of helping migrants find housing.14 Rather, it amounted to implementing an overall quasi-official policy of dispersion of ethnic Japanese throughout the United States, and facilitating their absorption into the larger population.
The WRA, the War Department, the White House (notably First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt), and liberal and “fair play” groups—along with many Japanese Americans—broadly agreed that, by retarding assimilation and/ or restricting economic opportunity, the prewar ghettoization of Japanese Americans in “Little Tokyos” had helped inspire the hostility that led to evacuation. Therefore, despite their continuing conflicts over the justice of removal and the morality of the government's operation of the camps, these disparate groups joined forces to facilitate the scattering of the Japanese American population across the rest of the country. This, they believed, would be the best solution to the “Japanese problem” as it had existed on the West Coast, and would ensure that the tragedy of removal would never recur. WRA director Dillon Myer expressed a widely held view when he claimed in 1946 that, on the whole, the Nisei were actually better off in the long run for their confinement experience and diaspora, since they could now establish themselves on an equal basis with other Americans.15 As harsh and punitive as the destruction of ethnic Japanese communities may sound to present-day ears, these Americans—including many Japanese Americans, and not just the JACL—looked upon the relocation process as a providential opportunity for the Nisei to enter the larger society and ensure that the tragedy of removal would never recur.16
Government officials realized early that the key to opening the doors of the camps and ensuring the success of mass dispersal and resettlement lay in remaking the public image of the Nisei so as to reduce white suspicion and hostility toward Japanese Americans—a phenomenon for which the removal itself was largely responsible. Thus, although public relations figured only distantly, if at all, in the WRA's charter and initial mandate, the agency gradually shifted its program as the war proceeded. WRA staffers teamed up with colleagues from the Office of War Information (OWI) to produce an enormous pile of propaganda for public consumption, focusing jointly on the achievements of the WRA and on the loyalty and American character of the inmates.17 WRA efforts included informational pamphlets, documentary films, and speaking tours by WRA director Myer, former U.S. ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew, and Ben Kuroki, a Nisei war hero. The WRA and OWI also exerted pressure on publishers and film producers to promote responsible media images of Japanese Americans and avoid hostile depictions.18
Liberal groups outside the government, especially those opposed to incarceration, gladly collaborated with the government's media campaign. Some of them may well have privately deplored the WRA's heavy-handed management of the Nisei's public image and suppression of internal dissent—certainly many supporters of Japanese Americans with experience of the camps considered the official picture excessively rosy—but they obviously felt that it was in the interest of all to downplay their differences in light of the enormous public opposition to Japanese Americans.
It is not clear whether government censors ever vetted Miné Okubo's drawings or text before the piece was placed in This World. It is reasonable to assume as much, though, given the wartime restrictions on inmates and the interpolation of Dillon Myer's words into the text. Such review was in any case common practice. When Eleanor Roosevelt drafted an article in support of the Nisei for Collier's magazine, “A Challenge to American Sportsmanship,” she first submitted her draft text to Myer for comment.
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