Sometimes America failed and suffered. Sometimes she made mistakes, great mistakes. America hounded and harassed the Indians, then remembering that they were the first Americans, she gave them back their citizenship. She enslaved the Negroes, then remembering Americanism, she wrote out the Emancipation Proclamation. She persecuted the German Americans during the First World War, then recalling America was born of those who come from every nation, seeking liberty, she repented. Her history is full of errors, but with each mistake she has learned.… Can we the graduating class of Amache Senior High School believe that America still means freedom, equality, security, and justice? Do I believe this? Do my classmates believe this? Yes, with all our hearts, because in that faith, in that hope, is my future, our future, and the world’s future.
And Stanley Hayami, at Heart Mountain? He still had a year of high school left and, one more time, he did not raise his grades and wrote, “Well, today was the finish of one year of hard schoolwork. I got the same grades as last semester: English—A; History—A; Advanced Algebra—B; Chemistry—A; Spanish II—B.”
He was also missing more friends. On the seventeenth of August, Stanley wrote, “Kei Bessho who sat in front of me in Chemistry class last year went to Chicago 2 weeks ago. Mits Inouye and Ralph Yanari, also in my chemistry class, and Albert Saijo, who worked in mess hall 5 with me back in Pomona, went together to work in the hospital at the Univ. of Michigan at Ann Arbor.”
In late August and early September, he wrote again of one Nisei after another, family and friends, leaving Heart Mountain. His cousin Eddie left for the University of Cincinnati; his sister, Grace, nicknamed “Sach,” left for Chicago. Stanley described her leave-taking: “It was windy—Sach had some tears in her eyes—though she tried hard to fight them back—don’t blame her.” She was headed to the American Academy of Art, planning to work for a doctor’s family while she attended school.
Even Hayami’s brother Frank had left Heart Mountain. Frank was released in August 1943, as by then, he wrote, “the government had decided that I was no longer considered dangerous to the public safety, and that I could leave camp to any destination in the United States with the exception of the area under the Western Defense Command which included the entire Pacific Coast.” He packed one suitcase and, carrying a railroad ticket and $100 in cash, he departed for New York City “to seek my fame and fortune.” At the time, he was carrying a 4C draft card, 4C meaning “enemy alien,” even though he was a native-born American.
“I traveled without too much trouble from authorities or confrontations from the white Americans since they all took me for an American Indian or a Hawaiian because of my deep tan,” he wrote. “The only work I could find was in restaurants, bussing the dishes off of the tables and slopping them into the garbage cans. My 4C draft card did not help me to get any work in the engineering field since most of that work was of a military nature.”
* * *
All the policies that allowed anyone out of the camps were vehemently opposed by General DeWitt and Colonel Bendetsen. Both men, the architects of evacuation, were dealt with in the army way: they were quietly relieved and promoted upward to avoid any chance of national publicity or unrest about the camps. In September of 1943, DeWitt was transferred to duty in Washington, D.C., and was replaced by General Delos Emmons, the martial law commander in Hawaii. Bendetsen, an extraordinarily lucky man, was sent to London and then France, where he served as deputy chief of staff of the forward communications zone in Normandy.
While some Nisei were being released from the camps, the state where most had originated, California, did not want them back. Governor Warren said that the evacuees being released to jobs and schools in other states were all “potential saboteurs”—and he wanted none released in California. That same week, the San Diego City Council formally called on the federal government to stop releasing evacuees.
The state legislature took the same line as Governor Warren and began forming committees again to try to prevent the American Japanese of California from returning to their home state. Senator Herbert Slater, called the “dean of the California Legislature” because he had served more than thirty years, traveled the state holding hearings designed to build public support for preventing Japanese and Japanese Americans from returning to their old homes. The committee invited parents of white Americans fighting in the Pacific, leading to exchanges like this with Mrs. Margaret Benaphfl, representing the Gold Star Mothers of California.
“We want to keep the Japs out of California,” she said.
“For the duration?” asked Senator Slater.
“No, for all times.”
