Infamy (35 page)

We leased the place in Loomis for twenty-five dollars a month. And when we got back, we were happy and amazed to see that he [a neighbor] had kept the ranch in reasonable condition. And he did pay his rent, so we were one of the fortunate ones. Because I hear that some farmers came back to a disastrous situation.…

We had bought, we had a 1939 Plymouth. It was blue. And my brothers, who were teenagers, said, “Hey, if we sell this, we’re going to get nothing for it.” So what they did was they put it in the garage and jacked it up. I think they took off the tires, and did everything to it, hoping that when we got back it would be intact. And sure enough, when we got back, they put back the tires, they put the oil in, the water, started it, and believe it or not, it started. So we had a car.

He was walking, in great pain, when he finally got home to Loomis and that Plymouth. With only one leg—and that one was kept straight by iron bars—he still managed to drive. The first time he stopped at the local gas station, he struggled for several minutes to get out of the car to reach for the pump.

After the gas tank was filled, the owner, who had been a friend of his father, came out and said, “I’d like to talk to you.”

“Hop in,” Makabe said.

After he drove down the road a bit, the man said, “Y’know, I was one bastard. I had signs on my service station saying, ‘No Jap trade wanted.’ Now when I see you come back like that I feel so small.”

The man began to cry.

EPILOGUE

Few of the American Japanese mentioned in these pages were able to return to their prewar lives. Most of the older evacuees, the Issei, had to start over, more than three-quarters of them without money or property. Thousands of their children, the Nisei, decided not to return to the Pacific Coast, making their new lives in other parts of the country. The Pacific states, particularly California, had been greatly changed by millions of new residents who came west during the war to work in defense industries. With millions of veterans coming back to the United States ready to start their own families, there were housing shortages everywhere and the Japanese returning from the camps often found themselves in shoddy new government facilities, empty barracks, trailer parks, and quickly built apartments put up for the new migrants working in the defense plants. And nobody talked about what had happened to them from 1942 to 1945. Parents and grandparents were ashamed to talk about the camps and the young ones learned not to ask.

Edison Uno, a Nisei who was eighteen years old when he was released from detention after the war ended, devoted the rest of his life as a human rights activist trying to tell the story of the camps and organize Japanese Americans to demand government apologies and financial redress. Uno said of the silence, “We were like the victims of rape. We felt shamed. We could not bear to speak of the assault.” That attitude began to change in the 1960s when Sansei, the third generation, many inspired by the black civil rights movement and growing anti–Vietnam War protests, began questioning their parents and grandparents about the camp years. A Sansei young woman I met, while researching the colony of Japanese Americans who remained in Arkansas after leaving the camps there, made an interesting, if defensive, point about the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957, telling me: “The black students didn’t integrate that school. It had already been integrated by Japanese students in the 1940s.”

There were, in fact, more than a few historical intersections between the Japanese American and African American experiences in the United States. The Little Rock confrontations were one of the first direct results of the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous 1954 decision on school integration in the case of
Brown v. Board of Education
. That court, of course, was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who, as California’s attorney general in 1942, was a principal force in the roundup and evacuation of Japanese and Japanese American residents of his state.

One of the first persons arrested on Terminal Island in Los Angeles was a merchant named Seiichi Nakahara who was recovering from an ulcer operation and died within twenty-four hours after his release from the hospital on January 20, 1942. His twenty-year-old daughter Yuri and the rest of his family were taken to the Santa Anita Assembly Center and then to the relocation camp in Jerome, Arkansas. In 1944, she was released from Jerome to help run a USO club for soldiers in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where she met her future husband, William Kochiyama, a veteran of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Later, living in New York’s Harlem, she became a radical civil rights activist. She befriended Malcolm X and joined his Organization of Afro-American Unity. She was famously photographed in 1965 cradling Malcolm’s head as he lay dying after being shot in the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.

Watching young black Americans marching through southern cities fighting for their rights and participating in anti-Vietnam protests in the 1960s caused many young Japanese Americans to begin questioning what happened to their own families in the 1940s:
Why didn’t you fight back? Why did you let the government do this to you?
Some of those younger Japanese Americans decided they, too, would march and in 1969 they organized a pilgrimage to Manzanar to dramatize what had happened there almost thirty years before.

That was a beginning in turning shame and silence into a movement. Then came the books. Perhaps the most important of them was published in 1973 when Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston of Santa Cruz, California, finally began to tell her husband, James D. Houston, a Caucasian writer, what she remembered as a child taken to Manzanar when she was seven years old. After a couple of months of such conversations, the Houstons decided to tape-record her memories, then decided to prepare a short memoir to share with their immediate families and thirty-six nieces and nephews. They put together a small book,
Farewell to Manzanar
, a children’s book they hoped might be used in classrooms to tell the stories of the great incarceration. There had been a number of books, some of them very good, about the evacuation before then, but they tended to be academic or legal studies published by university presses and small regional publishing houses.
Farewell to Manzanar
, however, struck a chord nationally. Nelson Algren, then a novelist at the height of his powers, reviewed the book, writing: “The Houstons have put together an account of the Japanese internment which never pleads for the readers’ compassion, never sentimentalizes the victims and never tries to make the reader feel guilty. It casts a lucid, sinewy, and completely convincing light on both the prosecutors and persecuted.” The book has sold more than a million copies and is considered one of the most successful children’s books in publishing history. It is required reading in thousands of American school districts.

