A Portrait of Japanese America, in the Shadow of the Camps

In the nineteen-twenties, United States officials began preparing for the possibility of war in the Pacific, and the consequences this would have for the territory of Hawaii. About a third of Hawaii’s population were people of Japanese descent, a community that had first arrived in the late eighteen-hundreds to work in the sugarcane and pineapple plantations. But the group remained largely mysterious to American leaders. If the United States went to war with Japan, a military study from 1929 concluded, “all Japanese, alien and Hawaiian-born . . . should be considered as enemy aliens.” The report echoed long-standing nativist fears that Asians were incapable of assimilation. Colonel John DeWitt, one of the architects of Japanese incarceration, foresaw the need for “complete military control over the Hawaiian islands,” including the suspension of civil liberties and the selective imprisonment of anyone considered threatening to local interests. As the so-called Japanese menace grew in the thirties and forties, so, too, did anxieties about what role this community might play in future conflicts. George S. Patton, who would later become a famed general, drew up a list of a hundred-and-twenty-eight influential community figures in Hawaii, including teachers, doctors, and a priest, who might be taken as “hostages” in the event of war with Japan. Franklin Roosevelt proposed a similar, secret list of suspected agitators who might be “the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble.”

There was little evidence that these communities were hotbeds of sedition. The late historian Gary Y. Okihiro argued that these suspicions were purely speculative, drawing from caricature rather than firsthand knowledge. In September, 1940, an F.B.I. report on the inner workings of the Japanese community bore this out, suggesting that “local alien Japanese” were “not organized for purposes of sabotage or subversive activity.” In fact, the younger, American-born Japanese seemed “predominantly loyal” to the United States. Whatever grievances these communities held, the report continued, owed to the discrimination they had experienced at the hands of white employers and landlords. “As a result, their resentment is directed more toward the Caucasian Race than the American government as such.”

Nonetheless, the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, fuelled racist paranoia. Shortly after the bombing, the columnist Walter Lippmann warned of a potential “fifth column”—subversives secretly living within the United States, plotting a “combined attack from within and from without.” He proposed a temporary, wholesale incarceration of the Japanese in America, even if it meant compromising on civil liberties. Some outspoken government officials agreed. “We want to keep this a white man’s country,” Bert Miller, the attorney general of Idaho, said. “All Japanese [should] be put in concentration camps for the remainder of the war.” On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which gave the War Department the authority to forcibly remove and relocate all persons of Japanese descent in the Western states. With little time to evacuate their homes, many lost their property and businesses; decades later, estimates placed the total monetary loss between four hundred million and three billion dollars. The Wartime Civil Control Administration commandeered fairgrounds, racetracks, and cattle halls for temporary shelter in the Western states, where Japanese communities were concentrated, while barracks were built. Yet some hard-liners, like Chase Clark, the governor of Idaho, felt these measures didn’t go far enough. Clark compared the Japanese to rats; his proposal was to send them all back to Japan, and then to “sink the island.”

About a hundred and twenty thousand people of Japanese descent—two-thirds of whom were American citizens—were incarcerated in ten camps throughout California, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. Tellingly, there was no wholesale roundup of the Japanese in Hawaii, despite the long-standing fears over the islands’ proximity to Asia, a fact that suggests that what happened on the mainland was a deeply arbitrary interpretation of military necessity.

While Executive Order 9066 was largely met with doubt, despair, and anger among Japanese Americans, it also became a source of collective shame that was seldom discussed in the years that followed. Few stories of camp life were published until decades later. This spring, the writer Frank Abe and the literary historian Floyd Cheung published “The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration,” an essential volume that collects more than fifty accounts of Japanese life before, during, and after the war. The title alone is a bold assertion of identity: for decades, the wartime incarceration of the Japanese was described in euphemistic terms such as “relocation” or “internment.” And Abe and Cheung’s definition of “literature” is admirably broad, encompassing letters, editorials, poetry, short stories, manga, and government documents. Although there have been many books written on the history of incarceration, few have captured the kind of emotional detail that comes through in the largely first-person accounts collected by Abe and Cheung. Their selections paint a complicated picture, convening hopeful, patriotic idealists, righteous firebrands, and downtrodden cynics.

Before the Second World War, one of the more pressing existential issues facing the Japanese American community seemed to be the generation gap between foreign-born immigrants—the issei, or first generation—and their American-born children, the nisei. In 1929, the Japanese American Citizens League was founded to help this latter group navigate what it meant to be American. (Until 1952, foreign-born Japanese people could not become American citizens through naturalization.) Organizations like the J.A.C.L. retained a modest faith in the powers of assimilation. Toshio Mori, whose short story collection, “Yokohama, California,” was completed before the Second World War, but not published until 1949, writes of a “perfect day” at the park as two Japanese American baseball teams squared off. “The outcome of the game and the outcome of the day do not matter,” he writes, of this carefree, quintessentially American afternoon. “That is left for moralists to work on years later.” 

