Captured: The Japanese Internment of American Civilians in the Philippines, 1941-1945

8. Idle Hands Are the Devil's Playground: Work in the Camps

Idle Hands Are the Devils Playground Work in the Camps Under the best of circumstances, being crowded in with others and lacking basic privacy cause friction, even without disliking fellow internees personally. The fact that the missionaries were people many of the other internees would have avoided, as the missionaries would have ignored them had they not been in a camp with them, made the friction even worse. Signs of distress began to appear at Los Banos. Explains Carol Terry, "Nerves are tested to the breaking point. The W7ay another ties his shoes or combs his hair may get on one's nerves until he has to get away from the barracks and walks up and down the camp roads until nerves are quieted"(57). The fluctuating camp population —at one point 2,146 internees in Los 225 8 226 Captured Bafios, 3,785 in Santo Tomas, and 468 in Baguio/Bilibid (Hartendorp, II, 466), demanded a variety of work be done both to make the overcrowding bearable and to maintain reasonable public health standards. Work functioned , then, not only as a necessary means to a healthful end but also as a way on a regular basis throughout the war for internees to pass the time productively and to keep from driving each other crazy in close quarters. According to internee Alice Bryant,all "able-bodied internees who were not superannuated" were supposed to work (151). Both the kinds of shelter and the work connected with each camp varied among the camps, as did food supplies, administrative rules, and health. "Able-bodied" also meant different degrees of "ableness" in different camps, as illness and malnutrition increasingly decreased the ranks of those able to pick up a bucket, gather firewood, or sweep out quarters with a twig broom. To understand the nature of the work with which the internees filled their time (or which they did to maintain the camp), "work" needs to be defined in terms of both the public good and self-maintenance. Understanding this thoroughly reveals not only the pressure, grievances, and attitudes of internees but also their unremitting labor and basic courage in insisting on a bearable existence , if only through their own unrelenting efforts. As Jim Halsema notes, these efforts were "a common characteristic ofAmerican-run camps" because of "the determination of their inhabitants to improve their environments, not to accept them as found" (Halsema Itr, May 21, 1997). Examining work in a variety of camps (Hay/Holmes, Bilibid, Bacolod, Cebu, Davao, Los Bafios, and Santo Tomas) helps illuminate the daily tasks they performed (some more physically demanding than others, in more primitive camps). Normally, life itself wasn't threatened by the work the internees did as itwas in the case of the POWs, who were forced, despite international law, to build airstrips, roads, and railroads for the Japanese military.Normally, publicworks for the internees were only in support of camp requirements or personal sanitation ; internees were rarelyused for militaryslave labor, though there appears to have been an exception made in Davao Internment Camp on Mindanao. There internees were forced to load rock and sand into trucks, repair bridges, and load supplies (sacks of rice) for the military on a ship as well as other unspecified but "illegal" duties (Gary, April 14, 1942, 5; IMTFE, Reel 10, 12,800; Wills, 17). Forced internee labor also happened in Santo Tomas, though, unlike that in Davao, it didn't directly aid the military and supposedly was legal because it "improved" internee safety. Acting Commandant Onozaki ordered internees to dig post holes, string wire, and construct a barbed wire fence around the wall and near the gym, as well as to replace the sawali on the fence around the Idle Hands 227 seminary grounds. Despite protests by the Executive Committee and Grinnell himself, in addition to strident citations of the Geneva Convention, internees started the fence —under protest. The Internee Committee, facing threats of punishment both to themselves and to any able-bodied men who refused to work on the fence, agreed to the work but picked men for the job rather than forcing them (as the Japanese initially wanted) to volunteer. Through this, they actively participated in keeping themselves prisoners as they strung barbed wire intended to mark the perimeter of their prison. To be forced to 'Volunteer" to string the wire, which both symbolically and literally kept the internees inside the camp, was an insult...