Infamy (34 page)

When Yoneichi Matsuda returned home in June of 1946, he retained a lawyer in Seattle and Deputy Hopkins, who had trouble providing records for anything, told the lawyer he was not doing well but offered to pay the Matsudas $2,000 for the trouble he caused them. “It isn’t much,” said the lawyer. “You could sue him and make him pay more.”

“No,” said Yoneichi. “I consider this blood money.… The money is not the issue. This has been a terrible time for my family and the deputy sheriff added to our misery. I just want him to think about the dishonest way he conducted himself.”

Yoneichi had a better idea for what to do with the money: “You helped us save our farm when we really needed help. I’d like you to accept the money.”

“You can’t be serious,” his lawyer said. “How will you pay your debts?”

“It’s only money,” was the answer. “We will earn more. The important thing is we still have our farm.”

*   *   *

As the American Japanese returned to the West Coast, national media and the government, too, focused on the Hood River Valley. The mayor of Hood River, Joe Meyer, said, “Ninety percent are against the Japs. We trusted them so completely while they were here among us, while all the time they were plotting our defeat and downfall. They were just waiting to stab us in the back.… We must let the Japanese know they’re not welcome here.”

There were rumors that there would be trouble at the railroad station when the first former residents returned. That did not happen. A WRA employee, Clyde Linville, waited at the station and drove the first returnees to their homes. He did the same day after day. Still, upon returning many American Japanese were met with hostility. Most local stores refused to serve their former neighbors. Then Major General James Ulio, the army’s adjutant general, traveled from Washington to the valley to say, “Here we are fighting a war for our lives and you’re telling a citizen they can’t buy groceries in your town?” He added that he had the authority to impose martial law—“at the point of a bayonet.” The local supermarket, a Safeway, responded by offering returnees free carts of groceries.

Attitudes did change when white veterans returned to town and supported the Japanese families, often confronting their own parents. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” asked returning Army Air Corps engineer Ed Shoemaker to his father, Kent Shoemaker, the leader of the American Legion’s anti-Japanese campaign. Joseph and June Haviland put a nine-line classified ad in the
Hood River News
saying, “Any Japanese-American soldier home on furlough will find friendship, good food, and a peaceful atmosphere in a comfortable home.… No phoning necessary. Welcome at any hour.” Still, only 233 of the 431 American Japanese taken from the valley in May of 1942 returned to Hood River after the war.

One son of Hood River, Frank Hachiya, served in the war and had been killed in the Philippines by friendly fire while delivering maps of Japanese defenses. He had been buried outside the town of Palo on the Philippine island of Leyte. His body was returned to Hood River on September 11, 1948. Former Oregon governor Charles Sprague and Reverend Sherman Burgoyne were among the pallbearers when he was reburied in the town cemetery after a service at Asbury Methodist Church. He is honored each year at the town’s Fourth of July ceremonies.

*   *   *

Most Nisei, the young people, were determined to return to normal lives after the war. Some, like Louise Ogawa of San Diego, chose to stay in the East and the Midwest. They sensed new lives coming; they felt more free and more American than they had ever been.

There were no Little Tokyos in Chicago or other middle-American cities, but the young people leaving for work or school were predictably inclined to go where other Japanese Americans, often relatives, had settled. A very wide generation gap had developed among American Japanese. Frank Aiso had been a strawberry farmer in Burbank, California, and had four sons in the army. He said, “I have been ill. My wife and I wish all of this had never happened, and it is hard for us to keep making changes. But the sons, I know, will have no trouble.” Their oldest son was Lieutenant Colonel John F. Aiso, the highest-ranking Japanese American in the U.S. Army, who became the director of the MIS language school. Aiso returned to Los Angeles after service in Tokyo on the staff of General MacArthur.

Kiyoko Nomura, a twenty-year-old from Santa Monica, who was the editor of the English-language edition of the
Manzanar Free Press
, also returned, saying, “People at first may be disapproving, but they’ll get over it. I for one am going to try very hard to make everyone realize we who were born in this country, and that our parents, too, are good people.”

