Infamy
Page 34
Watanabe, Grace
Watanabe, Hisako
Watanabe, Richard
Webb, Ulysses S.
Weckerling, John
Weglyn, Michi Nishiura
Western Defense Command
Western Pacific Railroad
Westminster, California
Weston, Edward
Whirlwinds (Manzanar magazine)
Whitney, Mount
WHO (Omaha radio station)
Wickard, Claude
Wilbur, George
Willoughby, Charles
Wilson, Mount
Wirin, A. L.
World Trade Center attacks
World War I
veterans
World War II. See also military service; Pearl Harbor; and specific battles, countries, and military units
Wright, Frank Lloyd
Wyoming
Yabe, Fumiko
Yada, Jimmie
Yamada, Yoshikazu
Yamaki, Bill Shyuichi
Yamamoto, Hisaye
Yamamoto, Isoroku
Yamashiro, George “Sankey”
Yamashita, Kanshi
Yanari, Ralph
Yasui, Kenny
Yasui, Masuo
Yasui, Minoru
conviction and appeals of
Yatabe, Tom
Yatsu, Lawrence
Years of Infamy (Weglyn)
Yoneda, Elaine Black
Yoneda, Karl
Yoneda, Tommy
Yoshimura, Akiji
Young Men and Young Women’s National Defense Association
Zanuck, Darryl F.
After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt addressed Congress: “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.”
Within forty-eight hours of the attacks, FBI agents searched the homes of thousands of “Suspect Enemy Aliens.” More than twelve hundred men were arrested without charges. The evidence against them ranged from membership in civic organizations to possession of any written materials with Japanese characters, including Bibles and knitting manuals.
Hysterical rumors of invasion and sabotage swept the West Coast. Soon guides were printed on how to tell Japanese “enemies” from Chinese “friends.” This cartoon by Milton Caniff was published in hundreds of newspapers in early 1942.
On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the incarceration of 120,000 West Coast American Japanese. Assembly notices were posted and American Japanese were registered for evacuation.
Like all evacuees, the Mochida children wore identification tags while they waited for their evacuation bus. War Relocation Authority (WRA) leaders removed anyone with “a single drop of Japanese blood.”
Residents of Bainbridge Island, Washington, were among the first to be evacuated. The islanders were marched to a ferry and when they docked in Seattle, men waiting with shotguns spat on them.
At Santa Anita racetrack, the largest of the assembly centers where American Japanese were held while the concentration camps were being built, lines of soldiers faced off against the evacuees arriving by train.
While residents at Santa Anita joked they lived in the stall of the great Seabiscuit, evacuees suffered the filth, unsafe water, and persistent sickness typical of assembly centers, as shown here at Tanforan.
Lieutenant General John DeWitt insisted on sending the American Japanese to camps because there was no way to tell the difference between the loyal and disloyal, saying “A Jap is a Jap.”
Army reserve officer Karl Bendetsen (left) was assigned to General DeWitt and conceived the legal strategy to hold the American Japanese for more than three years without charges.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson (left) opposed the evacuation, but as “a president’s man” he accepted his duties. His deputy John J. McCloy said, “Why, the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”
California attorney general Earl Warren pushed for the evacuation, claiming that the California Japanese had moved near airports and factories to commit sabotage—not mentioning that the Japanese had lived there long before those were built.
Walter Lippmann wrote in his influential column, which was published in more than 250 newspapers across the country, “The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and without.”
Theodor Geisel, the editorial cartoonist of PM, published a drawing showing hordes of buck-toothed American Japanese collecting dynamite. He signed the cartoon under his well-known pseudonym, Dr. Seuss.
Wayne Collins, a fiery civil liberties attorney, spent more than thirty years representing thousands of Japanese Americans threatened with deportation—sometimes literally pulling them off ships headed for Tokyo.
This photograph of Fred Korematsu (center) at his family’s plant nursery before the war now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery’s “Struggle for Justice” section. Represented by Wayne Collins, Korematsu was one of four Japanese American dissenters whose cases reached the Supreme Court.
The photographer Dorothea Lange, standing behind a crowd of evacuees, worked for the WRA after becoming famous for her photographs of migrant workers during the Great Depression.
The renowned photographer Ansel Adams sought to generate opposition to the camps, but he became frustrated when the incarcerated insisted on showing only the best side of their lives in camp.
Isamu Noguchi, the celebrated Japanese American sculptor, lived in New York and thus did not face evacuation. He volunteered to be interned and teach art to his fellow evacuees.
