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Japanese American Concentration Camps Begin Closing in 1943

“The War Relocation Authority began to close the camps. We didn’t know what our futures would be. . . . how we were going to be treated. . . . what the outcome of the war was going to be—all those uncertainties [we faced].”

—Iwao Ishino, 2010¹

Before the end of World War II in 1945, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) began shifting its policy from detainment to resettlement of Japanese Americans from the ten US incarceration centers. So, in 1943, when the US government started to recognize that the war’s outcome was turning in the Allies’ favor, it became concerned that there would be shortages of jobs and housing when its 12-million-armed forces personnel returned home from overseas.

Moreover, the WRA did not want the over 120,000 incarcerated Nikkei to “become economically dependent on government” and continue living within the camps.² Dillon Myer, director of the WRA, stated its goal was to “Americanize” the Nikkei and prepare them to disperse throughout the US mainstream after their incarceration.³  

Office of War Information: Pentagon (1944–1945) 

“We knew that California was not receptive to us. […] we were asked to move out before the war ended, so… if we go to the Midwest or the East Coast, how would we be treated?”

—Iwao Ishino, 2010⁴

My father, Iwao Ishino, had been living in Chicago since September 1943, working with social psychologist and anthropologist Alexander H. Leighton (1908-2007) and his team to write reports for the book, The Governing of Men (1945).⁵ The book’s anthropological findings would document which human relationships had worked and which had not at the Poston concentration camp.⁶ Their findings were based on their extensive public opinion surveys, interviews, and observations conducted with the Bureau of Social Research (BSR) at Poston.

Knowing that Nikkei could not return to the West Coast (as they were banned from doing so until January 2, 1945), Leighton offered my father and four others from his team jobs at the Office of War Information based at the Pentagon in Washington, DC. The research positions would be similar to those they held with Leighton as community analysts in Poston for the BSR.

Perhaps Leighton offered my father a job due to the bond formed in Poston.⁷ Iwao’s mother, possibly suffering from postpartum depression, struggled to care for her infant son.⁸ Their sudden displacement from their San Diego home of 22 years to a horse stall at the Santa Anita Racetrack “Assembly Center” for five months (April-August 1942), followed by incarceration in cramped tar paper shacks at Poston during the Arizona summer, overwhelmed her. Leighton arranged her care in a hospital outside the camp until her health improved.⁹

In any case, on January 18, 1944, my father received the news that he had been hired into Leighton’s unit and moved to Washington, DC.¹⁰  

Foreign Morale Analysis Division

Leighton created a unit inside the Office of War Information (OWI) called the Foreign Morale Analysis Division (FMAD). In a 2010 oral history interview, my father related that the OWI had set up a system for interviewing Japanese prisoners of war in the Pacific [Theater]. “Many…interviewers were Japanese Americans sent there to become interviewers, translators, and interpreters.”¹¹

So, whereas the OWI was responsible for creating propaganda for the European and Pacific war theatres, FMAD’s mission differed. My father stated their responsibility “was to go through and systematically collect documents and prisoner of war interrogation reports. The idea was to trace the morale of the Japanese soldier… We developed a technique of… content analysis… and… noted reference to poor leadership, inadequacy of supplies, faith in the system, etc.”¹²

As the organizer and director of FMAD, Leighton assembled a team of preeminent US anthropologists to collaborate with. All had conducted decades of fieldwork and published on isolated and remote cultures in the US, such as the Navajo, Apache, and Zuni.  They were pioneers in ethnographic and cultural theories of applied anthropological practices. Also, as forerunners of “psychological anthropology,” they viewed culture as psychologists would through an individual patient’s perspective.¹³ They believed in “cultural relativism,” where one does not judge another culture by their own cultural standards, but rather by how that culture sees itself.¹⁴

This assembly of FMAD anthropologists would help shift anthropology’s influence from the periphery—studying isolated cultures—to the center of society. As social scientists, they became advisors and consultants to the US military and government. They shared their findings on the best ways to perceive and treat the people of the nations with which they were at war and how their later role as occupying forces might unfold.

For example, as my father relayed, “Three months before the atom bomb was dropped on Japan this unit  [FMAD] put out a report that went all the way to General Marshall [(1880-1959), Chief of Staff of US Army and architect of the postwar Marshall Plan] saying Japan was ready to surrender.”¹⁵ Though ultimately FMAD’s report was ignored and the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As later critics would argue, these nuclear bombings might have been executed as a demonstration of US military might, not only to the Japanese but also to the Soviet Union.¹⁶

Indeed, Leighton’s Foreign Morale Analysis Division would be recognized as a pioneering organization where “the application of psycho-anthropological insights and methods of government policy” would be held up as a future model for setting foreign policy and strategizing international order.¹⁷

David H. Price (b. 1960), a contemporary American anthropologist, who specializes in the discipline’s interactions with military and intelligence agencies, writes in Lessons from Second World War anthropology (2002): “Anthropologists… contribute[d] their specialized knowledge to the war effort. …the methods they had developed for understanding varied modes of life permitted them to give realistic aid to the intelligence units...”¹⁸

Furthermore, Price states, “[Their] most important work consisted of fighting attitudes of racial reductionism within the US War Department.” And he maintains, it is the “basic responsibility of anthropologists to serve rather than fight or oppress those we study.”¹⁹  

FMAD Anthropologists

Working with this team of innovative cultural relativists and psychological anthropologists at the age of twenty-three must have whetted my father’s appetite for what would become his lifelong career in the discipline and, with their personal support, altered the trajectory of his private life as well.

