Infamy (14 page)

Korematsu was arrested on May 30 on a street corner in San Leandro, California, and taken to the San Francisco county jail. Ernest Besig, director of the ACLU of Northern California, visited him in jail, and asked Korematsu if he was willing to be a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the mass evacuation. When Korematsu agreed, Besig and another ACLU lawyer, Wayne Collins, represented him in federal court in San Francisco—against the wishes of ACLU leaders in New York. Judge Adolphus F. St. Sure rejected Besig’s argument that Korematsu, an American citizen, was being denied due process. St. Sure released Korematsu on $2,500 bail, pending an appeal. But as Korematsu left the courtroom, a military policeman holding a gun took him into custody and delivered him to the Tanforan Assembly Center. Korematsu was later convicted in federal court for violating Executive Order 9066. Represented by Collins, who left the ACLU, Korematsu fought his case through the courts and he, too, appealed to the Supreme Court.

Mitsuye Endo was from Sacramento and had been a California state employee before being removed to Tanforan and then the Tule Lake Relocation Center. She was contacted by a civil liberties attorney, James Purcell, about challenging her evacuation. She seemed to have a strong case: she was a U.S. government worker, her brother was in the U.S. Army, and she had no connections to the Japanese government. Purcell filed a habeas corpus petition on her behalf; when it was denied, her case was appealed and was eventually brought to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a unanimous decision in 1943, the Court decided two of the four challenges, ruling against Hirabayashi’s and Yasui’s appeals, stating that the curfew was constitutional under the government’s war powers. Korematsu’s and Endo’s cases reached the Supreme Court as well, but judgments were deliberately delayed until after the 1944 presidential election.

4

“KEEP THIS A WHITE MAN’S COUNTRY”

THE OPENING OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS: MARCH
22
TO OCTOBER
6
,
1942

On April 7, 1942, the governors of ten western states met with Milton Eisenhower of the War Relocation Authority and Colonel Bendetsen of the Wartime Civil Control Administration in Salt Lake City, Utah, to discuss the relocation of the West Coast Japanese from assembly centers to camps in the badlands of their states. “The people of Wyoming have a dislike for any Orientals and simply will not stand for being California’s dumping ground,” said Governor Nels Smith of Wyoming, shaking his fist at Eisenhower. “If you bring Japanese into my state, I promise you they will be hanging from every tree.”

The governor of Arizona, Sidney Osborn, repeated the “dumping ground” line. Utah’s Herbert Maw said he thought there was too much emphasis on constitutional rights. Then he stood up and shouted: “The Constitution could be changed.… If these people are dangerous on the Pacific Coast they will be dangerous here!” The governor of Idaho, Chase Clark, said, “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats. I don’t want them coming into Idaho.” He later compromised, saying he would accept American Japanese “only if they were in concentration camps under military guard.” The state’s attorney general, Bert Miller, backed him up: “All Japanese must be in concentration camps for the remainder of the war.… We want to keep this a white man’s country.”

Only one governor, Ralph Carr of Colorado, said he would accept American Japanese in his state. “If you harm them, you must harm me. I was brought up in a small town where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred. I grew to despise it because it threatened the happiness of you and you and you.”

Soon enough, the federal officials realized that the relocation of the
Nikkei
was going to be more difficult than first imagined. Finding the Japanese and Japanese Americans had not been difficult. Although for more than forty years the Census Bureau denied it
—
admitting the truth only in 2007
—
the 1940 census had just been completed and Census Bureau records were moved to the Presidio in San Francisco, so the army and the FBI had maps of where almost every Japanese family lived. The problem was where to put them, and how to move them. And there were still questions about who would be in charge of the relocation camps.

It was not only officials and bureaucrats who were wary or just plain scared about the evacuation. May and June of 1942 became one of the peaks of hysteria in the West, as reports reached the public of the fall of Corregidor, one of the last American outposts in the Philippines. More than seventy-five thousand starving Filipino and American troops, many of them crippled by disease, surrendered on the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor, a rocky island in Manila Bay, in April and May of 1942 and were marched through eighty miles of jungle on their way to a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Thousands of Filipinos and hundreds of Americans died on the brutal march. Though the fall of Corregidor was reported in 1942, news of what would be called the Bataan Death March was kept from the American public until January of 1944.

