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-Evacuation. More than 100,000 men, women, and children, all of Japanese ancestry, removed from their homes in the Pacific Coast states to war-time communities established in out-of-the-way places. Their evacuation did not imply individual disloyalty, but was ordered to reduce a military hazard at a time when danger of invasion was great. 2/3 of the evacuees are American citizens by right of birth. The rest are their Japanese born parents and grandparents. The people are not under suspicion. They are not prisoners, they are not internees. they are merely dislocated people, the unwounded casualties of war.

The time? Spring and summer of 1942. The place? ten different relocation centers in unsettled parts of California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. The relocation centers are supervised by the War Relocation Authority, which assumed responsibility for the people after they had been evacuated and cared for temporarily by the Army.

A relocation center, housing from seven to 18,000 people. Barracks-type buildings, divided into compartments. 12 or 14 residence buildings to a block. Each block provided with a mess hall, bath house, laundry building, and recreation hall. About 300 people to a block. The entire community bounded by a wire fence and guarded by military police, symbols of the military nature of the evacuation.

Each family, upon arrival at a relocation center, was assigned to a single room compartment, about 20 by 25 feet, barren, unattractive. A stove, a light bulb, cots, mattresses, and blankets. The were the things provided by the government. The family's own furniture was in storage on the west coast.

Scrap lumber, perhaps some wallboard, and a great deal of energy. Curtains, pictures, drapes, depending on the family's own ingenuity and taste help to make the place livable. Some families built partitions to provide some privacy. Others took what they received and made the best of it.

The 300 or so residents of each block eat in a mess hall, cafeteria style. Rough wooden tables with attached benches. The food is nourishing, but simple. A maximum of $0.45 a day, per person, is allowed for food, and the actual cost is considerably less than this, for an increasing amount of the food is produced at the centers. A combination of oriental dishes to meet the tastes of the Issei, born in Japan, and American type dishes to satisfy the Nisei, born in America.

Land that had never been occupied or farmed were chosen for most of the relocation centers. Most of the land was covered with desert growth or with timber, in the case of the Arkansas centers. It had to be cleared before farming could start, then it had to be leveled, and irrigation ditches laid out or rebuilt, in order that the people could produce a part of their own food. Then came the plowing and preparation of the soil, and planting. A few of the centers had crops in 1942. In 1943, all of them.

About half of the evacuated people were farm folk, skilled producers of vegetables, fruits, and other crops. They had made desert land productive before, and around the relocation centers they could, and did, do it again, by the application of hard work, and water for irrigation.

At the two centers in Arkansas, they have introduced Western type irrigation and succeeded in producing vegetables in the heat of mid-summer, when ordinary production methods are not successful. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, corn, melon, and many other crops have been grown on land that a year, or two years ago was unproductive.

Food production is aimed at self support for the relocation centers. It does not go onto the open market. From the field, it goes to the center warehouse. From there, it may go to the kitchen, or it may be shipped to other centers. The Arizona centers are most productive in winter. The others produce only in summer, or fall, so vegetable crops are exchanged.

Besides the workers engaged in farming, it takes many others to handle food, in the warehouses, in transportation, in the kitchens. To keep the rolling equipment, trucks, cars, and tractors in operation, it takes mechanics and machinists. Water mains have to be laid and repaired. Roads, sanitation systems, and buildings have to be maintained. At the Arkansas centers, the land is covered with trees, and the clearing process provided lumber for construction, and firewood for heating.

Those who work are paid.