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The Jerome War Relocation Center was a Japanese American internment camp located in southeastern Arkansas near the town of Jerome. Open from October 6, 1942, until June 30, 1944, it was the last relocation camp to open and the first to close, and at one point it held as many as 8,497 inhabitants.〔(Japanese-American Internment Sites Preservation "Japanese-American Internment Sites Preservation" ), a report from the National Park Service.〕〔Niiya, Brian. "(Jerome )," ''Densho Encyclopedia''. Retrieved 5 August 2014.〕 After closing, it was converted into a holding camp for German prisoners of war.〔 Today, there are few remains of the camp still visible, the most prominent being the smokestack from the hospital incinerator. Jerome is located southwest of the Rohwer War Relocation Center,〔 Due to the large number of Japanese Americans detained there, these two camps were briefly the fifth and sixth largest towns in Arkansas. Both camps were served by the same rail line. A high granite monument marks the camp location and history. The marker is located on US Highway 165, at County Road 210, approximately 8 miles south of Dermott, Arkansas. On December 21, 2006, President George W. Bush signed H.R. 1492 into law guaranteeing $38,000,000 in federal money to restore the Jerome relocation center along with nine other former Japanese internment camps. The 2004 PBS documentary film ''Time of Fear'' outlines this history of the camp and the similar camp in nearby Rohwer, Arkansas. ==History of the camp== After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 brought the United States into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized military leaders to declare the West Coast a military zone from which persons who posed a threat to security could be excluded. This allowed for the "evacuation" of 120,000 Japanese Americans, who were rounded up and placed into concentration camps isolated in the country's interior. The Jerome War Relocation Camp was located in Southeast Arkansas in Chicot and Drew Counties. It was one of two relocation centers in Arkansas, the other being at Rohwer, north of Jerome. The Jerome site was situated on of tax-delinquent land in the marshy delta of the Mississippi River's flood plain that had been purchased in the 1930s by the Farm Security Administration. Despite initial resistance from then-Governor Homer Adkins — who only agreed to allow the camp after exacting a guarantee that the Japanese American inmates would be watched by armed white guards and removed from the state at the end of the war — the War Relocation Authority acquired the land in 1942.〔 The A. J. Rife Construction Company of Dallas, Texas, working under the supervision of the Army Corps of Engineers, built the Jerome camp at a cost of $4,703,347. The architect of the camp, Edward F. Neild of Shreveport, Louisiana, also designed the camp at Rohwer in Desha County.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Neild, Edward F. )〕 Jerome was divided into 50 blocks surrounded by a barbed wire fence, a patrol road, and seven watchtowers. Administrative and community spaces such as schools, offices and the hospital were separate from the 36 residential blocks, which each consisted of twelve barracks divided into several "apartments" in addition to communal dining and sanitary facilities. Approximately 250 to 300 individuals lived in each block.〔 The only entrances were from the main highway on the west and at the back of the camp to the east. The camp was not finished when its first inmates began to arrive from California assembly centers, and these early arrivals worked to complete construction.〔 It was the last center to open and the first to close, and was only in operation for 634 days — the fewest number of days of any of the relocation camps. The constant movement of camp populations makes completely accurate statistics difficult. As of January 1943, the camp had a population of 7,932 people, and the following month Jerome reached its peak at nearly 8,500. Most had lived in Los Angeles or farmed in and around Fresno and Sacramento before the war, but some ten percent of Jerome's population came from Hawai'i.〔 Fourteen percent were over the age of sixty, and there were 2,483 school age children in the camp, thirty-one percent of the total population. Thirty-nine percent of the residents were under the age of nineteen. Sixty-six percent were American citizens, having been born in the United States. The Issei, or first-generation, parents and grandparents of these children, who were prohibited from obtaining citizenship along with other East Asians, were officially referred to as "aliens." The camp was closed at the end of June 1944 and turned into a German prisoner of war camp called Camp Dermott. Many inmates had already been transferred to the Tule Lake camp in California and, upon closing, most of the remaining camp residents were sent to Rohwer and Gila River.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jerome War Relocation Center」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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