The Internment of Japanese Americans in United States History (9 page)

Agricultural workers also got temporary releases from camps. They were needed because of the labor shortage caused by the war. In May 1942, the first group was released from a Portland assembly center to harvest sugar beets. By the end of the year, ten thousand others would be released from camps to do farm work.

Their situation was unusual. Many of the farmhands had owned farms before the evacuation order. Had they been left alone, they would be the landowners paying others to harvest their crops.

There was one other irony. Evacuee farmers were required to be in the camp area at night, unless accompanied by their employers or a government official, but other Japanese Americans living in the area had no restrictions at all.

Like the students, the farm workers were peaceful. There had been no record of attempted escape by any of the farmhands. Yet these releases bothered some diehard Japanese opponents. In 1942, the American Legion passed a resolution protesting the release of the college students and farmhands.

The final group that received early clearance were part of the Japanese-American civilian exchanges. More than two thousand civilians were sent to Japan. Most were diplomats or prisoners.

Leave Clearance

In the summer of 1942, permanent work leaves began. Camp inmates could work outside if state and local officials agreed that their labor was needed. The employers had to provide housing and transportation, and they had to pay the prevailing wage without displacing local workers. Local law authorities had to assure the workers’ safety.

Inmates could leave if they had job offers or other means of support. The WRA also needed evidence that they would not endanger national security and that their presence would be accepted by the surrounding community. They were required to keep the WRA informed of any change of address.

Myer called the policy leave clearance. At first, it went anything but smoothly. It involved a lot of paperwork and security clearances from the FBI. Eventually, the process was hastened. Evacuees could leave the camp almost immediately.

The WRA opened up offices in Chicago and Salt Lake City, Utah, in early 1942 to help evacuees find work. By the end of the year, more than twenty other offices opened in eastern and Midwestern cities. These offices worked with local businesses to hire the Nisei. Often they had great success. Chicago alone offered more than ten thousand jobs.

Most of the evacuees went to eight states—Illinois, Colorado, Ohio, Utah, Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, and New York. In some instances, the relocation could be to one’s advantage. One Nisei in Chicago wrote a letter to the president of the University of California, “Hundreds of Japanese Americans are employed in occupations which were denied to them on the Pacific Coast. They have, for the first time, found occupation outlets . . .”
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West Coast officials remained opposed to having Japanese Americans in their states. Earl Warren, then governor of California, claimed “No one will be able to tell a saboteur from any other Jap.”
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Racism was not confined to the West Coast. In Chicago, some cemeteries refused to bury Japanese corpses. Some dance halls would not admit Japanese customers. The same hospitals that welcomed Japanese Americans as employees turned them away as patients.

Despite the problems that might lie ahead, most Nisei jumped at the chance to leave the camps. “I felt wonderful the day I left camp,” Helen Murao remembered. “We took a bus to the railroad siding and then stopped someplace to transfer, and I went in and bought a Coke, a nickel Coke. It wasn’t the Coke, but what it represented—that I was free to buy it.”
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Closing the Centers

By 1944, attitudes in Washington, D.C., were changing. With the overbearing DeWitt gone, top Washington officials now spoke their minds to President Roosevelt. Attorney General Francis Biddle told him, “the present practice of keeping loyal American citizens in concentration camps for longer than is necessary is dangerous and repugnant to the principles of our Government.”
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On June 2, 1944, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes recommended that the relocation centers be closed. He listed his reasons to the president: The War Department assured Roosevelt that there was no danger to national security. Exclusion was clearly unconstitutional. Exclusion of Issei and Nisei from the West Coast made it more difficult to relocate them elsewhere. The longer the evacuees stayed in the camps, the more difficult it would be for them to readjust to normal life.

“I will not comment at this time on the justification or lack thereof for the original evacuation order,” Ickes wrote. “But I do say that the continued retention of these innocent people in the relocation centers would be a blot upon the history of this country.”
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Roosevelt hesitated. He did not campaign for the end of West Coast exclusion. A presidential election was coming up in November 1944. Return of the Nisei might displease California voters, and Roosevelt believed that he needed California’s electoral votes to win the election.

Evacuation Revoked

By mid-1944, the tide of war had changed. Allied troops now had a strong foothold in Western Europe. American forces had the Japanese on the run in the Pacific. The war was far from over, but it was only a matter of time.

In the United States, the relocation centers also had changed. Most young, loyal, and able adults were out of the camps now, working elsewhere. The camps remained as storehouses for children, the elderly, and at Tule Lake, for malcontents. One camp, Jerome, closed in late June.

On December 17, 1944, one month after Roosevelt’s reelection and one day before the Endo Supreme Court decision, the War Department revoked its evacuation orders. Evacuees would be free to return to California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona. The next day, the WRA announced that remaining relocation centers would be closed by the end of 1945.

Many evacuees were delighted with the news; others saw problems. Most evacuees had suffered mental anguish and financial losses. They feared physical violence if they returned home. Almost every Buddhist priest had been removed from the Pacific Coast, and many Buddhist evacuees wished to stay where they could worship. Some families had become accustomed to communal living and did not want to change their lifestyle. Chizuko Omorl recalled, “A young woman was so afraid to leave the camp to face a hostile white society that she became unbalanced and bashed her baby’s brains out with a hammer.”
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Tule Lake’s camp posed special problems. Residents of the other camps were considered loyal. They could leave the camps without posing security problems. But Tule Lake housed the No-Nos who had refused to sign loyalty oaths Many of them, under pressure from camp radicals, had signed forms renouncing United States citizenship. Some had second thoughts and now wished to reclaim their citizenship. Most evacuees, no matter what their status, worried about being separated from their families.

