1
PEARL HARBOR
DECEMBER 7, 1941
On that terrible Sunday, December 7, 1941, eighteen-year-old Daniel Inouye heard of the Pearl Harbor attack on the radio, stepped outside his Honolulu house, and saw three planes as they flew over, gray planes with red circles on their wings. "I knew they were Japanese," he remembered. Inouye later became a United States senator representing Hawaii, but at the time he had just been accepted as a premedical student at the University of Hawaii. "I felt that the world I had known, and had dreams about and planned for, had come to a shattering end." Already trained in first aid, the teenager bicycled to the harbor to help medical personnel. More than twenty-four hundred sailors, soldiers, and civilians were killed in the attack. He helped doctors there for five days before returning home.
Soon after hearing of the attack, Saburo Kido ran to his office in San Francisco at the New World Sun, a Japanese-language newspaper. Kido was the president of the twenty-five-year-old Japanese American Citizens League, a strongly pro-American organization, and he was also an attorney and a columnist for the paper; when he arrived every phone was ringing, mostly calls from eastern newspapers looking for details and quotes. He handled as many as he could, then sent a telegram to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, stating, "In this solemn hour we pledge our fullest cooperation to you Mr. President, and to our country.... Now that Japan has instituted this attack upon our land, we are ready and prepared to extend every effort to repel this invasion together with our fellow Americans."
The largest Japanese-language newspaper in the United States, Rafu Shimpo, which published many of its articles in English, said in an editorial in its next edition, "We have lived long enough in America to appreciate liberty and justice. We cannot tolerate the attempt of a few to dominate the world.... Japan started this war and it is now up to the United States to end the war by crushing the Japanese Empire and her ruthless, barbaric leaders. In order to live, we must be ready to die for our country." The editorial went on to say, "Fellow Americans, give us a chance to do our share to make this world a better place to live in."
Despite the patriotic words streaming from the community, soon after the attack hundreds of Nikkei, or American Japanese, were being arrested across the country. In Nebraska, Mike Masaoka, the field secretary of JACL, was speaking to fifty or so members of the small local Japanese community in the basement of the North Platte Episcopal Church when two men burst through the back doors shouting, "Where's Masaoka?" They were Federal Bureau of Investigation agents. Outside the church, the FBI men put handcuffs on Masaoka and took him to the city jail.
When Kido learned that Masaoka, who lived in Salt Lake City, Utah, was in jail, he telephoned Senator Elbert Thomas of Utah, who then called around Washington to have Masaoka released and put on a train to San Francisco. On the train, a Cheyenne, Wyoming, police officer took one look at Masaoka and arrested him then and there. Senator Thomas intervened again, this time getting permission for two soldiers to travel with Masaoka to San Francisco.
Masaoka was among more than twelve hundred American Japanese community leaders identified from "Suspect Enemy Aliens" lists secretly compiled by the FBI with the help of the Census Bureau. Merchants, priests, teachers, newspapermen, and heads of various civic organizations were arrested without charges within forty-eight hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor. More than a thousand of them were from California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. Thirteen of them were women.
Less than twenty-four hours after the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked a joint session of Congress for a Declaration of War against Japan, stating, "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." A few hours later, after Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover informed the White House that 620 Germans and 98 Italians were also taken into custody. The Germans arrested included leaders of such organizations as the uniformed and openly pro-Hitler German-American Bund, which had a membership of more than forty thousand in the Northeast and Midwest.
The Italian number might have been a bit larger, but the FBI decided not to incarcerate a San Francisco alien named Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio, a fisherman from Sicily, who lived in the United States for forty years without applying for citizenship. The bureau, however, did stop him from going near Fisherman's Wharf, where he and his wife owned a boat and a restaurant. In memos and phone calls, government officials worried about the publicity that would come if they put Joe DiMaggio's parents in jail during the year that "Joltin' Joe" of the New York Yankees had been named the American League's Most Valuable Player after hitting in fifty-six straight games.
The same was true for the mayor of New York and the mayor of San Francisco: the parents of Fiorello La Guardia and Angelo Rossi were Italian aliens who had never applied for American citizenship. President Roosevelt had already told his attorney general, Francis Biddle, to take it easy on Italians and Italian Americans. "They're just a bunch of opera singers." Ironically, the FBI in New York did arrest one of the more famous opera singers, Ezio Pinza, an Italian citizen who was first basso of the Metropolitan Opera. Like the DiMaggios, he had lived in the United States for more than twenty years without seeking to become naturalized. Two FBI agents entered his home in Bronxville without warning. After searching the house for hours, one of the agents spotted a framed page of writing in Italian on the wall of his study.
"What is this?"
"It's a letter written by Verdi."
"Who?" asked the agent.
The other agent said, "In the name of the President of the United States, you are under arrest."
That was front page news in the New York Times, under the headline, "Ezio Pinza Seized as Enemy Alien; FBI Takes Singer to Ellis Island." The singer was one of the 126 Japanese, German, and Italian men held there. He suffered some kind of breakdown, barely speaking, until he was released three months later, thanks to a team of high-priced lawyers and the backing of New York mayor La Guardia. Pinza believed he was arrested because of an untruthful report from a Met rival saying he was a friend of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Like other imprisoned aliens, Pinza was never charged, but later wrote that interrogators accused him of secretly sending messages to Mussolini-a man he had never met-by changing the tempo of his voice during radio broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera.
