Infamy (22 page)

Overall life in the camps had largely settled into a routine for many residents, a kind of shadow of life in an American town. Schools were built, teachers were imported, the boys played baseball and, in Boy Scout uniforms, raised the American flag each morning. The Boy Scouts were one of the few organizations that brought together the evacuees and local townspeople. Scouts from Cody, nine miles away, and Heart Mountain would hold joint programs, with the locals often staying over for weekends. Pup tents were shared. One was assigned to a Cody boy named Alan Simpson, who later became a Republican senator, and Norman Mineta, who later became the mayor of San Jose, California, and a Democratic congressman. Mineta would also come to serve in two cabinets as secretary of commerce under President Bill Clinton and secretary of transportation under President George W. Bush. A couple of American kids, Boy Scouts. They became friends for life, and unlikely partners across the aisle when they served in government.

Mineta’s father, Kunisaku, was sent from Heart Mountain to the Military Language School at the University of Chicago early in 1943 to join other bilingual Japanese Americans teaching American soldiers in language classes. When his family was later allowed to join him there, they caught a bus along Wyoming Route 20 in front of the camp and rode to Greybull, Wyoming, and then to Billings, Montana. While waiting for the train east, they had dinner in a Billings restaurant. Norman, by now thirteen years old, stood up and began walking around the table, stacking the dishes.

“Norman,” his mother said. “You don’t have to do that anymore.”

The exodus from the camps was continuing, but it was still a one-by-one process. In the spring of 1943, Stanley Hayami was worrying about his grades, but he was also writing about his friends at Heart Mountain leaving the camp for school or work. Almost every day through the spring of 1943 there were new notations in his diary. Some were about his grades but most of them were about friends leaving the camps for school or work. “Today James Nakada got his release to Chicago. He’s going all by himself and he’s only 16, too. He’s going to get a job as a houseboy or something.” In a way, Hayami was also getting chances to interact with the world outside the camps: “Today I helped clean the school grounds. In the afternoon went to play Lovell. Our first game with the outside. We beat them 18–5.”

Then, on April 25, Easter Sunday, he wrote of dressing and going to church with his friend Jimmie Yada. “I got baptized,” he wrote. “So now I am a real Christian. I hope I can live up to that name.”

Easter Sunday of 1943, the day Stanley Hayami became a Christian at Heart Mountain, the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, was visiting Gila River and other camps. Traveling separately, President Roosevelt was at Fort Riley, Kansas, part of a nineteen-stop presidential tour of military installations around the country. There were more than 15,000 soldiers training at Riley, 160 of them Nisei who had completed their basic training and were given menial jobs around the installation, mowing lawns, chopping weeds, working in the motor pool. Although they had completed basic training, they were not issued helmets or firearms. Thirty of them were shoveling horse manure fifteen miles from the fort at the Cavalry Replacement Training Center. On the day of the president’s visit, forty-two of the Nisei were ordered to mend fences and dig postholes ten miles away from their base. The rest were lined up and marched twenty minutes to a large hangar, which served as the Motor Mechanics School Building. Guarded by soldiers with machine guns, they were ordered to sit in bleachers, staring straight ahead and maintaining silence. After four hours, with Roosevelt long gone, they were dismissed. A private named Fred Sumoge from Hood River, Oregon, whose parents were at Tule Lake after losing their seven acres of strawberry fields because they could not pay their property taxes from the camp, said, “They treated us like prisoners. I wasn’t sure that I would live through it.” Then he began wondering if the reason American Japanese were concentrated in camps was that it would make it possible for the Air Corps to bomb them.

Still, no matter how they were treated, most of the American Japanese were still instinctively loyal to the United States. Masuru Ben Kahora, a Seattle businessman arrested on December 7 and held in Santa Fe, wrote to his family at Minidoka, urging them to buy U.S. war bonds. His wife, Kikuko, wrote back, “I am determined to become a part of American soil in order to bring up a new American generation. I am willing to take part in patriotic duties such as school PTA. My one point is to make an American of our daughter and a true one.”

