Infamy (23 page)

5. Do you favor a constitutional amendment after the war for deportation of all Japanese from this country, and forbidding further immigration?… “yes”—10,598; “no”—732

6. Would you except American-born Japanese if such a plan as the above were adopted?… “yes”—1,883; “no”—9,018

7. Would you permanently exclude all Japanese from the Pacific Coast states including California?… “yes”—9,855; “no”—999.

The
Times
then published an editorial titled, “Public Demands New Policy on Japs in the U.S.” A cartoon showed West Coasters turning thumbs down on “Jap-Molly-Coddling.”

7

“LOYALS” AND “DISLOYALS”

TULE LAKE: SEPTEMBER
1943

After his Easter conversion, Stanley Hayami returned to his diary, now worried by newly published stories of Japanese Imperial Army atrocities in the Pacific. Most of them had actually happened in 1942—the Bataan Death March and the execution of the airmen captured after Colonel James Doolittle led a dramatic bombing raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942—many of the stories had been censored for more than a year for fear of their effects on American morale at home.

“It seems that since the ‘murder’ of the Doolittle bombers who were captured by the Japanese, public feeling seems to be pretty strong against us,” wrote Hayami. “Every time the Japs over there do something bad, we over here (who have nothing to do with it—and who don’t like it any more than anyone else) get it in the neck. Phooey!”

That same day in a speech on the Senate floor, Senator Tom Stewart, a Democrat from Tennessee, demanded that the citizenship of Japanese immigrants be rescinded. “They cannot be assimilated,” he said. “There is not a single Japanese in this country who would not stab you in the back. Show me a Jap and I’ll show you a person who is inherently deceptive.” The national president of the American Legion’s Women’s Auxiliary said, “Let us long realize what the Japanese are. We have leaned over backward to care for the Japs who were sent to relocation camps. We might just as well realize now that they are not and never will be Americans.”

Senator Chandler, the Kentucky Democrat who was chairman of the Senate’s Military Affairs Committee, got some more publicity by holding hearings that concluded that as many as twenty thousand Japanese American young people were loyal to Emperor Hirohito. The senator was perceptive enough to understand that the camps were turning many evacuees against the government, and he considered the internment camps to be a failed experiment. The senator blamed Myer and his staff, stating: “I may say that generally, from the top, that is from Mr. Myer on down through each one of the officers, these people are sincere and God-fearing, honest, well-meaning American citizens, but they are theorists, they are professors, they are making a social experiment of this thing.”

Because of Chandler’s speeches on the Senate floor and interviews he gave to California newspapers basically saying the army should take over the camps, Myer asked Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he knew, if she could persuade her husband to see him. The WRA director was invited to lunch at the White House and told his story, saying Chandler was making a bad situation much worse, that if Chandler’s committee report repeated officially what the senator was telling reporters, there would be more trouble in the camps. The president replied that he could take care of that—and he did. Calling other senators, Roosevelt said he wanted the Chandler report toned down when it was made public. In the end, the Kentucky senator satisfied himself by recommending that “loyal” Nisei should be allowed to join the army and “disloyals” should be segregated in a single camp—decisions the War Department and the WRA had made months before.

By then, though, West Coast newspapers had begun opposing any release from the camps. The
San Diego Union
attacked both American Japanese and the War Relocation Authority. Writing in a June 9, 1943, editorial that repeated General DeWitt’s “A Jap’s a Jap” language, the paper editorialized, “The American people may soon find an invasion force of 119,000 Japs has been landed by the WRA.” The
San Francisco Chronicle
’s editorial was headlined “DeWitt Is Right” and advocated suspending the Bill of Rights. The
Los Angeles Times
headline was “Stupid and Dangerous” over an editorial declaring, “As a race, the Japanese have made for themselves a record for conscienceless treachery unsurpassed in history.”

