John Burling, the assistant director of the Justice Department’s Alien Enemy Control Unit, who had opposed the renunciation law, wrote in a Justice Department report, “It seems, at least in the light of hindsight, foreseeable that this group could be whipped up into a sort of hysterical frenzy of Japanese patriotism.” Sympathetic or not to the pro-Japanese Hokoku, hundreds of male residents, some as a means of self-protection, shaved their heads in the bozu style of the Japanese Imperial Army.
Conditions at Tule Lake were dismal at best and, at the time, renunciations of U.S. citizenship, forced or voluntary, seemed irreversible. Despite opposition from ACLU headquarters in New York and Los Angeles, Wayne Collins, the driven San Francisco attorney, eventually represented more than five thousand Japanese Americans incarcerated in the Justice Department prisons and WRA camps—including the hopeless people who had given up their American citizenship. Even in the ensuing decades, Collins’s style and accomplishments made an impression: in a 1985 issue of the Pacific Historical Review, John Christgau wrote on Collins in a piece aptly titled “Collins versus the World: The Fight to Restore Citizenship to Japanese American Renunciants of World War II.”
“These renunciants whom I represent,” Collins argued in a letter to the attorney general’s office in Washington, “have submitted to gross indignities and suffered greater loss of rights and liberties than any other group of persons during the entire history of the nation, all without good cause or reason. They have been misunderstood, slandered, abused and long have been held up to public shame and contempt … and now these internees, faced with the loss of citizenship rights, are confronted with a threatened involuntary deportation to Japan.”
In court, he argued, “Herr Hitler was guilty of abusing segments of [his] own citizenry for racial reasons. We are inured, however, to a like abuse of our own citizens by our own government.”
* * *
Though more and more American Japanese were leaving the camps, their departures were not always easy. Regulation piled upon regulation as camp administrators were overwhelmed by paperwork coming from all directions. One of the first rules was showing evidence that Japanese Americans would not be living or working within twenty-five miles of a railroad line.
And for many of the evacuees, even younger ones, leaving the camps was almost as traumatic as leaving their homes. George Nakamura, who had been a student at Berkeley before being sent to Tule Lake and becoming an editor on the Tulean Dispatch, wrote, “Now that I have made plans to leave the project, I feel like staying a little longer. Life here has made me soft and indolent. I’m clothed, sheltered, and don’t have to worry about where my next meal is coming from. I feel I’ve become part of the dust.”
The old Issei, building Japanese gardens and pools framed by delicate little bridges, were caught between two worlds. The oldest evacuees, women and men who had worked from dawn to dusk all their lives, suddenly had something they never knew before, leisure. They had time now to relax and gossip and knit as they talked—or sip homemade sake and play the ancient Japanese board game Go.
One Issei at Heart Mountain, a man who had been wealthy, said:
I guess I’ll just have to go. I don’t want to go. I sort of like it here. My work is interesting. I have time for golf and fishing. I have lots of friends. I have no worries. My wife likes it here alright. My daughter has her friends. We’re used to it.
Difficult as it was for some to leave camp life, the departures continued. The breakup of the Matsuda family, the farmers from Vashon Island, Washington, began two weeks into June 1944. The Matsudas, their twenty-one-year-old son, Yoneichi, and daughter, Mary, had all signed “yes” on the Application for Leave questions 27 and 28. So as “disloyals” from other camps were being sent to Tule Lake, they had been moved from Tule Lake. Yoneichi Matsuda, who considered himself a Christian pacifist, still felt he had to fight and left for basic training in Florida in June. On his last day in camp, his mother prayed in front of the family.
God, this is a difficult time for all of us. We know Yoneichi-san carries the burden for our family and for all other Japanese families to fight with courage and bring honor to our community. Guide and protect him. May his battles be fought with a pure heart. We know You will be with him wherever he goes.… Amen.
Mary cried for a day, thinking, “My only brother goes off to fight a war for a country that is keeping us imprisoned like criminals.”
