As a child, Buddy felt marginalized by racism. At twelve, when the Uno family lived in Utah, he was rejected as a member of the Boy Scouts because of his race. In the 1930s in Utah, Japanese Americans were denied access to public swimming pools and sat in the balconies with African Americans in movie theaters.
Over time, Buddy grew curious about his Japanese heritage and in 1939 moved to Shanghai. When the war between Japan and the United States began, Buddy was an employee of the Japanese Army Press Bureau and was named editor of the government-controlled Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury. He wore an army uniform and brandished a military sword. One lieutenant colonel in the Japanese army described Uno as a “Yankeefied Japanese officer.” After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Buddy wrote an editorial that proclaimed, “The year 1942 will be remembered as a year of emancipation for the peoples of East Asia, for during the brief twelve months, through the consistent victories of the Imperial Nipponese Armed Forces, millions have been released from the shackles of Anglo-American imperialism.”
The Japanese army transferred Buddy to Bunka Camp in Tokyo, where American prisoners of war were held. At the camp, he attempted to coerce POWs into writing anti-American radio scripts for broadcast. Many POWs testified that Uno was abusive. George H. Henshaw, an American POW, wrote of Uno in his diary, “He threatened us with everything from a firing squad to the tortures of a Gestapo dungeon if anyone ever dared to question an order from this camp again.”
Given Buddy’s activities in Japan, the FBI of course profiled his father in Los Angeles. Agents made several trips to his home after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Kay Uno, the youngest of the ten children, remembered the moment on December 7, 1941, when she learned about Pearl Harbor. She was nine years old and on her way to Sunday-morning service at the Church of Christ, where the Uno family regularly worshipped. “We were in the car, going to church, and the radio was on and said that the war had started,” Kay wrote in an essay published in A Fence Away from Freedom. Her father turned the car around and went back home. Her brothers wanted to go outside to find out more about what was happening in Hawaii from their friends, but Riki, their mother, ordered them to stay inside: “You boys, you cannot go anywhere.”
Kay’s brothers shared a love of model airplanes, which hung from their bedroom window and over a table where they worked. George had sent the plans for one of these models to Buddy, the oldest brother, in Japan. On February 1, 1942, when agents came to the house to arrest George, they removed all the model planes from the house and told George he was considered a spy because he sent airplane plans to Buddy in Japan. An innocent gift to Buddy was now evidence of George’s disloyalty.
Shortly after George’s arrest, Riki and the children relocated to the Santa Anita racetrack, not far from Los Angeles. As Kay remembered, they stayed in a tar-paper barrack on the parking lot, the scent of manure from the horse stalls wafting through the tar paper. Later, while the children moved to Camp Amache in Colorado, George, classified as a dangerous enemy alien, shuttled through a succession of camps: Missoula, Fort Lincoln, Lordsburg, and Santa Fe.
In Camp Amache, one of his sons, Ernest, known as Ernie in the family, turned eighteen and answered yes-yes to the loyalty questionnaire. With his voluntary application for the 442nd already signed, Ernie traveled to the Santa Fe Internment Camp to seek his father’s blessing. American surveillance officers at the Santa Fe camp monitored the painful meeting of father and son. George listened as his son explained his decision to join the US Army. After a prolonged silence, George told his son he disagreed with his decision. The battle was joined between father and son.
As a Japanese man, George Uno was trained to believe that a soldier goes to war with the idea that he will never return. “You should go and be prepared to die,” Uno told his son. When Ernie was shipped out with the 442nd to fight in Italy, he left believing that his father wanted him to die. Many years later, George explained that he only wanted Ernie to recognize that if he joined the military, he should be prepared for death.
For Ernie the decision to become a US soldier wasn’t easy. He felt particularly let down by President Roosevelt. One year after Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, leading to the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, Roosevelt urged the formation of the 442nd. Ernie understood what was on the line for him and other Japanese Americans. The issue was whether Japanese Americans would fight and, if necessary, die for America. The paradox was that Roosevelt asked loyalty of a disenfranchised group of people—people like Ernie, who’d been stripped of their rights as Americans. Ernie decided to pay the price of Roosevelt’s loyalty test. It was personal. He felt it was his duty to fight for America to counterbalance the actions of Buddy, his brother who fought on the side of Japan.
