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The Rohwer War Relocation Center was a World War II Japanese American internment camp located in rural southeastern Arkansas, in Desha County. It was in operation from September 18, 1942 until November 30, 1945, and held as many as 8,475 Japanese Americans forcibly evacuated from California.〔Niiya, Brian. "(Rohwer )" ''Densho Encyclopedia''. Retrieved 2014-05-29.〕 The Rohwer War Relocation Center Cemetery is located here, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1992.〔 ==History== The of land on which Rohwer was built had been purchased by the Farm Security Administration from tax-delinquent landowners in the 1930s. It remained largely abandoned until the War Relocation Authority, which oversaw the World War II incarceration program, took it over in 1942. (Then-Governor Homer Adkins initially opposed the WRA's proposal to build Rohwer and its neighbor, Jerome, in Arkansas, but relented after ensuring that the Japanese American inmates would be kept by armed white guards and would be removed from the state at the end of the war.) The Linebarger-Senne Construction Company was contracted to build the camp at a cost of $4.8 million and worked under the supervision of the Army Corps of Engineers. The land was heavily forested and swampy due to its proximity to the Mississippi River, only 5 miles to the east, which made the clearing and draining necessary to build on the site a difficult and slow-going task. The camp was still under construction when the first inmates began to arrive, but ultimately there were administrative offices, schools, a hospital, and 36 residential blocks, each with twelve 20' by 120' barracks divided into several "apartments" and communal dining and sanitary facilities, all contained within a guarded barbed-wire fence.〔 The architect of the camp was Edward F. Neild of Shreveport, Louisiana, who also designed the camp at Jerome.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Neild, Edward F. )〕 Rohwer opened on September 18, 1942 and reached a peak population of 8,475 by March 1943, most of whom had come from Los Angeles or the San Joaquin Valley in California. A large portion of Rohwer inmates were school-age children, and about 2,000 students attended the camp's schools, which were opened on November 9, 1942 after some delay. Adults took jobs with the administration, hospital, schools, and mess halls, in addition to agricultural work or labor details outside camp. With only of the site used for residences and other buildings, the remainder of Rohwer's land was used to grow over 100 agricultural products, which supplemented the inmates' food rations (kept to a bare minimum of 37 cents a day per inmate to avoid feeding rumors that the WRA was "coddling" Japanese Americans).〔 In 1943, the WRA required all adults in Rohwer and the other camps to submit to a series of questions. Officially, it was presented as the registration process to obtain clearance to leave camp for work or school — and it was initially distributed only to the citizen Nisei who were eligible for leave, before being extended to the first-generation Issei — but administrators soon began to focus instead on assessing the loyalty of imprisoned Japanese Americans. The "loyalty questionnaire," as it came to be known, created anger and confusion because of two questions that asked Japanese Americans to volunteer for military service (despite their mistreatment by the government and the army) and to forswear their allegiance to the Emperor of Japan (despite the fact that many had never held such allegiance in the first place). The loyalty questionnaire and subsequent recruitment efforts proved especially unpopular in Jerome, which was located only 27 miles south of Rohwer. Only 2 percent of eligible men in Jerome (and in Rohwer) enlisted, and 2,147 others, a quarter of Jerome's population, were designated "disloyal" after giving unfavorable responses to the questionnaire and transferred to the "segregation center" at Tule Lake, California.〔Niiya, Brian. "(Jerome )" ''Densho Encyclopedia''. Retrieved 2014-08-07.〕 The decline in population, combined with earlier unrest over working conditions in the camp, led Jerome authorities to close the camp at the end of June 1944, and a significant number of former Jerome inmates were then transferred to Rohwer. Rohwer was the last WRA camp to close, besides the Tule Lake Segregation Center, on November 30, 1945.〔 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「Rohwer War Relocation Center」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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