A month later, she applied for training in the United States Cadet Nurse Corps and was accepted at Jane Lamb Memorial Hospital in Clinton, Iowa. Before she was scheduled to go to Clinton, her parents told her that they had applied to be transferred to Minidoka because they had Japanese friends nearby in Idaho, Japanese who had not been incarcerated because they lived away from the West Coast. Mary and her parents took a bus east to Pocatello, Idaho, before her parents boarded another bus to Minidoka.
While walking down a street in Pocatello, Mary was attacked in front of a barbershop—there was a NO JAPS ALLOWED sign in front—and the barber came rushing out and grabbed her in a choke hold, holding something against her throat, saying, “I oughta slit your throat from ear to ear you goddamned Jap!” She thought he was going to do it, but a friend of his across the street shouted, “Hey, Ken, knock it off!”
A month later, finally on her way to Clinton, Mary suddenly realized she was free, writing back to her parents, “It was like being in heaven.… It was incredible—the sense that I could walk anywhere I wanted to, and enjoy the flowers, the grass, and hear the birds.”
Soon after that, Mrs. Matsuda, who was fifty-two, was offered a job at a vegetable cannery in Ogden, Utah. Her husband, sixty-seven, said that she should go and she did, holding her leave pass and crying and praying at the camp gate. In November, Mrs. Matsuda wrote to Mary, who had just turned twenty, “This afternoon when I opened your letter, your picture dropped out. It was such a wonderful picture showing how you are getting along so fine with your white friends.… I will watch you become a great nurse. That is all I ask.”
Granted leave before being shipped overseas, Yoneichi traveled, illegally, to Vashon to check on the family farm. He could not find Mack Garcia, the Filipino workman, or Sheriff Hopkins. The place was run-down, but it was still there. He then went to Minidoka. He and Mary were both visiting at the same time. They were both in U.S. Army uniforms and camp residents could not stop staring at them. Then Private Matsuda was off for Maryland and then a nineteen-day freighter trip to Marseille, France, as a replacement in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
Other young people at the camps were also looking ahead to the rest of their lives. Stanley Hayami graduated from the Heart Mountain High School on May 11, 1944, and, at last, he got all As on his final report card and made the school’s honor roll. He wrote, “Man, do I feel swell! ’member I thought I had T.B. or something, well I don’t! Dr. Robbins looked my X-ray over and told me that there’s nothing wrong with my lungs—so I guess I’ll go on to college! Or the army.”
Hayami remained an enthusiastic and optimistic young man, writing, “I made up my mind on something else, too—I’m going into the artist-writer field. And I’m going to be the best artist in the world. (Even if my I.Q. is low.)” After his planned college graduation, he figured, “I’m going to bum my way around the world—So the world better watch out—Hayami is going to the top!”
Stanley Hayami put the 1944 valedictory address by his friend Paul Mayekawa in his diary. It was titled “Citizenship Carries Responsibility,” and in Mayekawa’s speech he asked, “What are we, you and I? Are we Japs, simply in a sense as General DeWitt declared, ‘A Jap is a Jap?’ … As evidenced by General DeWitt’s remark, there are some Americans who judge us only by our appearances.” Despite the color of their skin, Mayekawa asserted that “by right of birth in the United States, we are Americans.”
Still, Mayekawa went on to say that “evacuation has proved, however, that we cannot take citizenship for granted. We, the Japanese-Americans, in not
establishing ourselves as firmly in the American way of life as we had thought, must now reaffirm our loyalty to our country and prove ourselves worthy of our citizenship.” Yet, at the same time, he warned his audience not to forsake their Japanese heritage, since their heritage “may be the means by which we … further develop and enrich the American culture, for is not America made up of the various cultures of many nations?”
He acknowledged that graduates would be going their separate ways soon, to work or to college, though he stressed that “there are also those among us who will go into the armed forces. These persons, besides hastening the day of final victory, will constitute what I believe will be the greatest single factor in the re-establishment of the Japanese-Americans in such a definite and permanent place in the American life that issues, such as the evacuation, shall never again be necessary.”