Two other Uno brothers, Stanley and Howard, also answered yes-yes to the loyalty questions. They were among the earliest nisei volunteers in the Military Intelligence Service, two of more than six thousand Japanese Americans performing secret operations in the Pacific. Like the other volunteers, Stanley and Howard translated and deciphered enemy codes. The men in this service were known as Yankee samurai. World War II historians have credited the work of the MIS in the Pacific with shortening the war by approximately two years.
As Ernie felt the need to atone for Buddy’s loyalty to Japan, so did Howard and Stanley. In a letter to his younger brother Robert, Stanley urged him to join the US Army and fight for the country of his birth rather than side with Japan and his disloyal brother. “I tell you that I love this country, above any and all things which may be on this conflicted world,” Stanley told Robert. “I am unashamed of my love. On the contrary, I am proud.”
As in the American Civil War, when brothers from the North fought against brothers from the South, so it was with the Uno brothers. Stanley expressed his fury with Buddy for fighting alongside the Japanese. He vowed that, if given the chance, he would destroy Buddy. “We infantrymen live by the ghastly phrase of ‘kill or be killed,’ ” Stanley wrote. “To uphold the American principles by which I live, I will fight even Buddy.”
When Stanley wrote the letter, Robert was a teenager interned in Crystal City with his father, his mother, his sister Kay, and his brother Edison. Edison was two years younger than Sumi, and a nisei leader in camp. Easygoing and good-looking, Edison was elected class president every year he was in school. Even in the face of arbitrary internment, Edison urged his peers to value their American citizenship and to stand against what he labeled their “too Japanese-y” issei fathers.
From behind barbed wire in Crystal City as a teenager, Edison made speeches, urging young Japanese Americans to not give up on their country. “This internment is against our constitutional rights. We’re American citizens, and as American citizens we should not have been put into camps,” Edison told his fellow students. “If you were in Los Angeles, and you were taken into prison, and they found out that you were not supposed to be in prison, they would let you go and give you a letter of pardon. We need that pardon.”
With those words, Edison became the first Japanese American from inside an internment camp to ask for official redress. Edison believed that the way to prove his loyalty as an American was to claim his right—and the rights of other Japanese Americans—to challenge the internment of the Japanese and their children on the basis of race as un-American and unconstitutional.
The family of Alan Taniguchi faced similar disagreements. In the early 1920s, Alan’s father, Isamu, an immigrant from Japan, worked as a farmer on the San Joaquin Delta near Stockton, California. In those days, the delta farms were remote and inaccessible by automobile. The only access to the four-hundred-acre farm where Isamu grew tomatoes, melons, cauliflower, and other vegetables was by pack boats that plied the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers. In 1922, Sadayo, Isamu’s wife, pregnant with her first son, moved to a boardinghouse in Stockton owned by Isamu’s parents. Alan was born there, but his given name was not Alan. Sadayo named her son Yamato, an ancient name for the spirit
or soul of Japan. A second son, Izumi, was born in 1926.
Isamu had a keen mind, a strong back, and skillful hands. As a boy in Japan, he was schooled in the art and philosophy of horticulture. As a result, his farming business in the United States prospered. The family moved to Brentwood, halfway between Stockton and Oakland. Isamu and five other Japanese farmers started the Brentwood Produce Association, which built its own packing plant to process and ship produce directly to markets. In 1932, Isamu cross-pollinated two varieties of tomatoes, which were shipped by the Brentwood co-op to the East Coast market at favorable prices. While many Americans suffered during the Depression, the Taniguchi family prospered. Isamu’s success was the realization of a long-held dream.
After Pearl Harbor, the lives of the Taniguchis followed the predictable pattern. Around noon on March 7, 1942, all four members of the family, plus a farmer who was boarding with them, were gathered at the table for lunch at their Brentwood home. Two FBI agents arrived at the door. Isamu was not surprised. All of his other partners in the co-op had been arrested. Isamu’s suitcase was already packed. One of the agents was older, calm, and experienced. The other was young, with red hair and a spring-loaded temper.
