Not all camp newspapers reached for so much, so early on. At the Manzanar internment camp in California, the U.S. government's Office of Official Reports cleared and censored all documents. The camp's newspaper, the Manzanar Free Press, could not directly criticize the policy of rounding up and confining Japanese Americans. (It was, however, permitted to write short, purely factual stories on the legal challenges to the policy.)
"It was just a camp newspaper whose writers and editors were told what to put in the paper," says Togo Tanaka, who was twenty-four when he joined the Free Press's staff as an errand boy.
The name of the newspaper was a joke to Manzanar's occupants, who thought of the camp and the newspaper as anything but free. The Free Press provided information about regulations in the camp--when the curfew was, and where to line up to eat. It did not give voice to the frustration of the camp's occupants. "There was a lot of dissatisfaction," Tanaka says. But "if you wrote an angry editorial criticizing the government policy, you weren't likely to stay on the staff too long … You could be disciplined or reprimanded, or maybe your food would be restricted."
Even Japanese American newspapers outside the camps faced pressure not to express certain opinions in their editorials. "We couldn't say directly anything that would be critical of the U.S. government policy, so we had to be oblique about it," said James Omura, editor of the Rocky Shimpo newspaper in Denver, during a PBS interview. "I couldn't tell people to organize, but in essence, I was telling them to organize."
Omura, who protested the Japanese American internment and the draft, was arrested for conspiracy to counsel draft evasion. Government prosecutors used his articles as evidence against him in court. He sought protection under the First Amendment and was eventually found not guilty.
Today, many of the Japanese American journalists who worked during the internment years say they do not remember much about the camps, or try not to. "We just wanted to forget all about that," Tanaka says.
Still, they are proud of what their newspapers accomplished. If the government
placed restrictions on their work, the camp journalists still managed
to carry out their responsibility to chronicle their communities. For
that reason, even newspapers like the Manzanar Free Press served
a purpose, Tanaka says: "It was important that we published those papers
and recorded that part of history."
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