“That’s the stuff.”
Pearl Buck, the author, also appeared before the Slater committee, praising the contributions of Asians to American life, but most California newspapers did not even report her presence, much less her hour-long testimony.
A state assembly committee, headed by Chester Gannon, questioned Mrs. Maynard Thayer of Pasadena, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who was a leader of a pro–American Japanese organization called the Pacific Coast Committee on American Principles and Fair Play. Mrs. Thayer cited the Bill of Rights and this time the committee questioning was hostile.
GANNON: What do you know of the Bill of Rights? The Bill of Rights has no application to state legislation and we know you attacked the American Legion and the Native Sons. When was the Bill of Rights written? What is it?
THAYER: Of course, it’s the first ten amendments of the Constitution.
GANNON: You’re like all these people who prattle about the Bill of Rights and don’t know a thing about it. The Bill of Rights is not such a sacred thing after all. Don’t you know at the time the Bill of Rights was written that we had 150,000 slaves in the U.S.? What did the Bill of Rights do about that—nothing. Slavery was accepted. And yet you talk about the rights of minorities being protected by the Bill of Rights.
THAYER: I think we’ve made some progress in our interpretation since then. Our committee will back any groups whose constitutional rights are threatened. It is of the greatest importance that in time of war we do not get off into race hatred.
GANNON: Are you a Communist? This sounds like Communist doctrine.
THAYER: I have been a registered Republican for thirty years.
Governor Warren then appointed a new committee, this one on race relations in the state. Leo Carrillo, an actor who was of Mexican descent, was appointed a member of this committee. He traveled California making speeches that included this line: “When people in Washington say we must protect American-Japanese, they don’t know what they’re talking about. There’s no such thing as an American-Japanese. If we ever permit those termites to stick their filthy fingers into the sacred soil of our state again, we don’t deserve to live here ourselves.”
A few notable figures tried to use their reputations and talents to push against the anti-Japanese sentiment, including photographers Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams.
Dorothea Lange, already famous for her work during the Great Depression in the 1930s, was hired by the War Relocation Authority to photograph the American Japanese evacuation and internment. She dedicated herself to the project, working seven days a week from the first roundups in March through the summer of 1942.
The army first limited her access and then confiscated her photos for the duration of the war.
Lange later wrote, “The internment is an example of what happens to us if we lose our heads.… What was, of course, horrifying was to do this thing entirely on the basis of what blood may be coursing through a person’s veins, nothing else.”
Adams, the visual poet of the west, had tried to enlist in the army in 1942 but was rejected because of his age, forty. He was invited to take photos at Manzanar by the camp’s director, Ralph Merritt, an old friend from the Sierra Club.
Merritt was a man who knew the rules—and how to bend them. Internees were not allowed to use cameras, but Toyo Miyatake, who had been a
student of Edward Weston and was a well-known photographer back in Los Angeles, had smuggled lenses into the camp and used scrap wood to build a camera that looked like an ordinary lunch box. When Merritt realized what was going on, he arranged to have Miyatake’s cameras, three of them, taken out of storage. He personally handed them to Miyatake, saying, “Use them!”
When Merritt invited Adams to Manzanar, the photographer agreed and came in September of 1943. He was a passionate man who hated the idea of the camps and thought that he could generate sympathy around the country for the hardworking and loyal Japanese and Japanese Americans being held behind wire fences and guard towers.
He spent a week in Owens Valley photographing the internees at work, at school, and in church. He was frustrated, however, by internees’ insistence on showing only the best side of their lives behind barbed wire. They wore their finest clothes and smiled with their families. They were anxious to pose for the kind of photographs released by the government to try to picture camp life as happy and normal. He put together a book of photographs with the title, Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese Americans. “It is,” he wrote of the book, “addressed to the average American citizen, and is conceived on a human, emotional basis accentuating the realities of the individual and his environment rather than considering the loyal Japanese as an abstract, amorphous, minority group.”
Both the book and an exhibit of the photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York were commercial failures. In Adams’s own words, “People refused to buy it.” It was too soon. To many citizens, the faces of the camp still looked like the enemy.
