Bulletin of the History of Medicine

In the spring of 1942, the U.S. Army began a forced evacuation of 110,000 residents of Japanese ancestry from their homes in Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona. More than 90,000 Nikkei ¹ were herded into public facilities converted from racetracks and fairgrounds, so-called assembly centers. There men, women, and children waited out the construction of more permanent “relocation centers” in sparsely populated regions of the arid West, where they would eventually be dispersed. ² Only weeks or months earlier, these focal points had sheltered racehorses, show animals, or other livestock; in their place, humans representing a hated minority now found themselves hidden away behind barbed-wire fences and locked gates, to be guarded by soldiers in watch towers armed with rifles and powerful searchlights. The months-long sojourn in these unsanitary and crowded habitats posed a great challenge [End Page 565] to the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) and to Nikkei resident physicians and nurses charged with preventing epidemic outbreaks and providing general medical care for the imprisoned population.

The incarceration of Japanese Americans and their immigrant elders during World War II followed President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 of 19 February 1942, a validation of the Army’s argument that evacuation was a military necessity because it was impossible within this population to distinguish the loyal from the disloyal. The president authorized the secretary of war and his military commanders to identify military areas from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” ³ Although the order was silent on which group or race should be excluded, or which geographic locations should become exclusion zones, its interpretation soon focused specifically on the Japanese American population residing on the West Coast, representing 90 percent of the entire Nikkei population in the country, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens by birth.

The first phase involved removing residents from their homes and confining them in nearby holding pens under military control. Eventually, the Army would turn over its jurisdiction to a civilian bureaucracy, the War Relocation Authority, once the Nikkei reached the relocation centers. The Army took over fifteen preexisting public facilities abutting main-line transportation connections, which lay adjacent to Japanese communities in urban and rural settings, and constructed the sixteenth from scratch. Each had in place an infrastructure, including power, light, and water. One site, the Portland Pacific International Live Stock Exposition grounds, became temporary home to four thousand Japanese Oregonians and central Washingtonians, who no doubt believed the facility was aptly named.

The owners of eleven racetracks and fairgrounds signed leases with the government. The larger buildings were converted to mess halls, recreation halls, and other large gathering areas. To supplement them, the Army Corps of Engineers constructed barrack housing for most of the inmates, allotting approximately three hundred square feet of living space for families with children. ⁴ But many unlucky families were shoved into whitewashed stalls that still reeked of manure, thereby exposing themselves as well as those with whom they came into contact to public health risks with potentially serious consequences. One interpreter of the experience at the Tanforan racetrack in San Bruno, California, a poet, later wrote: [End Page 566]

Hay, horse hair & manure

are whitewashed to the boards.

In the corner

a white spider is suspended

in the shadow of a white spider web.⁵

Compounding the health risks of the unsanitary living quarters, the mess halls became potential breeding grounds for epidemic outbreaks. All were staffed by inexperienced workers with little knowledge of sanitation and proper food-handling methods.

Although this phase of the incarceration was expected to last only a few weeks, life in the transitory facilities dragged through the long, stifling months of summer and well into fall. Only tiny Mayer Assembly Center, on the site of an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Arizona, closed after four weeks of operation; the majority remained open for more than four months (see Table). The largest—the former Santa Anita racetrack, at Arcadia, California, now the Santa Anita Assembly Center—remained operational for seven months and did not close its gates until...