The bombing at Pearl Harbor put immediate pressure on many young Japanese Americans to figure out where they fit in. Many had grown up with only a tenuous link to Japan, yet they also lived in the shadow of racist policies, like laws prohibiting “alien” ownership of land. Abe and Cheung focus on this moment of fear, offering the perspective of people reckoning with the inflexibility of wartime politics. (...)

In February, 1943, the War Relocation Authority and the War Department administered a questionnaire designed to affirm the loyalty of those incarcerated in camps. It also offered draft-age men the opportunity to enlist in the military, if they answered affirmatively to two questions. The first asked their willingness to serve in the armed forces, wherever ordered; the second required their “unqualified allegiance to the United States,” as well as their renunciation of Japan. Approximately twelve thousand young men volunteered for service. The well-documented heroism of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, which consisted almost entirely of American soldiers of Japanese ancestry, was a boon for wartime morale.

Yet the loyalty questionnaire was divisive within the camps. One in five nisei—the American-born, second-generation Japanese Americans—refused to answer, answered no, or qualified their answers to one of these two questions. Draft resisters organized sizable protests, particularly at the camps in Poston, Arizona, and Heart Mountain, Wyoming. At the Tule Lake Segregation Center, in California, they were met with violence.

These men would later be seen as heroes. But what’s striking about Abe and Cheung’s collection, particularly in these moments of rebellion, are the modest hopes held by those incarcerated. “I just wanted to be who I was—a Japanese American, an American of Japanese descent, an American citizen,” the poet and playwright Hiroshi Kashiwagi writes. He was in his twenties during his incarceration. Kashiwagi refused to enlist, and he grew dismayed by the harsh treatment of his fellow draft resisters. “I renounced my American citizenship at Tule Lake,” he writes, but he came to feel like it “was the dumbest thing I ever did in my life.” Yet this was a no-win situation. How else to reckon with the paradox of your government seeking patriotic obedience while stripping you of your rights? “Living under such pressure, it’s inevitable that there should be doubts and questions about your actions, as well as feelings of guilt. Were my actions wrong or bad? What kind of man did this make me?”

Okihiro, the historian, whose book “Cane Fires,” from 1991, tracked the roots of anti-Japanese sentiment in Hawaii in the eighty years leading up to the Second World War, passed away late last month, at the age of seventy-eight. I’d been rereading his book alongside Abe and Cheung’s collection when I learned of his death. Okihiro grew up on a sugar plantation on Oahu, in Hawaii. “Cane Fires” grew out of his firsthand perspective of how wartime jingoism bore down on individuals, like his parents and grandparents, who “burned and buried” all traces of Japanese culture, like flags, letters, and records. An influential scholar and inspiring teacher known for his generous, mellow vibe, Okihiro later reflected on the deep psychological wounds that remained. “It was not so much the loss of property that bothered Japanese Americans,” he explained in an interview that he did in 2010. “It was the loss of their humanity, their dignity as people. Because they were treated as subhuman, treated like cattle: rounded up, given tags with numbers instead of names, put into cattle trucks to be assembled in horse stalls, or race tracks and fairgrounds, then to be dumped in horse stalls that still reeked of manure.”

In December, 1944, the Supreme Court ruled that the government could not indefinitely detain a citizen who was “concededly loyal” to the United States, leading the way for the Roosevelt Administration to rescind Executive Order 9066 and allow for Japanese Americans to leave the camps. Each person was given twenty-five dollars and a train ticket to go wherever they wanted to go. Settling nearby was rarely an option. The Wyoming legislature, fearful that Japanese Americans from neighboring states who’d been incarcerated at the Heart Mountain camp would eventually want to settle in the region, passed a law that would “prevent Asiatic aliens from buying or owning property” in the state. Returning to the West Coast, Japanese Americans faced discrimination in the job and housing markets.

Few of the writers in “The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration” expected to be read decades later, if at all. Some were merely keeping records for themselves. After the war, there was little hurry to revisit this moment of victimhood; the few who wanted to share their experiences with a broader readership found there was no real market for books about such a dark chapter of American history. Instead of dwelling on their plight, many Japanese Americans sought to reintegrate themselves into the mainstream. Once seen as an alien threat, they were now embraced as exemplary Americans. In 1966, the sociologist William Petersen wrote in the New York Times of the unusual “success story” of this community. “Barely more than twenty years after the end of the wartime camps, this is a minority that has risen above even prejudiced criticism. By any criterion of good citizenship that we choose, the Japanese Americans are better than any other group in our society, including native-born whites.”

by Hua Hsu, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: A line crew at work in the Manzanar camp. Ansel Adams/Library of Congress
[ed. I'm Japanese/American and during the mid-50s to -60s grew up on a sugar cane plantation on Oahu (my grandparents worked on a pineapple plantation on Lanai, where I spent much time as well). I'm actually grateful for the unique experience. The cane fields were my playground. I heard scattered war-time stories growing up from older generations - in not much detail - and generally have the impression that most preferred not to relive that experience. It was such an inconceivable reaction, especially in Hawaii, where everyone of all races lived in general acceptance of each other.]