The fall of the Philippines and the perception that Japan was winning the war turned some Issei and Nisei against each other. Charles Kikuchi was walking through the grandstands in Tanforan when he saw an old Issei smiling, talking to a friend about the Philippines. “About time, no?”

“It made my blood boil,” said Kikuchi. He challenged the old man, who asked him who he was for in the war. “America,” he answered. “The man,” wrote Kikuchi, “called me and my friends fools, saying they could never become Americans. ‘Only the
Ketos
[literally, hairy people] could become Americans.’”

One of the units captured by the Japanese army on Corregidor was the 200th Coast Artillery Battery, originally made up of eighteen hundred reservists from the New Mexico National Guard, more than a third of them Hispanic Americans or Native Americans. At least two hundred of them died on the march, some shot or bayoneted if they could not keep walking. In Santa Fe, where local families did not know much about the details of what was happening in the Philippines, telegrams were arriving announcing the deaths of their young men at the places called Corregidor and Bataan. Local residents armed with shotguns and hatchets marched on the nearby internment camp where hundreds of the so-called dangerous Issei were being held, determined to kill as many American Japanese as they could. They were talked out of it by officials who said that a massacre would invite retaliation on the rest of the American soldiers being held in the Philippines.

Other towns struggled with their own conflicting reactions to the movement of prisoners and evacuees to their areas. In Lone Pine, a ranching town of 1,071 people six miles south of the Manzanar Assembly Center and Relocation Camp, twenty-two local merchants signed a letter to the army requesting that small numbers of internees be allowed to shop at their businesses. Other townspeople, five hundred of them, then signed another petition asking that the evacuees be kept behind barbed wire. The town barber said, “We ought to take those yellow-tails right down to edge of the Pacific and say to ’em, ‘Okay boys, over there’s Toyko. Start walkin’.” A county supervisor in Inyo County, which had a population 7,625, said, “A Jap’s a Jap, and by God I wouldn’t trust one of them as far as I could throw a bull by the tail.” A flight instructor at a small local airstrip added, “It’s a plain case of survival of the fittest. It’s either us or the god-damned Yellow-bellies! What are we waiting for? The Army needs target practice on those sons-of-bitches.”

Nine miles north of Manzanar, in Independence, the Inyo County seat and a town slightly bigger than Lone Pine, a storekeeper’s wife said, “There’s people in Independence who were just frightened out of their wits. They thought the Japanese were going to break out of Manzanar and we’d all be slaughtered in our beds.” A former official at Manzanar added, “I can’t remember the guy’s name, but there was a man in Independence who formed his own militia and was training people.… They were going to save the women and children of Independence.”

*   *   *

As the government wrestled with issues of authority, logistics, and statistics, the spring of 1942 was a time of anguish and uncertainty for American Japanese families and individuals in the three West Coast states. The army, with the help of civilian contractors, was still searching for relocation sites, usually on empty land already owned by the federal government. The military was designing and building—sometimes with the help of American Japanese volunteers—President Roosevelt’s “concentration camps.” Ten locations were finally chosen from the dry lake beds and lava fields in the far north of California to Arizona deserts and Indian reservations and swampland in Arkansas. By the summer of 1942, most of the Japanese and Japanese Americans had been moved or were in the process of being moved from the assembly centers, Santa Anita and the sixteen others. Most of the camps were ready—almost ready, anyway. Beginning on March 22, the army had begun moving people inland from the assembly centers. The long, slow, and dirty trains—171 of them—were alternately too hot and very cold, always dark, with window shades pulled so the evacuees could not see where they were going.

Estelle Ishigo, the white woman who chose to go with her husband, Arthur Ishigo, a Nisei, to the camps, wrote back her impression of the first relocation camp, Manzanar. “The sight of the barbed wire enclosure with armed soldiers standing guard as our bus turned slowly through the gate stunned us.… Here was a camp of sheds enclosed with a high barbed wire fence, with guard towers and soldiers with machine guns.”