There were, however, important differences in dealing with immigrants to the United States from Europe and immigrants from Asia. Europeans, including Pinza and the DiMaggios, could have become naturalized U.S. citizens. U.S. residents born in Japan could not become citizens and could not own land in the United States under the Immigration Act of 1924, a special provision of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. The prohibitions on land ownership were popularized by distinguished Californians such as Dr. Edward Alsworth Ross, a famous professor of sociology at Stanford, who wrote of the Japanese as early as 1900:
1. They are unassimilable.
2. They work for low wages and thereby undermine the existing work standards of American workmen.
3. Their standards of living are much lower than American workmen.
4. They lack a proper political feeling for American democratic institutions.
The denial of citizenship to Japanese immigrants had begun with the case of Takao Ozawa, a graduate of Berkeley High School and a junior at the University of California, Berkeley, which reached the Supreme Court in November of 1922. The justices ruled that he was not a "free white person" and was therefore ineligible for citizenship. "The decision provoked wild resentment in Japan," wrote Carey McWilliams in his 1944 book Prejudice. "In commenting upon the decision, the Osaka Mainichi said that 'Americans are as spiteful as snakes and vipers-we do not hesitate to call that government a studied deceiver.'"
Those American laws were part of a buildup of tension between the United States and Imperial Japan and between Caucasian and American Japanese merchants and farmers living on the West Coast. Within hours of Pearl Harbor, the government moved against American Japanese. When Yoshiko Uchida, a Christian, came home from church that Sunday, she opened the door to her house in Berkeley and was shocked to see a white man sitting in the living room. He was an FBI agent and he had already searched the house, leaving it a mess. He wanted to know where her father, a prosperous San Francisco-based executive of Mitsui Export, a Japanese-owned shipping line, was "hiding."
"I'll be back," the man said.
Her father, Dwight Takashi Uchida, returned an hour later, took one look at the house, and called the police, saying, "There's been a burglary here!" The police arrived in minutes-with three men from the FBI. They took Uchida away, saying, "It'll only be a short while." One agent stayed to answer the family's phone, saying they were not available. Friends who came to the door for Sunday visits were turned away.
It was not until five days later that a friend called and told the family that Uchida was being held in jail with about one hundred other men at the Presidio, army headquarters in San Francisco. They received a postcard from him the next day, asking for shirts and shaving gear.
He told his wife he was going to be taken to a federal prison in Missoula, Montana. Other prisons, used by the Justice Department to hold aliens, were also far from California, in Bismarck, North Dakota; Kooskia, Idaho; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Crystal City and Seagoville, Texas. In his next letter home from Missoula, Uchida told his wife that their bank accounts were frozen and she should go to the bank and try to get enough money on which to live, perhaps $100 a month. Then he added: "Don't forget to lubricate the car. And be sure to prune the roses in January. Brush Laddie every day and give him a pat for me. Don't forget to send a monthly check to Grandma and take my Christmas offering to church."
To the north, in Washington State, Mitsuno Matsuda, the wife of a strawberry farmer on Vashon Island, in Puget Sound, twenty minutes from Seattle by ferry, received a call from Hisaye Yamamoto, her friend on Bainbridge, another island in the sound. "The FBI came to our house and searched everything. It was awful, just awful. They even ran their hands through our rice and sugar bowls, looking for guns and radios or anything with Japanese writing," said Yamamoto. "Vashon must be next."
That evening Mitsuno and Heisuke Matsuda and their two children, teenagers, Yoneichi and Mary, began to destroy anything that they thought might look too Japanese to a policeman or an FBI agent. "This is it," Mary remembered her father saying as he walked to the dining room stove with his favorite phonograph record. "This one is 'Sakura,' Yoshiko-san's voice is so clear."
He broke the record in two and threw it into the fire. For an hour, the family burned their family photographs and books. Mary began throwing her dolls, in little kimonos, into the stove. The FBI came two weeks later. The two agents took away Yoneichi's .22 caliber rifle and the family's radio. They found one book.
"What is this book?" an agent asked.
"This is my parents' New Testament in Japanese," said Mary. "We are Methodists."
In Petaluma, California, Jahachi Najima packed his suitcase after he heard that his friends, other prominent Japanese, had been arrested. His daughter, Irene, was at home when the FBI came, along with local police, in a long black limousine.
"Where's your father?" one asked.
He was working on the ranch, his ranch. Irene went out to get him and when he came back to the house the FBI men immediately put him in handcuffs.
"Would you permit me to change my clothes?" he asked.
They took off the handcuffs and let him put on a business suit. When Irene asked where they were going, she got no answer. Irene and her mother spent days making phone calls and visiting jails to find Najima. They finally found him at the Presidio. After a few more days they were able to visit him. As they left he said, "This is war. We may never see each other again."
Another "dangerous" person picked up after December 7, Edward Oshita, owner of a small factory making miso, left his house assuring his wife, Grace, "Don't worry. Don't worry. This is America." In Hood River Valley, Oregon, home to 130 American Japanese farming families, FBI agents arrived in town at 3:00 a.m. on December 8. They ransacked homes and took away a dozen community leaders, including Tomeshichi Akiyama, president of the local Japanese Society. His son George was in the United States Army, one of 3,188 Nisei serving in the armed forces the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked.
Barry Saiki, a senior at the University of California in Berkeley, watched as the FBI took away his father in Stockton. "Wait," the old man said, handing his son an envelope. "You may need these."
Inside was a small stack of U.S. war bonds.
* * *
The FBI roundup of first-generation American Japanese aliens, the Issei, was not unexpected and its lists were not particularly sophisticated documents. Hysteria about spies and saboteurs had been building on the West Coast and in Washington, D.C., for years. On August 1, 1941, the Washington Post had published a "Confidential report on Japanese activities in California." The paper said, among other things, that Japanese consulates were forcing Issei and Nisei farmers to move near oil wells, instructing them to be prepared to attack them if war came; that 90 percent of Japanese fishermen were actually Japanese naval officers and seamen; and that cooks, butlers, and laundrymen were expected to "cripple vital utilities, bridges, and tunnels."
