13. Life in the camps was dependent on the individual camp leaders
Although the camps were operated by a government bureaucracy, daily life for what the government called internees, who were in fact prisoners, varied depending on their location. Some camps became notorious for the difficulties encountered by the Japanese Americans held within. Gila River War Relocation Center was a complex of detention camps established on the Gila River Indian Reservation, located south and east of Phoenix, Arizona. When it opened in the summer of 1942 it was intended to hold no more than 10,000, it eventually housed more than 13,000, including the mother of the woman known to history as Tokyo Rose, Iva Toguri. Gila River was built on land owned by the Gila River Indians, who were offered payment for its use. Despite strenuous objections on the part of the Indians, the land was taken and used anyway. The Gila Indians had to wait until the 1980s to receive compensation from the federal government.
The Gila River camps were considered to be one of the more comfortable camps of the WRA system, though there were continuous shortages of fresh water, and the buildings offered little relief from the desert heat. Its administrators stressed both education for children and recreation for all, and its residents, most of whom were relocated from Fresno and the Los Angeles region, created baseball leagues, with teams playing in a 6,000 seat ballpark. Though the baseball teams were well supplied the schools were not, textbooks were scarce, all classes were conducted in English, and classes which presented Japanese history and culture were banned. Among the residents interned at Gila River was Pat Morita, who later earned fame as an actor on the television series Happy Days and the Karate Kid motion pictures.