Infamy

by Richard Reeves

  * * *

  Charles Kikuchi, who had always had trouble getting along with his father, had been put in an orphanage at age eight, the only Japanese boy in the place. He rejoined his family when they were interned at Tanforan, and it was the first and only time he lived among many other Japanese and Japanese Americans. By then, he was twenty-six years old and in his diary, on May 7, 1942, he provided a fairly detailed profile of his fellow detainees at Tanforan and their fracturing families.

  There are all different types of Japanese in company seven. The young Nisei are quite Americanized and have nice personalities. They smile easily and are not inhibited in their actions. They have taken things in stride and their sole concern is to meet the other sex, have dances so they can jitterbug, get a job to make money for “Cokes.” Many are using the evacuation to break away from the strict control of parental rule.

  Other Nisei think more in terms of the future.… They want to continue their education in some sort of “career,” to study and be successful. The background which they come from is very noticeable: their parents were better educated and had businesses. I asked a girl what her father expected to do after the war and she said that he and his wife would probably be forced to leave this country, but she expects to get married and stay here.

  Kikuchi felt the same way, writing, “I just can’t help identifying myself with America; I feel so much a part of it and I won’t be rejected.”

  Another time, Kikuchi commented on how American Japanese “can’t throw off the environmental effects of the American way of life which is ingrained in them.” He went on to say with some hope: “The injustices of evacuation will someday come to light. It is a blot upon our national life—like the Negro problem, the way labor gets kicked around, the unequal distribution of wealth, the sad plight of the farmers, the slums of our large cities, and a multiple of things.”

  * * *

  At the centers many kids ran wild for the first time in their lives. At Santa Anita, meals were served in shifts for three thousand people at a time, military-style at long tables seating at least thirty-two people. Instead of sitting with their parents, family-style, young Japanese Americans would go to far ends of the mess halls to sit and eat with their friends. Yoshiko Uchida, earning $16 a month at the Tanforan Assembly Center, a standard salary for evacuee teachers, noticed that when her second-grade girls at the makeshift school played house, they had their dolls lining up at a little mess hall.

  Parents were being publicly shamed, unable to control their own children. Among the things they worried about were promiscuity, rape, and even prostitution. Charles Kikuchi, the grad student at Berkeley, wrote the diary he faithfully kept about a “bull session” with friends.

  J.Y. said that a lot of the bachelors sent an unsigned letter to the Administration asking for licensed prostitution here because they “were going nuts.”

  J. thought the only solution was to put a few professional women here on a P&T (Professional and Technical) rating by the Administration to protect the young girls.… He claimed that promiscuity was growing after only three months here and the young fellows especially were developing a “what the hell” attitude. B. made some exaggerated claim that 300 unmarried girls were pregnant at Santa Anita. S. said a father over where he lived gives his daughter a loud cross-examination every time she goes out because he is so suspicious. He said that a lot of Issei parents don’t let their daughters out at all because of all the rumors that they have heard about young girls being raped.

  J. said the reason the most of the Nisei would not get married was because they still clung to the idea that we would be out of the camps in a year. “The Japanese in this country we’re through,” he said, “regardless of who wins the war.”

  * * *

  When they were home in San Diego, many young Japanese had been befriended and mentored by an extraordinary woman named Clara Breed, the children’s librarian at the city library’s main branch. Dozens of young Nisei came to the building to study and read after school. Miss Breed, appalled at the mass roundups, went to the trains and buses leaving town and gave “her” children small gifts and, more important, her address, postcards, envelopes, and stamps. Their letters, collected in a 2006 book by Joanne Oppenheim, provide a unique view of the evacuation, the assembly centers, and camp life. Katherine Tasaki, a ten-year-old from San Diego, was one of dozens of children from that city who corresponded throughout the war with Clara Breed. In her first card from Santa Anita, Katherine was as cheerful as she was young: “I am having a good time. Lots of my relatives live here, we can see Mt. Wilson from here. The grandstand was made into a cafeteria. There is a playground for children.”

