Retired Farmer Recalls His Firebrand Days at Manzanar

As he autographed books in a Little Tokyo bookstore on a recent Saturday afternoon, Harry Ueno didn’t look the part of a man whose arrest once roused a crowd of thousands and triggered a riot.

Sitting quietly at a table in a back cranny of the store, a short man with leathery skin and small, direct eyes, he didn’t look like a person once considered dangerous enough to the United States to be imprisoned for a year without specific charges and without a hearing or trial.

Retired Farmer

Ueno (pronounced U-eh-no) looked more like what he is, a retired cherry and strawberry farmer who lives in San Jose.

But in late 1942, at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in Owens Valley, treatment of Ueno became the flashpoint for tensions that had been building between Japanese-Americans and U.S. government officials.

His account of the Manzanar riot--which left two dead--and of conditions during World War II for Americans of Japanese ancestry is contained in “Manzanar Martyr, an Interview with Harry Y. Ueno” by Sue Kunitomi Embrey, Arthur A. Hansen and Betty Kulberg Mitson. The book was published in July by California State University, Fullerton, as part of the school’s oral history program.

Ueno was 36, married and had three young sons in February, 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The order authorized the U.S. War Department to evacuate from the West Coast anyone of Japanese, German or Italian ancestry. Although no Germans or Italians were affected, authorities rounded up about 110,000 Japanese, most of them U.S. citizens, and sent them to 10 hastily built camps.

The first of the camps was Manzanar, about 220 miles northeast of Los Angeles, and it grew to a population of 10,000 in a matter of months. Manzanar means “apple orchard” in Spanish, but the land had been left barren years before by diversion of Owens Valley water to Los Angeles. When the Ueno family arrived there in May, 1942, the camp was a collection of crowded barracks built on dusty ground.

The family shared its room with three other people. Ueno was put to work cutting sagebrush for $16 a month. Although he had lost a $32-a-week job as produce manager of a Hollywood market and, like other Japanese, was forced to abandon property in the abrupt relocation, he found at least one positive aspect to the upheaval. He was safe from the widespread anti-Japanese sentiment of the months following Pearl Harbor.

Secure From Threats

“I didn’t have any strong feelings against the government or anything like that,” Ueno says in “Manzanar Martyr.” “I thought, well, we have to move, maybe that’s some way we could be protected from people who were stirred up by newspaper or radio propaganda. Some people wrote that it was open season for ‘Jap hunting.’ At least we are secure from any outside threat. Every time I had stayed in town or rode a street car, I always kind of feared somebody might hit my head from behind. . . .”

Ueno and other evacuees set about making Manzanar more livable. He and friends built an 80-foot ornamental pond near their mess hall so that the wait in food lines, which at lunchtime lasted an hour for those without jobs, would be more tolerable. People in other barracks followed suit, and a total of 17 ponds were built around the mile-long camp.

“But people were getting unhappy,” Ueno recalled during his visit to Los Angeles. “The camp officials assigned your job. They took away the right to compete for a better job. They took away the right to make more money. Soon people just cared about survival, and survival is food. Food is very important to people who are cooped up.”

Ueno had been assigned to a mess hall. He and other food workers began complaining about injustices in the allocation of supplies. The Japanese population received less sugar than was called for in the camp’s ration, yet Ueno scouted the Caucasian mess hall and found sugar in abundance. The same, he said, was true of meat and milk. Camp officials, he charged, were diverting food and equipment such as kitchen knives to a black market.

“There were a lot of complaints like that,” Ueno says in the book. “When people went over and complained to the division head, nothing happened. They never paid attention. We figured the only way was we had to get together and organize. Probably then, they would listen more.”

Popular in Camp

Ueno formed the Mess Hall Workers’ Union. His frequent grievance meetings with Manzanar officials made him a popular figure in camp. The public role was a new one for Ueno. Born in Hawaii, he lived in Japan from age 8 to 16. That background--American birth, but a Japanese education--made him a “Kibei,” and because of their choppy English and lack of familiarity with American culture, Kibei tended not to mingle with the U.S.-born and educated Nisei. Government authorities looked upon Kibei as the likeliest sympathizers with the Japanese war effort.

Food shortages were not the only source of friction in Manzanar. In the months before Pearl Harbor, largely Nisei groups up and down the West Coast had formed the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) to proclaim their allegiance to the United States. Many other Japanese-Americans viewed league members as untrustworthy opportunists and favor-seekers, and with good reason. Before the creation of camps such as Manzanar, one league official suggested that Japanese-Americans could be “branded and stamped and put under the supervision of the federal government.”

Speculation was rife in Manzanar that JACL members served as informers to the FBI, and that some Japanese-Americans had been sent to prison-like enemy alien camps solely because of accusations made by the league. An FBI internal memo, dated January of 1942 and released almost 40 years later under the Freedom of Information Act, supports the speculation. League members had approached the FBI and offered “to inform on all individuals who appeared to be a danger to this country,” the memo says, adding that “every attempt was made (by FBI agents) to encourage this attitude. . . .”

