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Siting of the Assembly Centers
The first phase entailed taking residents from their houses and putting them in military-controlled detention facilities nearby. After Japanese Americans started reporting to collection points near their homes, they were relocated to assembly centers. With a total of seventeen centers, many of them were in California but some were Arizona, Washington, and Oregon. The locations of these centers in California were: Fresno, Owens Valley, Marysville, Merced, Pinedale, Pornona, Sacramento, Salinas, Santa Anita, Stockton, Tanforan, Tulare, and Turlock. The centers in Arizona were located at Mayer and Parker Darn. One of the centers was in Portland, Oregon. The final center was in Puyallup, Washington. The largest assembly center was in Santa Anita. The Merced Assembly Center had a maximum population of 4,508 people. Eleven of the assembly centers were at racetracks and fairgrounds. The others were: unsuitable facilities, migrant workers camps, abandoned corps, and a former mill site. The owners of eleven racetracks and fairgrounds signed leases with the government. The mess halls of the centers became potential breeding sites for epidemic outbreaks, compounding the health dangers of the unsanitary living quarters. All of them were staffed by inexperienced personnel who lacked basic hygiene and food-handling skills. The army was aware and concerned with the assembly centers: “Assembly Centers are not and cannot, without the expenditure of tremendous sums of money for space and facilities in duplication of those which will be provided on relocation sites, be designed to permit the development and maintenance of a vocational, educational, recreational and social program. Long residence in an assembly center is bound to have a demoralizing effect” (52).