*   *   *

Once General DeWitt finally concluded that all Japanese, including American citizens, were the enemy, he stuck with that position. With Bendetsen as his spokesman, the West Coast commander continued to insist that there was no way to determine the loyalty of American Japanese—even the men who were now wearing the same uniform he wore. When McCloy, questioning and playing down his own role in the evacuation of 1942, began arguing that those Nisei soldiers must have the same rights as any other Americans in uniform, including a furlough before induction or before being shipped overseas, DeWitt countered by demanding that the Nisei soldiers from California would have to wear their uniforms, carry a permit issued by his command, and would be allowed to visit only two places in California, Manzanar and Tule Lake. Earl Warren, now the governor of the state, was no different than DeWitt, saying as late as June of 1943, “We know that submarines have been hovering off our coast and could send saboteurs into California. If we permitted Japanese to return to this combat zone, how could we tell between them?” He went on to state that “large numbers of Japanese in the relocation centers are Japanese army reservists and others have been taught sabotage.”

“There isn’t any such thing as a loyal Japanese and that loyalty just can’t be determined,” DeWitt said to McCloy and to General Marshall. McCloy’s answer now was:

We are going to send him to North Africa, we’ve got to let him have the same benefits as any soldier.… These fellows are going to war. They volunteered to fight for the white man.… These fellows, lots of them are Oriental in only one sense—they have that blood in them, but they have been born in California, chew chewing gum and go to American movies, played on basketball teams …

After DeWitt’s testimony before Congress, on April 15, 1943, the War Department was forced to issue a directive ordering the Western Zone commander to allow Japanese American soldiers on furlough to visit anywhere in the West Coast states. The next day, the general called a press conference and said that he would follow orders. Then he added, “The War Department says a Jap-American soldier is not a Jap; he is an American. Well, alright. I said I have a Jap situation to take care of and I’m going to do it.”

The number of Japanese Americans who had left the camps for jobs, schools, and the army since the beginning of the evacuation reached almost 20,000 before the end of 1943. By then, just more than 1,000 Nisei from the camps had volunteered and been accepted for military service. In Hawaii, the number was 2,686; a crowd of more than fifteen thousand people cheered as they were loaded onto ships in Honolulu.

On the mainland, Washington and the WRA continued to try to find ways to release more evacuees and make plans to close most of the camps as soon as possible. But there was opposition to that by the new governor of California, the former attorney general, Earl Warren, who had practically ridden to office on the backs of Japanese, alien and citizen alike. He won 57 percent of the vote on November 3, 1942, defeating Culbert Olson. During the campaign, Warren promised that the first thing he would do as governor would be to fire Carey McWilliams, director of the Division of Immigration and Housing. McWilliams was an Olson official hated and feared by California’s big farmers, and he had also become a critic of the Japanese evacuation after visiting assembly and relocation centers.

Once in office, Warren did just as he promised. McWilliams, the author of highly praised books, particularly
Factories in the Field
detailing how white farmers treated migrant farm workers, went to New York, where he became editor of the
Nation
magazine.

Then, the new governor refused to negotiate with the WRA about the return of Japanese to their homes in his state. Warren stated his reservations in a press conference on the day after he was elected.

I firmly believe there is positive danger attached to the presence of so many of these admittedly American-hating Japanese in an area where sabotage or any other civil disorders would be so detrimental to the war effort. I have always felt that the concentration of these Japs [in California camps]—the reason for their concentration is based on military necessity and the Army, which is charged with the external security of our country is the only agency thoroughly familiar with the Jap and his machinations.… The Army should control the whole situation.