  There was indeed a playground, but the center was still in very rough shape. Latrines and laundry buildings were unfinished and, as Margaret Ishino wrote to Miss Breed, she was in charge of her two-and-half-month-old sister and the only place the baby could sleep was in a horse trough. The Ishinos did what almost everyone with any family money did: purchase mail-order supplies from the catalogs Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. For the baby, they ordered a buggy.

  Seventeen-year-old Louise Ogawa, who had been a junior at San Diego High, was one of Miss Breed’s most faithful correspondents, one of many who would send her small amounts of money they earned as waitresses or doing other camp chores—they were paid $12 a month and professionals, such as doctors and teachers, were paid $16 or $19—and she would do shopping for them back in San Diego. One of Louise’s first notes was dated January 6, 1942:

  Dear Miss Breed,

  I received the sweater and my brother’s shorts. Thank you very much for going through so much trouble for me.… I was very glad to hear you liked the flowers. I wish I could have sent 10 dozen Am. beauty roses (red ones) to show my appreciation for everything you have done for me. In my last letter I said the fence was torn down—well, it is up again. This time a few feet further out. We have been told that the reason for the fence building was so the cattle won’t come near our homes. In other words, cattle is going to be grazed outside the fence. But as yet, we have not seen any. Yes, I think the fence tends to weaken the morale of the people.

  On April 23, Louise wrote:

  I just received two intensely interesting books which you so kindly sent.… The first thing I did after receiving the books was to run to my parents.… Then I ran to Margaret Ishino and showed them to her. I was so happy.…

  This is my third week at Santa Anita. It is a beautiful place. I visited Seabiscuit’s statue and have gone around the racetrack several times.… “I am sleeping where Seabiscuit used to sleep” is a common saying here.… I heard we are going to have a library soon. It was the best news I’ve heard.…

  Every day there is a line blocks and blocks long. I often wait an hour or two at the mess hall.… Father, brother, sister and I went every day to the scrap wood pile to find wood to make our furniture.… Bitter feelings do not enter my head.… If I am helping the government by staying here, I am glad. I want so much to be some help for my Govt.

  Miss Breed, who kept all of the letters she received, wrote an article on the incarceration for Library Journal, a national magazine, and, after visiting the Santa Anita Assembly Center, quoted a small girl she had overheard talking to her mother: “I am tired of Japan, Mother. Let’s go back to America.”

  * * *

  Masuo Yasui, a merchant, a member of the local Rotary Club, and an influential leader of the Japanese community in Hood River, Oregon, was arrested after Pearl Harbor and imprisoned in an army jail in Fort Missoula, Montana. Because his son Minoru was an attorney and a lieutenant in the army reserve, Minoru was allowed to sit in at his father’s internment hearing in Fort Missoula. The evidence against the older man included the fact that he had vacationed in Japan in 1925 and was later awarded a medal by the Japanese government for fostering Japanese American friendship.

  The military prosecutor in Missoula suddenly held up childish drawings of the Panama Canal. “Didn�
�t you,” the officer asked, “have these maps and drawings so you could direct the blowing up of the locks of the canal?”

  “This is just the schoolwork of my children,” said Masuo. The children’s names were on the drawings.

  “No,” said the questioner. “We think you’ve cleverly disguised your nefarious intent and are using your children merely as a cover.”

  “No. No. No.”

  “Prove that you didn’t intend to blow up the Panama Canal.”

  The Yasui children, almost laughingly, were no threat to the canal, but security of the path from the Atlantic to the Pacific was a legitimate obsession of American officials. Military security was only one of the reasons the United States, with the enthusiastic cooperation of Latin American countries, decided to take on the costs of rounding up at gunpoint more than two thousand Latin Americans of Japanese descent. In fact, the forced removal—kidnapping really—and imprisonment of Japanese immigrants and their descendants stretched across the Americas, from Latin America to Canada.

