The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (23 page)

At his hearing on February 2, 1942, before a three-man panel,
Fukuda was surprised at how much information the FBI had gathered on his activities and how long he had been under surveillance. The case against him centered on eight activities. His connections to officers of the Japanese Foreign Service, many of whom were classmates from Tokyo, were carefully documented. Members of the Japanese army and navy had stayed with the Fukuda family as guests on Bush Street. He had recently met with Fritz Wiedemann, consul general of Germany, in San Francisco. Fukuda described this as an innocent meeting, during which he asked Wiedemann, based on his experience with Germans in America, how the Japanese in the United States might expect to be treated in the event of war. The FBI agents also knew that Fukuda was a reserve officer in the Japanese army and a member of the Japanese Veterans Society of California. On several occasions, he had held receptions for Japanese navy officers when they visited San Francisco. Moreover, he sent care packages to Japanese soldiers, and on a previous visit to China, Fukuda had visited Japanese soldiers.

Fukuda argued that all of what he had done was a courtesy to his fellow countrymen on their visits to the United States and to facilitate the growth of the Konko Church in San Francisco. Like the others who were arrested that day, Fukuda was incarcerated without charges. He had no lawyer, but offered his own defense, arguing that none of the accusations against him could be classified as acts of espionage, crimes, or subversive activities. He was a citizen of Japan, but he was also a legal resident of the United States. He insisted that he was no danger to the United States, only a missionary.

At home on Bush Street, Shinko, also a legal resident of the United States, maintained her husband’s innocence. Later, however, she confided to him that a part of her wondered if he was in fact a spy. If so, she knew that he would never reveal his identity, not even to her. As a traditional Japanese man of his era, he would rather die.

The Konko religion has an equivalent to the Judeo-Christian Bible’s story of Job, the Hebrew poem written at the beginning of the fourth century BC that confronts the universal question “Why do good people suffer?”
The founder of the Konko faith, Bunjiro Kawate, a farmer, endured his own version of the Job story. Job lost seven sons and three daughters and was visited by plagues and boils. As a young man, the Konko founder lost five members of his family, and in his forties he suffered a serious illness. In the face of such losses, both Job and the Konko founder were first silenced by grief, but then spurred to seek spiritual answers from God to major questions about life and death. For Shinko and Yoshiaki Fukuda, internment was a Job-like experience.

In March 1942, the fourth month of the war, notices for Evacuation Order No. 19 appeared all over Japantown in San Francisco. Shinko knew that she and the children would be forced to evacuate their home. She made lists of what she could take: one suitcase per person, cups and bowls. On the day they left their house, the sky was sunny and clear, and a cool wind blew off the bay. The streets were noisy and crowded with American soldiers and hundreds of Japanese evacuees and their American-born children. Buses squeezed into Japantown to pick up evacuees. Shinko had her family’s government-issued number pinned to her dark coat, and she hung white tags with the same identification number around the neck of each of her children.

A tall, lean white woman dressed in trousers approached, her gait marred by a limp, her right leg partially paralyzed from polio. She raised a boxy camera and motioned to Shinko and her children to stand still. The camera clicked. In the photos, Shinko’s dark hair is pulled back into a hard bun, revealing a magnificently open and decent face ravaged by worry. She was thirty-six years old and pregnant with her seventh child. In her arms, she cradles one of her young sons. Five-year-old Makiko, her only daughter, wears a short dress covered by a sturdy wool coat. Standing beside Makiko is an American soldier, gesturing for the family to board a bus. With one hand, Makiko tugs at her mother’s coat; with the other, she holds a doll.

Shinko and her children were taken by bus to the Tanforan racetrack,
located on the outskirts of San Francisco. Tanforan was one of the sixteen assembly centers established by the Army. All summer, Shinko, her children, and two other members of their church lived behind the racetrack in a stall in a stable that was ten by twenty feet. At night, they slept on mattresses stuffed with straw. Twice a day a siren blew, and they stood in front of their stall for a head count; three times a day they lined up at the mess hall.