Hooded Men

The night of Dec. 5, 1942, six hooded men in the Manzanar camp beat a league member named Fred Tayama. Camp officials immediately picked up Harry Ueno and jailed him in the nearby town of Independence. Overwhelming sentiment in the camp held that Ueno had not been involved in the crime. Ralph Lazo, now 61 and a resident of North Hollywood, was in Manzanar and remembers Ueno.

“Everyone knew he wouldn’t be involved in anything like that,” Lazo said in a telephone interview. “He was a very peaceful individual who believed in right and wrong.”

Internees named a negotiating committee to press a demand that Ueno be returned to Manzanar. Camp director Ralph P. Merritt complied, and on Dec. 6 Ueno was placed in the camp jail. That night a crowd estimated at 2,000 to 4,000 people gathered outside the jail, yelling for Ueno’s outright release. Both sides--internees and camp officials--later agreed that the military police guarding Ueno were vastly outnumbered and frightened. Both sides agreed that the mob ignored orders to disperse and that soldiers tossed tear gas grenades. But accounts of the riot then differ.

Authorities said that a stiff wind made the tear gas useless and that, when the mob continued to advance, a police commander gave an order to fire. Eleven internees were shot. One died instantly, one a few hours later.

Version of Events

Ueno and other witnesses said that the tear gas routed the mob and the shots came as people were running away. Frank Chuman, an administrator at the Manzanar hospital, supported the internees’ version of events.

The Army “tried to whitewash the military shooting incident,” Chuman said in a 1975 interview for the book, “And Justice for All” by John Tateishi. “They tried to get the evacuee doctors and nurses and all the other witnesses to say that the evacuees who died or were injured were in the process of attacking the military police. . . . However, the medical examination, the records and the trajectory of the bullets showed that the victims had been either shot in the side or the back.”

Press accounts of the Dec. 6 riot said that internees were celebrating the anniversary of the eve of the Pearl Harbor bombing. In fact, participants said, the riot was triggered by Ueno’s arrest the day before and the timing was mere coincidence.

Ueno and seven other Manzanar residents deemed “troublemakers” were sent to jail in Bishop. For Ueno, the trip marked the beginning of a year’s stay in jails and isolation camps. Although he frequently requested that specific charges be presented against him and several times was promised a speedy hearing on his case, nothing of the sort took place.

“They tried to isolate us completely,” Ueno said of his treatment during the year. “For punishment they would say ‘you can’t receive a letter or send one.’ The hardest thing is when you cannot find out what’s happening with your family.”

Yeras in Confinement

Ueno’s longest stays were at camps in Moab, Utah, and Leupp, Ariz. In Leupp he and about 60 other Japanese-Americans were guarded by 150 MPs. In December, 1943, Ueno was reunited with his wife and sons at a relocation camp in Tule Lake, Calif., where the family was kept until the spring of 1946. In all, they spent four years in confinement.

At one point in 1944, bitter and disheartened, Ueno renounced his U.S. citizenship. About 6,000 Japanese-Americans did the same. Some returned to Japan when the war was over. Ueno said he considered doing so, but doubted he could support his family in that country’s collapsed economy. He and others who stayed in the United States regained their citizenship in a 1956 lawsuit against the federal government.

Life in the early post-war years was “just like being a tumbleweed--there’s no place to live,” Ueno recalled.

The family bounced from San Jose to San Luis Obispo to Sunol in Alameda County. “We lived for 18 months in a storage shed where you could see the moon through the roof,” Ueno recalled. He worked most often as a field hand or sharecropper, saving money, and finally bought a 10-acre farm near Sunnyvale. Later the family moved to San Jose, where he and his wife, Yaso, now live in retirement. Each of their three sons spent a hitch in the U.S. armed forces.

“I had no objection,” Ueno said. “It’s our duty to serve the country.”

Ueno, however, has not forgotten his wartime incarceration. He was among a group of 19 former internees who filed a lawsuit in 1983 against the U.S. government, charging violations in 22 causes of action, including false imprisonment and loss of property. Joyce Okinaka, a Los Angeles attorney who serves as a local spokesperson for the plaintiffs, said the suit remains unresolved.

A federal district court in Washington found in 1984 that the statute of limitations had expired for all 22 causes of action, Okinaka said, but a court of appeal later ruled that lies by the government in 1942 invalidated the limitations law for one cause of action--the loss of property issue.

$400-Million Loss

Estimates have put the total loss of property at $400 million. Both sides in the case have asked for a hearing before the Supreme Court, the plaintiffs wanting other causes of action to be restored and the government wanting complete exoneration.

Ueno, now 79, said he has no hope of financial gain from the action. “What I want to do is prove the government was completely wrong and make sure it will never happen again,” he said. “Many people who were hurt are gone now, and others are dying every day.”

“Manzanar Martyr” is available through the oral history program at California State University, Fullerton, and at Amerasia Bookstore in Los Angeles.