8 - Prison City

Summary

Chapter 8 links and compares two case studies. The sites of the Canadian and US internment or incarceration of people of Japanese origin were spatially initiated through their demarcation of a strip of land along the Pacific coast varying approximately inland as an exclusion area. The Canadian government moved “members of the Japanese race” in British Columbia, including Canadian citizens, into the mountainous terrain of the Kootenays region. Camps, named Assembly Centers and Relocation Centers, were designed as prison cities laid out in grid systems with repetitive rows of standard military barracks, using US Army Corps of Engineers standard plans. Using Manzanar and New Denver as case histories, the chapter examines how incarcerated civilian populations immediately set about altering the camp environments to make them more habitable.