given a number, 23146, examined by a medical officer, relieved of any straight razors or other contraband, and assigned to a bed. Since the outcome of the war was unknowable, there was no long-term plan other than to keep people like him imprisoned indefinitely. At the end of May 1942, he was transferred out of Santa Anita to Poston, a permanent camp in western Arizona.
Poston was situated on a sprawling acreage in the middle of the Arizona desert. It was encircled by a barbed-wire fence, but the prospects of escape were so slim that the usual watchtowers were never constructed. Adobe buildings stood in for the wood and tarpaper barracks found in other camps. Irrigated fields provided supplements to the canned rations. That November a strike over inhumane treatment brought camp life to a standstill, with internees refusing to work and gathering in crowds before the camp’s jail. Local newspapers reported that a “Jap riot” had engulfed the facility. During another strike the next month at Manzanar, a camp in central California, soldiers fired into the crowd, killing two people.
The situation at Poston was resolved peacefully, but the upsurge in tension convinced officials of how little they knew about the people they were meant to superintend. By the end of the year, each of the ten facilities had a permanent “community analyst” on staff to help devise strategies to prevent rioting and to ensure the smooth operation of factories, schools, and recreation centers. Public relations materials and government reports featured photographs of watermelon-eating contests, dungaree-clad teenagers, camp orchestras, and orderly transports by bus and train. “Great care was exercised for the comfort of the evacuees traveling from Assembly Centers to War Relocation Centers,” as one summary stated. “Each train carried a Caucasian physician and two nurses.” But the reports of social scientists on the ground were chronicles of shock, disbelief, and sadness. “A mass evacuation of people on the basis of Japanese ancestry…has created in many evacuees a sense of disillusionment or even bitterness in regard to American democracy,” wrote one social scientist. “Armed guards, barbed wire fences, search-lights, visits of government agents, all engender the feeling of being in a concentration camp.”
Poston soon became the centerpiece of the WRA’s applied social science program. A psychiatrist and Naval Reserve officer, Alexander Leighton, gathered a battery of young non-Japanese anthropologists and sociologists, some with no more than a master’s degree. Their task was to offer advice on the proper governance of a sprawling facility, none of whose inhabitants had any desire to be there. Leighton recruited inmates to administer surveys, write up field notes, and provide expert advice on everything from cultural norms to canteen food.
In the racial hierarchy of the camp system, issei were at the bottom: first-generation immigrants and therefore, given the 1924 race-restrictive immigration act, ineligible for citizenship. Nisei were U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, whose children were in turn sansei, or third-generation Japanese Americans. Those categories could determine access to better housing and medical care, and even to better day-to-day behavior from a military policeman or camp commandant. Hashima, however, was kibei, a natural-born American who had been educated in Japan, the very highest rank. In the chaos of 1942, with people piling bundles of belongings onto train cars, closing down their businesses, and desperately trying to find a white neighbor willing to look after a house or apartment, that label could make all the difference.
Through John Embree, one of the social scientists employed at Poston, Leighton made the acquaintance of Hashima and quickly realized the young man’s potential importance beyond the fence. Hashima knew Japan and the United States from the inside and was uniquely suited to becoming a cultural interpreter. Not long afterward the camp authorities notified him that he was to be released on special assignment. He was soon on his way to Washington and a job on the staff of the OWI. That is where he got to know “a lady, who was slender and had beautiful silver hair,” as he later recalled.
The two first met when Benedict appeared at his desk and asked him to translate a haiku. Over the next several months, Hashima became Benedict’s sounding board. She had relied on the work of Embree and other experts and had consumed memos written by colleagues in the OWI. Hashima, though, was different. In conversations and written correspondence, “Bob,” as she came to call him, served as a private tutor on everything from the Japanese tea ceremony to the captured