An Ansel Adams photo of Manzanar, taken from a guard tower. The landscape was harsh, but incarcerated farmers and gardeners were able to make the desert bloom.
The barbed wire and guard towers of Manzanar were secretly photographed by a well-known Los Angeles photographer, Toyo Miyatake, who built a camera hidden inside what appeared to be a lunchbox.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited Gila River Relocation Center with WRA director Dillon Myer in 1943. That same spring, Japanese American soldiers were hidden from view while her husband was touring western army bases.
The cheerfulness of Ansel Adams’s camp subjects, as seen in his portrait of the Tsurutani family, irked the photographer, but served the government’s purpose in portraying camp life as something like a long vacation.
Mess halls broke up families, as children ate with their friends. In Farewell to Manzanar, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston wrote: “After three years of mess hall living, [my family] collapsed as an integrated unit.”
Many teenagers found freedoms in camp; Chiyo Kusumoto said it “was like a dream—going to the grandstands where there were records—and boys and dancing.”
Clara Breed, the children’s librarian of the San Diego Public Library, met hundreds of young Japanese Americans and during the camp years she sent them letters, books, and gifts.
All the camps had boy scout troops. As boy scouts, the future senator Alan Simpson met the future congressman Norman Mineta when Simpson’s Cody, Wyoming, troop came to visit Mineta’s camp.
Christmas at Heart Mountain. Children tried to continue normal American life in camp; it was only years later that they began to ask their parents why they hadn’t fought back.
Some internees, of course, did fight incarceration. Frank Emi led the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, protesting the fact that evacuees were eligible for the draft but were still denied their full civil rights.
In 1943 the WRA, using confusing loyalty questionnaires, sent those deemed “disloyal” to Tule Lake. This photograph is of “disloyals” from Manzanar arriving at Tule Lake.
Tule Lake became a violent place, with pro-Japan activists terrorizing “loyals,” and with troops and tanks regularly moving in to quell riots.
General John Weckerling recruited Private John Aiso as the first soldier to serve as a secr
et translator in the Pacific, saying, “John, your country needs you.” Later, Aiso said, “No American had ever told me America was my country.”
Harry Fukuhara (right) interrogating a Japanese prisoner of war in in Aitape, New Guinea. Major General Charles Willoughby said, “Never before in history did an army know so much concerning its enemy…. Those translators saved over a million lives and two years.”
Military Intelligence Service recruit Kenny Yasui served in Burma and had swam alone to an island and persuaded the Japanese garrison there to surrender.
In Europe, German and Italian soldiers surrendered in large numbers before the ferocious fighting of Japanese American units. A German officer captured by a Japanese American shouted, “You’re not an American. You’re supposed to be on our side.”
Stanley Hayami kept a diary of life at Heart Mountain Relocation Center, agonizing over his high school grades and ambitions before joining the army as soon as he graduated.
Sergeant Ben Kuroki flew fifty-eight missions in Europe and the Pacific and toured America as a war hero. One of his stops was at Heart Mountain, where he thrilled young people, but he never heard the threats from some of the pro-Japan groups.
Lieutenant Daniel Inouye, a winner of the Medal of Honor as a platoon leader in Italy, returned home to Hawaii with a metal hook, replacing the arm he lost in combat. Standing here with his father, he later became a long-serving United States senator.
Members of the American Legion Post in Hood River, Oregon, became a national symbol of prejudice when they painted over the names of Japanese Americans serving in Europe on the “Wall of Honor” at the local courthouse.
As the American Japanese returned to their homes after the war, a few found that their neighbors had helped preserve their businesses and farms. Far more were still treated as enemies.
Many of the evacuees, having lost everything, became residents of shoddy towns, trailer parks, and abandoned army barracks.
General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell presented a Distinguished Service Cross to Mary Masuda in honor of her brother, who was killed while serving in Italy. Upon hearing about her family’s difficult return home, Stilwell said he would be glad to form a “pick-axe” brigade to protect them.
President Harry S. Truman saluted the all–Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most honored combat unit per capita in American military history. Truman shook the hand of Private Wilson Makabe (left), who lost a leg in combat. He addressed the veterans: “You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice and you have won.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I had wanted to write this book for a long time for the simplest of reasons: to answer the question, “How could this have happened here?” I had wandered the bare ruins of several of the “Relocation Centers” of World War II, hoping I might hear the voices of the Americans there. I couldn’t, of course; there was only the howling wind. The winds became words late in the 1960s and 1970s when young Japanese Americans, inspired in part by the black civil rights movement and anti–Vietnam War protest, urged their families to tell their stories. They created Japanese American foundations and museums; writers and researchers collected and saved those words in thousands of interviews and oral histories describing a dark stain on American history. I am in debt to thousands of Americans who became historical archaeologists to dig up a story sure to be lost in the tales of World War II and the American ascendance in the second half of the twentieth century. So I am grateful to the witnesses and scholars of this extraordinary time in American history. I am especially grateful to two of my guides through this world: Lane Ryo Hirabayashi of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Robert Asahina, who pointed me in directions I never would have found on my own.
