Historical Notes: 20 Years After

Through the lantern-lit streets of Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district, masqueraders, serpentine dancers with an ancient shrine on their shoulders, and kimono-clad maidens will parade this week. Kendo swordsmen polished their bamboo breastplates for a tournament, luncheon speakers rounded out their testimonial oratory and, at a glittering ball at the Ambassador Hotel, a porcelain princess will reign as Queen of the Nisei Week. Officially, Nisei week is a tribute to Southern California’s Japanese-American community, the largest (90,000) in the continental U.S. Unofficially, it recalls an ugly footnote to American history: the World War II evacuation and internment of more than 110,000 West Coast Japanese, most of them native-born U.S. citizens.

In the panicky weeks after Pearl Harbor, feeling against Japanese of all ilk ran high. A superpatriot chopped down four Japanese cherry trees along the Tidal Basin in Washington; the Tennessee State Department of Purchasing declared “open season on Japs, no licenses required,” and an elderly Japanese man and wife were shot to death in their beds in El Centro, Calif. As American military losses increased in the Pacific and American morale dipped at home, rumors of Japanese-American fifth-column activity raged along the Pacific Coast. The very fact that no sabotage had occurred—or ever did occur—was viewed with alarm. “It is a sign that the blow is well organized,” warned Pundit Walter Lippmann darkly, “and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect.”

“The Achilles’ Heel.” By February, 1942 Japan had swept the U.S. and Allies from the Western Pacific, and the Rising Sun was nearing its high noon. In the U.S. the yellow fever of anti-Japanese feeling had become pandemic. Earl Warren, then California’s Attorney General, later the state’s Republican Governor and presently the civil righteous Chief Justice of the United States, agreed: “I have come to the conclusion that the Japanese situation, as it exists in this state today, may well be the Achilles’ heel of the entire civilian defense effort.” Everyone from California’s Democratic Governor Culbert Olson to the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West clamored for the banishment of the West Coast Japanese, regardless of civil liberties or their constitutional rights. And on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt duly signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the evacuations. Lieut. General John DeWitt, commander of the Western Defense Command, lost no time in designating the western half of Washington, Oregon and California, and the southern third of Arizona as “Military area No. 1,” off-limits to all persons of Japanese descent. In March, Milton Eisenhower was appointed director of the War Relocation Authority, and the sorry mass evacuation began. Paradoxically, the Territory of Hawaii, in a much more vulnerable situation, never considered a mass evacuation of its 120,552 Japanese-American citizens, and the war passed without a single proven act of sabotage or espionage.

“No Difference.” There was not one effective voice of U.S. protest. The Congress passed a bill supporting the move; only one Senator, Robert Taft, voiced strong opposition to the theory of evacuation. California profiteers greedily grabbed up the lush farms and prosperous businesses of their Japanese-American neighbors. General DeWitt, appearing before a Senate committee, made a flat statement that seemed to reflect majority sentiment: “A Jap’s a Jap. It makes no difference whether he’s an American citizen or not. I don’t want any of them here.” Even the victims of the enforced exodus decided to submit without a fight for their constitutional rights. Says Nisei Lawyer Frank Chuman, current president of the Japanese American Citizens League: “We used the principle of shikatagonai—realistic resignation.”

The evacuees went to the “assembly centers” at Santa Anita racetrack and other staging areas for transshipment to ten “relocation centers”—a euphemism for concentration camps, as it turned out—across the Sierra Nevadas. At the half-completed relocation centers, the evacuees were dismayed to find no inside plumbing, and in the frigid camps of Wyoming and Idaho, the only protection against the winter cold consisted of antique potbellied stoves. Bachelors were jammed 30 to a tarpaper-covered barrack, and each one-room, 20-ft. by 25-ft. “apartment” was shared by two families. “Goodness, we certainly could stand just another room,” wrote a young Nisei mother from the sweltering Manzanar. Calif., Center. “This being seven in one room makes privacy an unknown word.”

The Perpetual Lump. Although the evacuees were free to come and go, with official permits, in the neighborhoods near their camps, they were effectively imprisoned by the hostility of their neighbors. “Jap, keep out, you rat.” proclaimed a crayonned sign on a barbershop in Parker, Ariz., near the Poston Center.

Many of the internees were fearful and overwrought. “I had a perpetual lump in my throat,” recalls Nisei Frank Chuman. Inevitably, there was trouble: in November 1943. after a demonstration against the administration of the Tule Lake camp in California, the Army’s Military Police took over the camp, manned the watchtowers and began patrolling the area with Jeeps and command cars. The transition to Nazi-type stalags was complete.

Fruit of Shikatagonai. In January 1943, Assistant War Secretary John J. McCloy conceived the idea of recruiting an all-Japanese combat team to fight in Europe. The Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion (later the 442nd Infantry Regiment), eager to prove its U.S. patriotism, became the most-decorated unit in U.S. military history, suffered 300% casualties in combat in Italy. By the end of the war, 33,000 Nisei were in the armed forces,* while the families of many of them waited in concentration camps from Idaho to Arkansas.

After V-J day, most of the Japanese Americans returned to the West Coast communities they had left and resolutely began to rebuild their lives. A remorseful Government indemnified them for an estimated one-third of the value of their lost property, and their West Coast neighbors somewhat sheepishly accepted their return. Among the Japanese Americans, as the new generation of American-born Nisei took over leadership of their families, appeared an eagerness to enter community life and integrate as their fathers had never done. They displayed surprisingly little bitterness—perhaps the fruit of shikatagonai—and the story of the Nisei reintegration into Southern California life is as bright as the evacuation was ugly. Japanese Americans participate in every phase of contemporary California life, from Rotary Clubs to farming, from films to dispensing justice (Judge John Also, 51, is the first Nisei to rise to the State Superior Court). Their criminal rate record is the lowest of any ethnic group in the state. They are no longer forced by zoning laws to live in the ghetto of Little Tokyo, and public acceptance of the Japanese Americans is general.

But in the happy ending of the Nisei story there is a stark reminder of past injustice. Wrote Yale’s Professor Eugene Rostow, in a 1945 article: “The evacuation was our worst wartime mistake. . . One hundred thousand persons were sent to concentration camps on a record which wouldn’t support a conviction for stealing a dog.”

*The fact that 6,000 served in the Pacific, fighting the Japanese, was kept secret until after the war. One of the most distinguished Nisei warriors of World War II was 2nd Lieut. Daniel Inouye, who lost his right arm in the Po Valley campaign in Italy, won a Distinguished Service Cross, and, two years ago, became the new State of Hawaii’s first member of the House of Representatives.