By the summer, when Imperial Japan surrendered, there were just over forty thousand evacuees left in the other camps and fifteen thousand or so in Tule Lake. The majority of them were elderly. Many of them had been convinced against all evidence that Japan was winning the war and that the empire would reward them for their loyalty to the emperor. The rumor was that the victorious Japanese would give each family $10,000 plus $7,000 more for each child as recompense for their years in the camps. The end of that era finally came on March 20, 1946, when Tule Lake was closed. The last prisoners there were given $25 and a train ticket back to wherever they had been first picked up. There were more suicide attempts by old bachelors; one seventy-seven-year-old hanged himself the day before he was to leave with the last group. As in other camps, some had to be carried or pushed onto the trains. One old man ran back toward the camp as fast as he could, throwing his $25 on the tracks.

Most of the remaining Issei had aged before their time, seriously damaged by camp life. Ernest Besig, the ACLU attorney from San Francisco, wrote his impressions of those final days.

I learned that a Mrs. F … because of her worries and fears arising from her detention was committed by the [Tule Lake] Center authorities to a mental institution for hammering one of her children to death and injuring another. A Mr. S, an internee, worried over his separation from his sons, tried to commit suicide by drinking gasoline. A Mrs. K, an internee, took pills in an attempt at suicide because she was being deported from the United States. Many mental cases were known to have been hospitalized at the Center because of their fear of pressure groups, continued detention, deportation, separation from their families, and the splitting of their families.

*   *   *

In the town of Westminster in Orange County, California, local officials locked the gates of the town cemetery to prevent the body of Staff Sergeant Kazuo Masuda, killed in Italy, from being buried there. He was one of four Masuda brothers who served in the 442nd. Their sister, Mary Masuda of Talbot, California, was one of the first Nisei to leave the camp at Gila River, Arizona, and return to the family farm. Within a few weeks midnight raiders came to her door and told her to get out. Frightened, she did.

Her brother was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the second-highest decoration in the United States Army. General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, a champion of Nisei soldiers and a senior officer ever willing to speak his mind, asked her to return to Talbot with him for a formal presentation of the medal—in the town. Said Stilwell on the steps of the little city hall:

The
Nisei
bought an awful big hunk of America with their blood.… And I say we soldiers ought to form a pick-axe club to protect Japanese Americans who fought the war with us. Anytime we see a barfly commando picking on these kids or discriminating against them, we ought to bang him over the head with a pick-axe. I’m willing to be a charter member. We cannot allow a single injustice [toward] the
Nisei
without defeating the purposes for which we fought.

The Masuda family was also supported by the
Santa Ana Register
. N. Christian Anderson III, the
Register
’s publisher, told an Orange County Forum luncheon how the often-fiery owner of the paper, R. C. Hoiles, came to the defense of Masuda’s family after World War II. Hoiles spoke of how the Masudas had lived and farmed in Fountain Valley since the early 1900s, and how, despite their unjust internment in Arizona, Masuda and three of his brothers joined the U.S. military. He spoke of how one brother sacrificed his life for this country, dying in Italy. Hoiles railed against the treatment that Masuda’s mother and sister encountered when met by hostile Orange County residents. He went on to strongly assert the family’s right to live here and to reclaim their property. Ultimately the Masudas prevailed and got their farm back.

Other Japanese Americans, including veterans, continued to face humiliations. On his way home to Hawaii, where he would be hospitalized for rehabilitation for two years, Lieutenant Daniel Inouye, in full uniform, combat medals on his chest, one arm missing, went to a barbershop in San Francisco. The barber asked, “What are you?”

“I’m an American,” Inouye replied.

“Don’t give me that American stuff. You’re a Jap and we don’t cut Jap hair.”

That story got all the way back to the White House. After reading it, President Harry S. Truman, who had taken office after President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, sent a letter to his widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, saying, “These disgraceful incidents almost make you believe that a lot of our Americans have a streak of Nazi in them.”

