Infamy (26 page)

By that spring, the War Department began—in secret, of course—to propose to the president that they end the evacuation of the American Japanese. Secretary of War Stimson brought the subject up at a cabinet meeting on May 26, 1944. But the closing of the relocation camps was not going to happen just yet. As Attorney General Biddle wrote in his notes of the meeting, “Secretary of War raised the question of whether it was appropriate for the War Department, at this time, to cancel the Japanese Exclusion Orders and let the Japs go home. War, Interior, and Justice all agreed this could be done without danger to defense considerations but doubted the wisdom of doing it at this time before the election.” Harold Ickes, now officially in charge of the WRA, was the strongest voice in the room, telling President Roosevelt, “The continued retention of these innocent people would be a blot upon the history of this country.”

He added that the Japanese children “are becoming a hopelessly maladjusted generation, apprehensive of the outside world and divorced from the possibility of associating—or even seeing to any considerable extent—Americans of other races.”

At the same time, the general who replaced General Emmons in DeWitt’s old job in San Francisco, C. H. Bonesteel, cabled the War Department, writing, “My study of the existing situation leads me to a belief that the great improvement in the military situation on the West Coast indicates that there is no longer a military necessity for the mass exclusion of the Japanese from the West Coast as a whole.”

After the meeting, the undersecretary of state Edward Stettinius wrote to President Roosevelt, saying, “The question appears to be largely a political one, the reaction in California, on which I am sure you will probably wish to reach your own decision.”

Exactly. The president made it clear to his men that they should do nothing until after the election in November. Two weeks later Roosevelt refined his thoughts in a memo to Stettinius and Ickes: “The more I think of this problem of suddenly ending the orders excluding Japanese Americans from the West Coast the more I think it would be a mistake to do anything drastic or sudden. As I said at Cabinet, I think the whole problem, for the sake of internal quiet, should be handled gradually.” Ickes and the others knew what he meant: after the elections.

*   *   *

That spring, while Washington debated and evaded the issue of closing the camps, frustration and violence continued behind the barbed fences of the relocation centers out west. On May 24, 1944, thirty-year-old Shoichi James Okamoto, who had been born in Garden Grove just south of Los Angeles, was shot at Tule Lake by Private Bernard Goe. He died the next day.

There were eight witnesses to the incident, both Japanese and Caucasian. The official report of the Army Investigation Committee released on July 3 read:

Okamoto was driving Truck #100-41 at the order of the construction supervisor to get lumber piled across the highway from the old main gate, which is called Gate #4.… Harry Takanashi accompanied Okamoto on this assignment. Eleven boys from the heavy equipment crew were waiting for an Army escort.…

According to Takanashi, the new sentry had just come on duty. Word has it that the new sentry was in a disagreeable mood and was known as one of the tougher sentries. The two on the truck went over the line a bit. The sentry, on Okamoto’s side of the truck, could see Takanashi’s badge, but could not at first see Okamoto’s because of the high side door of the truck, and because of the sentry’s short stature.… Okamoto showed the pass, was allowed through, and returned in a few minutes.… While he had been waved through the gate a few minutes before, he was halted. It is claimed Okamoto said words to the effect of, “Well, here’s the pass.” Perhaps this sounded cocky to the already irritated guard. The sentry ordered him off the truck and commanded Takanashi to drive. Without a driver’s license, the latter explained he could not drive a truck. The sentry, it is said, was infuriated at this delay. From then on, commands were well peppered with curses.… To Takanashi’s answer the guard is said to have replied, “You Japs and your WRA friends are trying to run the whole camp.” He then turned back to Okamoto.… Heavy equipment boys, not many feet away, were talking among themselves of the sentry’s aggressive manner. “This one has it in for ‘Japs,’ etc.” Okamoto, too, was apparently apprehensive by this time.

