A Time of Agony for Japanese Americans

By Otto Friedrich

No sooner had the Japanese bombers hit Pearl Harbor than a rumor spread that they had been guided by Hawaii's Japanese farm workers' slashing giant arrows in sugarcane fields. Similar stories swept California and beyond. "The fifth- column activities added great confusion," said Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the Pacific Fleet commander. The confusion was largely his own.

Though there was no evidence of a single case of Japanese-American espionage throughout the war, FBI agents on the afternoon of Dec. 7 began to detain suspected "subversives." They swooped down on a Los Angeles baseball field, for example, to apprehend members of a team called the L.A. Nippons. Within two months, 2,192 "suspects" had been jailed. The U.S. Constitution is supposed to protect citizens against arbitrary arrest, but a U.S. law of 1924 had virtually forbidden Japanese immigration, so most of the arrested suspects were classified as "enemy aliens."

Though there were a few incidents of anti-Japanese violence in the first days after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. initially refrained from collective reprisals. "Let's not get rattled," said a Dec. 10 editorial in the Los Angeles Times. The FBI and the military had been compiling lists of "potentially dangerous" Japanese since 1932, but most were merely teachers, businessmen or journalists. And the lists totaled only about 2,000 names in a community of 127,000 (37% were aliens, known as Issei, the rest American-born Nisei, who theoretically had the same rights as other citizens). "Treat us like Americans," said the Japanese-American Citizens League. "Give us a chance to prove our loyalty."

Military leaders worried acutely, however, about the thousands of Japanese scattered all over the vulnerable West Coast. On Dec. 29, Lieut. General John L. DeWitt ordered all Japanese aliens in the eight states in his Western Defense Command to surrender their shortwave radios and cameras. But the Army's basic demand was much broader: mass expulsion.

While some questioned the constitutionality of wholesale deportations, California Governor Culbert Olson demanded action. So did the ambitious state attorney general, who would someday become Chief Justice of the U.S., Earl Warren. Expedient arguments could always be found. Though no Japanese Americans had actually committed sabotage, wrote the eminent columnist Walter Lippmann, "it is a sign that the blow is well organized and held back until it can be struck with maximum effect." Said General DeWitt: "A Jap is a Jap."

In February 1942 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9,066, authorizing DeWitt to expel all Japanese, aliens and citizens alike, from the coastal area. That spring 120,000 people were rounded up with little more than the clothes on their back -- farmers and fishermen, old women, children, a kaleidoscope of the "subversive." They were shipped off to 10 bleak concentration camps in remote areas like Manzanar, west of Death Valley.

"I was 10 years old and wearing my Cub Scout uniform when we were packed ! onto a train in San Jose," recalls California Democratic Congressman Norman Mineta. "People had to just padlock and walk away from their businesses -- they lost millions. After six months in a barracks at the Santa Anita Racetrack, we were sent to Heart Mountain, Wyo. We arrived in the middle of a blinding snowstorm, five of us children in our California clothes. When we got to our tar-paper barracks, we found sand coming in through the walls, around the windows, up through the floor.

"The camp was surrounded by barbed wire. Guards with machine guns were posted at watchtowers, with orders to shoot anyone who tried to escape. Our own government put a yoke of disloyalty around our shoulders. But throughout our ordeal, we cooperated with the government because we felt that in the long run, we could prove our citizenship."

Mineta was a leader in the long-run effort to get the U.S. to pay amends for its transgressions. In 1988 Congress finally passed a law promising $20,000 to each of 75,000 victims. "Words alone cannot restore lost years or erase painful memories," said the presidential letter handed to each survivor. So far, $957 million of the promised billion-plus dollars has been paid.