Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II

by Daniel James Brown

Yamasaki Arches; five hundred-foot-high Gothic arches were created by the former Seattle architect Minoru Yamasaki for the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. They were supposed to be a temporary installation. However, they were so beautiful they became a permanent and historic landmark. Ironically, two of Yamasaki’s other creations, these meant to be permanent, the Twin Towers in New York City, were destroyed by terrorists on September 11, 2001.

I remembered my father’s words: “Life can change quickly.”

Facing the Mountain comes to us during a time of deep unrest, a time when our empathy for others is so needed to guide the choices we will make.

Local ordinances regulated where they could and could not live. Labor unions routinely barred them from employment in many industries. Proprietors of businesses could, at will, ban them from entering their premises. Public facilities were sometimes closed to them. State laws prohibited their parents from owning real estate. In many states they were not free to marry across racial lines. Their national government prohibited their parents from becoming citizens.

USA

At the request of the army, the station manager had agreed the evening before to stay on the air and keep the music playing all night. That way, the navigators of the incoming B-17s would be able to use the station’s signal to home in on the most direct route to the Honolulu area. Now the Japanese navigators began to do exactly that, following the music toward Pearl Harbor.

At a hospital in Honolulu, ambulance drivers in blood-soaked uniforms carrying in moaning victims, their bodies blackened. In the hospital morgue, a little girl, barefoot, wearing a red sweater, clutching the burned-off end of a jump rope.

In 1941, nearly a third of Hawai‘i’s residents were of entirely Japanese ancestry.

From the time the first white missionaries had arrived, the history of the islands had been all about the exploitation of the land and its people. Coming mostly from New England, missionaries like the Baldwin and Alexander families were imbued with the Puritan notion that wealth was an indicator of divine favor.

By segregating their housing into camps along racial lines, they adopted a kind of divide-and-conquer strategy, keeping their workforce from organizing in any meaningful way and fostering perceived resentments among the different groups as they competed for scant wages. It was an efficient, often ruthless system that enabled a small oligarchy of powerful families to wield enormous power over the lives of those who made them wealthy.

On Sundays, the Miho family put on shoes, dressed up in fancy clothes, and went to the Kahului Union Church, where they sang songs with lyrics like “Jesus loves me, this I know.” After the services they walked down the street to the Buddhist temple, where a priest in robes beckoned them in. They removed their shoes and sat on tatami mats while the priest, to everyone’s amusement, sometimes led them in singing, “Buddha loves me, this I know.”

At first, Kats thought the sideshow guests were funny, something to snicker about later with his friends down on the beach, but as he matured, and they kept coming back to the hotel each year, Kats soon came to empathize with them. Seeing the world through the eyes of “freaks,” understanding their humanity, feeling the warmth of their goodwill toward him, added to what Kats had learned from his father about treating others with compassion.

Fred put his homework aside unfinished and sat in front of the radio stunned as the word began to pour out, over and over again, sounding more and more venomous each time. “The Japs.” “The dirty Japs.” “The dirty yellow Japs.” This time, though, the word wasn’t coming from adolescent bullies on the streets of Hillyard; it was coming from adults, from stern-voiced news announcers, from military officials issuing emergency proclamations, from figures of respect and authority. It was serious, sober, cold, official, and it seemed to be coming from the heart of America itself.

1936,

August 10 of that year, President Roosevelt proposed to the chief of naval operations that “every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the Island of Oahu who meets these Japanese ships [arriving in Hawai‘i] or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble.”

Talking about the American-born Nisei, the Los Angeles Times editorialized, “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.” Smaller newspapers chimed in as well. Fred Shiosaki’s hometown newspaper, the Spokane Spokesman-Review, ran an editorial calling for people like his parents to be imprisoned: “All Japanese nationals on our islands and our mainland should be rounded up and placed in concentration camps for the duration of the war.”

Representative John Rankin of Mississippi declared, “This is a race war. . . . I say it is of vital importance that we get rid of every Japanese. . . . Damn them! Let’s get rid of them now!” Another member of Congress, Oklahoma’s Jed Johnson, demanded the forced sterilization of all Japanese living in the United States. Chase Clark, governor of Idaho, said, “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats, act like rats.”

From the earliest days of Asian immigration in the nineteenth century, first print media and later Hollywood had promoted the notion of a “Yellow Peril”—an unrelenting wave of Asian immigration that threatened to overwhelm and destroy not just the United States but the entire western world.