Every other camp was closed by the end of 1945, but Tule Lake had more than seven thousand people remaining. By March 1946, five thousand had been transferred to internment camps. The rest were mainly elderly, impoverished, or mentally ill people.

On March 20, 554 evacuees were still in Tule Lake. By the end of the day, they had left their “home” of more than three years. On March 21, 1946, the population of Tule Lake was zero.

Chapter 10

WE SHOULD PARDON THE GOVERNMENT

A single atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. It exploded with a force greater than ever before known to humanity. Three days later, a larger blast leveled the port of Nagasaki. These atomic bombs marked the end of the Japanese empire. World War II was over.

By now, many Japanese Americans had returned to the West Coast. Some of them returned to nothing. Their trusted “friends” had sold off their possessions. Goods believed safe in warehouses had been stolen or vandalized. Their land had fallen into other people’s hands because trusted partners failed to pay real estate taxes.

Prejudice against Issei and Nisei had not disappeared with the war. Returning evacuees faced shootings, bombings, and arson. More than thirty such incidents were recorded in the late 1940s. The Arizona state legislature passed a bill that would have made it virtually impossible for any Issei or Nisei to buy goods in the state. A court ruling voided the law.

Gradually, anti-Japanese attitudes changed. Bigots still existed on the West Coast, but they no longer made the rules. A turning point came in late 1945.

Mary Masuda’s brother had died a hero’s death on an Italian battlefield, earning a Distinguished Service Cross. When Mary returned home to California, however, she received neither sympathy nor welcome. Instead, neighbors threatened her.

General Joseph Stillwell tried to defuse this hatred. He flew across the country to present Mary Masuda with her brother’s medal. Americans throughout the country heard of the presentation from newspapers and newsreels.

The publicity quelled anti-Japanese feeling. When California voters had a chance to pass restrictive anti-Japanese laws in 1948, the measures failed overwhelmingly.

Other laws began to right wrongs against people of Japanese ancestry. President Truman urged Congress to pass the Japanese American Claims Act of 1948. It was hardly a generous appropriation. Congress gave only $38 million to cover twenty-three thousand claims totaling at least $131 million.

Four years later, Congress authorized the Walter-McCarran Act. Thousands of Issei, aliens in their adopted land for most of their lives, now became United States citizens. That same year, the Alien Land Law was declared unconstitutional. Those Issei who were not yet citizens could legally own land for the first time in forty years.

Repatriation

Other injustices remained uncorrected for many more years. One such group of injustices had been inflicted on repatriates at Tule Lake.

Rumors flew at Tule Lake and the other camps that all Issei would be shipped to Japan. Their Nisei children, rather than face separation from their parents, asked for repatriation.

Others signed up for repatriation involuntarily. A rebel group that called themselves the
Sokuji Kihoku Honshi Dan
(Organization to Return Immediately to the Homeland) terrorized other camp residents. Dressed in headbands and gray sweatshirts printed with red rising suns, the symbol on the Japanese flag, they exercised at dawn while screaming pro-Japanese slogans. These hotheads encouraged other Tuleans to file for repatriation. Some were afraid to disobey them.

In the spring of 1944, the pro-Japanese group wanted to take over the camp. They demanded the ouster of pro-American evacuees. Camp administrators had a different action plan. They would transfer the anti-American protesters to internment camps. Then those who requested repatriation could be shipped to Japan. Loyal evacuees would take over the camp, and eventually it could be closed.

There was one catch. The Nationality Act declared that a United States citizen could only renounce citizenship by applying to a consul while abroad; no one could renounce citizenship while in the United States. Congress in 1944 repealed that part of the act, then the Justice Department approved all renunciation requests.

In July 1945, President Truman signed Presidential Regulation 2655. It declared: “All dangerous enemies . . . who adhered to enemy governments . . . shall be subject to removal from the United States.”
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Many of the Japanese Americans who had given up their United States citizenship now were having second thoughts. These people wanted no part of a one-way trip to live in war-ravaged Japan. Thousands of Japanese Americans protested, saying their renunciations had been made under pressure.

Wayne Collins, a San Francisco attorney, had been the lawyer for Fred Korematsu in his unsuccessful evacuation challenge. He wrote a nineteen-page letter to Attorney General Tom Clark. The letter said that renunciation did not automatically make evacuees Japanese. Instead, they were stateless victims of coercion by the government and by organized gangs.

Collins filed a lawsuit in November 1945, claiming that these Japanese Americans were still citizens of the United States. He argued that their renunciations were not valid because they had no opportunity to consult lawyers or invite witnesses. Wayne Collins also asserted that the congressional amendment to the Nationality Act was unconstitutional.

More than thirty-five hundred plaintiffs sued in an attempt to regain United States citizenship. In 1949, Judge Louis Goodman ruled that each case must be tried separately. Collins protested in vain. For the next two decades, he worked to secure full citizenship rights for these Nisei clients.

The final court action took place on March 6, 1968. A weary Collins savored his victories. After the last verdict he commented, “This brings to a conclusion these . . . proceedings. . . . The episode which constituted an infamous chapter in our history has come to a close.”
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Justice for Korematsu

Fred Korematsu strode into Oakland’s courthouse on November 10, 1983. Nearly forty years earlier, courts had ruled against him when he tried to stay out of a relocation camp. After the 1944 Supreme Court case he had married, returned to California, and worked as a draftsman until his retirement.