Clyde Kluckholn (1905–1960) was Leighton’s co-director at FMAD and the founder of psychological anthropology. He was also a professor of Social Anthropology and Social Relations at Harvard University (1936–60) and would offer my father entry to his department at Harvard University as a PhD student—a position which Iwao later attained in 1947.²⁰

Morris E. Opler (1907–1996) served as Leighton’s deputy chief at FMAD and had worked in the Manzanar camp for the US Community Analysis Section (1943-1944).²¹ Subsequently, he became an opponent of the Nikkei mass incarceration. He wrote amicus briefs for the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in their US Supreme Court cases against the US: Hirabayashi (1943) and Korematsu (1944). Opler and his wife later hosted my parents at their home while my father was a PhD student at Harvard (1947–49). Out of gratitude, when I was born in 1952, my parents named me Catherine after Opler’s wife.

Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) was another leading psychological anthropologist hired by Leighton.²² She was already well known for her groundbreaking 1934 anthropology book, Patterns of Culture. While my father was at FMAD, Benedict worked on her highly influential and popular book, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which was published in 1946.²³ (Unusual for an anthropological book, it had sold 2.3 million copies in Japan and 350,000 in the US by 1999.) In it, Benedict claimed Japan had contradictory personality traits and traditions concerning its “shame” versus “guilt” culture. She also maintained that the Emperor played a central role in the country’s popular culture, regarding him as a divine descendant of the nation’s sun goddess, Amaterasu. Benedict further proposed to President FDR that the US allow the Emperor’s reign to continue symbolically to sweeten Japan’s final surrender offer. Her book shaped American perceptions of Japanese culture during its US occupation, possibly influencing my father as well.  

Marriage and Military (1944–47)

“I arrived in Washington, DC, yesterday [January 27, 1944] and tonight I attend a USO Dance for Japanese American Soldiers at the Calvary Baptist Church. I met [my future wife]… there for the first time in DC.”

—Iwao Ishino, 2010²⁴

My Nisei mother, Mary Tomiko Kobayashi (1923–2015), told me that her first memory of seeing my father was at Poston, where he sat behind a large table wearing a pair of saddle shoes. He may have interviewing incarcerees for Leighton’s public opinion surveys.

Why did she remember his footwear? Perhaps it was because she was a 19-year-old country girl who grew up alongside her five older brothers on her father’s poultry farm and wasn’t accustomed to seeing such stylish shoes. My father must have seemed to her like a sophisticated city boy.

As fate and synchronicity would have it, my parents later met again in Washington, D.C., at a USO dance and began dating in January 1944. As my father’s sister wrote in the Rafu Shimpo, “He…enjoyed ballroom dancing and was an excellent dancer. …The mothers of the girls he dated often told me how impressed they were with Iwa and what a gentleman he was.”²⁵

My mother had moved to the area in the spring of 1943, as did her three elder brothers, Fred, Roy, and Bill. The brothers had been raising chickens at Poston and were brought to D.C. by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes (1874–1952) to work on his poultry farm. They were graduates of California Polytechnic School in poultry husbandry because their father, Sahichiro Kobayashi, had sent them there to prepare for eventually taking over the family farm. Ickes recruited the brothers to demonstrate his advocacy for resettling the Nikkei out of the camps to the President.²⁶

* * * * *

Two days after Iwao arrived in DC on January 20, 1944, the War Department reinstated the draft for Nisei. He was reclassified from 4-C, “enemy alien,” to 1-A, making him eligible for the draft. And that spring, the first segregated Nisei soldier units, the 442 Regional Combat Team and the 110th Battalion, were on their way to fight in the deadly battles of Italy and France.²⁷

In early summer 1944, Iwao learned he had three weeks to report to the recruiting office. During that first week, he proposed to my mother. They married the following week on June 18th. In the third week, they went on their honeymoon to a Virginia hotel, where their travel agency had booked them as a couple from the Philippine Embassy to avoid discrimination.

When Iwao returned to the FMAD office, he discovered that he had received a “Presidential Dispensation,” likely due to the work he had been doing at the Pentagon. As a result, he continued working there until he was drafted into the army in January 1946. By this time, World War II had ended (September 1945) and the US occupation of Japan had begun. There was a need for interpreters and translators in the military, so Iwao was assigned “to join the ranks of one of the most selective military units,” the US Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS) in Presidio, California.²⁸ He spent the next eighteen months in this unit (January 1946 to August 1947).