The young agent pointed to the table, spread with a typical Japanese lunch of fish, rice, and assorted vegetables, and blurted, “This is why you’ll never be Americans. You are Japs and have to have Jap food.”
Isamu sat silent and still. His family followed his lead. But the boarder, a Japanese American, could not contain his anger. “You’re no different,” he shot back. “With your red hair and temper, you must be Irish. You eat your potatoes, cabbage, and corned beef. Does that make you less of an American?”
The older agent sent the other outside and finished the search himself. By then, Isamu and Alan had already turned all contraband items—shortwave radios, cameras, rifles, and swords—to the constable’s office. The agent found nothing. Wordlessly, Isamu picked up his suitcase and was taken to the county jail in Stockton. Alan, then nineteen and a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley, dropped out of school and came home to take his father’s place.
Isamu was granted the usual hearings, and the charges against him were unsurprising. On the farm, Isamu had an incinerator that he pulled behind a tractor to burn brush. In the hearing, Isamu was accused of sending smoke signals to the Japanese with the burning brush. In addition, FBI agents suspected Isamu of arranging six-foot-by-twenty-five-foot muslin sheets, used for protecting tomato beds from frost, in arrow shapes that were supposedly pointed toward military installations. He denied all charges.
Nonetheless, Isamu was classified a dangerous enemy alien, and the family was separated. After his arrest, he was taken to the Silver Avenue Detention Center in San Francisco, then to the Santa Fe Internment Camp, and subsequently transferred to the internment camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico. While Isamu was incarcerated in Lordsburg, on July 27, 1942, 145 issei prisoners arrived at the train station near the camp. Armed guards instructed the prisoners to walk the two miles to the entrance of the camp. Shiro Kobata, fifty-eight, had suffered from tuberculosis, and Hirota Isomura, fifty-nine, had a spinal injury that slowed his walk. Both men fell behind on the march to the camp. A guard, armed with a twelve-gauge shotgun, believed they were attempting to escape and ordered them to halt. When they kept moving, the guard took aim and killed them both.
The incident intensified Isamu’s sense of disillusionment. Always quiet, Isamu grew insular, and that summer he decided to request repatriation to Japan for himself, his wife, and his American-born sons.
By then, Sadayo, Alan, and Izumi were interned in the Gila River Relocation Camp in the desert of Arizona, where temperatures rose to 125 degrees in the summer and dropped to 30 degrees in the winter. Sadayo and her sons lived in a crowded barrack with communal toilets. The rules of the camp required all of the thirteen thousand internees to be in their barracks by nine with lights out by ten. Guards in sentry towers had orders to shoot anyone who approached within twenty feet of the fence.
Izumi, Alan’s younger brother, worked as a timekeeper for the Block 66 mess hall, tracking the hours of the people who worked there. Mealtimes at Gila River were busy and chaotic, as thousands of people filed into the mess hall to eat food prepared by untrained cooks. Izumi and Alan referred to the food as “slop suey.” Worse than the quality of food was the loss of traditional Japanese family meals. Instead of gathering around a family table, they were crowded in a mess hall with thousands of others. Conversation was impossible, table manners forgotten.
On April 23, 1943, Izumi was in the mess hall when Eleanor Roosevelt arrived for a camp inspection, accompanied by Dillon Myer, national director of the War Relocation Authority. Eleanor was on a mission from FDR. Earlier that month, Roosevelt had received a letter from Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who reported that morale among Japanese American internees had dangerously declined. While internees had “first accepted with philosophical understanding the decision of their government,” Ickes told Roosevelt that these imprisoned Americans, charged with no crimes, were now bitter. “I do not think that we can disregard the unnecessary creation of a hostile group right in our own territory.”
