Masaoka was among more than twelve hundred American Japanese community leaders identified from “Suspect Enemy Aliens” lists secretly compiled by the FBI with the help of the Census Bureau. Merchants, priests, teachers, newspapermen, and heads of various civic organizations were arrested without charges within forty-eight hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor. More than a thousand of them were from California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. Thirteen of them were women.
Less than twenty-four hours after the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked a joint session of Congress for a Declaration of War against Japan, stating, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date that will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” A few hours later, after Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover informed the White House that 620 Germans and 98 Italians were also taken into custody. The Germans arrested included leaders of such organizations as the uniformed and openly pro-Hitler German-American Bund, which had a membership of more than forty thousand in the Northeast and Midwest.
The Italian number might have been a bit larger, but the FBI decided not to incarcerate a San Francisco alien named Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio, a fisherman from Sicily, who lived in the United States for forty years without applying for citizenship. The bureau, however, did stop him from going near Fisherman’s Wharf, where he and his wife owned a boat and a restaurant. In memos and phone calls, government officials worried about the publicity that would come if they put Joe DiMaggio’s parents in jail during the year that “Joltin’ Joe” of the New York Yankees had been named the American League’s Most Valuable Player after hitting in fifty-six straight games.
The same was true for the mayor of New York and the mayor of San Francisco: the parents of Fiorello La Guardia and Angelo Rossi were Italian aliens who had never applied for American citizenship. President Roosevelt had already told his attorney general, Francis Biddle, to take it easy on Italians and Italian Americans. “They’re just a bunch of opera singers.” Ironically, the FBI in New York did arrest one of the more famous opera singers, Ezio Pinza, an Italian citizen who was first basso of the Metropolitan Opera. Like the DiMaggios, he had lived in the United States for more than twenty years without seeking to become naturalized. Two FBI agents entered his home in Bronxville without warning. After searching the house for hours, one of the agents spotted a framed page of writing in Italian on the wall of his study.
“What is this?”
“It’s a letter written by Verdi.”
“Who?” asked the agent.
The other agent said, “In the name of the President of the United States, you are under arrest.”
That was front page news in the New York Times, under the headline, “Ezio Pinza Seized as Enemy Alien; FBI Takes Singer to Ellis Island.” The singer was one of the 126 Japanese, German, and Italian men held there. He suffered some kind of breakdown, barely speaking, until he was released three months later, thanks to a team of high-priced lawyers and the backing of New York mayor La Guardia. Pinza believed he was arrested because of an untruthful report from a Met rival saying he was a friend of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Like other imprisoned aliens, Pinza was never charged, but later wrote that interrogators accused him of secretly sending messages to Mussolini—a man he had never met—by changing the tempo of his voice during radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera.
There were, however, important differences in dealing with immigrants to the United States from Europe and immigrants from Asia. Europeans, including Pinza and the DiMaggios, could have become naturalized U.S. citizens. U.S. residents born in Japan could not become citizens and could not own land in the United States under the Immigration Act of 1924, a special provision of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. The prohibitions on land ownership were popularized by distinguished Californians such as Dr. Edward Alsworth Ross, a famous professor of sociology at Stanford, who wrote of the Japanese as early as 1900:
1. They are unassimilable.
2. They work for low wages and thereby undermine the existing work standards of American workmen.
3. Their standards of living are much lower than American workmen.
4. They lack a proper political feeling for American democratic institutions.
The denial of citizenship to Japanese immigrants had begun with the case of Takao Ozawa, a graduate of Berkeley High School and a junior at the University of California, Berkeley, which reached the Supreme Court in November of 1922. The justices ruled that he was not a “free white person” and was therefore ineligible for citizenship. “The decision provoked wild resentment in Japan,” wrote Carey McWilliams in his 1944 book Prejudice. “In commenting upon the decision, the Osaka Mainichi said that ‘Americans are as spiteful as snakes and vipers—we do not hesitate to call that government a studied deceiver.’”
Those American laws were part of a buildup of tension between the United States and Imperial Japan and between Caucasian and American Japanese merchants and farmers living on the West Coast. Within hours of Pearl Harbor, the government moved against American Japanese. When Yoshiko Uchida, a Christian, came home from church that Sunday, she opened the door to her house in Berkeley and was shocked to see a white man sitting in the living room. He was an FBI agent and he had already searched the house, leaving it a mess. He wanted to know where her father, a prosperous San Francisco–based executive of Mitsui Export, a Japanese-owned shipping line, was “hiding.”
“I’ll be back,” the man said.
Her father, Dwight Takashi Uchida, returned an hour later, took one look at the house, and called the police, saying, “There’s been a burglary here!” The police arrived in minutes—with three men from the FBI. They took Uchida away, saying, “It’ll only be a short while.” One agent stayed to answer the family’s phone, saying they were not available. Friends who came to the door for Sunday visits were turned away.
It was not until five days later that a friend called and told the family that Uchida was being held in jail with about one hundred other men at the Presidio, army headquarters in San Francisco. They received a postcard from him the next day, asking for shirts and shaving gear.