* * *
During 1943, the population of the camps dropped from a peak of about 107,000 in January to 93,000 in December. With many of the better-educated evacuees gone, there was less leadership of the evacuees and a good deal more violence, beatings, and attempted murders of evacuees, who were now being called the “disloyals” and the “loyals.”
The number of young men who answered no to questions 27 and 28 on leave application questionnaires, the “No-No Boys,” had shocked camp administrators—and their bosses in Washington. On July 3, 1943, the U.S. Senate had reacted to their answers by passing a resolution urging segregation of the “disloyals” in a separate camp. Within days, the WRA announced its segregation policy for “persons who by their acts have indicated that their loyalties lie with the Japanese during the present hostilities or that their loyalties do not lie with the United States.” The segregation had been proposed and backed by the same men who devised the evacuation after Pearl Harbor, including General DeWitt, Colonel Bendetsen, and Governor Earl Warren.
In effect, the government and its sloppily worded questionnaire had manufactured a new crisis in the camps. At the beginning of September, Tule Lake, where 42 percent of young men either failed to register for the draft or answered no to question 28, was selected as the segregation camp for “disloyals” and was converted to a maximum-security facility.
WRA director Myer specified the “disloyals” as:
• those who had applied for expatriation or repatriation to Japan and had not withdrawn their application before July 1, 1942;
• those who answered no to the loyalty question or refused to answer it during registration and had not changed their answers;
• those who were denied leave clearance due to some accumulation of adverse evidence in their records;
• aliens from the Department of Justice internment camps who the agency recommended for detention, and family members of segregants who chose to remain with their families.
As the transfers began, hundreds, then thousands of Tule Lake residents voluntarily declared themselves “disloyal” to avoid the breakup of their families or to avoid the chaos of one more move in sealed trains.
The plan, not publicized, was to strip “disloyals” of citizenship—the Constitution be damned!—and deport them to Japan when the war was over. A battalion of combat-ready troops, 899 men, backed by six tanks and a dozen armored cars, patrolled the fences of Tule Lake as the transfers of “disloyals” began. The first transfer started late in September of 1943 with 500 “disloyal” internees from Heart Mountain being sent to Tule Lake and 400 “loyals” sent from Tule Lake to Heart Mountain. There were more transfers to come: the WRA, with army help, came to move 6,289 more Tule Lake “loyals” to other camps and more than 9,000 “disloyals” to Tule Lake.
Chief Judge William Denman of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals described Tule Lake, after it became the segregation camp for “disloyals,” during legal hearings.
The barbed wire surrounding the 18,000 people, including thousands of American citizens, [made the camp look] like the prison camps of the Germans. There were the same turrets for the soldiers and the same machine guns for those who might attempt to climb the high wiring. The buildings were covered with tarred paper over green and shrinking shiplap—this for the low winter temperatures of the high elevation of Tule Lake.… No Federal penitentiary so treats its adult prisoners. Here were children and babies as well.… To reach the unheated latrines, which were in the center of the blocks of 14 buildings, meant leaving the residential shacks and walking through the rain and snow—again a lower than penitentiary treatment, even disregarding the sick and the children.
At its peak, Tule Lake was “home” to 18,700 “inmates,” twelve hundred combat-equipped soldiers, and 550 administrative personnel. The number of soldiers and administrators assigned to the segregation camp was more than ten times the average allotment of three officers and 124 soldiers to the other camps.
The extra contingents of military guardians of Tule Lake had been moved there in October 1943, after a truck carrying twenty-eight workers rolled over, killing one resident and severely injuring seven more. The workers were outside the gates headed for twenty-nine hundred acres of the farmland that provided food for the camp and for military bases in the west. The dead man was named Kashima, recently arrived from Topaz in Utah. Raymond Best, the camp’s director, denied evacuees permission to hold a public memorial service for the victim. He shut off the camp’s public address systems, but more than five thousand internees gathered anyway and declared a work stoppage, leaving $500,000 worth of vegetables to rot in the sun. The Tule Lake farm workers demanded improved safety and working conditions, and Best responded by firing them. He secretly brought in eight hundred farm workers from other camps, who were paid a dollar an hour, making more money in two days than Tulean workers made in a month.