Shinko stayed behind on her mattress in the horse stall, too weak to stand in line. The walls were whitewashed, but on warm days, when the flies were bad, the smell of horses rose up from the floors. On June 6, 1942, she went into labor and was taken to a hospital in nearby San Bruno, where she gave birth to a son that she named Koichi. As she recovered from childbirth, one of the families from the Konko Church in San Francisco volunteered to take care of the newborn Koichi. The older boys took care of Makiko and the younger sons. Much of the time, Shinko was alone in that stall.

On the day following Koichi’s birth, June 7, General John DeWitt, the Army general who’d convinced Roosevelt to evacuate all Japanese and Japanese Americans from the West Coast, announced that the removal of all 120,000 of them was complete.

Four months later, Shinko and all of her children left the assembly center at Tanforan and were sent to the Topaz internment camp in the highlands of Delta, Utah. The train trip to Topaz took more than a week and was hard on Shinko. By the time she arrived at camp, she had to be hospitalized. A Japanese doctor in the camp diagnosed her with rheumatic heart disease.

By February 1943, her condition was critical. The Japanese doctor, Ben Kondo, thought she was near death and asked the camp officer in charge at Topaz if Fukuda could visit her. The officer declined the request. Incarcerated enemy aliens, especially those as notorious as Fukuda, were not allowed to visit their families. The doctor went on strike for one week in opposition to the decision. He refused to see patients in the hospital until Fukuda was allowed to see his wife.

In a rare move, Fukuda was given temporary leave to visit his
family in Topaz. Over time, Shinko’s health improved, and in Topaz, Fukuda first saw Koichi, his newborn son. Fukuda was preoccupied with internment issues, and the Fukuda children knew that their father’s ministry was his first priority. “I was the youngest,” said Koichi many years later, when he was a grown man living in San Francisco. “I knew I had to obey my father. He was so busy with the church and the community. I was really raised by my two older brothers—Mitch and Nob. It took me a long time to understand him.”

During Fukuda’s stay at Topaz, he held worship services that drew large crowds. In a political meeting with fifty other issei men, he announced his plan to request that he and his family be transferred to the Crystal City Internment Camp. “Crystal City is the showcase for President Roosevelt,” he told his peers. The food, shelter, and schools would be better than in any other camp. It was imperative, Fukuda said, that separated Japanese families reunite.

Several men, including one powerful minister in camp, disagreed with Fukuda. The opponents argued that volunteering to transfer to Crystal City would prolong their children’s imprisonment, and they feared that their sons would face increased pressure to join the American military in Crystal City. Fukuda replied that Japanese men, such as himself, should remain loyal to Japan, but nisei children, born in America, should be loyal to the United States. It was a provocative statement: most of the issei loyal to Japan wanted their children to be devoted to the home of their forefathers.

Internment camps were sieves of gossip. That night, an informer noted Fukuda’s declaration of loyalty to Japan in a secret memorandum, which quickly made its way to the authorities in Topaz. By morning, Fukuda learned that he would be expelled from Topaz because of his statement, and as soon as he received the news, he went to his barrack to warn Shinko.

Two days later, Fukuda was on his knees, digging a small garden in front of the family bungalow, when a guard approached him and escorted him out of Topaz. His wife and seven children did not see
him again until January 26, 1944, when they greeted each other just inside the gate of Crystal City Internment Camp.

In Crystal City, the Fukuda family settled in a five-hundred-square-foot bungalow, number 26 in the T section, not far from the swimming pool. The children slept on Army cots. The two older boys, Mitch and Nob, alternately carried their younger brother Koichi on their backs. All of the Fukuda children went to the Japanese School. Shinko prepared family meals in the small kitchen. They had their own bathroom. Once the stress of the journey was relieved, Shinko’s health improved. Other members of the Konko Church in San Francisco were in camp, and she enjoyed seeing old friends.

The camp’s population was now at its peak at roughly four thousand, two-thirds of the internees Japanese or Japanese Americans. Fukuda held Konko services for believers. He also became involved in the community outside of the Konko ministry, teaching judo at the Japanese School and working with the Boy Scouts. On movie nights—Wednesdays and Saturdays—he sometimes ran the 16 mm projector in Harrison Hall. The film program that year included
Chip off the Old Block
, with Donald O’Connor and Ann Blyth;
Tender Comrade
, with Ginger Rogers and Robert Ryan; and
Bowery to Broadway
, with Turhan Bey and Susanna Foster.