Takanashi and other witnesses said that the sentry then cocked his gun and went around via the front to the other side of the truck where Okamoto was standing. The sentry then ordered Okamoto to the back of the truck. This would have been just outside the gate. Okamoto started but hesitated for an instant.… The suspicion is that the guard wished to shoot him outside the gate. “Shot while trying to escape.” The sentry struck Okamoto on the right shoulder with a rifle-butt. Okamoto raised his right arm and moved his body slightly back to ward off any further blows. While in this defensive position, the guard stepped back one pace and from a distance of four or five feet fired without warning. In all eyewitness testimony, the act was looked upon as an unprovoked attack.…

The sentry cursed, seemed nervous, and it is said, swung the rifle in [the heavy equipment crew’s] general direction. More cursing. “You people get the hell out of here”—and they fled.

Six weeks later, military officers held court-martial proceedings for Private Bernard Goe. The private was charged and acquitted of manslaughter after an hour’s deliberation. He was fined one dollar for the unauthorized use of government property: the bullet.

Both the actions of the army and the WRA questionnaires increased the tensions between guards and guarded; they not only divided the camps but also goaded residents to organize and resist in ways they never had before. At Heart Mountain, Frank Emi, the grocer from Little Tokyo, and Sam Horino, who had made the soldiers carry him out of his family’s home in Gardena on the day they were relocated, formed a so-called Fair Play Committee with other “No-No Boys” in February 1944, soon after draft notices arrived in the camp.

When Emi read question 27 of the leave application—“Will you go into combat duty wherever ordered?”—he thought, “It was very stupid and a very arrogant question to ask us, after we were thrown out of our homes and put in these concentration camps, without even a word about our citizenship rights or civil rights or constitutional rights being restored.” He thought question 28—“Will you forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan?”—was just senseless. “We had never sworn allegiance to the Emperor of Japan,” he told camp administrators. “And for our parents to forswear allegiance to Japan, that would have left them without a country,” since Issei were not allowed to earn U.S. citizenship.

Emi himself was not eligible for the draft or military service. He was thirty-two years old and had two children. But when he first read the questionnaire, he had stayed up all night working out his response: “Under the present conditions and circumstances, I am unable to answer these questions.” Then, with his brother, they put those words up on latrine doors under the headline, “Suggested Answers to Questions 27 and 28”:

We the members of the FPC are not afraid to go war—we are not afraid to risk our lives for our country. We would gladly sacrifice our lives to protect and uphold the principles and ideals of our country as set forth in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, for on its inviolability depends the freedom, liberty, justice, and protection of all people including Japanese Americans and all other minority groups. But have we been given such freedom, such liberty, such justice, such protection? NO! Without any hearings, without due process of law as guaranteed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, without any charges filed against us, without any evidence of wrongdoing on our part, one hundred and ten thousand innocent people were kicked out of their homes … and herded like dangerous criminals into concentration camps with barbed wire fences and military police guarding it.… Is that the American way? NO!… THEREFORE, WE MEMBERS OF THE FAIR PLAY COMMITTEE HEREBY REFUSE TO GO TO THE PHYSICAL EXAMINATION OR TO THE INDUCTION IF OR WHEN WE ARE CALLED IN ORDER TO CONTEST THE ISSUE.

The Japanese American Citizens League members in camp accused the Fair Play leaders of sedition. So did the camp newspaper, the
Heart Mountain Sentinel
.

Emi and a friend, Min Tamesa, a millworker from Seattle, continued to protest and decided to walk out of the camp, knowing they would be stopped. They wanted to then use the incident to prove that they were not free citizens, if they ever ended up in court.

On the day of their planned walkout, the guards stopped them and asked for identification.

“Well, we don’t have passes,” said Emi. “We’re American citizens.”

The soldiers repeated the request for passes.

“Well,” replied Emi, “what will you do if we don’t get a pass and walk out?”

“Well, I’ll just have to shoot you,” said the guard.

A grand jury in Wyoming indicted Emi, Horino, and sixty-one other Heart Mountain Nisei who had refused to sign up for Selective Service. It was the largest trial in Wyoming’s history and all of the resisters were found guilty and sentenced to three years in federal penitentiaries on McNeil Island, Washington, and in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Later, the same grand jury indicted seven Fair Play leaders again, including Emi and Horino. The charge this time was trying to organize a draft resistance movement. James Omura, a columnist for the English-language
Rocky Shimpo
in Denver, was indicted as well for writing columns urging the Heart Mountain leaders to exercise their rights as American citizens. Omura was found not guilty because of the First Amendment of the Constitution protecting free speech in the press.