As Eleanor toured the camp, hundreds of Japanese American teenagers, including Izumi, surrounded her. She told them that she was proud of their resourcefulness. In the challenging desert terrain, internees raised livestock and produced enough vegetables to feed the entire camp. On-site was a camouflage-net factory, where nineteen-year-old Alan worked, that manufactured enough nets for the US Army. “Everything is spotlessly clean,” Eleanor later wrote in her report. “The people work on their whitewashed barracks constantly, and you can see the results of their labors.”
The first lady experienced the unrelenting dust storms in Gila River that turned everyone’s hair white and eyes red. “It chokes you and brings about irritations of the nose and throat,” she wrote. With Myer at her side, Eleanor toured every facility essential to the camp’s life: the wards in the hospital, the barracks that had been set aside for nursery and elementary schools, a high school, a library. She noted that the tiny living quarters were decorated with paper flowers, poems, and paintings.
Eleanor witnessed as well evidence of the declining morale of the internees. In Gila River, as in other camps, the loyalty test had sparked outrage. In her report to FDR, she argued that it was time to disband the camps and allow the Japanese to return to their homes. “To undo mistakes is always harder than to create them originally, but we seldom have foresight,” Eleanor told her husband. “Therefore, we have no choice but to try to correct our past mistakes.”
In March 1943, one month after his visit to Gila River, Myer publicly called for an end to the relocation camps. He reported that they were too expensive to build and maintain and said that in his opinion the Japanese Americans, as a group, no longer constituted a military threat. “After many months of operating relocation centers, the War Relocation Authority is convinced that they are undesirable institutions and should be removed from the American scene as soon as possible,” wrote Myer. “Life in a relocation center is an unnatural and un-American sort of life. Keep in mind that the evacuees were charged with nothing except having Japanese ancestors; yet the very fact of their confinement in relocation centers fosters suspicion of their loyalties and adds to their discouragement.”
While Roosevelt agreed with Eleanor and Myer that the incarceration should end as soon as possible, his military advisers warned that subversive activities among Japanese and Japanese Americans were still a danger to the war effort. Roosevelt again sided with the military advisers. The internment dragged on.
While in Gila River, Alan and Izumi Taniguchi received permission to visit their father in the Lordsburg camp in New Mexico. During the face-to-face meeting, Isamu demanded that both of them refuse to volunteer for the American military. Alan was nineteen, and Izumi was sixteen—one year away from eligibility for the draft. Even though both son
s were born in America, had pledged allegiance to the flag, and had sung the national anthem, Isamu now demanded they put their loyalty aside and consider themselves as young men without a country. Izumi bitterly refused. He told his father that he’d never even been to Japan and that his loyalty was to the United States. To prove his allegiance, Izumi vowed to join the US military as soon as he turned seventeen. Alan was more measured, but equally firm: he told his father that he would do whatever was necessary to stay in the United States, his homeland.
When Alan returned to Gila River, he confronted the infamous two questions: number 27, concerning his willingness to fight for America; and number 28, about forswearing allegiance to Japan. Alan wanted to answer yes-yes, but he could not bring himself to officially defy his father. He told authorities that, until his constitutional rights were restored and his family was released from internment, he would not answer the questionnaire at all. Officially, that made Alan a no-no, which meant that he was likely to be sent to Tule Lake camp in California, where internees considered “disloyal” were segregated and lived in punitive conditions. To avoid transfer, Alan formally asked the Religious Society of Friends, known as the Quakers, who had important contacts with the INS, to petition for his parole from Gila River so that he could resume his education. The Quakers were the only group in America that consistently opposed internment and offered protection for internees. They agreed to plead Alan’s case.
In the spring of 1943, shortly after Eleanor’s visit to Gila River, Isamu asked for a transfer to the Crystal City Internment Camp, where he was reunited with his wife and younger son. Alan, who was no longer a minor, refused to go to Crystal City, but Izumi had no choice. When his mother and brother left Arizona in May 1943 for Crystal City, Alan stayed behind in Gila River. A few months later, the Quakers negotiated Alan’s release. He moved to Detroit, where he lived with relatives and continued his education at the Detroit Institute of Technology.
The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Page 16