I occasionally look back, with deep concern, to the hysteria which was whipped up in our country against 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry and brought their banishment from their West Coast homes to inland concentration centers.
A great nation of democratic traditions was lashed by hatred and prejudice of the organized and powerful racist minority and vested interests. The die-hard racists of the anti-Oriental West Coast really had a field day. The vested interests, with eyes on grabbing the farms and businesses built by years and years of sweat and toil by the Japanese immigrants and their children, did not sit and wait like vultures, but actively agitated to gulp up these assets as quickly as possible.
A whole people of common ancestry were labelled subversive, dangerous and potentially dangerous. The majority of us were American born, educated in public schools. What meaning did American birth, education, upbringing and experiences have in time of war and the whipped-up hysteria? Actually the 200 per cent super patriots showed how little regard they have for the teachings, cultures and traditions of this land which shape people's minds. After all the years of living in this country, people of Japanese ancestry were to the West Coast racists just "Japs" and nothing more.
This was the period when the leaders of our government could have set an example for the whole world and given true meaning to the war against imperialist aggressors and their superior race myth. The American people could have learned lessons in democratic processes by the government's firm stand in face of pressures and hysteria, and by informing the populace who the people of Japanese ancestry in the United States and Hawaii were, and how they differed from the Japanese militarists and war financiers. We could have taken the wind out of the Japanese propaganda of "Asia for the Asiatics."
But our country, which denies 15 million Negroes equality and holds Indians in custody on reservations, had a long way to go before carrying on such a healthy program to mobilize the people. Civil rights cannot be fully enjoyed by one minority and be denied to others. All the people must believe in and live by them. On the other hand, such education as mentioned above would wipe away jim crow and the ward system among Indians, and those who forced the evacuation did not want this to happen. Evacuation was a great setback for civil rights.
Months later, a War Relocation Authority public relations officer told me that the government's attitude was conditioned on the premise that no holds were barred to whip up war feelings of the American people and we were the "poor scapegoats." This did not answer me when I asked him if this was the reason why Washington did not quash reports of sabotage in Hawaii by alien and Japanese Americans on December 7, once it was confirmed that they were false. The newspapers kept repeating these lies over and over, building anti-Japanese American resentment.
Evacuate "Citizens Before Enemy Aliens"
Prior to my leaving San Francisco, I frequently met with a group of Nisei in the Montgomery Street workshop of sculptor Isamu Noguchi. We discussed the coming evacuation and speculated on the kind of life we would be permitted to live.
One night Larry Tajiri, now editor of the Pacific Citizen and one of the ablest Nisei newspapermen, came with a news release from General J. L. DeWitt's Western Defense Command headquarters. The information said that DeWitt would evacuate Japanese aliens, American citizens of Japanese ancestry, German aliens and Italian aliens—in this order.
"Citizens before enemy aliens?"
This question came to my mind and I believe to the others.
The "Subversive" List Then and Now
We began making preparation for evacuation. Some moved far inland, beyond the jurisdiction of the Western Defense Command. Tajiri went to Salt Lake City to edit the Pacific Citizen for the Japanese American Citizens League. This was one of the very fortunate things that happened to the Issei and the Nisei, for Tajiri made the weekly an influential voice that elicited support nationally for people of Japanese ancestry. And the Pacific Citizen, published outside the relocation centers, gave voice to grievances of evacuees in the camps whenever it received such information, kept the evacuees informed of occurrences in the various centers and generally helped to give them perspective.
I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and there I found the alien Japanese dreading and fearing the FBI. Those that I talked to did not know for what reason they might be arrested. Most of them had been affiliated with some Japanese organizations, church or community groups. Many of these organizations are still on the attorney general's "subversive" list and not long ago some Japanese aliens were having trouble with the immigration service just because they had once belonged to now defunct associations.
Today, the FBI and the Justice Department harassment is directed against advocates of peace when our country is spending 88 cents out of every tax dollar for war and war preparation, against Communists and those suspected of being Communists, but the system of "subversive" listing to keep people frightened and in line—like jim crowism—hits all minorities. One persecutes on the ideological and even religious level, while the other works on the color line.
Frenzied People Burning Keepsakes
In Los Angeles, as in San Francisco, I saw family heirlooms going up in smoke. Photographs, letters, particularly those from relatives in Japan, books and periodicals were burned in haste. Kodaks and cameras were broken or given away.
Fear had infected our people. Some second-generation community leaders were being accused as "FBI informers" who were turning in names of "disloyal" elements at $25 per head and for personal protection. This allegation was fantastic but it divided the Japanese community by instilling fear and distrust for one another.
The FBI was evidently not above offering bribes of various sorts, including payment of money, for gossips and information. The Nisei, I am sure, did not crawl before the agents.
Today this same FBI is offering money to individuals right here in Hawaii to finger their friends as Communists, strongly pro-labor sympathizers or "subversives"—whatever that means to them.
