Infamy (19 page)

At one of those meetings of hundreds of people, an administration informer reported that a
Kibei
said, “If you think you are citizens, just try to walk out of the camp past the sentry line. If the sentries don’t shoot you, I’ll believe you are a citizen.” Two weeks before Christmas at Heart Mountain, Amy Imai walked along the fence with her five-year-old brother, who was chattering on about what Santa Claus might bring him that year. Amy couldn’t take it. She pointed to a guard tower and the spotlights and said, “There is no Santa Claus here!”

Actually there was a Santa Claus at Heart Mountain. He was the star of a Christmas carol celebration in the main hall. Hayami wrote that little kids went up to shake hands with Santa and get some candy and nuts from him, and “they looked as if they were in a trance.” They came back holding up their packages and looking intently at them.

There had been no snow so far in Wyoming, but “White Christmas” was a favorite song among the evacuees. Then at eleven o’clock the crowd started for their barracks. It was finally snowing.

Some of the carolers, almost as a joke, decided to go to the guard towers and continue singing. As Karo Kendo remembered the night, “I can still picture it. I was so cold and the [light] glistened on the barbed wire. After we sang, we heard this poor voice, almost choking with tears, saying ‘Thank You!’ How lonely he must have been up there.”

*   *   *

“Dec. 25, 1942,” wrote Hayami. “Merry Xmas!” He gave his mother five balls of wool yarn for crocheting, but “the presents I’m giving to Sach and Walt haven’t come yet.” He wrote:

This morning I went to church then went to Nishioka’s house with Walt, Tomo, George, and a bunch of other guys. We played a game of cards and Nishioka’s mother served us cocoa, cake, candy, and soup. When we left at around 2 o’clock we were so full, we could hardly move. Walt and I went home and got our coats, because it was beginning to get a little chilly, and then we went to see the football game. The game was between Pomona and Santa Anita which ended in a 6 to 6 tie.

After the game we came home and at four o’clock we had a nice turkey dinner; yum, yum!! At about 7:00 o’clock I went to our mess hall Xmas party. It was lots of fun! We played some games, one of which I had to eat crackers. Walt, Frank, and Dick Tomemura sang and played some Hawaiian songs …

The Christmas turkeys had been raised by residents, a good many of whom had been poultry farmers before the war. The same thing was true of all the trimmings. The evacuees made the western deserts bloom and drained some of the swamps of Arkansas. Many of the American Japanese, particularly the Issei, had real trouble eating American staples like macaroni and cheese, and other foods without vegetables. Many of them were farmers, extremely talented farmers, and they began growing vegetables and soybeans to make tofu. They created rice paddies in Arkansas. Men were catching fish in western rivers. Seeing what was happening, the WRA encouraged camps to exchange their most successful produce and soon enough local farmers were visiting the camps to find out how the Japanese were able to grow crops that had never been seen in their areas.

But when news of turkey dinners was picked up by newspapers around the country, readers reacted predictably. Letters to West Coast editors poured in from Americans outraged by the thought that the Japanese in the camps were eating better than American civilians suffering under rationing and combat soldiers who were getting by on packs of C rations. So when a group of ingenious young Nisei figured out how to capture wild ducks landing on a camp pond (they took the front windshield out of a small panel truck and drove headlong into the ducks, in the end trapping almost a hundred birds), camp administrators took the ducks. Three of the young men were accused of violating state fish and game laws and sent to the county jail.

Two days after the Christmas festivities, Hayami was already turning to more serious matters facing his fellow Nisei. He wrote of a Nisei who had joined the army immediately after the war started:

He was sent to Australia as an interpreter under General MacArthur. Soon he became tired of being a soldier with a pen, so he asked for a gun and permission to be sent into battle. At first they refused him because of the double danger he faces. He would be shot by the Japanese and because of his face he might be shot by his own men. Because of his persistence however they sent him to the battle zone. They assigned an American as a bodyguard to lessen the danger, but the danger he faces is still great. So tonight in some jungle he is risking his life, so he can teach his parents’ people a lesson, and punish them for what they did. I don’t know this certain
Nisei
soldier, but I feel proud of him and what he is doing. He is showing that
Nisei
are loyal Americans.

*   *   *

By the end of 1942, after Colonel Bendetsen received the army’s Distinguished Service Medal for his legal work, exactly five hundred evacuees were released to return to their home communities on the West Coast under a Bendetsen-approved plan called “Mixed-marriage non-exclusive policy.” The colonel had become concerned that the children of mixed marriages living in the all-Japanese camps were becoming “exposed to infectious Japanese thought.” After the release, he reported that “mixed-blood adults predominantly American in appearance and thought have been restored to their families, their communities and their jobs.”

At the same time, Governor Charles Sprague of Oregon asked Hugh Ball, the editor of the
Hood River Daily News
, to visit Tule Lake and tell him what the camps were like. Ball stayed a few days and then wrote a letter to the governor that began:

For almost complete lack of objective, steady work, many of these young Japanese-Americans are rapidly degenerating into cynics, whose ideas are based upon what I believe is the utter hopelessness of their future. Some of them I have known for years, and in former days all white Americans who knew them rated them as fine, loyal American citizens. Today, a number of them with whom I talked scoffed when I suggested to them that it would be entirely in their own interests if they would regard their internment as “water under the bridge” and take this opportunity to live up to the oath they took and publicized just prior to their evacuation.

Here are but a few of the comments to my suggestion that they cooperate in large numbers to go out and harvest the beet crop: “Why should I work for people who hate me because I am an American born of Japanese parents?” “We are not good enough to be accepted as American citizens, so why should we help Americans?” “They have branded us as traitors—well, if that is the way they want to think about us, let it be that way.”

One of the young men there told him, “Just one year in this camp and we will all be bums.”