There were stacks of reports like that in government offices, going back decades before Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded all Asian immigration by reinstating a 1790 naturalization law that reserved citizenship for "free white persons of good character." During the 1924 debate, Ulysses S. Webb, California's attorney general, testified before Congress, saying of Asians, particularly Chinese and Japanese: "They are different in color; different in ideals; different in race; different in ambitions; different in their theory of political economy and government. They speak a different language; they worship another God. They have not in common with the Caucasian a single trait." Ten years after that, as political and economic relations between the United States and Imperial Japan were deteriorating, a secret State Department investigation concluded that if war broke out between the countries, "The entire [American Japanese] population on the West Coast will rise and commit sabotage." In October of 1940, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox presented President Roosevelt with a fifteen-point program for what should be done if war with Japan came. The twelfth recommendation was: "Prepare plans for concentration camps."
The reports reaching the president and his principal aides were totally and ridiculously false, but some of the same stories were circulating in newspapers and on radio. One set of stories in California journals said that Japanese and Japanese Americans were moving to surround ports and U.S. naval bases and Army Air Corps installations, along with defense plants.
What was true and was reported on the front page of the Los Angeles Times under the headline "Japanese Put Under F.B.I. Inquiry Here," on November 13, 1941, was that Justice Department officials and FBI agents had been interviewing leaders of Japanese and Japanese American organizations since at least early October. They had taken truckloads of business records to look for donations to charities and other organizations back in Japan. Local officials in West Coast states had been doing the same thing for years. In Hood River Valley, Oregon, for instance, in 1937 Sheriff John Sheldrake deputized and paid white residents to spy on the valley's Japanese families.
After the Times article appeared, the Los Angeles office of Time magazine reported, in a confidential and calm memo back to New York, "Southern California's Japanese colony is on edge over the prospect of wholesale firings in the event of ... war." The memo went on to state that "most work as agricultural laborers or fishermen. In Los Angeles proper they are principally employed as gardeners or servants. They have all lived here for a long time ... and the great majority are loyal." But reasoned words in memos did little to stall the inflation of the number of names on the "suspicious persons" lists compiled by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
The FBI arrest lists were bolstered by names collected by Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Ringle of the Office of Naval Intelligence, who spoke Japanese and had obtained the membership rolls of the small American offshoots of the Black Dragon Society, a Japan-based group that was formed in 1901 to spy on Russia, Korea, and Manchuria before the Russo-Japanese War. He had also built his own informant network with the cooperation of the pro-American JACL. Most of the FBI names, the businessmen, clergymen, doctors, and editors, even martial arts instructors, were no more than what could have been, and often were, the patrons and donors at a Chamber of Commerce dinner. They simply disappeared on December 7 and the following days.
The FBI, with the approval of the Justice Department back in Washington, had made up so-called A, B, C lists. Those categorized "A" for unspecified reasons were immediately arrested and incarcerated. Fishermen who owned boats and radios, prosperous farmers and small merchants considered to have some influence in Japanese communities were on the "B" list. The "C" list was more random, including anyone who had made a donation to a Japanese organization or charity or a few who were denounced by neighbors and friends, both Caucasian andNikkei.
The Reverend Fuji Usui of San Diego was on an "A" list. His daughter, Mitsuo, went to St. Mary's Church in San Diego that Sunday morning, and while she was gone the FBI had searched the house, leaving it a mess. When she arrived home she found her mother crying in a corner, hysterical. "They took Papa!" her mother shouted. "They chained him and numbered him like an animal."
Another "A" list Issei, Yutaka Akimoto, was an officer in two Japanese civic organizations in Stockton. Police and FBI agents came through the door of his house with leveled submachine guns. His twenty-one-year-old son, George, a college student, watched as the government men searched the house. Among the things they took was his mother's Japanese knitting manual-knit one, purl two-thinking it might be a codebook. The next time the family heard from Akimoto, he was in a Justice Department camp in Bismarck, North Dakota.
The knock on the door of Sally Kirita in San Diego came in the night. The local sheriff and FBI agents took her father away without a word. It would be two and a half years before his family saw him again.
Nearby, the agents came for Margaret Ishino's father. A junior at San Diego High School, Margaret watched as they searched the house. Her mother was in bed, having just given birth to Margaret's brother, Thomas. An agent ripped the blankets and sheet off the bed to see if anything was hidden there. Her father, knowing friends had already been arrested, had packed a suitcase; the FBI took that as a sign he was a spy preparing to flee.
Those community leaders, Issei, were shipped to twenty-six Justice Department facilities, prisons, around the country. More often than not, their families had no idea where their husbands and fathers were being held or even whether they were alive. West Coast Nikkei-aliens and citizens-were stripped of civic leadership. Thousands of women and children were without means of support; their situation was made worse when Japanese aliens and Japanese Americans learned that their bank accounts had been frozen the day after Pearl Harbor.