When MISLS asked if Iwao was interested in signing up for another eighteen months, he instead chose to contact Professor Cluckholn at Harvard University, who had earlier suggested that he reach out to him in his anthropology department to attain his PhD. He was accepted as a graduate student in June 1947.

All of these stints—BSR, FMAD, MISLS, and Harvard—would unwittingly align and prepare Iwao for his future specialization in cultural anthropology focusing on Japanese and Japanese American culture.

 

To be continued…

* * * * *

Notes

1. Martha Aladjem Bloomfield and Stephen Garr Ostrander, “We Didn’t Know How Our Future Would Be,” The Sweetness of Freedom: Stories of Immigrants (Michigan State University Press, 2010), 232.
2. Greg Robinson, “War Relocation Authority,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed April 9, 2025.
3. Shiho Imai, “Dillon Myer,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed April 28, 2025.
4. Bloomfield and Ostrander, “We Didn’t Know,” 232.
5. Matthew Linton, “President Obama's Moral Revolution and Its Dying Vanguard,” accessed April 28, 2025; “The Governing of Men: general principles and recommendations based on experience at a Japanese relocation camp,” PsycINFO Database Record, accessed April 11, 2025; “Time Magazine: Japs Are Human.” June 25, 1945, accessed April 13, 2025. For more detail see Poston Concentration Camp (1942–1944) in part 1 of this series.
6. Karen Inouye, “Bureau of Sociological Research, Poston,” Densho Encyclopedia, June 23, 2024.
7. One that they would maintain until Leighton’s death in 2007.
8. Thomas Ishino was born on January 27, 1942. Thomas Ishino- video oral history,
9. Bloomfield and Ostrander, “We Didn’t Know,” 231.
10. I wondered how he must have felt when he first stepped into the Pentagon building while many of his Nikkei compatriots remained incarcerated by the very government that had hired him. I only remember him telling me how amazed he was that the delivery of inner office mail was done by messengers on bicycles as the building was so large. Also, he told me how at the end of every day, his wastebasket was picked up and the contents were shredded.
11. Bloomfield and Ostrander, “We Didn’t Know,” 232.
12. Bloomfield and Ostrander, “We Didn’t Know,” 232.
13. Andrew Beatty, “Psychological Anthropology,” Oxford Bibliographies, April 24, 2019. 
14. Mayanthi Fernandao, “Cultural Relativism,” Oxford Bibliographies, June 25, 2023. 
15. Fernandao, “Cultural Relativism”; Bloomfield and Ostrander, “We Didn’t Know,” 232.
16. Michael R. Beschloss, “Did We Need to Drop It?”, The New York Times, July 30, 1995. 
17. D. G. and M. J. Mandelbaum, Review: Anthropology, Political Behavior, and International Relations, World Politics 2, no. 2 (1950): 277–84. Accessed April 10, 2025.
18. David H. Price, “Lessons from Second World War anthropology: Peripheral, persuasive and ignored contributions,” Anthropology Today 18, no. 3 (June 2002): 14–20. 14. Accessed March 26, 2025.
19. Price, “Lessons from Second World War anthropology,” 18, 20.
20. Talcott Parsons and Evon Z. Vogt, “Clyde Key Mayben Kluckhohn 1905-1960,” American Anthropologist 64, no. 1 (February 1962): 140–61. Accessed April 9, 2025.
21. Brian Hayashi. “Community Analysts,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed April 25, 2025.
22. Ruth Fulton Benedict: National Women's Hall of Fame, accessed April 10, 2025.
23. Pauline Kent, “Japanese Perceptions of ‘The Chrysanthemum and the Sword’,” Dialectical Anthropology, 24, no. 2 (1999): 181–92. Accessed April 10, 2005.
24. Timeline notes my father sent to me while I was working on a design installation for my Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art at Michigan State University. CJ Ishino Internment Installation, portfolio, installation, spaces of (re)remembrances.
25. Maggie Ishino, “OCHAZUKEL Thank you, Big Brother.” Accessed April  25, 2025.
26. “Kobayashis of Poston Arrive To Take Jobs on Ickes Farm,” Pacific Citizen, Thursday, April 22, 1943, 3, accessed April 16, 2025; Howard R. Hollem, photographer. Office of War Information. "Three Japanese-Americans from the Colorado River Relocation Center...", picryl. January 1, 1943. Accessed April 16, 2025.
27. The 442nd segregated Nisei unit is renowned for being the most decorated for its size and length of service in US military history because of its bravery and service. Franklin Odo, “442nd Regimental Combat Team,” “100th Infantry Battalion,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed April 12, 2025
28. “Because of the highly classified and secret nature of these missions, knowledge of the work of many MIS soldiers was largely missing during the war and even decades afterwards. The role and activities of the MIS was kept in secrecy for more than 30 years; the few records about its activities were finally made available to the public in 1972 under the Freedom of Information Act, however much still remains unknown today.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Intelligence_Service_(United_States); Kelli Nakamura, “Military Intelligence Service Language School,” Densho Encyclopedia, accessed April 26, 2025.

 

© 2025 Catherine Jo Ishino