The Internment of Japanese Americans in United States History (2 page)

Roosevelt’s promise did not extend beyond his term in office, and it did not include laws made by individual states. In 1913, California enacted the Alien Land Law. Aliens ineligible for citizenship were prohibited from owning land. They could rent land for no longer than three years at a time.

The Alien Land Law mainly affected the Issei. The Federal Naturalization Act of 1790 allowed “any alien, being a free white person” to immigrate and become a United States citizen. After the Civil War, “aliens of African nativity” were also included. But Asians, including the Japanese, could live most of their lives in the United States without hope of attaining citizenship.

Their American-born Nisei children, however, were United States citizens. Many Issei avoided the Alien Land Law by putting their property in their citizen children’s names. A 1920 revision to the law barred immigrant parents from serving as guardians for their minor citizen children and from renting their children’s land.

These Japanese Americans faced countless other varieties of discrimination. Some were economic. Unofficial but very real restrictions kept them out of many professions. Japanese-American teachers, for instance, had a hard time finding work because many white parents did not want Japanese-American teachers instructing their children. Most trade unions blocked Japanese Americans from membership. Property owners in many neighborhoods would not rent or sell homes to the Japanese Americans. Shops, restaurants, and hotels would not cater to them.

In Bakersfield, California, where Earl Warren grew up, telephone directories used the word “Oriental” instead of an Asian’s name before a listed telephone number. Writer Yoshiko Uchida, growing up in Oakland, California, always asked new barbers, “Do you cut Japanese hair?” She recalled an incident in which a photographer tried to crowd her, the only Japanese American in her class, out of a Girl Reserves picture. Only when a white friend insisted did the photographer include her in the picture.
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Image Credit: Enslow Publishers, Inc.

Unfriendly neighbors of Issei and Nisei put up signs discriminating against Japanese Americans.
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Sometimes treatment became violent. An Issei who opened a store had reason to fear picketing or rock throwing. In 1921, a band of white men in Turlock, California, rounded up fifty-eight Japanese Americans, put them on a train, and shipped them out of town.

Despite anti-Japanese sentiment, many Issei prospered. In California, only about sixteen hundred Issei owned farms in 1940, but those farms produced between 30 and 35 percent of all the fruits and vegetables grown in the state. They had a virtual monopoly on snap beans, celery, and strawberries. The average value per acre of farmland in California, Oregon, and Washington was $37.94. The average value of Nisei farmland, much of which was worked by Issei parents, was $279.96.

Not every Japanese-born resident was a farmer. Issei worked as domestic servants, merchants, gardeners, florists, and commercial fishermen. Many were drawn to urban life. Several West Coast cities had neighborhoods called “Little Tokyo.”

The Japanese Americans helped themselves by setting up ethnic unions such as the Japanese Association. This group provided translation and information, legal services and loans, and community events. Japanese-language newspapers, with local items and news from the homeland, provided a unifying force. Religious institutions, both Christian churches and Buddhist temples, also brought the Japanese Americans together.

Anti-Japanese agitators accused Japanese Americans of driving whites out of California. If anything, the opposite was true. Japanese-American farmers often took land rejected or ignored by whites. They supplemented, rather than competed, with other farmers on the West Coast. If Japanese-American farmers had chased whites away, the population of the West Coast would have dropped. However, the population of the West Coast states more than quadrupled, from 2.4 million to 9.7 million, between 1900 and 1940. Still, laws further diminished Japanese-American rights. The Cable Act of 1922 ruled that Asian women married to American citizens were not eligible for United States citizenship. Women who married “aliens ineligible for United States citizenship” would lose their own citizenship. Two years later, a new immigration act excluded “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” This, of course, meant the Issei.

Restrictive immigration laws, in addition to the fact that many Japanese-American families were small, kept the population of Issei and Nisei low. In 1940, Japanese accounted for less than one tenth of one percent of the United States population. In California, where most lived, they made up less than 2 percent of the population. By numbers, they were no threat to their neighbors.

But Japan, their ancestral homeland, was a threat to world peace. In the 1930s, the Japanese empire invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria. Further conquests appeared inevitable. Would the Japanese ever stop their conquests? Would the Issei and Nisei living in the United States come to the aid of Japan?

As early as 1937, a Nisei college student at the University of California pondered his fate if war broke out between Japan and the United States. “Our properties would be confiscated and most likely [we would be] herded into prison camps,” he predicted.
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His words were prophetic.

Chapter 3

WE LOOKED LIKE THE ENEMY

On December 8, 1941, the day after the Pearl Harbor bombing,
The Los Angeles Times’
headline screamed “350 Reported killed in Hawaii Raid,” and “Hostilities declared by Japanese.” Congress formally declared war on Japan that day. But the unofficial war on the Issei and Nisei had already begun.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) kept a list of potentially suspicious Japanese and Japanese-American men and women. Business owners, teachers, farmers, fishermen, journalists—anyone who might hold a leadership role—was held for questioning. Since the Japanese government donated money to Buddhist temples in the United States, Buddhist priests came under suspicion. By nightfall of December 7, hundreds of men and women were in custody.

Charles Kishiyama saw government officials take his father. “[T]hey had a struggle where they rassled with my dad, which frightened me,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what was going on, but they took him.”
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These government roundups of suspected saboteurs (enemy agents) were not the first actions against the Japanese population. A month before Pearl Harbor, the FBI raided the establishments of Japanese-American businesspeople and community leaders in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo. They seized records and membership lists of groups such as the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and the Central Japanese Association.

