By social custom, Ken Dyo was expected to ask formal permission of his Japanese elders, the issei leaders, to hold the prom. However, he also knew they would oppose it. Instead, he went directly to Ryuchi Fujii, the elected Japanese spokesman in camp, and asked him to publicly endorse the prom. Fujii, a Buddhist priest, turned him down. Like the other elders, Fujii viewed the prom as an insult to Japanese parents, an effort by O’Rourke to Americanize their children and he advised Dyo to withdraw his request to O’Rourke.
The battle over the dance was joined. Fujii called a meeting of all the members of the Japanese council, and they voted 322–20 against the prom. In a letter to O’Rourke, Fujii listed the reasons why leaders opposed the dance: “All Japanese leaders have disapproved of having any dance party in this camp because it may have a bad influence on all children.” He cited the war itself, saying it was “offensive” to hold a dance “at this time when other people are suffering in a life and death struggle.”
O’Rourke’s answer was swift: the prom would go on. He told Fujii that he would not allow the Japanese council to call off an event at the Federal High School, which was operated by the US government and attended by mostly American citizens. Many of the issei men opposed to the prom did not even have children enrolled in the school; their children went to the Japanese School. For O’Rourke, the line was clear. He would not allow the issei leaders to impose their cultural standards on American-born teenagers.
Fujii refused to give up the fight and sent a formal letter of complaint to Harrison and copied the Spanish consul: “According to time-honored Japanese customs, social dance has been condemned morally and religiously and is prohibited by law. A dancing girl is despised as much as any prostitute. Any girl of a well-to-do family never attends a social dance.” If the dance was held, Fujii warned, teachers at the Japanese School would resign in protest.
In every bungalow and Victory Hut in the Japanese section of camp, the issue of the dance was debated. In many of the other Japanese relocation camps, such as Manzanar and Tule Lake, where anti-American feelings ran high, strikes and demonstrations had broken out over such issues as the mandatory loyalty oaths and harsh treatment by guards. In Crystal City, what seemed like a minor event—a junior-senior prom—turned children against parents, students against teachers, and the Japanese leaders against O’Rourke.
At school, the prom was all anyone talked about, but Sumi did not bring up the subject at home. Since their arrival in Crystal City, Tokiji had become more temperamental—a symptom of fence sickness. Once, Sumi visited a girlfriend in a different bungalow and was supposed to be back by 8:00 p.m., but arrived home an hour late. Her father slammed the door in her face and screamed at her. “There was no way I would ever have asked him if I could go to the prom,” recalled Sumi. “If my father saw me talking to a guy, he would have been furious. I knew he would never let me go to a dance.”
Sumi’s friend Yae Kanogawa, whom she’d met on the train from Ellis Island to Crystal City, loved to dance and wanted to go to the prom, and was encouraged to go by her father, Sho, who worked as a cook in Crystal City. Sho received a circular, signed by Japanese leaders in camp, warning against allowing students to attend the prom. Yae was a student at the Japanese School, and her teacher pressured her father to keep his daughter home. “Only prostitutes dance in Japan,” said the teacher.
However, Sho was a michiro, a trained Japanese dancer, and he saw no harm in the prom. Indeed, he encouraged Yae to go to the dance with her brother Shoji. “He told me I had to go,” recalled Yae. “He thought everyone should learn to dance.” Meanwhile, Japanese block managers went door-to-door among the Japanese bungalows, asking that parents not allow their children to attend the dance. Ultimatums flew back and forth.
Nevertheless, on May 26, 1944, a Friday night, thirty brave Japanese American and fourteen German American teenagers gathered in Harrison Hall for the dance. The hall was festooned with balloons, and the walls were lined with tables laden with punch bowls and platters of cookies. O’Rourke, Tate, and several teachers in the American School attended as chaperones. They kept their eyes on the windows and the doors.