He told his wife he was going to be taken to a federal prison in Missoula, Montana. Other prisons, used by the Justice Department to hold aliens, were also far from California, in Bismarck, North Dakota; Kooskia, Idaho; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Crystal City and Seagoville, Texas. In his next letter home from Missoula, Uchida told his wife that their bank accounts were frozen and she should go to the bank and try to get enough money on which to live, perhaps $100 a month. Then he added: “Don’t forget to lubricate the car. And be sure to prune the roses in January. Brush Laddie every day and give him a pat for me. Don’t forget to send a monthly check to Grandma and take my Christmas offering to church.”
To the north, in Washington State, Mitsuno Matsuda, the wife of a strawberry farmer on Vashon Island, in Puget Sound, twenty minutes from Seattle by ferry, received a call from Hisaye Yamamoto, her friend on Bainbridge, another island in the sound. “The FBI came to our house and searched everything. It was awful, just awful. They even ran their hands through our rice and sugar bowls, looking for guns and radios or anything with Japanese writing,” said Yamamoto. “Vashon must be next.”
That evening Mitsuno and Heisuke Matsuda and their two children, teenagers, Yoneichi and Mary, began to destroy anything that they thought might look too Japanese to a policeman or an FBI agent. “This is it,” Mary remembered her father saying as he walked to the dining room stove with his favorite phonograph record. “This one is ‘Sakura,’ Yoshiko-san’s voice is so clear.”
He broke the record in two and threw it into the fire. For an hour, the family burned their family photographs and books. Mary began throwing her dolls, in little kimonos, into the stove. The FBI came two weeks later. The two agents took away Yoneichi’s .22 caliber rifle and the family’s radio. They fo
und one book.
“What is this book?” an agent asked.
“This is my parents’ New Testament in Japanese,” said Mary. “We are Methodists.”
In Petaluma, California, Jahachi Najima packed his suitcase after he heard that his friends, other prominent Japanese, had been arrested. His daughter, Irene, was at home when the FBI came, along with local police, in a long black limousine.
“Where’s your father?” one asked.
He was working on the ranch, his ranch. Irene went out to get him and when he came back to the house the FBI men immediately put him in handcuffs.
“Would you permit me to change my clothes?” he asked.
They took off the handcuffs and let him put on a business suit. When Irene asked where they were going, she got no answer. Irene and her mother spent days making phone calls and visiting jails to find Najima. They finally found him at the Presidio. After a few more days they were able to visit him. As they left he said, “This is war. We may never see each other again.”
Another “dangerous” person picked up after December 7, Edward Oshita, owner of a small factory making miso, left his house assuring his wife, Grace, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. This is America.” In Hood River Valley, Oregon, home to 130 American Japanese farming families, FBI agents arrived in town at 3:00 a.m. on December 8. They ransacked homes and took away a dozen community leaders, including Tomeshichi Akiyama, president of the local Japanese Society. His son George was in the United States Army, one of 3,188 Nisei serving in the armed forces the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked.
Barry Saiki, a senior at the University of California in Berkeley, watched as the FBI took away his father in Stockton. “Wait,” the old man said, handing his son an envelope. “You may need these.”
Inside was a small stack of U.S. war bonds.
* * *
The FBI roundup of first-generation American Japanese aliens, the Issei, was not unexpected and its lists were not particularly sophisticated documents. Hysteria about spies and saboteurs had been building on the West Coast and in Washington, D.C., for years. On August 1, 1941, the Washington Post had published a “Confidential report on Japanese activities in California.” The paper said, among other things, that Japanese consulates were forcing Issei and Nisei farmers to move near oil wells, instructing them to be prepared to attack them if war came; that 90 percent of Japanese fishermen were actually Japanese naval officers and seamen; and that cooks, butlers, and laundrymen were expected to “cripple vital utilities, bridges, and tunnels.”
There were stacks of reports like that in government offices, going back decades before Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded all Asian immigration by reinstating a 1790 naturalization law that reserved citizenship for “free white persons of good character.” During the 1924 debate, Ulysses S. Webb, California’s attorney general, testified before Congress, saying of Asians, particularly Chinese and Japanese: “They are different in color; different in ideals; different in race; different in ambitions; different in their theory of political economy and government. They speak a different language; they worship another God. They have not in common with the Caucasian a single trait.” Ten years after that, as political and economic relations between the United States and Imperial Japan were deteriorating, a secret State Department investigation concluded that if war broke out between the countries, “The entire [American Japanese] population on the West Coast will rise and commit sabotage.” In October of 1940, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox presented President Roosevelt with a fifteen-point program for what should be done if war with Japan came. The twelfth recommendation was: “Prepare plans for concentration camps.”
The reports reaching the president and his principal aides were totally and ridiculously false, but some of the same stories were circulating in newspapers and on radio. One set of stories in California journals said that Japanese and Japanese Americans were moving to surround ports and U.S. naval bases and Army Air Corps installations, along with defense plants.