6

UNCLE SAM, FINALLY, WANTS YOU

NISEI ENLISTMENT: JANUARY
29
,
1943

At the beginning of 1943, the closed world of the imprisoned young Nisei changed completely. On January 29, 1943, Secretary of War Stimson issued a press release in Washington that began: “It is the inherent right of every citizen, regardless of ancestry, to bear arms in the Nation’s battle. When obstacles to the free expression of that right are imposed, they should be removed as soon as humanly possible.”

Four days later, President Roosevelt declared, in an official letter to Stimson, “The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not and never was a matter of race or ancestry.”

Wonderful words, at last. But all they meant was that Nisei in the camps could enlist in the army (not the navy). But first, they would be required to complete a military form called “Statement of United States Citizen of Japanese Ancestry.” A loyalty oath. The key questions in the army form were:

27. Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty or wherever ordered?

28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government power or organization?

Dillon Myer of the WRA, who was determined to speed up the closing of the relocation camps, quickly realized that the form, with slightly altered wording, could be used to facilitate the release of camp residents too old or too young to serve in the military. The WRA began to print its own forms called “Application for Leave Clearance” and required all evacuees to declare their loyalty. The idea, in his mind, was to define “loyals” and “disloyals” and then separate them and allow “loyals” to leave the camps—as long as they did not try to go to the West Coast.

The War Department, pushed by Deputy Secretary McCloy, who was in the process of changing sides in Washington arguments, realized as early as mid-1942 that the internment had been a mistake. The notion of recruiting Japanese American soldiers from the camps had been debated, secretly, in the War Department for months, with General DeWitt in San Francisco repeatedly arguing for keeping all the West Coast evacuees behind barbed wire. But McCloy’s new position was being backed by other officials, including Elmer Davis of the Office of War Information, who told Roosevelt, “Loyal American citizens of Japanese descent should be permitted, after individual testing, to enlist in the Army and Navy.” Part of Davis’s argument was that, in broadcasts from Tokyo, the Japanese were effectively using the American concentration camps in a propaganda campaign in other Asian countries, asserting that the war in the Pacific was essentially “a race war”: Caucasians against all Asians.

*   *   *

The American people did not know it, but there were already hundreds and then thousands of Japanese Americans in the army. Even though more than two thousand Japanese Americans in the military were mustered out unceremoniously in January of 1942, others were kept in uniform by local commanders who innocently or deliberately ignored orders from Washington. One all-white army company in Hawaii reported that it had no Japanese Americans when, in fact, the unit’s star softball pitcher was a Nisei. By the time of Stimson’s announcement, a Nisei combat unit made up of former active-duty soldiers from Hawaii and members of the Hawaii National Guard was already training as the One Hundredth Battalion of the U.S. Army at Fort McCoy in Mississippi. Early in 1941, before the war, the military had been building a secret new unit, the Military Intelligence Service, quietly recruiting bilingual Japanese Americans from Hawaii and California to be used as translators and interpreters if there were a war with Japan. This was a difficult task: the army estimated that less than 3 percent of Nisei could speak much more than elementary Japanese and that perhaps one hundred Nisei were actually fluent in the language of their ancestors. Bill Hosokawa, a Nisei newspaper reporter before the war, described his MIS interview this way: “I thought I [had] a fair speaking knowledge of the language, but the interviewer quickly proved me completely inadequate.… First he asked me to read a high school text. I could make out perhaps two or three characters in a hundred.”

The first instructor hired, in September of 1941, was a thirty-one-year-old army private named John Aiso from Los Angeles, a prewar draftee working as an army truck mechanic. A graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, Aiso must have been the most overqualified mechanic in the service. He studied at Brown on a scholarship financed by the government of Japan, as did his roommate who became a translator for Emperor Hirohito in Tokyo. Aiso had practiced law in Los Angeles, and also in both Japan and Manchuria where he worked for the British American Tobacco Company. He was fluent in Japanese, which had turned out to be a rare talent among the Nisei. Aiso, who wanted to return to his law practice in Los Angeles, initially turned down the MIS offer made by General John Weckerling. He changed his mind when Weckerling stood up, came around his desk, put an arm on Private Aiso’s shoulder, and said, “John, your country needs you.”

“No American,” Aiso said later, “had ever told me America was my country.” He also recalled, vividly, that on December 8, 1941, when he and his colleagues were on a trolley going to his office at the Presidio, a hysterical woman waved her arms toward him and yelled to white men in the car, “There’s a Jap. Kill him! Kill him! What’s wrong with you men?”

The work of Aiso and Weckerling was little known until after the war. In the end, more than six thousand Japanese Americans secretly served in the Pacific—almost all with distinction and almost unbelievable bravery—as translators and interpreters attached to the British and Australian armies, as well as to U.S. Army units.

The secrecy surrounding the Military Intelligence Service was doubled for a few hundred translators and interpreters in the navy and Marine Corps, which were still essentially segregated services. MIS training originally began at the Presidio in San Francisco, but General DeWitt demanded they be moved out of California and the language school moved to Camp Savage and then Fort Snelling in Minnesota. People up there were different than the Californians. Minnesotans who lived near Camp Savage would wait outside the gates on Friday nights to invite the Nisei to their homes for dinner or the weekend.

When camp was over, though, their duty was among the most dangerous in the military. The linguists had to worry about friendly fire but also knew they would be executed as traitors if they were captured by Imperial Japanese soldiers. Nisei wearing American uniforms often were assigned white bodyguards in case American soldiers, trained to shoot first and ask questions later, mistook them for Japanese infiltrators wearing uniforms stripped from dead American soldiers. One of the Nisei, Sergeant Fred Tanaka, on a ship headed for the Solomon Islands, went from one white soldier to another saying, “Take a good look and remember me because I’m going in with you.”