It was summer, and school was almost over for the year. The pool had been open for a month, and days slipped away under the burning desert sun. That night, the guards were especially attentive at their tower posts, and after dusk, the air grew cooler. Soon, the music of Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, Judy Garland, and Harry James floated through the breeze.
Inside the hall, many of the boys stood with their hands shoved in their pockets. In time, the smooth-chinned young men summoned the courage to approach the girls, equally shy in their cotton dresses. Some couples awkwardly stepped on each other’s toes, while others glided easily to the music. Yae took to the dance floor early and urged her friends to join the fun. The sound of their feet—thump, thump, thump—echoed from the wooden floors in the first dance that many of them had attended since the war began. To Yae, the dance felt like the most natural, necessary thing in the world.
Halfway through the party, O’Rourke announced an intermission. The music stopped, and the teenagers were served refreshments. While they drank punch and ate cookies, several of the teachers from the Japanese School crashed the hall and ordered all the Japanese children to leave the prom.
Yae’s teacher confronted her and said that, because of her attendance at the dance, he was forced by his principal to quit his job at the Japanese School. He said her lack of morals indicated his failure as a teacher and called her a “harlot, a dancing harlot.” Like many of the Japanese Americans in camp, Yae felt scapegoated by her government for forcing her to evacuate her home and navigate existence behind barbed wire simply because of her Japanese heritage. Now she felt blamed by her Japanese teacher and forced to bear his burdens, as well.
After the teachers’ outburst, no one at the prom felt like dancing. Yae and her friends sulked home. The leaders had succeeded in breaking up the prom.
The following day, Yae sent a letter to a friend outside the camp. Before it was mailed, a censor read it and sent a copy to O’Rourke. In her letter, she used American vernacular and wrote, “Gee, the atmosphere around here between teacher and student, issei and nisei, is really sharp and annoying.” She commented on how the Japanese leaders had forbidden students to go to the event: “Isn’t that positively outrageous? And it was against the H.S. [high school], which was real earnest about giving the students a decent time, ’specially at graduation, and that’s some memory one cherishes. I went too, but after intermission, the fireworks began. The Japanese School sent spies to see which students from the tip school went—one of them saw me, and now I’m in a position where I have to quit school. Honestly! It’s inhuman. When you get in a place like this, you honestly wonder if these Japzip in here are really human! I pity the Caucasians who have to work with them.”
Yae was more Americanized than the Japanese leaders in camp could have understood. She blamed the Japanese leaders—the “Japzip,” as she referred to them—for the bitter atmosphere, not O’Rourke and the teachers in the American School.
She was not alone. Another student, Sachi Sasaki, was not allowed to go to the dance. In a letter forwarded to O’Rourke by censors, Sachi wrote that she loved to dance and said, “Of course my pop thought it was better if I didn’t go, so I had to stay home and suck my finger. I was so mad that I bawled for the first time in ages. I’m telling you, I never saw so many narrow-minded, ignorant Japs in my life. Pardon my language. The American teachers are our true friends.”
Maruko Okazaki, another student, wrote of the prom controversy to a friend outside the camp: “The atmosphere here hasn’t been any too good. Last night, they had the Prom (I didn’t go) and bang! Trouble after trouble has come up already. It’s too disgusting. We know there’s a war on—they keep reminding us that we shouldn’t go out and enjoy ourselves when soldiers are fighting with all they’ve got, and we realize that, too—but it’s just a dance a year. I
don’t think that’s hurt anyone.”
The prom became a standoff between O’Rourke and the Japanese leaders, and the teenagers were caught in the middle. The issei leaders kept the prom from being successful by intimidating the parents of most of the Japanese American students and disrupting the event. As Fujii threatened, Japanese teachers staged a strike at the Japanese School, closing it for several days after the prom. But O’Rourke won the cultural battle. If the dispute over the prom proved anything, it was that the students in the American high school were primarily Americans. Many stayed home from the prom out of respect for their parents, not out of loyalty to Japan.
