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The stratified social structure of Kahului—and all of Maui—was replicated across the Hawaiian Islands. 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.
As the plantation system matured, the planters found it useful to play these ethnic groups off against one another. 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.
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. Particularly from the 1880s onward, editorial cartoons in major newspapers routinely depicted Asian figures as rodents, cockroaches, snakes, and other vermin swarming ashore on American beaches. Magazine covers offered up lurid images of sinister Asian men with long fingernails ravaging white women or
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That same day, Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi strode onto the floor of the House of Representatives and declared, “I’m for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps.”
Eleanor Roosevelt did not. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Mrs. Roosevelt had flown to the West Coast, where, when she learned that the bank accounts of Issei farmers had been frozen, she successfully lobbied the Treasury Department to allow them to make monthly withdrawals of one hundred dollars. During her visit, she made a point of posing with a group of Nisei and making a radio address on January 11 in which she pointed out that the Issei were long-term residents of the country and yet they had always been denied the right to apply for citizenship. Back at the White House, she tried to
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When Eleanor Roosevelt learned of Executive Order 9066, she confronted the president about it. He refused to discuss the matter with her.
Japanese immigrants were prohibited from owning any sort of land by virtue of a set of anti-Asian laws that had roots reaching back to the arrival of Chinese laborers in California during the gold rush of 1849. Right from the start, many white Californians had resented the Chinese immigrants, who often worked harder and for lower wages than they were willing to accept.
In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, entirely barring the immigration of Chinese laborers.
In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Act, prohibiting “all aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning land. Other western states soon did the same.
The mess halls at Camp Harmony had no fresh fruits or vegetables that first week. Day after day, the internees were fed canned Vienna sausages and stewed tomatoes, and soon nearly everyone had diarrhea. People rushed to the latrines in the middle of the night but found they had to stand in long lines in the rain and the mud with machine guns trained on them and searchlights playing over the scene as they inched forward, each of them desperately hoping they could hold out long enough to make it into the building. It was deeply humiliating, and starkly dehumanizing.
When Gordon told them he was not going to allow himself to be taken away, his mother began to cry. She agreed with him in principle, respected his position, admired him for his courage, but she was desperately afraid of what might befall him. “Please put your principles aside on this occasion, come home, and move with us. Heaven knows what will become of you if you confront the government. . . .
Hundreds of major-league baseball players—among them superstars like Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams—enlisted in the military. So did movie stars like Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, and Jimmy Stewart.
Because of their vision and conviction, we, the people of these United States, have made tremendous advancements in the liberation of mankind from political, social, economic, and religious slavery. . . . But even though this is America, these things happening today are not American. They are the results of misinterpretations, mis-emphasis of the right thing to do, hysteria, and short-sightedness.
At the heart of the controversy were two specific items on the questionnaire. Question 27 asked Nisei men if they were willing to serve in combat duty whenever and wherever ordered. Question 28 asked both the Nisei and their parents if they would swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and forswear any allegiance to the emperor of Japan. On principle, many Nisei, although they were willing to serve, deeply resented the fact that—simply because of their race—they were made to sign an oath that other American citizens were not required to sign.
Hattiesburg—and Mississippi more generally—could be cruel almost beyond reckoning. Since Reconstruction, more than five hundred Black Americans had been lynched in Mississippi.
At about the same hour that day—as the boys hoisted their overstuffed barrack bags, climbed into the backs of trucks, and headed out to Camp Shelby, just south of town—Lieutenant General John DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, was testifying before members of the House Committee on Naval Affairs’ subcommittee in San Francisco. Arguing against allowing the return of any Japanese Americans to the West Coast, DeWitt declared, “A Jap’s a Jap. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not. . . . I don’t want any of them.”
Watching over the whole operation, a field boss, always a white man, sat on horseback a bit removed from the rest of them, a shotgun or a whip lying across his lap, keeping his eyes open for would-be runaways. Runaways were beaten, whipped, or jailed for breaking their contracts.
Soon after the women arrived, children—the Hawaiian Nisei—followed. And it was the boys among those children who now made up the bulk of the Buddhaheads at Camp Shelby. They knew well what their parents had endured at the hands of the powerful in Hawai‘i. They knew what they had experienced themselves growing up in a racially and economically stratified society. And they weren’t about to put up with a bunch of Japanese American boys their own age who sometimes seemed to mimic the language, the manners, and the attitudes of the haole bosses back home.
For the most part, Geneva County’s white citizens appeared to be more at ease with the presence of the Germans in their midst than they were with American boys with Japanese faces, even though not long before these same Germans had been doing their best to kill Americans in North Africa. And the tolerance shown the POWs in Alabama was not unique to that state. 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
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Gordon was far from the only young Nisei man for whom the renewal of the draft and the required oaths of allegiance that attended it provoked a new crisis of conscience that spring. For hundreds of them, particularly those incarcerated in the WRA camps, the questions again arose: Why should they be compelled to fight for a nation that had removed them from their homes and denied them the rights and liberties afforded to other citizens?