* * *
Lieutenant Commander Ringle, whose intelligence reports had circulated in Washington, was possibly the American who knew the most about Japanese living in the country. Long before Pearl Harbor, the navy had assigned Ringle to check the security of naval bases in the three states bordering the Pacific Coast. Ringle, who had been attached to the United States embassy in Tokyo for three years, had a network of friends and local informants in Tokyo and in the Japanese communities of California, Oregon, and Washington. Those people, the American Japanese, helped him uncover a spy ring in 1941 organized by an Imperial Japanese naval officer named Itaru Tachibana, whose agents included Toraichi Kono, the valet of actor Charlie Chaplin. Tachibana was arrested and deported. Ringle also managed a secret April 1941 break-in at the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles, which involved bringing in a professional safecracker from San Quentin State Prison. What Ringle learned from papers in the consulate was that the Japanese reporting to Tokyo did not trust either Issei or Nisei, describing them as "cultural traitors," and expected them to side with the United States in any war. The same distrust of American Japanese was expressed in four thousand so-called MAGIC cables between Tokyo and Japanese embassies and consulates in the United States, messages that were intercepted and decoded by the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service. On January 30, 1941, for instance, a cable on intelligence warned against using Japanese Americans or aliens. Instead, Japanese consulates in the United States were urged to recruit "communists, labor union members, Negroes, and anti-Semites."
Ringle first served on the West Coast for a year in 1936 and 1937-in that year a magazine published by the University of California speculated that American Japanese might be "slaughtered on the spot" if war came. Ringle was then sent back to Japan. He was brought back to California in July of 1940. He felt he understood the American Japanese, and he liked them, but he was hardly sentimental about Japan or about the Japanese in America, including his friends and informants-most of whom saw themselves as patriotic Americans and willingly reported to him about the "disloyal" minority in their community. As the roundups began after Pearl Harbor, Ringle wrote to his superiors in Washington.
The entire "Japanese Problem" has been magnified out of its true proportion, largely because of the physical characteristics of the people. It should be handled on the basis of the individual, regardless of citizenship, and noton a racial basis.... It is submitted that the Nisei could be accorded a place in the national war effort without risk or danger, that such a step would go farther than anything else towards cementing their loyalty to the United States.... The opinion outlined in this paragraph is considered most urgent.
There were obvious danger points, Ringle said, but he estimated that at least three-quarters of the Nisei were actively loyal and the great majority of Issei were very old, very tired, and tended to be passively loyal. He also pointed out that one group, the Kibei, whose Issei parents sent them back to Japan for education, had to be interned and their loyalties questioned and tested. "These people, the Kibei, are essentially and inherently Japanese and may have been deliberately sent to the United States as agents. In spite of their legal [American] citizenship, they should be looked at as enemy aliens and many of them placed in custodial detention."
Ringle was, however, appalled at the idea of mass evacuation and incarceration; he later noted with some grim satisfaction that, after "careful investigations on both the West Coast and Hawaii, there was never a shred of evidence found of sabotage, subversive acts, spying, or Fifth Column activity on the part of the Nisei or long-time local residents." The phrase "Fifth Column" was first used in the Spanish Civil War by a Nationalist general, Emilio Mola Vidal, as four columns of troops were fighting their way to Madrid to overthrow the elected Republican government. Mola Vidal stated he expected support from secret Nationalists in the Spanish military and government offices-a secret "Fifth Column" that would provide information to the Nationalist forces and rise up as combatants if needed.
In the end, Ringle concluded that perhaps thirty-five hundred Japanese or Japanese Americans in the United States posed potential security risks.
That information was pretty much ignored by the navy, because naval authorities considered homeland intelligence an army matter, and so it never got to army intelligence. It did, however, get to President Roosevelt, who had a personal spy service-financed by a secret White House fund managed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson-which included some government officials, businessmen, and journalists who reported to him and to him only. One of FDR's private spies was a Chicago businessman named Curtis B. Munson, who was dispatched to the West Coast by John Franklin Carter, a secret FDR spy who was a syndicated newspaper columnist under the name "Jay Franklin."
Munson, who conferred with Ringle and with the FBI, wrote to Carter and the president as early as November 7, 1941, saying "99 percent of the most intelligent views on the Japanese were crystallized by Lt. Commander K.D. Ringle." Summarizing all of the reports, Carter wrote to FDR:
There will be no armed uprising of Japanese.... The essence of what Munson has to report is that, to date, he has found no evidence which would indicate that there is a danger of widespread anti-American activities among this population group. He feels that the Japanese are in more danger from the whites than the other way around.... There will undoubtedly be some sabotage financed by Japan and executed largely by imported agents or agents already imported. There will be the odd case of fanatical sabotage by some Japanese "crackpot." ... The Japanese are hampered as saboteurs because of their easily recognized physical appearance. It will be hard for them to get near anything to blow up if it is guarded.... The dangerous part of their espionage is that they would be very effective as far as movement of supplies, movement of troops, and movement of ships out of harbor mouths and over railroads is concerned.... Japan will commit some sabotage largely depending on imported Japanese as they are afraid of and do not trust the Nisei.
A week later Munson added in his report to the president: "The Nisei are universally estimated from 90 to 98 percent loyal to the United States if the Japanese-educated Kibei are excluded. The Nisei are pathetically eager to show this loyalty. They are not Japanese in culture. They are foreigners to Japan."
Added Carter in a cover note: "For the most part the local Japanese are loyal to the United States or, at worst, hope that by remaining quiet they can avoid concentration camps or irresponsible mobs. We do not believe that they would be at least any more disloyal than any other racial group in the United States with whom we went to war."
Carter, who worked in the National Press Building, near the White House, passed more Munson and Ringle opinions to Roosevelt on December 16. The president responded to only one point, that unguarded bridges and other infrastructure might be vulnerable to sabotage. The president asked for more information on that problem.