Manzanar opened on March 22 and became a relocation camp under WRA control, built to hold ten thousand “evacuees,” or prisoners, from Bainbridge Island, Los Angeles, and San Joaquin County, California. Nine more camps opened between May 8 and October 6.

Poston, Arizona, was one of the first to open, starting on May 8. It was actually three camps—Poston I, II, and III—built on an Indian reservation near the California border. Its peak population was 17,814. People there came from all over California and southern Arizona and they called the camps “Roastin’, Toastin’, and Dustin’.”

Tule Lake, California, a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp built on lava beds close to the Oregon border, opened soon after, on May 27, and accommodated a peak of 18,789 people from Sacramento, Oregon, and Washington. When a young opera singer well known in the Sacramento area, Fumiko Yabe, was headed for Tule Lake, she bought a bathing suit, not knowing that the lake had disappeared into a barren plain five hundred years before.

Early that summer, with seven of the ten relocation centers still to open, Milton Eisenhower left the WRA. He hated the job, earlier telling his boss, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, that he had intended to use the camps as platforms to move the evacuees into useful jobs around the country. In the end, his inclination did not matter. On June 17, when the Office of War Information director, Elmer Davis, offered Eisenhower the position of assistant director, he jumped at the chance.

Eisenhower, desperate to leave the WRA, had recruited his own successor: Dillon Myer, a lifetime civil servant who was serving as deputy director of the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Soil Conservation Service. Eisenhower and Myer were friends. At a dinner one night, Myer asked Eisenhower one last time if he should take the job. “Yes, if you can do the job and sleep at night. I couldn’t.”

Eisenhower was offered a new position only eleven days after the U.S. Navy, with the crucial (and secret) help of Japanese American code breakers and translators, crushed the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway. It was the turning point of the Pacific War. Thereafter, there was almost no chance the Japanese military could approach the West Coast of the United States, much less invade California, Oregon, or Washington.

So, by the time Myer took over, “military necessity” was effectively dead as an argument for the camps. On that same day, June 17, 1942, the director of the American Friends Service Committee, C. Reid Carey, told a church conference, “We are doing exactly the same things as the Germans.
”

Still, the camps were being built and continued opening. The openings under Myer were:

Gila River, Arizona, opened on June 20. The land, a reservation, was the home of the Gila River Indian Tribe and held a peak of 13,348 people from Fresno County, Sacramento, and Los Angeles.

Minidoka, Idaho, near the town of Hunt, opened August 10, with a peak population of 9,397, and held people from Seattle, Portland, and northwestern Oregon. One of the first arrivals there, Monica Sone, wrote, “We felt as if we were standing in a gigantic sand-mixing machine as the 60-mile gale lifted the loose earth into the sky, obliterating everything. Sand filled our mouths and nostrils and stung our faces and hands like a thousand darting needles.”

Heart Mountain, Wyoming, with prisoners from Los Angeles and Santa Clara County, California, opened on August 12. Peak population was 10,767.

Amache (also called Granada), Colorado, built on a treeless prairie for prisoners from all over California, opened on August 24. Peak population was 7,318.

Topaz, Utah, with a peak population of 8,130 evacuees from the San Francisco Bay Area, opened September 11.

Rohwer in McGehee, Arkansas, opened on September 18. The camp held people from Los Angeles and San Joaquin, California. “It was a living nightmare,” an evacuee wrote of Rohwer. “The water stagnated at the front steps.… The mosquitoes that festered there were horrible, and the administration never had enough quinine for sickness.”

Jerome, Arkansas, was the last camp to open, on October 6, 1942. The people interned there were from the San Joaquin Valley and San Pedro Bay area, and the camp had a peak population of 8,497. Later on, Rohwer residents were moved to Jerome, and Rohwer was converted into a prisoner of war camp housing captured German soldiers.

The camps and various federal prisons, at their peak, held a total of 120,313 American Japanese, alien and citizen. Of those, 92,786 were Californians. Their new “homes” were described this way by the California Site Survey of the National Park Service: