For Japanese-Americans, Housing Injustices Outlived Internment

In the latest article from “Beyond the World War II We Know,” a series by The Times that documents lesser-known stories from World War II, we look back at how Japanese-Americans who had been interned during the war fared after the Japanese surrender.

On the second weekend of May 1946, more than 500 Japanese-Americans arrived at a dusty, ripped-up corner of Los Angeles County adjacent to a Lockheed Corporation bomber factory. Their bags were unloaded and piled next to bulldozers still planing the dirt outside their new homes, a cobbled-together assortment of used federal housing trailers in glistening silver and bland shades of green.

As the children — who made up nearly two-thirds of the new tenants — played, their parents and grandparents inspected the homes of the new Winona trailer camp. Fewer than a fifth of the trailers had working stoves, and those that did were in such disrepair that four fires ignited in one day. Broken windows and unlockable doors were common. The only phone was protected by a guard whose stated duty was to secure only the property of the site’s contractors, not its residents. There was no food, electricity or heat. Toilets were housed in a communal building, and not connected to the sewer.

“The trailers were so filthy that an animal should not have been expected to live in them,” said Seldon Martin, a Social Security Board official responsible for overseeing the well-being of the occupants, after visiting the camp. “Undoubtedly it was worse than any housing the Japanese had to put up with during evacuation.”