* * *
For about two weeks after Pearl Harbor, newspapers and public officials in California called for calm and tolerance. West Coast newspapers were printing stories about Japanese Americans and their alien parents pledging loyalty to the United States. Editorials and radio broadcasts often mirrored this one in the San Francisco Chronicle on December 9: "The roundup of Japanese citizens in various parts of the country ... is not a call for volunteer spy hunters to go into action.... Neither is it a reason to lift an eyebrow at a Japanese whether American-born or not.... There is no excuse to wound the sensibilities of any persons in America by showing suspicion or prejudice."
Southeast of Los Angeles, the Brawley News editorialized: "Americans should remain calm and considerate. In this community we have many Japanese neighbors and citizens whose loyalty to their adopted country remains steadfast during the time of crisis."
"In California we have many citizens of Japanese parentage," wrote the San Francisco News. "A large proportion of them are native-born Americans. They must not be made to suffer for the sins of a government for whom they have no sympathy or allegiance." Three days later, the News went further, saying, "To subject these people to illegal search and seizure, then arrest them without warrant to confinement without trial, is to violate the principles of Democracy as set forth in our Constitution."
Politicians, most notably Governor Culbert Olson and State Attorney General Earl Warren, also called for calm and restraint-at first. Governor Olson, a self-professed pacifist who was chairman of a high-minded group, the Northern California Committee for Fair Play for Citizens and Aliens of Japanese Ancestry, said: "Californians have kept their heads.... The American tradition of fair play has been observed. All the organs of public influence and information-press, pulpit, school welfare agencies, radio, and cinema-have discouraged mob violence and have pleaded for tolerance and justice for all law-abiding residents of whatever race."
There were some early signs of hope for peace and tolerance among West Coast schools, as well. In some schools, white students hugged their Japanese friends as they arrived on that charged Monday after the attacks. In Seattle, the principal of Washington Middle School, Arthur Sears, called all the students together for a morning assembly on December 8. "We are all Americans and we here at Washington want no part of race hatred," he said. "We are all under the same roof." After he spoke, students were assigned to write to their teachers about what he had said. A sixth grader named Betty wrote to Ellen Evanson, her teacher, "Mr. Sears told us that even if we have a different color face, it's alright because we're American Citizens.... When we were saluting the flag I was proud to salute the flag. Some people were crying because they were proud of their country." Another sixth grader named Emiko wrote to Miss Evanson: "Because of this situation, we [may be] asked to leave this dear city of Seattle and its surroundings ... if the school I will attend next would have a teacher like you I will be only too glad. When I am on my way my memories will flow back to the time I was attending this school and the assemblies that were held in the hall. Wherever I go I will be a loyal American."
Soon enough, however, fear and prejudice, politics and greed, began to spread quickly among white Californians. Politicians, military commanders, and the press began responding to or whipping up hysteria, passing on and publishing rumors of imminent Japanese bombing and invasion of California. The Los Angeles Police Department closed down the stores and shops on East First Street, the main thoroughfare of Little Tokyo, a community of more than thirty thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans, part of a colony that operated one thousand fruit and vegetable stands in the city, doing business of $25 million a year. Japanese florists had annual revenues of more than $4 million. Suddenly, carloads of people from other areas of the city descended on the streets of Little Tokyo and attacked the Japanese stores and stands. The vigilante "patriots" overturned carts and tables and threw tomatoes and potatoes at anyone with an Asian face.
Nisei schoolchildren were sometimes mocked. Some teachers refused to allow Japanese Americans to participate in each morning's Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. Kay Uno of Los Angeles, a third grader, was walking to school the morning of December 8 when she heard someone call, "There goes that little Jap!"
"I'm looking around," she said later. "Who's a Jap? Who's a Jap? Then it dawned on me, I'm the Jap."
In Seattle that same Monday morning, Sumie Barta, a secretarial student, told this story:
I was at the bus stop going for a brush-up course at Knapp's Business College. The driver did not greet me with the usual, "Hi, Sumi! How's tricks!" I heard someone from the back of the bus yell, "Get that damn Jap girl off the bus, Curly." He said, "Are you Japanese," and I said I am an American Japanese. "You got any proof of that?" he sneers.... "I was born in King County." Then Curly ordered me off the bus, saying, "You are still a damn Jap." I could not continue my classes. I was suddenly afraid to be alone on the highway.
The hatred continued to spread. The president of the University of Arizona, Alfred Atkinson, prevented the school's libraries from lending books to students with Japanese names, saying, "We are at war and these people are our enemies."
Forcing Barta off the bus and blocking American Japanese at libraries were harbingers of what was to come. Within days, there was a brisk business in buttons sold to American Japanese and other Asians saying: "I am an American!" and "I am Chinese!" Most Americans, even on the West Coast, could not tell the difference. Lifemagazine, one of the country's most influential journals, ran a section on how to identify the difference between a "Jap" and a "Chinese." A popular cartoonist, Milton Caniff, creator of the comic strip Terry and the Pirates, published around the country a six-panel strip called "How to Spot a Jap." The copy included:
A Chinese man or woman "C" is about the size of the average American. The Jap is shorter and looks as if his legs are joined directly to his chest.... "C" usually has evenly set chompers-Jap has buck teeth.... The Chinese strides. The Jap shuffles.... The Chinese and other Asiatics have fairly normal feet.... The Japs will usually have a fairly wide space between the first and second toes. Jap can't pronounce our liquid "L" ... hisses on any "S" sound.
* * *
Whatever goodwill there had been toward Issei and Nisei after Pearl Harbor was soon gone as news arrived daily of seemingly invincible and brutal Japanese armies running wild though the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. Tolerance of any kind was replaced by fear and by the greed of white merchants and farmers who wanted to eliminate competition from California's six thousand Japanese-operated farms, which totaled at least 250,000 acres and were worth more than $75 million. More than 40 percent of California's produce was from American Japanese farms that often stood on land white farmers ignored as too poor for cultivation.
