Problems arose at once at Tanforan, but before the week was out the evacuees had organized themselves. After taking a democratic vote to elect their representatives, among whom Heideko Fukuda was the only woman, they registered the adults according to their professions and skills—teachers, farmers, carpenters, blacksmiths, accountants, doctors. Then they started a school without either pencils or notebooks, and put sports and other activities on the schedule to keep the young people busy so as to combat their frustration and boredom. The evacuees spent much of the day and night lining up, for the shower, hospital, religious services, mail, and three meals in the canteens; they had to show a great deal of patience to avoid disturbances and fights. There was a daily curfew, and a twice-daily roll call. Speaking in Japanese was prohibited, which made life impossible for the issei. To prevent the guards from intervening, the internees themselves took charge of keeping order and controlling any troublemakers, but no one could stop the rumors from swirling around, which frequently caused panic. People tried to stay polite, so that the hardship, the crowded living conditions, and the humiliation were more tolerable.
Six months later, on the eleventh of September, the detainees began to be transferred by train. Nobody knew where they were headed. After a day and two nights of travel on dilapidated, suffocating trains with few toilets and no lights in the dark hours, crossing desolate landscapes they did not recognize and that many confused with Mexico, they came to a halt at Delta station in Utah. From there they continued the journey in trucks and buses to Topaz, the Jewel of the Desert, as the concentration camp had been called, possibly without any ironic intent. The filthy evacuees were trembling and half-dead from exhaustion but had not been hungry or thirsty, because sandwiches had been handed out in each carriage, and there were baskets full of oranges.
At an altitude of more than four thousand feet, Topaz was a ghastly makeshift city of identical low buildings like a military base. It was ringed by barbed wire, tall watchtowers, and armed soldiers, and was set in an arid, godforsaken landscape that was lashed by the wind and whirling dust storms. The other -Japanese concentration camps in the West were similar, and placed in -desert areas to discourage any attempt at escape. There was not a single tree or bush to be seen, nothing green in any direction, only rows of gloomy huts stretching to the horizon. Families huddled together, holding hands to avoid getting lost in the confusion. They all needed to use the latrines but had no idea where they were. It took the guards several hours to organize the new arrivals, because they did not understand the instructions either, but they finally assigned all the accommodations.
The Fukuda family defied the dust clouding the air and making it hard to breathe, and found their allotted lodging. Each hut was divided into six units measuring roughly twelve by twenty feet per family, separated by thin partitions of tar paper. There were twelve huts per block, forty-two blocks in total; each of them had a canteen, laundry, showers, and latrines. The camp occupied a vast area, but the eight thousand evacuees had to live in little more than seven thousand square feet. The detainees were soon to discover that the temperature varied between an infernal heat in the summer and several degrees below zero in the winter. In the summer months, as well as the terrible heat, they had to endure the constant onslaught of mosquitoes and dust storms that darkened the sky and scorched their lungs. The wind blew all year round, bringing with it the stench of the sewage that formed a swamp a half mile from the camp.
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