Dear Dad, I believe the War Dept. has notified you of our loss of Calvin. I’ve just learned of his passing. . . . Dad—this is no time to be preaching to you but I have something on my chest which I want you to hear. In spite of Cal’s supreme sacrifice, don’t let anyone tell you that he was foolish or made a mistake to volunteer. Of what I’ve seen in my travels on our mission I am more than convinced that we’ve done the right thing in spite of what’s happened in the past. America is a damned good country and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Well, Dad, the Germans are beginning to throw a
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Then, in an instant, thirty-two-year-old Harry Madokoro from Watsonville, California—Harry who had been the former chief of police at the Poston War Relocation Camp, who had encouraged Rudy and a dozen other young men at Poston to enlist, who had promised Rudy’s mother he would take care of him, who nursed him when he was hungover, who had always gone out at the front of K Company when danger lurked, who was the only son and sole living relative of his mother waiting for him in room 13-G, Block 213, in the barracks at Poston, Arizona—stepped on a mine and simply disappeared in a shower of mud,
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Oh Lord when will this horror end. Whenever I pass one of our men so still in the road with their body covered—I think of some family in the islands—think of the bright future the young lad might have had—all because a couple of mad men in the world wanted everything for themselves. CHAPLAIN HIGUCHI TO HIS WIFE, HISAKO OCTOBER 20, 1944
James Okubo
A few days later, forced from their home in Kaunas, Solly, his parents, and his sister, Fanny, were herded—along with about twenty-nine thousand other Jews—into the miserable confines of the Kovno ghetto, a jumble of small, mostly primitive houses with no running water in an area called Slobodka. There for more than two years they somehow managed to survive mass starvation, periodic outbreaks of disease, and the regular mass executions that the Germans called Aktions. In one of these, the Kinder Aktion of March 27 and 28, 1944, the SS systematically murdered twelve hundred children as police
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Much of the public discussion centered on an incident in Hood River, Oregon. As in many American towns, the local American Legion post in Hood River had put up a monument to honor local boys serving overseas. But on the evening of November 29, the legionnaires had blacked out sixteen names—all of Hood River’s active-duty Japanese American servicemen. Lest there be any doubt about the intended message, the post’s commander, Jess Edington, stated it bluntly: “We simply want to let them know that we don’t want them back here.”
On Monte Folgorito, in the Vosges forest, among the hills of Tuscany, at Monte Cassino, time and again they selflessly offered up their best selves. And the selves they offered up—the lives they put on the line—grew from both American and Japanese roots. 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.
It took more than half a century and a sustained lobbying campaign in Congress before President Clinton, on June 21, 2000, finally conferred Medals of Honor on another twenty members of the regiment—some of them posthumously—saying, “Rarely has a nation been so well served by a people it has so ill served.” Among those receiving the Medal of Honor that day were Daniel Inouye; the medic James Okubo; two men from K Company—Ted Tanouye and Joe Hayashi—and William Nakamura, for whom, the following year, the federal courthouse in which Gordon Hirabayashi had been convicted would be renamed the
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It would take decades for the country’s leadership to broadly recognize and formally address the wrong that had been done to them. But there was at least the beginnings of a shift in attitude among some at the highest levels of government, particularly among those aware of what the Nisei soldiers had accomplished. 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
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On August 10, 1988, after initially opposing the legislation, President Reagan signed the 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.
As part of that effort, Katsuro, now a member of the Hawai‘i Statehood Commission, traveled to Washington, D.C., where he gave forceful, eloquent testimony before Congress on April 7, 1957. In June, a territorial referendum on statehood passed, with 132,938 eligible voters in favor and 7,854 opposed.
After retiring from teaching, Gordon continued to speak out in defense of civil rights for the rest of his life. He died in Edmonton, Alberta, on January 2, 2012. Ten hours later, in a hospital a block away, Esther Schmoe also passed away. On May 29, 2012, President Obama—standing in front of an embroidered gold curtain in the East Room of the White House, with Susan Carnahan and other members of Gordon’s family looking on—posthumously conferred on Gordon the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. As he presented the medal, Obama quoted from Gordon himself: “Unless
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*More than 1.2 million people in the United States had been born in Germany, and 5 million had two German-born parents. The nation’s ethnic Italian community was even larger. During the war, the Department of Justice incarcerated roughly 11,500 individuals of German ancestry and 3,000 of Italian ancestry. However, neither Italian Americans nor German Americans were ever subject to the sweeping, all-inclusive incarcerations that would follow for Japanese Americans and their parents.
