Infamy (33 page)

By the end of August there were only 3,600 people in Manzanar, which once held 10,046 evacuees. While many of those still held there were afraid of what might happen if they stayed in California, many were determined to do just that. “I’m not going to worry about it,” said Mrs. Alice Nitta, who was thirty years old, born in El Monte. Her husband was in the army in Germany. “Both my husband and I have lived all our lives in Los Angeles—he was born in Eagle Rock—and we consider it home. We’re going back.… I think people will be pretty fair.”

Jeanne Wakatsuki, who was ten years old at the time, later remembered, “To most of the
Nisei
, anything looked better than remaining in camps. For many of their parents, just the opposite was true.” The American Japanese had no homes to return to. Wakatsuki wrote, “The very thought of going back to the West Coast filled us with dread. How will they look at us?” In addition to the traditionally racist organizations like the American Legion and the Native Sons of the Golden West, new groups had sprung up during the war, including No Japs Incorporated in San Diego, the Homefront Commandoes in Sacramento, and the Pacific Coast Japanese Problem in Los Angeles.

Of her father, Wakatsuki said:

Here he sat, a man without prospects, perhaps now without even a family in Japan to confirm his own history, fifty-eight years old, and his children scattered across the land: Woody in the army at Fort Douglas, Utah; Eleanor in Reno; her husband in Germany; Bill and Martha and Frances and Lillian in New Jersey. Ray now in the Coast Guard.… Papa already knew the car he’d put money on before Pearl Harbor had been repossessed. And, as he suspected, no record of his fishing boats remained. This put him right back where he’d been in 1904, arriving in a new land and starting over from economic zero.

The older generations had lost nearly all they had when interned, and for many reasons the oldest folks resisted leaving when camps closed. At Manzanar, some elderly residents refused to budge, and so they had to have their bags packed for them. Some had to be carried and shoved onto the buses.

*   *   *

Among the last residents of the camps were Issei and
Kibei
, many of whom had lost faith in the United States. Some had come to hate the country. Over the years the concentration camps had become a subject and target of propaganda from Tokyo and from Berlin as well. The
Shanghai Times
, a newspaper in occupied China, editorialized, “The Anglo-Americans in Japan and occupied China should be herded together and driven into interior regions where there are no modern facilities.” The outcome of evacuation and almost three years of segregation and isolation was exactly the opposite of what the WRA had expected. Many Issei and
Kibei
insisted on speaking only Japanese. A few of the older evacuees killed themselves; many more tried.

There were also at least three thousand American Japanese still in prisons and separate, official “internment” camps—and more of them had become or were becoming anti-American in word if not deed. One of them, Henry Hideo in Santa Fe, wrote to a friend on August 10, four days before Japan surrendered to the United States, saying:

I am interned in Santa Fe. Rights and freedoms are restricted, so I am having an awful time. The Caucasian officials here are big and seem strong. But they are good for nothing. They are useless. Also the censors here are all damn fools.… We are the people of the great Imperial Japan, from the beginning to the end, we are all faithful to our nation.

That part of the letter was censored and Hideo was put in solitary confinement.

At Tule Lake, two weeks later, Miye Ichiki wrote, “All I see and hear about these days is Atomic Bomb … and Japanese soldiers in American uniforms, and it makes me sick. I am glad to hear that a couple of United States soldiers I know have been killed in action.” Ichiki went on to say, “It served them right for fighting for the United States. When I see any Japanese in the American uniform visiting this camp, I feel like killing them.”

There were 5,461 Japanese Americans who had signed away their citizenship; almost all of them were at Tule Lake. Only 128 Nisei signed renunciation papers in the other nine camps. Most of the renunciations, however, were not because of pro–Imperial Japanese sentiment; they were made in the hysteria fueled by rumors and fear over what was going to happen as the war with Japan was ending. Would they all be sent to Japan? Would families be separated, depending on their ages or what papers members had signed? Where could they go and were they going to be attacked by white Americans if they left the camp?