After their second indictment, Frank Emi and other leaders of the Fair Play Committee at Heart Mountain were taken into custody by the FBI in the middle of the night on July 21, 1944, and taken to the jail in Cheyenne. This time the men were charged with conspiracy to violate the Selective Service Act.

On October 27, 1944, Emi and the other Fair Play leaders from Heart Mountain went on trial before a jury in Cheyenne. They denied nothing, said what they did and why they did it. They were found guilty and taken to Leavenworth, Kansas. Emi got four years this time. He served eighteen months before his conviction—and those of the others—was reversed by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals after the war was over.

Before the trial, Frank Emi and others had asked the American Civil Liberties Union to provide them with attorneys, but the ACLU refused, probably because the organization’s founder and president, Roger Baldwin, still did not want to do anything that might embarrass his friend the president. But then an ACLU attorney from Los Angeles, A. L. Wirin, agreed to defend the seven as a private attorney.

In spite of the ambivalent attitudes of Baldwin and some other national officers of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, the director of the San Francisco office, Ernest Besig, had been trying for more than a year to be allowed to see the camps, particularly Tule Lake, and talk to the residents. He was finally granted permission to visit on July 10, 1944. He was not, however, allowed to speak alone with residents. Camp administrators insisted on being present at all interviews. Even so, women in the camp learned that he was there and told him about the camp’s “stockade,” and the fact that they were not allowed to visit their husbands and sons in the makeshift prison.

Raymond Best immediately ordered Besig and his secretary to leave the camp and return to San Francisco, five hundred miles away. It was a rough ride. Someone had poured two bags of salt into Besig’s gas tank. It was not hard to figure out that administration people were behind that bit of sabotage; Besig’s car was parked in the “whites only” housing area outside the camp.

Shocked by all that he saw and heard in two days, Besig reported to New York: “Instead of being a center for disloyal Japanese, Tule Lake is really the dumping ground for misfits, anti-administration leaders, embittered youngsters, and a lot of old people who just want to go back to Japan. The administration under Best is so stupid that it succeeds in uniting all these elements against itself.”

Besig was pressured by the ACLU board in New York to be supportive of the government and government power, but he was determined to find a way to defy New York. As he had before, Besig went to Wayne Collins, who was working out of a tiny office in San Francisco, to once again represent Korematsu against the orders of ACLU superiors in New York. No longer an ACLU employee, Collins, who had founded the San Francisco unit, was free and determined to ignore the calls, telegrams, and letters from New York that were prohibiting Besig from going back to Tule Lake.

Among other things, ACLU founder Roger Baldwin considered Collins incompetent and something of a wild man—and so did many who knew him. Besig said his friend Collins was “like a fox terrier,” a fast-talking, angry Irishman who came to cases as if he had a shotgun, ready to blast in any direction. Many of his shots were at the Japanese American Citizens League, which he considered a partner in the evacuation.

I detest them. They’re nothing but a bunch of jackals.… The JACL pretended to be the spokesman for all Japanese Americans but they wouldn’t stand up for their people. They led their people like a bunch of goddamned doves to the concentration camps.… I still feel bitter about the evacuation. It was the foulest goddamned crime the United States has ever committed against a wonderful people.

Whatever his skills and however deep his rage, the passionate and persevering Collins was already trying to represent the American Japanese behind the stockade fence at Tule Lake, the prison within a prison at Tule Lake. He was demanding to see the segregation camp and to get inside the stockade. Hoping to keep the attorney away, Best offered to come to Collins’s office in San Francisco with other WRA officials. Collins greeted them by saying he would file a writ of habeas corpus for all four hundred prisoners if the stockade was not immediately shut down. Three days later, he drove to Tule Lake. There was no sign of the barbed-wire and plywood enclosure. The stockade was gone.