In 1976, Michi Nishiura Weglyn wrote and published a more comprehensive account,
Years of Infamy
:
The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps
, which also had great impact. That same year, President Gerald Ford signed Proclamation 4417, “Confirming the Termination of the Executive Order Authorizing Japanese-American Internment During World War II.” Said the president, “We now know what we should have known then, not only that evacuation was wrong, but Japanese Americans were and are loyal Americans.”

Soon enough, there were more books, hundreds of them. Joanne Oppenheim, author of more than fifty books for young adults, edited extraordinary volumes on the letters of Clara Breed and the diary of Stanley Hayami. There were conferences and there was lobbying in Washington. The story was being heard for the first time by millions of Americans, particularly those who lived in the East and the Midwest and were often ignorant of the injustices of the West. One goal of Japanese American activists and their allies was to win redress for the financial losses of the families evacuated and held in camps. One of the results of the new activism was the creation by Congress in 1980 of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. The 493-page report of the commission, published in 1982, was titled
Personal Justice Denied
.

Perhaps the most significant sentences of the report were: “In sum, Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions that followed from it—exclusion, detention, the ending of detention, and the ending of exclusion—were not founded on military considerations. The broad historical causes that shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

Almost fifty years after the evacuation, the long campaign for reparations by the JACL and other Japanese organizations prompted Congress to pass and President Ronald Reagan to sign the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which included a formal apology for the evacuation and imprisonment. The act was sponsored by Representative Norman Mineta and Senator Alan Simpson, the two Boy Scouts who had met when local boys had come to Heart Mountain to share pup tents. They were joined by fellow supporters in Congress, including Representative Robert Matsui of California, a former evacuee, and one of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team’s heroes, Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. When President Reagan signed the bill, Matsui said, “It lifted the specter of disloyalty that hung over us for 42 years because we were incarcerated. We were made whole again as American citizens.” Mineta added, “Now, Congress and the President are asking a second faith of those who had been wronged. We have to make sure we don’t break faith again.”

The act provided $1.2 billion to enable payments of $20,000 to each of an estimated eighty thousand camp survivors. The money was a pittance compared to the billions in 2014 dollars American Japanese had lost, but, in the end, it was not about money. It was about getting a formal apology from the government for stealing liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It was about unraveling the lies and deceptions of the 1940s. The first payments were made in 1990.

*   *   *

Wayne Collins, who had represented Fred Korematsu after he refused to report to the Tanforan Assembly Center in 1942, decided in August of 1945 to take on the cases, more than five thousand of them, of the Japanese Americans who were coerced or tricked into renouncing their citizenship. Many of them were children or confused parents; others were old people who had sought repatriation to Japan. Collins, a driven, angry, quixotic servant of the law, spent most of the rest of his life filing cases to allow those renunciants to regain their American citizenship. “During the war,” according to Roger Daniels of the University of Cincinnati, an important historian of the evacuation, “a total of 5,766 Americans of Japanese ancestry formally renounced their citizenship, and a large number of non-citizen
Issei
applied for repatriation. After the war, as soon as transportation was available, the American government had begun shipping Japanese-Americans to Japan.” In some cases, Collins actually went to ships to pull off his “clients”—they were never paying clients, although they were asked for donations later—as those vessels prepared to leave West Coast ports for Japan. A total of 4,724 persons were actually deported or repatriated from WRA camps. Of these, 1,659 were aliens; 1,949 were American citizens, mostly minors accompanying repatriating parents; and 1,116 were adult Nisei
.

It was on November 13, 1945, that Collins filed two mass class equity suits (
Abo v. Clark
and
Furuya v. Clark
) and two mass class habeas corpus proceedings (
Abo v. Williams
and
Furuya v. Williams
) in the U.S. District Court of San Francisco. These cases sought to determine nationality, prevent removal of American citizens to Japan, allow those there to return to the United States, and end the internment of the American Japanese community leaders still held in federal jails without charges. Federal judge Louis E. Goodman, in 1955, found the mass renunciations unconstitutional, stating: “It is shocking to the conscience that an American citizen be confined without authority and while so under duress and restraint for this government to accept from him a surrender of his constitutional heritage.… Not even the hysterics and exigencies of war excused the government for the egregious constitutional wrongs it had committed by imprisoning citizens not charged with a crime.”

A federal appeals court upheld that decision but ruled that each renunciant’s case had to be individually decided. That process took more than twenty years, with Collins, who obviously was something of a fanatic, often living for weeks in his little office to make sure he would not miss calls of desperate American Japanese. The last case he filed was heard and decided in 1968.

Collins also represented most of the more than twenty-three hundred Latin American Japanese, taken by force from their countries by the United States Army and incarcerated in the United States during the war. Most of them, held at Crystal City, Texas, were deported from the United States after the war as “undesirable aliens”—actually charged with entering the United States without proper documents. More than seven hundred were deported to Japan, but again on a case-by-case basis Collins did enable hundreds to remain and make their homes in the United States.

Collins died in 1974. Michi Weglyn’s book,
Years of Infamy
, was dedicated to him and so was another,
Beyond Loyalty: The Story of a Kibei
by Minoru Kiyota, a man who saw some of the best and worst of America during and after the war. Kiyota was jailed at Tule Lake and was so angry about it that he, like many others, renounced his American citizenship. He was a bitter man, held until March of 1946 and released to accept a scholarship to the College of the Ozarks in Clarksville, Arkansas. Waiting for a train to go east from Oakland, California, he went into the station’s coffee shop, which was filled with American servicemen on their way home from the Pacific.