What happened next at Tule Lake was predictable. As the camp calmed down, hundreds, then thousands of the renunciants begged to regain their American citizenship. The husband of a renunciant and the father of three children wrote this in a letter to Edward Ennis at the Justice Department:

My wife picked up all the rumors and believed them. She thought if she renounced she would stay here. Otherwise she would be pushed out. We are from Hood River and that was a dangerous place. My wife was afraid to go there if we were made to leave. She felt that in some way she must fix things so the family could stay here together and her “fixing” was to renounce.…

And, now, Mr. Ennis, isn’t there some way that we can go out as an alien? She did not renounce out of disloyalty. She would never do anything against this country. She only wants us to be together.… Do help us if you can.

*   *   *

The timing of the events of 1944 and 1945 in the camps and in Washington were no coincidence. The Justice Department, representing the government, had done its political duty, making sure that Supreme Court decisions were not announced until after President Roosevelt was reelected on November 7, 1944. In fact, the Justice Department did more than its assigned duty. With help from Deputy Secretary of War McCloy, who ordered some evacuation records destroyed, the Justice Department withheld evidence indicating that race was the central factor in the army’s decision to remove Japanese and Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

The president was determined that, once freed, the Japanese Americans and Issei, too, should not congregate in Little Tokyos again. He wanted them scattered around the country, figuring that a dozen or so here and there would not offend local people, white people. In his first postelection press conference, the president had said there was progress being made in scattering Japanese Americans around the country. “After all,” he continued, “they are American citizens and we all know American citizens have certain privileges.” The president believed that “75,000 families scattered around the United States is not going to upset anybody,” and he went on to praise the Japanese Americans who had joined the war, saying, “We are actuated by the very wonderful record that the Japanese in that battalion in Italy have been making in the war. It is one of the outstanding battalions that we have.”

The president’s “scattering” ideas had some impact. Eighty-eight percent of Japanese and Japanese Americans were in California before the war; that number dropped to 70 percent after the war. Part of the reason was that companies and organizations in other states provided better and more lucrative jobs, including white-collar positions, than young Nisei could get in the West where many former evacuees were still being told, “We don’t hire Japs.”

Whatever the president said then, many of the Issei distrusted him and were afraid to leave the camps for parts unknown. After Pearl Harbor, many had lost the lives they lived and the property they owned. Many were broken people who had no place to go. One government estimate was that West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans lost 75 percent of their assets. The official government figure, calculated in 1982 and reported in
The Wartime Handling of Evacuee Property
, was that evacuee losses amounted to at least $250 million in real, commercial, and personal property, or approximately $3 billion 2013 dollars. In Los Angeles and other California cities, their neighborhoods had been taken over by other people, particularly by black people from southern states, 150,000 of them, drawn west by the promise of well-paying defense work in shipyards and aircraft factories. When former residents came back to the area around the Los Angeles city hall, what had been Little Tokyo was now called Bronzeville.

The relocation camps, miserable as they could be, had become the new homes of a majority of American Japanese, the only homes most of them had when the war ended. Many did not want to leave; they were convinced they had nothing to go back to in California or anyplace else. And they were afraid they would be beaten or killed wherever they went. If they agreed to leave, they were given a train ticket and $25. The camps ironically had become assisted-living homes for many of the elderly—and now they were being thrown out into the mercy of hostile streets. The most vocal and the most unfortunate of the camp residents were eight thousand “old bachelors,” men without families or homes who had worked as migrant farm workers for decades. The camps were mean, but they were the best places some of those old and work-weary men had ever lived.

More than thirty years later, the official report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians stated:

They returned by the trainload to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Often elderly or infirm or burdened with heavy family responsibility, the last evacuees to leave piled into temporary shelters, hotels, converted Army barracks, and public housing. Very few could come back to their pre-war holdings. Only about 25 percent of the prewar farm operators, for example, retained property. Many testified that their stored possessions had been lost or stolen. Sometimes taxes had not been paid.

The Nichiren Buddhist Church was a major repository in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, storing the personal property of six hundred families. A postwar report stated, “[The building was] a hopeless mass of destruction. Furniture broken, mirrors smashed to smithereens … household goods scattered helter-skelter, trunks broken open, pictures thrown to the four winds. Most things of value, radios, typewriters, sewing machines, Persian rugs have been carried off.”