Trouble became the norm at Tule Lake. WRA director Myer came to Tule Lake in November 1943. When word got out that the director was there, hundreds of internees surrounded the administration building for three hours. Led by “disloyals,” most of them Kibei, they shouted demands for more food and better pay for their labor. The situation was bad enough to be brought to the attention of President Roosevelt. In a memo, which exaggerated what had happened, Attorney General Biddle wrote, “Serious disturbances have recently taken place at a relocation center of the War Relocation Authority at Tule Lake.… Japanese internees armed with knives and clubs shut up Dillon Myer and some of his administrative officers in the administration building for several days. The Army moved in to restore order.”
On November 14, Raymond Best scheduled an Army-WRA rally at Tule Lake to support the camp administration. Colonel Verne Austin, commander of camp troops, was the principal speaker, but not a single evacuee appeared at the parade ground. The colonel gave his unity speech to rows of empty benches.
Martial law was declared the next day, as soldiers went from barrack to barrack trying to find out, without much luck, who were the ringleaders of this soft rebellion. Six barracks, fenced off, had been designated a “stockade” and were soon filled, though not necessarily with actual rebels. Then a stockade inside the stockade was built for suspect “disloyals” who were then forced to live in tents. A twelve-foot-high beaverboard wall was built around this inner sanctum, hiding the fact that the prisoners
were denied visits, medical care, or mail.
The news of the army takeover became exactly what the military wanted to avoid: a national story. The New York Times referred to the Tule Lake riots in an editorial, saying, “We can’t give leeway to possible spies and saboteurs because we simply want to believe that human nature, including that which is wrapped in a saffron-colored skin, is inherently good.”
Another typical editorial was from the Huntington, West Virginia, Herald-Dispatch on November 8, 1943.
It’s something of a relief to learn that Army forces—some of whom are veterans of the fighting in the Pacific area—have taken over at the Tule Lake internment center for disloyal Japanese and presumably have the situation well in hand. The War Relocation Authority policy of coddling and kid-gloving these treacherous, fanatical, insolent prisoners has finally resulted in an incident which promises to clean up the whole mess. Protecting the nation from the thousands of disloyal Japanese rounded up after Pearl Harbor is a military policing job, not a welfare workers’ tea party.
In fact, Tule Lake was a citizen prisoner of war camp and a fearful place for most families. A 7:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. curfew was enforced by armed troops inside and outside the fences. As in many prisoner of war camps, the army protected the administration but let prisoners terrorize each other. At Tule Lake, there were gangs armed with clubs and homemade knives, including fanatic pro–Imperial Japan groups called Hokoku Dan and Hoshi Dan, The Young Men and Young Women’s National Defense Association to Serve the Mother Country, which specialized in midnight raids and savage beatings of anyone they suspected of cooperating with WRA or military officials.
Jim Tanimoto, classified as “disloyal” because he had refused to answer questions 27 and 28, described a night at Tule Lake.
Maybe twelve o’clock, two o’clock, this soldier comes running through our barrack and he’s shouting as loud as he can, says, “Get your ass out of bed and get outside.” We could see a line of soldiers ten, fifteen yards apart. There was probably ten or eleven of ’em. On one side, say there were five soldiers, loading their guns. And there was a machine gun right in the middle of the line. There was another five or six soldiers on the other side.… We’re standing there, middle of the night in our night clothes, and you begin to wonder, man, this is it.… We can see their faces, we can see their reaction, like “Hey, let’s shoot ’em. These guys are animals.” And then the officer in charge stepped forward, he comes forward and says nobody’s going to escape while he’s in charge. And he said that several times, real loud voice.… Next morning we heard that some soldier thought he heard someone planning to escape and that’s why we got awakened.
Infamy Page 18