Yae, in one of her letters the morning after the disastrous prom, felt sorry for O’Rourke: “You know Mr. O’Rourke waza-waza sponsored the prom himself so the grads could enjoy themselves for one nite. I feel perfectly horrible. My eyes are all swollen from last night. Gee, more trouble!” In the margin of the letter, the censor who reviewed the letter translated the phrase waza-waza as “specifically.”
• • •
From the safety of their desks in the Internal Security Division, the censors monitored the travails and dramas of camp life. The mail instructions from O’Rourke were complex. Internees were allowed to send only two letters and one postal card (on approved stationery) per week. Domestic letters could not exceed thirty-five lines; international letters couldn’t exceed twenty-four. Letters had to be legible, and any extremely small written script was cause for rejection. Telegrams were relayed to Western Union with the words internee telegram in the body of the messages.
In May 1944, a married Japanese woman began writing love letters to a Japanese American writer and artist in Denver. Before the war, they had shared interests in music, poetry, and art, eventually falling in love. To evade the censors, the woman wrote her feelings in minuscule letters hidden underneath the stamps of the letters. Despite her efforts, the censors found her out.
In one chatty dispatch on approved stationery, the woman described mundane details of her daily life in camp: “The climate here is bad. Both children have taken cold. I feel badly, too, and am in bed. I am not able to play music, either, and have really become thin recently.” But underneath the stamp was this message: “Beginning today, I am going to try the tactics of fasting. I am weeping as I look at the clear, bright moon. The birds are crying, too. My home is just like hell. I shall not write for four or five days. If you become angry and do not care about me, I shall die. I hate everything, and am beating my pillow in anger.” The censors discovered the message, and charged with “violation of censorship,” the woman lost her mailing privileges for thirty days.
Eventually, she wrote again to her lover and told him that she needed to end their relationship. She was older than he was, trapped in marriage, and behind barbed wire in Crystal City. Her suitor wrote back, “If you cannot come out, I cannot go on living. I shall not let anyone know where or how I shall die. I do not need any other woman but you. I do not like young women. I do not want any other person to call my wife except you. Whether I walk, stand, or sit, I am thinking of nothing but you. Please come as soon as you can.”
While O’Rourke managed quarrels and monitored mail in Crystal City, Harrison waged larger, tougher battles in Washington. By 1944, Harrison had been INS commissioner for two years and had reorganized the service following its transfer from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice. In addition to running Crystal City and other internment camps, Harrison dealt with Congress on refugee matters. Although the country was still anti-immigrant and isolationist, Harrison urged Congress to lower racial barriers to allow more Jews from Europe to immigrate to the United States. In a report to Biddle, the attorney general, Harrison confided that “practically the only disappointing experience” of his job was the lamentably slow progress to reform discriminatory exclusion laws that kept European Jews from finding refuge in the United States. As early as 1939, Harrison and his wife, Carol, had sheltered Jewish families in their home in Rose Valley. “My mother always took people in,” remembered Bart Harrison, his son. “Our house was the house of last resort.”
When in 1943 Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882 to keep Chinese from immigrating to America, Harrison told the Washington Post that the repeal was a “commendable one,” but pressed Congress to go further: “The old theory of inferior peoples should be declared as something no longer worthy of America.” Harrison also pressed for bills to lift barriers that had been designed to keep Filipinos, East Indians, and other Eastern peoples, including Jews, out of the United States.
The debate over immigration was grounded in the realities of World War II. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed because China was America’s ally. Harrison’s argument was that existing immigration laws against Europeans were comparable to the racial laws of Nazi Germany. “The only other country in the world that observes such racial discrimination in matters relating to immigrants is Nazi Germany, and we will agree that that is not very desirable company,” he told Biddle and the press.
Congress refused to act on the additional bills. On July 20, 1944, Harrison resigned in protest. In a story in the New York Times, Roosevelt praised Harrison for his reform of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, “notwithstanding the wartime additions to the work of the service, such as the civilian internment program.” The Washington Post said in an editorial on July 24, “Hats off today to Harrison, who resigned that position in protest of our immigration laws, which he compares to the racial laws of Nazi Germany.”