In the cities, many white businessmen coveted the stores, businesses, and fishing boats of Japanese competitors. The leader of one agricultural organization, Austin Anson, managing secretary of the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association of the Salinas Valley, told the Saturday Evening Post:
We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japanese for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man.... They undersell the white man in the markets. They can do this because they raise their own labor. They work their women and children while the white farmer has to pay wages for his help.
Soon after Pearl Harbor, Caucasian shopkeepers joined the farmers in outspoken hatred, with signs saying THIS RESTAURANT POISONS BOTH RATS AND JAPS and OPEN HUNTING SEASON FOR JAPS. A barbershop put up this one: JAPS SHAVED: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ACCIDENTS. Then there was Burma Shave, a shaving cream company that advertised with rhyming signs placed in sequence along highways. The company replaced the advertisement, "A shave / That's real / No cuts to heal / A soothing / Velvet after-feel / Burma-Shave" with this new one, "Slap / The Jap / With / Iron / Scrap / Burma-Shave."
The California hysteria was also beginning to reach across the country. The editorial cartoonist of PM, New York City's most liberal newspaper, drew a cartoon showing multitudes of bucktoothed, squint-eyed Japanese lined up across the entire West Coast to be given packs of dynamite at a stand called "Honorable Fifth Column." The caption was "Waiting for the Signal from Home." The artist's name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, later to become famous writing children's books under the name Dr. Seuss.
* * *
Assistant Attorney General Thomas C. Clark, who happened to be in California in December of 1941, working on a federal antitrust case, began collecting newspapers with headlines such as "Los Angeles Bombed" and "L.A. Raided," and reports of mass suicides among the Japanese in California. Most of those rumors were not true, but there were a number of individual suicides up and down the state after Pearl Harbor. Dr. Honda Rikita, a physician in Gardena who had served as medical officer in the Japanese army as a young man, was picked up on December 7, one of the "dangerous" leaders. Imprisoned in solitary confinement, he was interrogated for a week by the FBI before he killed himself by slashing his wrists. Some Issei and Tokyo radio claimed he was beaten to death during questioning. He did leave a series of suicide notes, one reading: "A doctor's vocation is to save lives. In order to save lives it is a doctor's highest honor to sacrifice himself. I have dedicated myself to Japanese-American friendship."
Bombing stories, many of them coming from U.S. Army bases in California, were never confirmed. The civilian reports that the Justice Department's Clark saw were even more imaginative. One reported seeing Japanese admirals in northern California wearing flamboyant uniforms and cocked hats with feathers. That one turned out to be a meeting of a local Masonic lodge. Clark, whose knowledge of evacuation issues was negligible-he once asked an assistant what "Nisei" meant-was the first Justice Department official to publicly support military control of all coastal operations, military and civilian. He began traveling from city to city and town to town along the coast, making speeches on the way, saying: "When you hire a doctor, you usually do what he says, or you get another doctor. We have our Army people and they tell us to do this and we must try to do this with as little disruption as possible."
The army source Clark trusted and talked to every day was Lieutenant General John DeWitt, the sixty-one-year-old commander of the Western Command and the Fourth Army, five divisions of soldiers and marines, one hundred thousand half-trained and ill-equipped men scattered at bases from Puget Sound in Washington to San Diego, California. DeWitt, like many of the leaders of the peacetime military, was ill equipped himself, a military bureaucrat, an organizer of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression of the 1930s, whose career had been mainly in the Quartermaster Corps.
Now headquartered at the Presidio in San Francisco, DeWitt was an officer with a reputation for changing his mind, often echoing the last person he had talked to on the telephone. He was also noted for covering his career flanks. He had refused to talk to either Ringle or Munson, probably because he believed neither the navy nor political Washington had any business evaluating army performance. One point that stuck in DeWitt's mind and often appeared in his conversations was that after Pearl Harbor both the army and navy commanders of Hawaii-General Walter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel-were being charged with dereliction of duty for not having contingency plans in case of attack from Japan. Ironically, as part of his staff duties in the 1920s, DeWitt was responsible for a contingency plan for the aftermath of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The plan was forgotten or ignored, but its essential elements were total military control of the islands and internment of Japanese workers throughout Hawaii.
DeWitt's headquarters was reporting enemy sightings day after day, stating that Japanese air force planes and submarines were engaged in constant reconnoitering all along the Pacific Coast-and wilder tales of bombardment from the sea, arson around Seattle, and illegal radio transmissions up and down the coastline. Almost all of that was untrue.
The second-ranked soldier in the West was Major General Joseph Stilwell, commander of Fort Ord in California, later to become famous as "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell in China and India. He kept a pocket diary during those early days. Some of his notations beginning on December 8 included:
Dec. 8-Saw DeWitt Sunday night "air raid" at San Francisco.... Fourth Army kind of jittery. Much depressed.
Dec. 9-... Fleet of thirty-four [Japanese] ships between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Later-not authentic. (Sinking feeling is growing.) More threats of raids and landings ...
Dec. 11-[Phone call from Fourth Army] "The main Japanese fleet is 164 miles off San Francisco." I believed it, like a damn fool.... Of course, the attack never materialized. The [Fourth Army] passed the buck on this report. They had it from a "usually reliable source," but they should never have put it out without check.