What was true and was reported on the front page of the Los Angeles Times under the headline “Japanese Put Under F.B.I. Inquiry Here,” on November 13, 1941, was that Justice Department officials and FBI agents had been interviewing leaders of Japanese and Japanese American organizations since at least early October. They had taken truckloads of business records to look for donations to charities and other organizations back in Japan. Local officials in West Coast states had been doing the same thing for years. In Hood River Valley, Oregon, for instance, in 1937 Sheriff John Sheldrake deputized and paid white residents to spy on the valley’s Japanese families.
After the Times article appeared, the Los Angeles office of Time magazine reported, in a confidential and calm memo back to New York, “Southern California’s Japanese colony is on edge over the prospect of wholesale firings in the event of … war.” The memo went on to state that “most work as agricultural laborers or fishermen. In Los Angeles proper they are principally employed as gardeners or servants. They have all lived here for a long time … and the great majority are loyal.” But reasoned words in memos did little to stall the inflation of the number of names on the “suspicious persons” lists compiled by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
The FBI arrest lists were bolstered by names collected by Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Ringle of the Office of Naval Intelligence, who spoke Japanese and had obtained the membership rolls of the small American offshoots of the Black Dragon Society, a Japan-based group that was formed in 1901 to spy on Russia, Korea, and Manchuria before the Russo-Japanese War. He had also built his own informant network with the cooperation of the pro-American JACL. Most of the FBI names, the businessmen, clergymen, doctors, and editors, even martial arts instructors, were no more than what could have been, and often were, the patrons and donors at a Chamber of Commerce dinner. They simply disappeared on December 7 and the following days.
The FBI, with the approval of the Justice Department back in Washington, had made up so-called A, B, C lists. Those categorized “A” for unspecified reasons were immediately arrested and incarcerated. Fishermen who owned boats and radios, prosperous farmers and small merchants considered to have some influence in Japanese communities were on the “B” list. The “C” list was more random, including anyone who had made a donation to a Japanese organization or charity or a few who were denounced by neighbors and friends, both Caucasian and Nikkei.
The Reverend Fuji Usui of San Diego was on an “A” list. His daughter, Mitsuo, went to St. Mary’s Church in San Diego that Sunday morning, and while she was gone the FBI had searched the house, leaving it a mess. When she arrived home she found her mother crying in a corner, hysterical. “They took Papa!” her mother shouted. “They chained him and numbered him like an animal.”
Another “A” list Issei, Yutaka Akimoto, was an officer in two Japanese civic organizations in Stockton. Police and FBI agents came through the door of his house with leveled submachine guns. His twenty-one-year-old son, George, a college student, watched as the government men searched the house. Among the things they took was his mother’s Japanese knitting manual—knit one, purl two—thinking it might be a codebook. The next time the family heard from Akimoto, he was in a Justice Department camp in Bismarck, North Dakota.
The knock on the door of Sally Kirita in San Diego came in the night. The local sheriff and FBI agents took her father away without a word. It would be two and a half years before his family saw him again.
Nearby, the agents came for Margaret Ishino’s father. A junior at San Diego High School, Margaret watched as they searched the house. Her mother was in bed, having just given birth to Margaret’s brother, Thomas. An agent ripped the blankets and sheet off the bed to see if anything was hidden there. Her father, knowing friends had already been arrested, had packed a suitcase; the FBI took that as a sign he was a spy preparing to flee.
Those community leaders, Issei, were shipped to twenty-six Justice Department f
acilities, prisons, around the country. More often than not, their families had no idea where their husbands and fathers were being held or even whether they were alive. West Coast Nikkei—aliens and citizens—were stripped of civic leadership. Thousands of women and children were without means of support; their situation was made worse when Japanese aliens and Japanese Americans learned that their bank accounts had been frozen the day after Pearl Harbor.
* * *
Lieutenant Commander Ringle, whose intelligence reports had circulated in Washington, was possibly the American who knew the most about Japanese living in the country. Long before Pearl Harbor, the navy had assigned Ringle to check the security of naval bases in the three states bordering the Pacific Coast. Ringle, who had been attached to the United States embassy in Tokyo for three years, had a network of friends and local informants in Tokyo and in the Japanese communities of California, Oregon, and Washington. Those people, the American Japanese, helped him uncover a spy ring in 1941 organized by an Imperial Japanese naval officer named Itaru Tachibana, whose agents included Toraichi Kono, the valet of actor Charlie Chaplin. Tachibana was arrested and deported. Ringle also managed a secret April 1941 break-in at the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles, which involved bringing in a professional safecracker from San Quentin State Prison. What Ringle learned from papers in the consulate was that the Japanese reporting to Tokyo did not trust either Issei or Nisei, describing them as “cultural traitors,” and expected them to side with the United States in any war. The same distrust of American Japanese was expressed in four thousand so-called MAGIC cables between Tokyo and Japanese embassies and consulates in the United States, messages that were intercepted and decoded by the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service. On January 30, 1941, for instance, a cable on intelligence warned against using Japanese Americans or aliens. Instead, Japanese consulates in the United States were urged to recruit “communists, labor union members, Negroes, and anti-Semites.”
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