Rudy’s father, Jisuke—a veteran of World War I—carefully laid his U.S. Army uniform on top of the pile of clothes inside, to make sure that anyone searching the trunk would see it first.

“What’s this?” “That’s my uniform,” Jisuke replied quietly. “This is an American uniform.” “Well, I was in the American army. I went to France.” “Aw, the American army never took no Japs.” They threw the uniform on the floor and trampled it underfoot as they continued to search the house.

Anyone whose ancestry was so much as one-sixteenth Japanese—anyone with even a single Japanese great-great-grandparent—was now required to register for removal from the exclusion zone.

There were Japanese orphans, some living in orphanages and others who had been adopted by people of other races. There were foster children as well. They would all have to be taken from their orphanages or their foster homes. And then what was to be done with the bedridden elderly? Pregnant women about to give birth? The chronically ill? The mentally disabled? People recovering from surgeries in hospitals? All would—somehow—have to move.

February 1905, the San Francisco Chronicle launched what would become a drumbeat of fiercely anti-Japanese editorials: the japanese invasion: the problem of the hour; japanese a menace to american women; crime and poverty go hand in hand with asiatic labor. In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Act, prohibiting “all aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning land. Other western states soon did the same. In June 1919, Senator James Phelan of California testified before Congress, seething about what he considered the unfair advantage Japanese immigrants gained by working too hard or being too ingenious: “They are tireless workers and persevering and clever agriculturalists. They know how to get the last penny out of the soil. . . . I regard them in their economic destructiveness, their competitive ability, as enemies to be rejected, to keep away from as a plague of locusts, not to be compromised with but to be eliminated.”

In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Takao Ozawa—a twenty-eight-year resident of the United States, a graduate of Berkeley High School, a former student at UC Berkeley, the father of two American children, and a practicing Christian—in his quest to become a U.S. citizen. Because he was neither a “free white man” nor a person of African descent, the Court ruled, his race precluded him from any right to citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1906. Finally, in May 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act, effectively shutting the doors to further Japanese immigrants, starting July 1 of that year.

Expecting to be inoculated, Katsuichi stood naked, waiting patiently for a doctor to arrive with a syringe. Instead, someone came into the room and slowly and deliberately wrote a number across his bare chest with a red pen. The number, from that moment forward, was to be his identity as far as the government was concerned.

In Laurel, a bit north of town, just a few months before the Nisei soldiers arrived, a mob had dragged two fourteen-year-old boys—Charlie Lang and Ernest Green—out of jail, tied ropes around the terrified boys’ necks, and thrown them to their deaths from what locals had long quietly and confidentially called the Hanging Bridge. The bridge, on the Chickasawhay River, had earned its grim name in commemoration of an earlier lynching, in 1918, when two young men and two young women—both women pregnant, both begging for their lives—had been hanged there. Five days after Charlie Lang and Ernest Green were lynched, another mob removed yet another young man—Howard Wash—from the jail in Laurel and hanged him from a different bridge.

The lynchings were only the most brutal manifestations of an economic, social, and political order that white Mississippians had built on a foundation of intimidation and dehumanization. Forced to use inferior facilities, denied decent educations, exploited in their workplaces, barred from voting, called vile names to their faces, humiliated in front of their children, Black Americans in Mississippi and throughout the Jim Crow South lived and labored under a suffocating blanket of oppression. Beneath the scent of magnolia, there was always the smell of fear, the stench of degradation.

The presence of nearly 400,000 German POWs in America, in fact, led to some staggering ironies across the country. The camps in which they were held sometimes offered comforts and amenities that far exceeded those in the WRA camps for Japanese Americans.

“I wonder,” he thought, “when I get out of this, if I do, whether I’ll be a human being.”

One often wonders why this has to happen to fellers so young. Millions of lives lost in this war and unless we build up a better world after this—all for naught.

Whether they lived or died in the endeavor, they reminded us yet again that we Americans are all composed of varied stuff, a multitude of backgrounds and identities forged together in the furnace of our national tribulations and triumphs.

The new administration of President Harry Truman pushed for a restoration of property and civil rights for Japanese Americans. Shocked by reports of vigilantes attacking returning families, Truman wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, “These disgraceful actions almost make you believe that a lot of our Americans have a streak of Nazi in them.”

Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the language of which declares that the incarcerations of Japanese Americans were “carried out without adequate security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage, and were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” It still took three to five years for most of the 82,219 people then eligible to receive redress checks of twenty thousand dollars each.

many of the best and brightest among the 442nd veterans returned to the islands determined to fundamentally change the power structure of the territory. They started by going to law school.