I am also in debt to two extraordinary young women: my assistant Sue Gifford and Emi Ikkanda, my editor, under John Sterling at Henry Holt and Company. Emi and I may not have always agreed on how to analyze this American history, but this would be less of a book without her passions and insights. Michael Shashoua helped with research in New Mexico. There are a million moving parts in this story and no one could take it on without the smarts of many other people. It was an adventure and I am grateful to so many people from the National Park Service and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles who took this journey with me. They are a national treasure.
On a more personal basis, I am deeply grateful to hundreds friends and members of my family in Los Angeles, New York, Sag Harbor, and Paris. I worked on this book during the most difficult events of my life and could not have seen it through without their love and help. I am leaving out many more names than I am including here, but I must mention my children, Jeffrey, Fiona, and Cynthia Reeves, and Conor O’Neill, Colin O’Neill and his wife Deneen, and Mary Ann and Jack Garvey, Ann Beirne, Mary and Roger Mulvihill, my agent, Amanda Urban, not only for her usual professional excellence but for many other things, and her husband, Ken Auletta, Nancy Candage, Dr. Janet Pregler, Marcia and Paul Herman, Millie Harmon Meyers, Alice Mayhew, Leslie Stahl and Aaron Latham, Kay Eldredge and Jim Salter, Myrna and Paul Davis, Amanda Kyser and Robert Sam Anson, Gail Sheehy and Clay Felker, Bina and Walter Bernard, Ellen Chesler and Matt Mallow, Jean Vallely Graham, Meredith and Tom Brokaw, President Barack Obama, Cynthia and Steven Brill, Liv Ullman, Susan Alberti, Fran and Roger Diamond, Susan and Alan Friedman, Heidi Shulman and Mickey Kantor, Nancy and Len Jacoby, Roger Gould, Ken Turan and Patty Williams, Ron Rogers and Lisa Specht, Alice and David Clement, Diane Wayne and Ira Reiner, Aileen Adams and Geoff Cowan, Susan and Donald Rice, Nancy and Miles Rubin, Linda Douglass and John Phillips, my colleagues at the Annenberg School of the University of Southern California, most of all Mary Murphy, Nancy and Richard Asthalter, Berna and Lee Huebner, Connie and Dominique Borde, Elizabeth Johnston, Pat Thompson and Jim Bitterman, Pat and Walter Wells, Judith Symonds, Sarah Stackpole and Ward Just, Ina and Robert Caro, Sarah and Mitch Rosenthal, Marlise and Alan Riding, Lynne and Russell Kelley, Pat Hynes, Ralph Schlosstein and Jane Hartley, Deb and Kevin McEneaney, Susan Lacy and Halstead Welles, Kathleen Brown and Van Gordon Sauter, Anne Graves, and, above all, Patricia Rivera.
RICHARD REEVES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RICHARD REEVES, the bestselling author of such books as President Kennedy: Profile of Power, is an award-winning journalist who has worked for The New York Times, written for The New Yorker, and served as chief correspondent for Frontline on PBS. Currently the senior lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, he lives in New York and Los Angeles. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY RICHARD REEVES
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What the People Know: Freedom and the Press
Do the Media Govern?: Politicians, Voters, and Reporters in America
Family Travels: Around the World in 30 (or So) Days
Running in Place: How Bill Clinton Disappointed America
President Kennedy: Profile of Power
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Passage to Peshawar: Pakistan Between the Hindu Kush and the Arabian Sea
American Journey: Traveling with Tocqueville in Search of Democracy in America
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Convention
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Introduction
1. PEARL HARBOR
DECEMBER 7, 1941
2. BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT
SIGNING OF EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066: FEBRUARY 19, 1942
3. ONLY WHAT THEY COULD CARRY
PUBLIC PROCLAMATION NUMBER 1: MARCH 2, 1942
4. “KEEP THIS A WHITE MAN’S COUNTRY”
THE OPENING OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS: MARCH 22 TO OCTOBER 6, 1942
5. A DESERT CHRISTMAS
DECEMBER 25, 1942
6. UNCLE SAM, FINALLY, WANTS YOU