In a smaller California paper, the
Santa Maria Courier
, Edward Trebon, the editor and publisher, wrote a front-page column attacking a Caucasian reader’s letter defending Japanese Americans, writing:

In the first place, you’re a dirty, rotten, low-down, pusillanimous SNEAK. You haven’t any more decency about you than the dirty yellow-bellied Japs you are upholding and fighting for—enemies of America—the race that would make you a disgusting foreigner in your own homeland … but you wouldn’t understand that, because you’re just a Snake … you weasel … you mangy baboon, you warty lover of Hirohito.

Then he ended by saying that he had met many Japanese Americans who were “truly loyal to America” and said he had no quarrel with them.

*   *   *

High school graduations were important events at all of the camps, complete with caps and gowns, diplomas, flags, guest speakers, and, perhaps most important of all, valedictorians. At Amache Relocation Center in Colorado in 1943, the valedictorian, Marion Konishi, said in her speech:

Sometimes America failed and suffered. Sometimes she made mistakes, great mistakes. America hounded and harassed the Indians, then remembering that they were the first Americans, she gave them back their citizenship. She enslaved the Negroes, then remembering Americanism, she wrote out the Emancipation Proclamation. She persecuted the German Americans during the First World War, then recalling America was born of those who come from every nation, seeking liberty, she repented. Her history is full of errors, but with each mistake she has learned.… Can we the graduating class of Amache Senior High School believe that America still means freedom, equality, security, and justice? Do I believe this? Do my classmates believe this? Yes, with all our hearts, because in that faith, in that hope, is my future, our future, and the world’s future.

And Stanley Hayami, at Heart Mountain? He still had a year of high school left and, one more time, he did not raise his grades and wrote, “Well, today was the finish of one year of hard schoolwork. I got the same grades as last semester: English—A; History—A; Advanced Algebra—B; Chemistry—A; Spanish II—B.”

He was also missing more friends. On the seventeenth of August, Stanley wrote, “Kei Bessho who sat in front of me in Chemistry class last year went to Chicago 2 weeks ago. Mits Inouye and Ralph Yanari, also in my chemistry class, and Albert Saijo, who worked in mess hall 5 with me back in Pomona, went together to work in the hospital at the Univ. of Michigan at Ann Arbor.”

In late August and early September, he wrote again of one Nisei after another, family and friends, leaving Heart Mountain. His cousin Eddie left for the University of Cincinnati; his sister, Grace, nicknamed “Sach,” left for Chicago. Stanley described her leave-taking: “It was windy—Sach had some tears in her eyes—though she tried hard to fight them back—don’t blame her.” She was headed to the American Academy of Art, planning to work for a doctor’s family while she attended school.

Even Hayami’s brother Frank had left Heart Mountain. Frank was released in August 1943, as by then, he wrote, “the government had decided that I was no longer considered dangerous to the public safety, and that I could leave camp to any destination in the United States with the exception of the area under the Western Defense Command which included the entire Pacific Coast.” He packed one suitcase and, carrying a railroad ticket and $100 in cash, he departed for New York City “to seek my fame and fortune.” At the time, he was carrying a 4C draft card, 4C meaning “enemy alien,” even though he was a native-born American.

“I traveled without too much trouble from authorities or confrontations from the white Americans since they all took me for an American Indian or a Hawaiian because of my deep tan,” he wrote. “The only work I could find was in restaurants, bussing the dishes off of the tables and slopping them into the garbage cans. My 4C draft card did not help me to get any work in the engineering field since most of that work was of a military nature.”

*   *   *

All the policies that allowed anyone out of the camps were vehemently opposed by General DeWitt and Colonel Bendetsen. Both men, the architects of evacuation, were dealt with in the army way: they were quietly relieved and promoted upward to avoid any chance of national publicity or unrest about the camps. In September of 1943, DeWitt was transferred to duty in Washington, D.C., and was replaced by General Delos Emmons, the martial law commander in Hawaii. Bendetsen, an extraordinarily lucky man, was sent to London and then France, where he served as deputy chief of staff of the forward communications zone in Normandy.