The same day that Warren spoke out, there was unrest at the Tule Lake camp, and soon the army came in to manage the situation. Oregon’s largest newspaper, the
Portland Oregonian
, wrote, “With tanks, tommy guns, rifles and bayonets, the army moved into the Tule Lake segregation center, where Jap chauvinists had disregarded the civilian authorities and created a situation pregnant with dread.” The paper went on to praise the army for “quelling the disorder without firing a shot,” remarking that “had that camp been an American camp in Japan, and had Japanese soldiers been summoned to abate a similar uprising, the ground would have been drenched with blood. The Jap, as a soldier, revels in the slaughter of unarmed human targets.”

An editorial in the
Denver Post
added, “There is just one word to describe the situation which is being uncovered by investigation of the Jap mutiny in the Tule Lake segregation center. That is ‘Rotten.’” The
Post
went on to complain about how “White employees of the camp were under instructions from the War Relocation Administration not to give orders to Jap internees but merely ‘Make suggestions.’”

The
Post
was further alarmed that WRA director Myer had been quoted in the
Seattle Star
“as saying the postwar problem of handling the Japs in this country is no problem at all because ‘We can within three generations assimilate them.’” The editorial went on to say, “The only way the Japs in this country could be assimilated is through intermarriage with white Americans. Is that what Myer is advocating? Does he want to mix yellow and white blood?”

Kentucky’s Senator Chandler reentered the scene, saying, “These disloyal Japanese have no place at all in the American way of life.” He went on to accuse the WRA of “coddling” the inmates. He added that “disloyals” should be transferred to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, two of which had been occupied by the Imperial Japanese in June of 1942. They were driven off by American troops a year later. Representative John Costello, a California congressman heading a congressional subcommittee investigating conditions at Tule Lake, told the
Times Herald
in Washington, D.C., that he had discovered reports indicating that the disturbances in the camps were ordered and directed by shortwave radio from Tokyo.

*   *   *

The press continued to attack the WRA and the camps throughout 1943—not because the camps were un-American but because officials were “soft” on the inmates. The
Los Angeles Times
published editorials like this one directed, the paper declared, at “sappy Jap-lovers”: “Tokyo is protesting against our treatment of Jap internees. It is true that it has been scandalous—the scandal being that the Nips under this soft restraint have been better fed, housed, and otherwise more privileged than a great many free Americans.” The paper then parroted the now oft repeated phrase, “As Gen. DeWitt remarked: ‘A Jap is always a Jap.’”

“Soft restraint” or “coddling” the evacuees had been an issue, fed by rumors, from the very beginning. Such complaints drove the WRA to cut money allocated for food at Topaz from 39 cents a day to 31 cents. In the West, locals resented the fact that the camps had hospitals and their small towns did not. In Arkansas, the poorest of states, residents were enraged when local schoolteachers, being paid $900 a year, were quitting to take Civil Service positions at the camps for as much as $2,000 a year. (Japanese American teachers were still being paid $16 a month.) In the areas around the camps, farmers picking up garbage and slops for pigs claimed that ham and fruit and other scarce and rationed items were being thrown away by well-fed prisoners. That was not true, but many Americans believed it. One of them, Congressman J. Leroy Johnson of California, said that there were “numerous reports and rumors of huge shipments of eggs, butter, sugar, and coffee” that were being delivered to the camps, and that classes in “art, dancing, rug-making are being offered the confined Japs.”

The
Denver Post
published a six-part series on food surpluses at Heart Mountain, under the headline: “Food Is Hoarded for Japs in U.S. While Americans in Nippon Are Tortured.” On December 6, a day before the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the
Los Angeles Times
published what the paper called a “Survey of Opinion,” a straw vote collected from readers over two months. There were seven questions and more than twelve thousand responses.

1. Do you think the War Relocation Authority has capably handled the problem of Japanese in the United States?… “yes”—369; “no”—10,773

2. Do you favor Army control of Japanese in this country for the duration?… “yes”—11,203; “no”—372

3. Do you approve of the policy of freeing avowedly loyal Japanese to take jobs in the Midwest?… “yes”—1,139; “no”—9,750

4. Would you favor “trading” Japanese now here for American war prisoners held in Japan if it could be arranged?… “yes”—11,249; “no”—256