The class of 1944 at Manzanar High School graduated that same June. Their yearbook, Our World, looked almost exactly like any other yearbook in the United States. It was seventy-six pages long, gave short bios of the 169 graduates, including names of the high schools they attended before being forced to leave their homes. There were photos of all the teachers, athletic teams, cheerleaders, and clubs. The kids were all Japanese Americans, of course, boys growing out of their suits and bobby-soxers in saddle shoes.
The first pages of the yearbook began, “Since that first day when Manzanar High School was called into session, the students and faculty have been trying to approximate in all activities the life we knew ‘back home.’” On the drama class page there were photographs, taken by Ansel Adams during the weeks he had spent at the camp, of student actors in Growing Pains by Auriana Rouveral. The play was described in the program as “the story of a typical American home.”
There was a page devoted to a letter from Ralph Merritt, the director of the camp. He wrote, “Each of you can find a place in this country for normal living as free citizens. Of course this depends on your cooperation and courage and initiative.… Never was your future as bright as now.”
There were no soldiers, or guns, or fences shown until the last two pages of the yearbook. There were no words on those pages, just one full-page photograph that showed a hand with garden shears trying to cut the barbed fence and another of a guard tower along the barbed-wire fences enclosing the camp.
That same summer, Ted Hirasaki, who had graduated from San Diego High School six years before, was moved after witnessing a Poston camp graduation. He wrote to Clara Breed about this, the first graduating class of Parker Valley High School. That day, graduates “marched into the partially constructed school auditorium and received their diplomas. They looked splendid in their caps and gowns. The boys were in blue and the girls, in white.”
Hirasaki reported that Poston III High School had become an accredited high school that spring, and the name was changed to Parker Valley High School. “If I am not mistaken I believe Parker Valley High School is the only relocation center high school that has been so honored. It is magnificent the way the students have striven for higher education.”
He went on to describe the growth of this school, writing how in the first year students had made do in makeshift barrack classrooms, but then:
When construction of the school began the whole community volunteered in making adobe bricks for the school buildings. Even school children helped so that school could open in time for the fall semester of 1943–1944. Yes, the students can rightfully be proud to say “It’s my school” for they built it with sweat and toil. The class gift was a beautiful American flag.
Many of the young graduates were anxious to adjust to new lives outside the barbed wire and watchtowers. “This will probably be my last letter written to you from the fair city of Poston, Arizona,” Fusa Tsumagari wrote to Miss Breed that spring. “My mother is going to join my father in Crystal City Texas. It is now almost 2½ years since we last saw him.” Crystal City, originally built as a migrant labor camp, was one of the few Justice Department facilites that held both Japanese and German aliens—and, after late 1943, their families. The population there, more than three thousand, included the 1,500 Japanese seized in Latin America, mostly in Peru, as well as more than 1,000 Japanese aliens and almost 900 American Germans.
There was great irony in Tsumagari’s next paragraph: the Japanese men on the FBI’s “potentially dangerous” lists, and Germans on similar lists, were often treated much better than the confused innocents sent to the high deserts of the West.
Crystal City, according to various letters we received, is a very wonderful place. It is quite an improvement over Poston. The buildings are white (not this black tar paper), each family cooks for themselves, have a shower in each barrack to be shared by the families occupying the barrack, well furnished, and a nice canteen. So much is allowed per person per day for food and this amount is given them in certain coins only good at the local store, and they tell us food is ample.
Tsumagari was not joining her parents in Crystal City; she headed to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her next letter, in June, reported on her new life. “As you know, I am living with my ‘sis’ and her husband. All three of us are working; they in Heinrich Envelope Co., and I in L.S. Donaldson Company, a dept store.” Tsumagari was working there as a typist in the mail-order division. She reported, “The work is monotonous and rather tiring at times, but I enjoy it. There are lots of things to learn, people are nice, and my typing has increased in speed and my accuracy is getting better. We’re slightly swamped with work and consequently have little time to fool around, like in camp, but time passes fast.”
