Japanese POWs in Wisconsin Were Served White Rice — They Thought It Was a Death Row Meal

In a mess hall in Wisconsin, in the middle of a frozen American winter, Japanese prisoners of war sat down before trays of food — and on every tray stood a bowl of steaming, polished white rice. In the Japan they had left behind, rice like that was festival food. And in the code they had been raised on, there was one other man who was fed the very best his captors could offer: a condemned man, eating his last meal. The interrogation reports of the U.S. Army recorded what happened next, in camp after camp: men who would not eat — who sat in silence before the finest meal they had been offered in years, waiting to be taken outside and shot. This is the story of Camp McCoy, Wisconsin — the largest Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in the continental United States — told from the prisoners' side: the Senjinkun code that forbade surrender, capture and the shame of survival, the processing line at Angel Island, the trains across a continent, the Wisconsin winter, the camp's daily steamed rice with soy sauce and chopsticks, the secret interrogations of ATIS and Camp Tracy, the farm details, the Buddhist services with incense supplied by the YMCA, and the long disbelief of August 1945. Of the 425,871 prisoners of war held in the United States, only 5,413 were Japanese — and 2,700 of them, half of all the Japanese prisoners in America, ended up behind the wire of this one Wisconsin camp, beside nearly 3,000 Germans and 500 Koreans. Drawing on the interrogation and research reports of the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS), the prisoner-of-war records of the Office of the Provost Marshal General, the U.S. Army's own Fort McCoy POW camp history study, John W. Dower's "War Without Mercy" and Sidney F. Mashbir's "I Was an American Spy," the narration is an original script built on the documented record. The white-rice reaction is presented as the prisoner reaction pattern recorded by ATIS interrogation reports and camp accounts; no words are invented for any prisoner. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Meal That Meant Death 0:59 The Code of No Surrender 1:57 Taken Alive 2:49 The Long Way to Wisconsin 3:52 Camp McCoy 4:59 The Wisconsin Winter 5:57 Waiting for Punishment 7:00 White Rice 8:14 Fed Like Soldiers 9:21 The Questions 10:21 Work Behind the Wire 11:20 Hands and Prayers 12:27 What Washington Learned 13:35 The Names They Hid 14:38 August 1945 15:48 The Numbers 16:54 Going Home — 1946 18:00 The Verdict Sources are credited in the film's closing card: ATIS interrogation & research reports (1942–46); Office of the Provost Marshal General POW records & camp population reports (1945); Fort McCoy WWII POW camp history study, Directorate of Public Works, U.S. Army; Dower (1986); Mashbir (1953). Photographs: U.S. Signal Corps & U.S. Army via the National Archives and Wikimedia Commons (public domain); the Angel Island prisoner inscription photograph is by the National Park Service (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons. #WWII #POW #Japan #Wisconsin #History #Documentary Displaying desc62.txt.