Dec. 13-Not content with the above blah, [Fourth] Army pulled another at ten-thirty today. "Reliable information that attack on Los Angeles is imminent. A general alarm being considered...." What jackass would send a general alarm [which would have called for the evacuation of Los Angeles] under the circumstances. The [Fourth] Army G-2 [Intelligence] is just another amateur, just like all the rest of the staff. Rule: the higher the headquarters, the more important is calm.
Stilwell knew, of course, who the "jackass" was: his immediate superior, General DeWitt.
On December 21, Stilwell was ordered out of California. He was called to Washington to work on planning for an Allied invasion of North Africa toward the end of the coming year. He was more than glad to leave. His diary was filled with what he called:
The wild, farcical and fantastic stuff that G-2 Fourth Army pushes out! The latest is a two-pound bundle of crap. An investigation of a PhD, at California Tech, a distinguished research man in weather, who runs a service for orange growers. He voluntarily discontinued his broadcast when the war broke out, but [Fourth Army] had him investigated by FBI.... Report from Army that secret airfield had been reported about 20 miles north of Palomar (in San Diego County), the planes being concealed under alfalfa.... Where is our Navy? Five Mexican destroyers coming up from Panama to patrol Baja California. (The day has come we lean on Mexican Navy!)
Then something did happen. On December 23, a Japanese submarine torpedoed and sank a Union Oil tanker, the company's largest, the USS Montebello, in sight of the beaches of the town of Cambria, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. No one was killed or wounded and four lifeboats brought the thirty-six-man crew safely to shore. This time, because of rising fear and hysteria across the state, the navy and Coast Guard denied there was an attack. The news that two other smaller freighters were torpedoed off the California coast that same week, the Abbaroka and the Emidio, was also censored by the Coast Guard. Before and after the three real incidents, there were dozens if not hundreds of rumored stories, including one that Japanese farmers were cutting or burning arrows into their fields to guide Japanese planes to American bases and factories.
The rumors won the day. By Christmas of 1941, soldiers, FBI agents, police, and local authorities were conducting raids on homes across California, Oregon, and Washington, arresting people whose names had never appeared on the sloppiest government lists. Sometimes breaking down doors, the agents and police were confiscating ordinary radios and binoculars along with guns and anything with Japanese characters on it. After raids on Japanese farms in the Palos Verdes section of Los Angeles, city law enforcement officials proudly showed the results of the raid to local newspapers: a length of water pipe called a possible cannon part; wires for hanging clothes identified as a possible shortwave radio antenna; and insecticides, which were called poison gas. "Our goose was cooked," wrote Thomas Sisata, after seeing such photos in the Los Angeles Times and after his fiancée was fired from a housekeeper's job on the day after Pearl Harbor. "I really began to believe," he wrote in a college paper, "that the average intelligence of people in the United States was that of a high grade moron."
The FBI officials and local police reported that they had confiscated guns in the hundreds from Japanese residents of California. What they did not report was that most of those arms were collected at Japanese-owned or -operated sporting goods stores, of which there were more than a hundred in a state noted for its hunting. The count of confiscated items for the three West Coast states came to 2,592 guns, 199,000 rounds of ammunition, 1,652 sticks of dynamite, 1,458 radios, and 2,015 cameras. The Justice Department secretly advised the president, "We have not, however, uncovered through these searches any dangerous persons. We have not found a single machine gun nor have we found any gun in any circumstances indicating it was to be used in a manner helpful to our enemies."
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When the war began there were only a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans, mostly farmers, living east of the Rocky Mountains. In Hershey, Nebraska, Ben and Fred Kuroki, who had been at the North Platte church meeting where Mike Masaoka was arrested, told their father that night that they wanted to join the army. "This is your country," said their father, Shosuke Kuroki. "Fight for it." So the next morning the brothers got in the farm truck for the 150-mile drive to Grand Island, the nearest army recruitment station. They filled out the papers but then never heard back. Two weeks later, Ben Kuroki heard on the radio that the Army Air Corps was looking for men and had opened a station in North Platte. This time they were accepted. When they asked why the Air Corps would accept them, the sergeant in charge of the office said, "I get $2 for every enlistee. Welcome to the United States Army Air Corps." A photo of the Nisei brothers taking their oath to serve the United States made the front page of the state's largest newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald.
But it wasn't all quite that easy for the two farm boys. Even on the train ride to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a couple of other enlistees began hassling them. "What are those two lousy Japs doing here?" one said. "I thought this was the American Army." Fred was assigned to digging ditches and Ben, who had learned to fly in a little Piper Cub, spent his first twenty-one days in the army peeling potatoes-and pretending not to hear the "Jap" jokes and threats of white soldiers and airmen. "We were the two loneliest men in the United States Army," Ben recalled.
Finally, the Air Corps separated the brothers, sending Ben to clerical school at Fort Logan, Colorado. Then it was on to Barksdale Field near Shreveport, Louisiana, and more KP, peeling potatoes again. He was depressed and lonely, and his misery got worse when he learned that his brother had been dropped by the Air Corps and assigned to an infantry unit. After a month of pleading, begging really, with officers, he was assigned to a combat unit, the 409th Squadron of the Ninety-Third Bomb Group. It took three months in the Ninety-Third, but more and more of the white guys were nodding when they passed by and a few began talking with him. Still, many of them were soon on their way overseas and Ben was still begging officers to send him with those groups. Then it happened, and the boy from Nebraska was on the Queen Elizabeth with nineteen thousand other soldiers passing the Statue of Liberty on their way to England. Soon enough about eighteen thousand of them, including Kuroki, were pale and vomiting for five rough days.