Many Began To Feel Barbed Wire Enclosure Would Be Safer
Propaganda of the racists and vested interests and dramatized arrests by the FBI in early 1942 made the Nisei and their alien parents appear more and more "dangerous." Nisei were losing jobs. Japanese-owned businesses suffered. And cold hostility of the uninformed but propagandized public developed. By the time the order for evacuation came, there were many who felt that it was safer for them to go into inland relocation centers.
The manner in which the evacuation came, through the whipped-up hysteria to create hatred and suspicion of the Issei and Nisei, naturally resulted in untold injustices and tragedies. Families lost their life savings, part of which they are still trying to collect today in the face of government stalling.
The Tragedy Resulting From Whipped-Up Hysteria
At this time, white persons visited the Issei and Nisei homes to buy their belongings. One morning I heard a visitor offer $15 for a brand new, $250 refrigerator. The Japanese couple finally sold for $25. Another family sold a 50-gallon drum of oil for $2. Everything was sold for a song for the white people knew the Issei and Nisei would have to dispose of their property in a hurry and they drove a hard bargain. In the meantime the army was instructing us to get rid of all excess baggage in a hurry.
I remember the day I went to register to go to the Manzanar Relocation Center. The man at the desk told me I could take only one duffle bag or two small bags, whichever I could handle by myself.
"Where can we store our furniture and other personal property?" I asked for an old alien couple.
"Get rid of them; there are lots of junk buyers." the man answered.
"Doesn't the army or government provide warehouses?"
"Not that I know of."
When I told this to the old couple they quietly shed tears and remarked about the callous treatment of human beings. I helped them store their belongings in a church. Months later, when we were far inland, we were informed that vandals had broken into the storehouse and taken the valuables.
For later evacuees the army and the government provided storage places but by then the frenzied people had disposed of their belongings accumulated over a long period of years, for practically nothing.
Propaganda Attack Took On a New Line
When the first contingent of volunteers left for Manzanar, a very close friend of mine who had longshored with me on the West Coast signed up and left. I asked him to write me how conditions were.
We read in the anti-Oriental Hearst Los Angeles Examiner that about 20 beauty pallors and fancy barber shops with manicurists, were being planned for Manzanar. Manzanar would be a modern city, with stores and shops to satisfy our needs. We were going to be paid union wages, the army press releases said. Now that the evacuation was a fact, the banishment that was made possible mainly by blind hate and suspicion, the propagandists turned on the faucet that gushed out with falsehoods about "coddling" of "subversives," "disloyals," and suspects. Why treat us good? it said.
"A Jap's a Jap!"
To the man in charge of the evacuation, General DeWitt, we were:
"A Jap's a Jap. They are a dangerous element, whether loyal or not. There is no way to determine their loyalty ... It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen; theoretically, he is still a Japanese and you can't change him . . . You can't change him by giving him a piece of paper."
General DeWitt expressed this and other views before the House Naval Affairs Sub-Committee in San Francisco much later.
One of the first photographs to come out of Manzanar was rather interesting. I saw it in a Los Angeles newspaper. A few Nisei girls smiled as though the world was theirs in a barracks! room with a photograph of General MacArthur pinned on the wall behind them.
I later learned from one of the girls, who were early volunteers, that a news photographer had gone to Manzanar with MacArthur's photograph under his arm. He tacked it on a wall and asked the girls to relax and smile. They were played up as loyal elements who were taking evacuation without bitterness or anger, but with an adventurous spirit.
"Don't Rush To Come Here"
One of my friends received a letter from his friend who had gone to Manzanar in the first contingent. "Don't rush to come here," the letter said. When the first 83 volunteers arrived in the most inhospitable, isolated desert land, four barracks were taking shape. They ate dry sandwiches at mealtime. The first night they huddled against each other because there were no window panes. No roof over their heads! either. It was extremely cold, with a strong, cutting wind blowing down from a nearby snowcapped mountain range. The plank lumber walls were full of holes and cracks. Dust and sand swept by with the strong wind.
The army had a white construction crew of 400 men to build Manzanar, a community of one square mile in area, to house 10,000 of us, in 90 days. One thousand evacuees were to move in seven days after construction began. Naturally, hardships resulted.
On April 2, 1942, shortly after my friend had gone to Manzanar, I, too, joined a contingent that rode on a train with cars that seemed to have been dragged out of antiquity. I took a last look at Los Angeles, people waving, white friends of evacuees wiping their eyes as the train pulled away. All day we travelled northward and saw black lava, glittering white alkali lake beds, desert stretches, oases, and bronzed, parched mountain ranges.
"We Can't Go Back Now"
At nightfall we arrived at a town near Manzanar where we transferred to a bus. The cold wind howled outside and as we approached the new clearing amidst sagebrush that was Manzanar, sand and dust pelted the bus windows.
At the gate the bus stopped. A military sentry was there. As the bus entered the barbed wire enclosure, I looked back into the darkness, on the road we had come. Out there, beyond the barbed wire, was the world we knew.
"We cannot go back now," a friend said. "We are locked up."
In this manner, 110,000 people were put away. Today, in this period of whipped-up hysteria and instilled fear, I see many similarities to this earlier experience I went through in 1942—when we were an instrument used to whip up war feeling.