Government testimony documented the physical and familial toll of the camps.

Evidence

The conditions at the prisons were dire. Masato Uyeda, one of those imprisoned who later testified before a government commission, remembered that the camps made their occupants feel like criminals. “Internees had to wear uniforms similar to prison garb and had numbers on their backs,” he said. “The camp was surrounded by barbed wire fences and the US Army patrolled the fences with machine guns mounted in jeeps.” Food shortages and overcrowding were common. “Upon our arrival we were told to stuff our mattresses with straw…. We lived in bare tar-papered barracks that were hastily constructed,” Grace Watanabe Kimura recalled. “We even had to share a room with another couple.” Another survivor, Shuzo Chris Kato, later testified, “The government destroyed the important family structure of the Japanese families by forcing them to eat in the mess halls and use communal showers and lavatories…. Everyone was forced to use out-houses since the sewer system had not been built.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 173

Categorization

• XREF: The testimonial structure — survivors’ testimony before a government commission — is the same evidentiary genre the reparations brief relies on; connects to why testimony matters as evidence.