done from scratch. You from Northern California and Oregon will have to help us get this place organized to receive the bulk of the evacuees who will follow in two weeks. About five hundred of you have arrived today and you will choose or be chanelled into the type of work you are trained for or want to get a crack at. Being a community of people, the usual kind of work necessary in the daily lives of any society will be found here. You will be assigned to any type of work, but it will not be free enterprise like on the outside. The WRA will pay twelve, sixteen, and nineteen dollars a month plus clothing allowance... about three dollars per person.