Most captured Japanese Americans cooperated with the authorities. A spokesperson for the Central Japanese Association commented, “We teach the fundamentals of Americanism and the high ideals of American democracy. We want to live here in peace and harmony. Our people are 100 percent loyal to America.”
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Terminal Island, a small island in Los Angeles harbor, had been home to a colony of Japanese fishermen for decades. In February 1942, these fishermen and their families lost their homes, boats, and other property in only a few days. Every male who had been to Japan in recent years was placed in custody; then their families were told they had only forty-eight hours to dispose of their property and leave the island. No English-language newspaper spoke out against the forced evacuation.

Other government officials added insult to injury. State sales tax collectors went out to Terminal Island while the hapless Japanese and Japanese Americans sold everything they could at bargain rates. One former Terminal Island resident remembered, “Here we were working as if it was a matter of life and death, and [a tax collector], without any respect for our precious minutes, came over and collected to the last penny.”
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Two days after the evacuation order, a once-thriving community became a ghost town. An evacuee lamented, “The only souls around were the soldiers and the prowlers who were going through the empty homes.”
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Suspected Saboteurs

“My mother was dumbfounded. She said, ‘War? By whom?’ First, she said ‘Russia?’, then ‘China?’ We said, ‘No, Japan!’” a Nisei woman related years later. “My mother couldn’t believe it. My mother was so ashamed.”
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The woman’s reaction was not unusual among the West Coast Japanese community. Many Issei, even those who strongly loved their native culture, now rejected their homeland. “Everything Japanese was bad,” a woman said. “The fear struck Mother; she began tearing up Japanese books and breaking phonograph records with a hammer.”
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Up and down the Pacific Coast, the atmosphere became chaotic. Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron said “After Pearl Harbor, everything was in a state of confusion. We kept getting reports of Japanese spying and sabotage. . . . There were reports they were in touch with the Japanese fleet . . . and we didn’t have any way to tell who were loyal and who weren’t.”
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Rumors, most of them absurd, spread like a California brushfire. Japanese-American fishermen were really officers in the emperor’s navy. Japanese-American farmers in Hawaii allegedly planted their crops in the shape of huge arrows to direct the Japanese air force to the Pearl Harbor naval base. American university class rings were said to have been found on the fingers of downed Japanese pilots after Pearl Harbor—a sure sign that secret agents in the United States were working for the hated Japanese empire.

Residents of Japanese ancestry immediately fell victim to government rules. Their bank accounts were frozen and their safe deposit boxes were confiscated; now they had no access to their own money. They were held to an 8:00 p.m. curfew. They could not travel more than five miles beyond their homes. The government banned travel of “Japanese individuals, by plane, train, bus, or boat.” They had to turn in their shortwave radios, cameras, binoculars, and firearms. Knives, including Boy Scout pocket knives and hunting knives, were forbidden.

Nisei as well as their Issei parents faced discrimination. Many Japanese Americans lost private business or civil service jobs. Patriotic Nisei who wished to enlist in the armed forces after Pearl Harbor found that their services were not desired. Many of those already in the army or navy were discharged. Later, Japanese Americans would be given the classification IV-C—enemy aliens. They got this label although they were neither enemies nor aliens. “It was not because we had done anything wrong, but simply because we
looked
like the enemy,” wrote Yoshiko Uchida.
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What was the United States going to do about this group of suspected saboteurs? That problem led to heated debates in Washington, D.C.

We Must Worry About the Japanese

An unprepared United States military had been caught off guard by the Japanese Air Force shortly before 8:00 A.M. on December 7, 1941. Japanese bombers attacked the Pearl Harbor Naval base near Honolulu, Hawaii. More than twenty-five hundred Americans died, and another thirteen hundred were injured.

The Pacific Fleet lay in ruins. Japan’s surprise raid took less than two hours, but it left the navy shattered. The battleship USS
Arizona
was totally destroyed; battleships USS
Nevada
and USS
West Virginia
lay in the bottom of the harbor. Eighteen United States ships were hit. More than two hundred aircraft were damaged.

Military and political officials refused to admit that Japanese troops destroyed United States ships because the Americans were not alert. They did not realize that the Japanese had the capability or daring to pull off such a raid. There had to be some reason for the Pearl Harbor disaster, they figured. Spies and enemy agents must have helped the Japanese. Those spies, they reasoned, must be Japanese or Japanese Americans.

Frank Knox, secretary of the Navy, took a trip to Hawaii. He reported that Japanese Americans in Hawaii performed “the most effective fifth column [spy network] that’s come out of this war, except in Norway.”
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He made the impractical suggestion that all Hawaiians of Japanese blood be removed from the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

Commander Kenneth Ringle of the Office of Naval Intelligence disagreed. His ten-page report said that the Issei and Nisei on the West Coast were no more dangerous than anyone else. Ringle had firsthand information. He hired the Los Angeles Police Department and a safecracker to break into Japanese groups’ offices and examine their records.
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Voices of reason were drowned out by those of wild speculation. A West Coast businessperson named Curtis Munson, a special investigator appointed by the State Department, reported that the overwhelming number of Japanese Americans were loyal. But he claimed that there were Japanese Americans in the United States who might tie dynamite to their clothing and make human bombs of themselves. According to Munson, “Dams could be blown and half of [Southern] California could actually die of thirst.”
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