Being incarcerated at a place like Manzanar convinced Kurihara that America—both its people and its government—held DeWitt’s view that “a Jap is a Jap”; nothing could ever prove his loyalty. Kurihara wasn’t alone. In her book Impossible Subjects, the historian Mae Ngai argues that the experience of internment ultimately fostered in many Japanese Americans what the removal orders had been meant to contain: disloyalty.
Tensions between supporters of the JACL and dissidents like Kurihara exploded on December 5, 1942, when masked men entered the barrack of Fred Tayama, the president of the organization’s Los Angeles chapter, and beat him with clubs. Tayama identified Harry Ueno, an ally of Kurihara’s, as one of his assailants. Ueno was arrested by camp authorities, though he was widely perceived as innocent.
The next day, thousands of Ueno’s supporters rallied outside the mess hall, where Kurihara accused Tayama and other JACL leaders of informing on incarcerees deemed insufficiently pro-American to camp administrators and the FBI. “Why permit that sneak to pollute the air we breathe?” he asked, referring to Tayama. “Let’s kill him and feed him to the roving coyotes!”
When negotiations with camp administrators over Ueno’s release collapsed, a crowd mobilized to free him from the camp’s jail and hunt down Tayama and the others Kurihara had condemned. At the jail, military police deployed tear gas to disperse them. Amid the smoke, two soldiers fired live rounds. Two young men were killed; 10 others were wounded.
The shooting ended what became known to some as the “Manzanar Uprising,” and to others as the “Manzanar Riot.” The men Kurihara had threatened were removed from the camp and eventually resettled throughout the country; their status as his targets was apparently sufficient proof of their loyalty. Kurihara, it turned out, was correct—Tayama and the others he’d identified had been reporting “pro-Japanese” incarcerees to camp administrators and the FBI. Kurihara, Ueno, and other “troublemakers” were arrested and moved through a series of “isolation centers” for dissidents. Finally, they landed at a camp called Tule Lake, in remote Northern California, where they were initially held in a stockade.
Devastated by the deaths of the two men, Kurihara swore off camp politics and spent most of his time alone, reading his Bible and studying Japanese, a language he’d never mastered. Regardless of the war’s outcome, he had decided that as soon as he could, he would leave America forever.