While some Nisei were being released from the camps, the state where most had originated, California, did not want them back. Governor Warren said that the evacuees being released to jobs and schools in other states were all “potential saboteurs”—and he wanted none released in California. That same week, the San Diego City Council formally called on the federal government to stop releasing evacuees.

The state legislature took the same line as Governor Warren and began forming committees again to try to prevent the American Japanese of California from returning to their home state. Senator Herbert Slater, called the “dean of the California Legislature” because he had served more than thirty years, traveled the state holding hearings designed to build public support for preventing Japanese and Japanese Americans from returning to their old homes. The committee invited parents of white Americans fighting in the Pacific, leading to exchanges like this with Mrs. Margaret Benaphfl, representing the Gold Star Mothers of California.

“We want to keep the Japs out of California,” she said.

“For the duration?” asked Senator Slater.

“No, for all times.”

“That’s the stuff.”

Pearl Buck, the author, also appeared before the Slater committee, praising the contributions of Asians to American life, but most California newspapers did not even report her presence, much less her hour-long testimony.

A state assembly committee, headed by Chester Gannon, questioned Mrs. Maynard Thayer of Pasadena, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, who was a leader of a pro–American Japanese organization called the Pacific Coast Committee on American Principles and Fair Play. Mrs. Thayer cited the Bill of Rights and this time the committee questioning was hostile.

G
ANNON
: What do you know of the Bill of Rights? The Bill of Rights has no application to state legislation and we know you attacked the American Legion and the Native Sons. When was the Bill of Rights written? What is it?

T
HAYER
: Of course, it’s the first ten amendments of the Constitution.

G
ANNON
: You’re like all these people who prattle about the Bill of Rights and don’t know a thing about it. The Bill of Rights is not such a sacred thing after all. Don’t you know at the time the Bill of Rights was written that we had 150,000 slaves in the U.S.? What did the Bill of Rights do about that—nothing. Slavery was accepted. And yet you talk about the rights of minorities being protected by the Bill of Rights.

T
HAYER
: I think we’ve made some progress in our interpretation since then. Our committee will back any groups whose constitutional rights are threatened. It is of the greatest importance that in time of war we do not get off into race hatred.

G
ANNON
: Are you a Communist? This sounds like Communist doctrine.

T
HAYER
: I have been a registered Republican for thirty years.

Governor Warren then appointed a new committee, this one on race relations in the state. Leo Carrillo, an actor who was of Mexican descent, was appointed a member of this committee. He traveled California making speeches that included this line: “When people in Washington say we must protect American-Japanese, they don’t know what they’re talking about. There’s no such thing as an American-Japanese. If we ever permit those termites to stick their filthy fingers into the sacred soil of our state again, we don’t deserve to live here ourselves.”

A few notable figures tried to use their reputations and talents to push against the anti-Japanese sentiment, including photographers Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams.

Dorothea Lange, already famous for her work during the Great Depression in the 1930s, was hired by the War Relocation Authority to photograph the American Japanese evacuation and internment. She dedicated herself to the project, working seven days a week from the first roundups in March through the summer of 1942.

The army first limited her access and then confiscated her photos for the duration of the war.

Lange later wrote, “The internment is an example of what happens to us if we lose our heads.… What was, of course, horrifying was to do this thing entirely on the basis of what blood may be coursing through a person’s veins, nothing else.”

Adams, the visual poet of the west, had tried to enlist in the army in 1942 but was rejected because of his age, forty. He was invited to take photos at Manzanar by the camp’s director, Ralph Merritt, an old friend from the Sierra Club.

Merritt was a man who knew the rules—and how to bend them. Internees were not allowed to use cameras, but Toyo Miyatake, who had been a student of Edward Weston and was a well-known photographer back in Los Angeles, had smuggled lenses into the camp and used scrap wood to build a camera that looked like an ordinary lunch box. When Merritt realized what was going on, he arranged to have Miyatake’s cameras, three of them, taken out of storage. He personally handed them to Miyatake, saying, “Use them!”