  The U.S. Department of State, working with the Justice Department, concluded agreements with ten Central and South American countries to arrest residents of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were then turned over to American military authorities and flown by U.S. Army Air Corps planes to camps or prisons in the United States. The Latin American Japanese were held in American prisons to be used in bartering for the repatriation of American citizens held in Japan and in areas occupied by Imperial Japanese troops. A State Department internal memo on that project stated: “Nations of Central America and the Caribbean islands have in general been willing to send us subversive aliens without placing any limitation on our disposition of them. In other words, we could repatriate them, we could intern them, or we could hold them in escrow for bargaining purposes [with the government of Japan].”

  The Army Air Corps sent dozens of planes and ships—and combat-equipped troops—to Latin American airports and seaports on an “urgent” basis in 1942 and early 1943 to pick up Japanese immigrants living in ten countries, most of them in Peru. That country’s president, Ignacio Prado, wanted to get rid of all Japanese, including naturalized Peruvian citizens. Most of them were held by the Justice Department in Crystal City, Texas, or on U.S. Army bases in the Panama Canal Zone. In addition, Mexico agreed to put Japanese residents living near the U.S. border in a series of small concentration camps. Costa Rica interned Japanese residents on an island. The two Japanese residents of Paraguay were jailed in that country as well. By war’s end eight hundred Latin American Japanese were sent to Japan, traded for U.S. diplomats and other American citizens who had been interned in Japan on December 7, 1941. After the war, Peru refused to accept the return of its citizens and former resident aliens. The United States then declared that they were all illegal aliens who had entered the United States without valid passports and began deporting them to Japan, a country most of them had never seen.

  The government of Canada, which entered World War II with Great Britain against Germany in 1939, relocated 23,000 persons of Japanese ancestry after declaring war on Japan. They were moved to camps and abandoned mining towns in the interior of the country; three-quarters of those interned were Canadian citizens. Males sixteen or older were ordered to assembly areas as early as mid-January 1942. On February 27, the Canadian government issued an order for all Japanese in the western provinces to be moved inland. The evacuees’ property was confiscated and auctioned off to help pay for the evacuation and internment. Former residents of British Columbia were not allowed to return to Canada’s west coast until 1949. In Alaska, then an American territory, the United States evacuated 151 persons of Japanese ancestry to the relocation center at Minidoka, Idaho.

  * * *

  While thousands quietly entered the assembly centers and camps across the Americas, a few fought back. Masuo Yasui’s son, Minoru, was one of them. He was an American citizen, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Oregon and its law school and an officer in the army reserve. He tried nine times, in uniform, to enlist in the regular army and was turned away nine times. When Minoru’s father, Masuo, was sent back to jail after the interrogation about his younger children’s Panama Canal drawings, Minuro went back to Oregon and decided to deliberately violate the 8:00 p.m. curfew for Japanese in Portland so that he could file a lawsuit. He walked the streets until 11:00 p.m., but foot patrolmen refused to arrest him, so he finally turned himself in at the Second Avenue police station. “Jap Spy Arrested” was the front-page headline in the Portland Oregonian.

  Minoru Yasui was sent first to the assembly center at the North Portland Livestock Pavilion, where there were already more than three thousand people living in stalls built for cattle, hogs, and sheep. After being taken to the Minidoka camp in Idaho, he was brought back to Portland, where he was found guilty of choosing loyalty to Japan rather than the United States. The evidence, which put him in Multnomah County jail in solitary confinement for nine months, was that he had worked as a clerk in the Japanese consulate in Chicago, after being turned away by a dozen law firms in Oregon. He had quit his job at the consulate in Chicago on December 8, 1941.

  Minoru’s conviction would be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. His case became one of four American Japanese challenges to the curfews and evacuations to reach the high court. The others were brought by Gordon K. Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Mitsuye Endo.

  Gordon Hirabayashi, a senior at the University of Washington, was a Quaker whose parents had converted to Christianity in Japan. He had declared he was a conscientious objector before the war. He decided to defy the evacuation and curfew orders and went to an FBI office to report his deliberate violations—and was jailed on the spot. In a letter he wrote on May 13, 1942, he said:

  This order for the mass evacuation of all persons of Japanese descent denies them the right to live. It forces thousands of energetic, law-abiding citizens to exist in a miserable psychological and horrible physical atmosphere.… It kills the desire for a higher life. Hope for the future is exterminated.… I must maintain my Christian principles. I consider it my duty to maintain the democratic standards for which this nation lives.