Fukuda worried that he and his family would be forced to repatriate to Japan. If he was sent back to Japan, he would regard himself as a failure as a Konko missionary. Moreover, he knew his children’s future was in America, not in Japan. To O’Rourke, the Japanese men in camp fell into two distinct groups: those who were eager to repatriate because they were loyal to Japan, and those with a pro-American stance who wanted to stay in the United States. Fukuda did not fall into either of those groups; rather, he walked a thin line as he stayed loyal to his homeland without being disloyal to America.

Despite the order to stay out of politics, Fukuda could not stay silent for long. On February 7, 1944, less than two weeks after his
arrival, he wrote a petition to Willard Kelly, assistant commissioner of the INS in Philadelphia, on behalf of 250 internees in Santa Fe that he’d left behind who had requested transfers to Crystal City: “As you know, they are very uneasy and irritated because your government announced the family reunion program more than one year ago, but the programs were changed often, and thus they are still separated from their loving families.” Some, Fukuda added, were organizing “propaganda activities” to ask the Japanese government to punish American prisoners in Japanese camps in retaliation for the denied transfers to Crystal City. This was the threat of negative reciprocity that Harrison and Kelly had labored to avoid.

“You may think such action is very foolish, but I would like to ask your deep understanding and warm sympathy about the fact that most of the psychology of the internees is becoming unordinary,” continued Fukuda. “I sincerely felt this fact during my internment life of family separation at Santa Fe and heartily sympathized with them.” He told Kelly that foreigners such as himself could not understand Japanese. “Outwardly, the internees might have appeared patient. Yet, when they pass the limit of patience and decide to do something, they will execute it surely and bravely. They will give up their own lives—individually or in mass—to save the interests of their friends.”

On February 14, Kelly sent Fukuda’s letter to Harrison and to the Special War Problems Division, which decided who would be repatriated and who would not. He attached a private memo in which Kelly explained that Fukuda “has shown himself in a number of ways to be a trouble-maker. He was, without doubt, one of the leaders, if not the leader, of the element in Santa Fe which recently delivered several threatening ultimatums.”

Fukuda had good reason to fear involuntary repatriation, and Kelly’s anger was understandable. The brutality of Japanese soldiers toward Americans in POW camps was well known. On January 1, 1944, Japanese soldiers occupying the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean theater killed forty-four Indian civilians who were
suspected spies. In what later became known as the Homfreyganj Massacre, the civilians were shot dead at point-blank range. Moreover, the treatment of American civilians in Japanese internment camps was far worse than the treatment of Japanese in American internment camps.
A report from the Red Cross compared the amounts of food furnished to Americans in one Japanese camp, the Kanagawa Civil Internment Camp, with the average food allowance in US camps. In Kanagawa, American internees received no eggs, milk, margarine, cheese, sweets, or coffee. Fish was allowed when available, and internees picked their own fruit in season. Meat was rare. The total daily food allowance was listed as 3.549 pounds per person in Kanagawa, in contrast to the US allowance of 5.298.

Angered by Fukuda’s complaint, Kelly’s response was direct. He assured Fukuda that “appropriate steps” were being taken in Santa Fe to reunite internees with their families in Crystal City. Then he reiterated O’Rourke’s warning that Fukuda was not allowed to act as a spokesman for Japanese in Crystal City. “Your attention is invited to Article 43 of the Geneva Convention, which provides that prisoners of war (internees) shall be allowed to appoint agents to represent them directly with the military authorities and protecting powers, but that such appointment shall be subject to the approval of the military authority, or, in this case, the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” wrote Kelly. “You are advised that should you be appointed to represent any group of internees, such appointment would not be approved by this Service.”

In Crystal City, Fukuda temporarily suspended the writing of petitions, concentrated on his ministry, and spent more time with his seven children than in any other period of his life. That summer, he took his children to the pool and taught them to swim and ate most meals with his family.