One Nisei, John Saito, told the commission that his father had returned to Los Angeles in July of 1945, later finding work as a dishwasher in a skid row restaurant. John Saito followed his father soon after and they shared his hotel room. Saito recalled, “There was only one room, and only one bed. He worked the graveyard shift and I went to school during the day, therefore we managed to use the same bed at different hours of the day.” The rest of the family was scattered; John’s mother worked as a cook at a farm labor camp in Idaho, and his older brother was still overseas with the 442nd.

Versions of his story were common in the three West Coast states. Many of the groups that had called for evacuation in 1942 were still active and hostile in 1945, including the Seattle Chamber of Commerce and an organization called the Remember Pearl Harbor League. Many Christian leaders, including the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, continued to oppose the return. One of the more vicious anti-Japanese organizations with Christian connections, the Home Front Commandoes, distributed brochures titled “SLAP THE JAP: No Jap Is Fit to Associate with Human Beings.”

Mutsuo Hashiguchi, the Washington state farmer who had sent an open letter to a newspaper saying he expected his family would be welcomed back, came home to find his house vandalized and debris thrown into his well. Neighbors told him truckloads of men came and looted the place on a day in the spring of 1942, the day he and his family left for the assembly center at Tanforan.

Another Washington resident, Mary Yogawa Saito, returned to Tacoma to claim her family’s dry-cleaning business. “We sold our dry-cleaning business for a mere $600 with the stipulation we could reclaim our business for the same price when the war concluded,” she recalled. “Arriving back in Tacoma, I discovered that our buyers had betrayed our agreement by selling the business and leaving the city. The new owners were hostile and uncommunicative. To make a long story short, with little money and very little faith in the American justice system, I tore up the contract in frustration.”

There were also hundreds of violent incidents as the Japanese came home from the camps and from the war. There were anti-Japanese rallies in many towns, including Brawley, California; Gresham, Oregon; and Bellevue, Washington. In Placer County on the California side of Lake Tahoe, three men confessed to burning down the barn of an Issei named Sumio Doi, whose younger brother, Shig, was a sergeant in the 442nd Regiment. They were acquitted after their defense attorney proclaimed, “Remember, this is a white man’s country.”

Walt Hayami, Stanley Hayami’s younger brother, recalled his family’s return to San Gabriel.

“There was a family that went back before we did and one of the daughters in that family said it was quite hostile for Japanese Americans until the word came about Stanley.” She had told the Hayami family, “The announcement of his death in combat was made in the high school assembly. After that, she said things changed quite a bit. So in that sense, some good came out of it.”

Heisuke and Mitsuno Matsuda, given their $50 by the government, returned to Vashon Island on September 7, 1945. Mrs. Matsuda wrote to her daughter, Mary, still in nursing school in Iowa:

It is now one week since we got home. Mack has taken care of it fairly well, so Papa-san and I are rejoicing. He painted the house. It looks fine. Mrs. Peterson and Mrs. McDonald brought a lot of vegetables. They are delicious.… There are more Japanese people coming back to Vashon. They will come and stay at our place until they can find a place to live. It is wonderful, isn’t it? The white people on Vashon, all of them, are very nice to us.

Still, the Matsudas had creditors and they had trouble with Deputy Hopkins, who had obviously pocketed profits from the farm he promised to oversee. Their biggest problem, because Issei could not own land, was that the property officially belonged to their son, Yoneichi, who was still in uniform in Europe. Then Heisuke was kicked by a horse and, with several broken ribs, could not leave the house and could not deal with the problems of not legally owning the farm—and harvesttime was coming. Sheriff Hopkins had offered to buy the farm, but the Matsudas refused to sell. Hearing that, Heisuke’s doctor said he would contact the American Red Cross and ask them to contact the army and ask that they allow Yoneichi to come home early. The doctor did just that and it worked. Mrs. Matsuda wrote to Mary in Iowa, “You wouldn’t believe what the doctor told us. The Red Cross worker who placed the call for Yoneichi’s return was Mrs. Hopkins, the deputy sheriff’s wife.”