  He was promised legal help from the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco, but ACLU national headquarters in New York and its founding director, Roger Baldwin, backed away from his case. A friend of President Roosevelt, Baldwin wrote to ACLU offices around the country in June of 1942 stating that he and the ACLU’s national board wanted to keep the organization’s name out of any filings by individual attorneys. “We cannot participate,” he said, “except in challenging the evacuation order as it applies to Japanese Americans on the basis of race discrimination.… Local committees are not to sponsor cases in which the position is taken that the government has no constitutional right to remove citizens from military areas.” Hirabayashi was convicted by the Federal District Court in Seattle and appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

  Fred Korematsu was born and raised in Oakland to immigrant parents who ran a floral nursery, and after high school graduation he worked as a shipyard welder until he lost his job after Pearl Harbor. Like many other Nisei, he was rejected when he tried to enlist, first by the U.S. National Guard and then by the U.S. Coast Guard. His parents and three brothers reported to the Tanforan Assembly Center on May 9, but he refused to go to the incarceration camps, deciding instead to go underground. He had minor plastic surgery to change the look of his eyes and planned to move to the Midwest with his Italian-American girlfriend, Ida Boitano. The plan fell apart; his surgery failed to make him look more European, and he and his girlfriend broke up. So, changing his name to Clyde Sarah on a forged draft card, he claimed to be of Spanish and Hawaiian descent and was hired as a welder at a navy shipyard near San Francisco, rising through the ranks to foreman.

  Korematsu was arrested on May 30 on a street corner in San Leandro, California, and taken to the San Francisco county jail. Ernest Besig, director of the ACLU of Nort
hern California, visited him in jail, and asked Korematsu if he was willing to be a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the mass evacuation. When Korematsu agreed, Besig and another ACLU lawyer, Wayne Collins, represented him in federal court in San Francisco—against the wishes of ACLU leaders in New York. Judge Adolphus F. St. Sure rejected Besig’s argument that Korematsu, an American citizen, was being denied due process. St. Sure released Korematsu on $2,500 bail, pending an appeal. But as Korematsu left the courtroom, a military policeman holding a gun took him into custody and delivered him to the Tanforan Assembly Center. Korematsu was later convicted in federal court for violating Executive Order 9066. Represented by Collins, who left the ACLU, Korematsu fought his case through the courts and he, too, appealed to the Supreme Court.

  Mitsuye Endo was from Sacramento and had been a California state employee before being removed to Tanforan and then the Tule Lake Relocation Center. She was contacted by a civil liberties attorney, James Purcell, about challenging her evacuation. She seemed to have a strong case: she was a U.S. government worker, her brother was in the U.S. Army, and she had no connections to the Japanese government. Purcell filed a habeas corpus petition on her behalf; when it was denied, her case was appealed and was eventually brought to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  In a unanimous decision in 1943, the Court decided two of the four challenges, ruling against Hirabayashi’s and Yasui’s appeals, stating that the curfew was constitutional under the government’s war powers. Korematsu’s and Endo’s cases reached the Supreme Court as well, but judgments were deliberately delayed until after the 1944 presidential election.

  4

  “KEEP THIS A WHITE MAN’S COUNTRY”

  THE OPENING OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS: MARCH 22 TO OCTOBER 6, 1942

  On April 7, 1942, the governors of ten western states met with Milton Eisenhower of the War Relocation Authority and Colonel Bendetsen of the Wartime Civil Control Administration in Salt Lake City, Utah, to discuss the relocation of the West Coast Japanese from assembly centers to camps in the badlands of their states. “The people of Wyoming have a dislike for any Orientals and simply will not stand for being California’s dumping ground,” said Governor Nels Smith of Wyoming, shaking his fist at Eisenhower. “If you bring Japanese into my state, I promise you they will be hanging from every tree.”