The internment camps used to house Japanese Americans during World War II were crummy looking, make shift buildings which were built in a rush to detain the evacuees. Once in the camps, all class distinctions were blurred. People lived in the same shabby quarters, ate the same meals together in mess hall. The houses were separated only by narrow allies used for fire escape routes. The Camp Harmony Exhibit page in the online archive of the University of Washington gives insight into how demeaning the camps were to the incarcerated internees during this time and how such civil rights were denied. Armed guards patrolled the grounds surrounding each of the barracks and along the barbed wire fences enclosing the camps. In some cases the Japanese Americans were prohibited from bei

Howard Reich, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune wrote an article about Camp Harmony at Washington State Fair Grounds in Puyallup, Washington and how camp survivors listened to swing music to get by. Many of the internees turned to the jazz tunes of Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, and Art Shaw. Some even started their own bands and played for their fellow inmates. Art Hayashi was one of the internment survivors who played in one of these bands. He said, “The music got our minds off the war and what was happening to us. We’d be so concerned about the music; it took our minds off of the bad things.” Though the bands may not have sounded too great the bands were received like “a godsend” by the confined persons (1).

The Camp Harmony Exhibit also expresses the Japanese’s’ need to create some sort of educational structure. The Exhibit’s School downloads shares that classes were offered to both children and adults and ranged from general elementary and secondary education to teaching Americanization classes to the older residents of the camp. Many of the internees were high school aged teenagers. The classes taken in the many relocation camps went along with the curriculum of some of the areas local school departments. However in many instances students were not allowed off grounds to attend graduation ceremonies and were either mailed there diplomas or a small commencement party was held in the camp itself. Churches also held religion and CCD classes (1-2).

The Japanese Americans used their recreation programs as an attempt to make positive strides to achieving their normal lifestyles while they were incarcerated in the internment camps. Things were, in a way, done in spite of the American government and their ideas. Internees’ ability to find ways to turn the relocation site experience into a sort of small community was a way of showing defiance to the government and letting them know that they could not keep Japanese American morale and cultural values down.

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