At the same time, back in Washington, D.C., there was confusion, contradiction, and debate about what to do about young Japanese Americans already in the military or trying to join. Corporal Akiji Yoshimura, an army medic at Crissy Field in San Francisco, was taken to jail by two FBI agents for interrogation.
"Will you fight against Japan if you are called upon to do so?" asked one agent.
"Of course, I would. Anytime, anywhere," said Yoshimura.
"You sonofabitch," said the interrogator. "I expect you to say that you will shoot down the Emperor and tear down the Jap flag and stomp it into the ground."
Yoshimura, like many of the more than three thousand Japanese Americans serving in the military, draftees and men who had enlisted before Pearl Harbor, was discharged from the army. Later he volunteered for the Military Intelligence Service, a secret unit of Japanese-speaking Nisei training to serve as interpreters in the Pacific Theater, winning a battlefield commission as a lieutenant.
In Nebraska, the Kuroki boys were accepted for enlistment after Pearl Harbor, but, in California, Nisei were routinely being turned away. Most of the Nisei in military service before Pearl Harbor were summarily discharged by March of 1942, especially those in California. "We don't want any Japs in our Army, you guys are no damn good. So get out of here," an army recruiting officer in San Jose told one Nisei, Yasuko Morimoto.
But at the same time, there were others still in uniform in many states and young reservists were being called to active duty in Hawaii. The new Military Intelligence Service was based at the Presidio, close to DeWitt's headquarters. Sixty-five Nisei and Kibei were secretly studying military Japanese before being sent to army units in the Pacific. After Pearl Harbor, General DeWitt demanded that the military move the MIS, and so the handful of teachers and the sixty-five trainees were sent to Camp Savage in Minnesota.
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On December 12, a small newspaper published north of Los Angeles, the San Luis Obispo Independent, was the first on the West Coast to call for the evacuation of all Japanese, citizens or not, from Pacific coastal areas. TheNew York Times reported a rumor that the Japanese had a secret air base in Baja California, the Mexican state south of San Diego. Its source was Earl Warren, California's attorney general. The paper quoted General DeWitt as saying that anyone who disbelieved these reports was "inane, idiotic, and foolish." On December 15, after a visit to Hawaii, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, a former publisher of the Chicago Daily News and the Republican nominee for vice president of the United States in 1936, held a press conference in Washington. Knox portrayed the tens of thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the islands as a gigantic spy nest and claimed that "the most effective 'Fifth Column' work of the war was done there."
Untrue, every word. If Knox had a reason to say that, it was to shift blame for the devastation at Pearl Harbor from the navy, which had been unprepared for sneak attack, even though, for weeks, there had been military intelligence predicting some sort of assault. Dorothy Thompson, a nationally syndicated columnist, writing the day after Knox's performance, said: "There is a monstrous fifth column in the United States-just as there is fifth column in Hawaii, which contributed to the disaster at Pearl Harbor. Have those people been found? And are they still operating?" They were certainly in plain view; Nikkei were 37 percent of Hawaii's population. Except for General DeWitt, few officials even thought about interning Hawaiians because there was no doubt the local economy would crash if Japanese were taken away from the islands' huge fruit and sugar plantations. And, of course, the Hawaiian Fifth Column would never be found because it did not exist.
There were certainly many Japanese in Hawaii and California who sympathized with the rise and ambitions of the Old Country, but there was no evidence of sabotage or spying in either place. Instead, there were cadres of nervous military men and panicking politicians reacting to rumors and sensational news reports. There were also thousands of Californians who would benefit economically if the state's Japanese were forced out of their farms and businesses.
California's Governor Olson put forward a plan in mid-December to restrict all Japanese and Japanese Americans to their homes. It amounted to house arrest, but Olson argued that it would prevent violence and riots by angry white Americans. The plan was rejected by the California State Council of Defense, which countered that because Japanese farmers owned or worked so many of California's farms, there might be a food shortage if they stopped working. At the same time, General DeWitt was sending secret plans to his superiors in Washington. His first proposal, cabled to Washington on December 19, called for the relocation of all males, enemy aliens and citizens alike, over fourteen years old, including Germans and Italians, to camps east of the Rockies where they would be held "under restraint." It was the first of dozens of often contradictory plans put forward by DeWitt. The "restraint" proposal, whatever that word meant, was turned down by Major General Allen Gullion, the army's provost marshal general-because it did not go far enough. Gullion, formerly the army's chief legal officer, wanted Japanese of all ages, noncitizens and citizens, brought under military control. Germans and Italians were essentially exempt from the treatment forced on Nikkei. The reason was simple enough: officials in the Justice Department estimated that Italian Americans and German Americans in California had more than fifty million relatives in other parts of the country-a third of the nation-and without their help the United States had little chance of winning the war.
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It seemed the worst of times, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The confusion and fear touched every American, including the First Lady in Washington. In December, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to her daughter Anna, who lived in Seattle: "Dearest, the news of the war has just come and I've put in a call for you and Johnny as you may want to send the children East.... I must go dear and talk to Father. Much, much love, Mother."
Despite her own fears, though, Mrs. Roosevelt traveled to California to publicly meet with prominent Nisei women in Los Angeles on Decemeber 11, and she then wrote in her nationally syndicated column My Day: "This is, perhaps, the greatest test this country has ever met.... Our citizens come from all the nations of the world ... If we can not meet the challenge of fairness to our citizens of every nationality, of really believing in the Bill of Rights and making it a reality for all loyal American citizens, regardless of race, creed, or color, if we cannot keep in check anti-Semitism, anti-racial feelings, as well as anti-religous feelings, then we shall have removed the one real hope for the future on which all humanity must now rely."
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