Tsumagari was planning to attend business school and then aiming to take the civil service exam. As she looked ahead, she still thought of the past. She wrote, “Last Sunday Ikuko Kuratomi (do you remember her?) called me. She is living in St. Paul and attending Hamline University. She is coming over this Sunday for dinner and we hope to do some reminiscing and [put together the] patchwork of our life pattern.”
While some young workers compared their lives after camp to their earlier lives behind barbed fences, others compared their fates with those signing up with the army. Ted Hirasaki wrote to Clara Breed in the summer of 1944, “I had hoped to be a barber at Camp Savage, Minn. I had an offer. In a routine checking of the arm, the doctor advised me that the arm bone is in a rather dubious state and that it would take some time before the condition would clear up. I could have walked under a snake’s belly, I felt so low.” He was hit hard by that blow, and had started to feel sorry for himself. Still, he couldn’t help but look to other Nisei: “Then I read some articles in the Pacific Citizen, the JACL newspaper: It told of the heroic deeds of the Nisei soldiers, of the hardships they suffered—I woke up.” He realized that what he was going through was “nothing compared to the fighting man on the front. I am back in training now. I am taking weight-lifting to condition my body.”
The drafting of young evacuees continued to be the major topic of conversation—and conflicts—in the camps. Many aging Issei parents thought their sons’ first obligation was to them, not to the country that imprisoned them. And many young men decided to defy any military orders as long as their basic rights were being mocked. “I am a No-No boy,” said one teenager who refused to answer questions 27 and 28. “I am going to say ‘no’ to anything as long as they treat me like an alien. When they treat me like a citizen, they can ask me questions that a citizen should answer.”
“Those of us who volunteered were ostracized,” said another. “There were catcalls and we got into fistfights. The Kibei, those born in America but educated in Japan, threw food at us in the kitchen, and my poor mother, with three sons who had volunteered, was castigated mercilessly.”
The talk and the situation were about the same in all the camps, except for Tule Lake. “Speaking of the draft problem,” wrote Louise Ogawa from Poston to Miss Breed in San Diego, “quite a number of boys are being called for the army and together with the relocation this camp is slowly becoming emp
ty. There are quite a number of boys refusing to appear for induction. I just can’t imagine young boys just out of school being picked up by the F.B.I. and taken to jail. It just doesn’t seem right.” Ogawa went on, writing, “Maybe I am too Americanized to see their view point but on the other hand I know I should respect them for their decision and determination to carry out what they believe should be.”
Tom Kawaguchi at Topaz, like many other Nisei, enlisted in the army against his parents’ wishes. “I joined,” he said, “because I always felt very strongly about patriotism. I felt that this was my country. I didn’t know any other country.” To him, his choice was straightforward. “When war broke out with Japan, I was ready to fight the enemy, and I had no qualms about whether it was Japanese or German or whatever. This was my country and I was ready to defend it.”
Stanley Hayami felt the same way. His older brother Frank was already in the army, and after graduation Stanley was ordered to report for his army physical in Denver. “After taking the exam,” he wrote in his diary, “Mits Kawashima, Calvin Kawanami, Lloyd Kitozono, and Mas and I roamed around town, ate a big T-bone steak, saw [the film] ‘Guadacanal Diary,’ then we went to a hotel to sleep.”
By August, Hayami was headed to active duty. He wrote in his diary on August 20, “Probably this shall be the last time I will write in this book in a long time.” In this entry, he described the news of the past three months of the war: “Well, France has been invaded and the allies are now close to Paris. Saipan Island in the South Pacific has been taken with the result that Premier Tojo and his entire staff was forced to quit. Hitler has been almost killed.”
He wrote about American Japanese fighting in Europe, as well. “In Italy the Japanese-Americans are doing a wonderful job. The 100th is the most decorated outfit in the army.”
Infamy Page 21