The “Jewish question” was now impossible for Roosevelt to ignore. At the beginning of the war, Roosevelt concluded that America could save the Jews of Europe by quickly defeating Hitler and his troops. But he worried about anti-Semitism in America and finally took on the issue directly. In speeches during 1943, Roosevelt said that any American who condoned anti-Semitism was “playing Hitler’s game.” However, immigration restrictions stayed in place.
Biddle named Ugo Carusi, an Italian American who served as Biddle’s assistant, to succeed Harrison. In Crystal City, O’Rourke sent out notices to the camp about Harrison’s resignation. A Japanese internee, Tsurukichi Toriu, drew a portrait of Harrison based on a photograph, and O’Rourke sent it to Harrison. In an accompanying note Toriu told Harrison that while indefinite internment was difficult to accept, he wanted Harrison to accept the gift as a symbol of “enduring friendship” from the Japanese internees in Crystal City, who appreciated his “noble, indefatigable spirit.” The gesture indicates that at least some of the internees understood that their treatment could have been far worse.
• • •
Those behind the barbed wire at Crystal City had few ways to escape the furnace-like heat. In the middle of the day, temperatures climbed to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The living quarters all had thin roofs and walls, built without insulation. When children touched the metal parts of their beds, their hands were scorched. When men went into the orchards and family gardens to water, dust flew up from the ground. At night, parents hosed down the roofs of barracks and washed the floors with water.
In August 1944 the hospital reported eight births. However, statistics also show five cases of “threatened abortions” and many other maladies that summer. A forty-seven-year-old Japanese man died of tuberculosis. A German woman stated that her severely depressed husband had lost his mind and needed shock therapy. Nothing could be done for him. On average, the hospital treated sixty patients a day for malaise.
One place alone offered relief from the heat: the swimming pool. The size of a football field, it was large enough on the deep end for three diving platforms. The pool was a refuge, a place where fear, boredom, and anger were washed away. The water shimmered; people were energized. When birds flew over the heads of the swimmers, some thought of it as a kind of blessing. The Germans, Japanese, Italians, and Latin Americans from many different countries all spoke in their own languages. The Germans and the Japanese had separate bathhouses.
Like the image from a crystal, the pool reflected many histories and perspectives.
All that changed on the afternoon of August 15, 1944. Ty Nakamura, a student at the American School, was a lifeguard that day. Two Japanese Peruvian girls, thirteen-year-old Sachiko Taname and eleven-year-old Aiko Oykawa, played in the shallow end of the pool. The girls were best friends and lived with their families in a triplex near where Ty lived with his family. Often, Ty heard them singing Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in the showers. The song told the story of a famous train and the last line was “Won’t you choo-choo me home?” The girls loved the song.
Aiko and Sachiko strayed into the deep end. A safety cable and ropes divided the shallow and deep ends. Before the two girls reached the cable, they slipped on a deep shelf and plunged under the water in the murky floor of the pool.
Alice Nishimoto, another Japanese Peruvian girl, was in the pool that day with four of her friends. Like Aiko and Sachiko, they, too, inched their way from the shallow to the deep end of the pool, but they held on to the cable. While in the deep end, gripping the ropes, Alice and her friends watched lifeguards bring the lifeless bodies of the two drowned girls up from the bottom of the pool and carry them out of the water.
Others saw it as well. “I was swimming with my friends,” Bessie Masuda recalled in an oral history. “We actually saw the girls drowning at the deep end of the pool. We all grabbed hands and we tried to reach them and to save them, but the floor beneath us was too slippery. It was so sad that we couldn’t help them.”
Frantically, Ty and other lifeguards searched for the girls in the dark waters. Soon, they found them and rushed their bodies to the shore. Dr. Martin, the medical officer, and O’Rourke huddled over the girls. Both applied artificial respiration in an attempt to revive them, to no avail.
The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Page 19