Other veterans received varied responses upon their return. The tides of hatred in the West were not turning necessarily, but many Caucasians on the West Coast began the long process of looking to their better angels. Mitsuo Usui, one of the first Nisei to take advantage of the reopening of the West Coast, told this story about Los Angeles.

Coming home, I was boarding a bus on Olympic Boulevard. A lady sitting in the front row of the bus saw me and said, “Damn Jap.” Here I was a proud American soldier, just coming back with my new uniform and new paratrooper boots, with all my campaign medals and awards, proudly displayed on my chest, and this? The bus driver upon hearing this remark, stopped the bus and said, “Lady, apologize to this American soldier or get off my bus.”

She got off the bus.

But the story did not end happily for Usui. He was on his way to Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles to see the nursery his father had started in 1938 and then sold for $1,000 during the evacuation. His father asked him to go to Los Angeles and buy back the property.

“Still in my uniform,” he said, “I hurriedly went to the nursery and asked if the owner would sell it back to us. The owner of the nursery now was not the same person to whom we sold.”

The new owner said, “Yep, I’ll sell you the nursery. Give me $13,000 for the land and $13,000 for the inventory.”

“Impossible!” Usui exclaimed, and he went to the back of the property and kicked over a five-gallon can. The man followed, and Usui showed him some Japanese writings on the bottom of the can. “Can you see what’s written here?” Usui said. “It says here this plant was planted from a seed on this date, was transplanted into a gallon-can on this date, and finally into this five-gallon can on this date. My mother planted all these plants in the five-gallon cans and all the trees in the back, and now you want to sell them back to us at these outrageous prices?”

All the new owner said in response was, “Well, that’s the way the ball bounces.”

Usui came home to tell his parents what had happened. His father just broke down and cried. Usui later said, “My father never recovered from this incident.”

The Najima family, whose father was taken from their Petaluma, California, farm in the week after Pearl Harbor, had a happier ending to their story. The Najima brothers had figured out a way back in 1942 to try to save an expensive camera by using a fishhook to lower it into bottom of the family outhouse. As soon as they got back home, they raced to the outhouse and pulled up the string. The camera was none the worse for its smelly wear.

Many returning 442nd veterans received hard-won honors. Wilson Makabe from Loomis in Placer County, California, was in a wheelchair when he joined other 442nd survivors when the unit received a Presidential Unit Citation (its seventh) from President Truman on a rainy day in July of 1946. White House staffers had recommended that Truman not go to the ceremony outdoors on the Ellipse, but he said, “Hell, no, after what these boys went through, I can stand a little rain.”

“You are to be congratulated for what you did for this great country,” said the president. “You are now on your way home. You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice and you have won. Keep up that fight, and we continue to win—to make this great Republic stand for what the Constitution says it stands for: the welfare of all the people all the time.”

Makabe, whose father had been taken away by the FBI on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, was one of the boys who had gone through a lot more than a rainy day. He was wounded in Italy and was in a full-body cast for more than a year. He spent more than two years in military hospitals and suffered through more than a dozen operations and the loss of a leg. He was allowed one free long-distance call when he reached the United States, arriving in Miami in December of 1944. He called one of his brothers, who told him the family house was burned down on the day it was announced that Japanese and Japanese Americans could return to California. After all he had gone through, he cried for the first time since he was a child. “I remember the pain and the hurt, the suffering in hospitals in Italy,” he said. “That was nothing compared to this.”

In his wheelchair, Makabe had been taken to the Orange Bowl football game in Miami on the last day of 1944. A retired army general named Hugh Harris, whose West Point roommate had commanded Makabe’s battalion of the 442nd, came up to him in the stadium and said, “You know, it would be a privilege to be able to push you around and take you wherever you want to go.”

Even with the house burned down and his family living in a two-room cabin, Makabe finally got home in 1947 and said, “We were very fortunate, compared to other farmers.” They had another, separate property in town.