Infamy (27 page)

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Back in Washington, Congress was in the process of passing Public Law 78-405, the Denaturalization Act of 1944. Signed by President Roosevelt on July 1, 1944, it allowed American citizens to renounce that citizenship in a time of war. Whatever the wording, there was only one group of citizens targeted: the residents of Tule Lake. The Justice Department believed that the law would provide a constitutional rationale to keep those citizens incarcerated, by pushing them to voluntarily become aliens. As always, there was also pressure from western politicians who used the chaos at Tule Lake as reason for barring American Japanese from returning to the West Coast. Representative Clair Engle of California, for instance, was saying, “We don’t want those Japs back in California and the more we can get rid of the better.” Engle, a Republican, was among those who believed the way to calm the camps was to tell inmates that they would be able to go to Japan after the war—a place most of them had never been.

Though only 117 evacuees, all
Kibei
, initially signed up for renunciation, Raymond Best and the Tule Lake administrators decided to deliberately ignore the growing pro-Japan organizations, gangs, and schools being put together by the true anti-Americans in the camp. They decided to turn a blind eye to these elements as a way to frighten residents into renunciation. As 1944 went on, “Japanization”—not the original idea of “Americanization”—effectively became the new Tule Lake policy. The gangs and their thugs were free to run wild, pressuring “loyals” to become openly disloyal—and thousands did, afraid of the violent disloyal gangs—and becoming convinced that they would be in danger outside the camp. It seemed the inmates were running the institution, a chaotic situation that led to the murder of the manager of the camp’s co-op store, Yaozo Hitomi, who was openly pro-administration. He was found on July 2, with his throat slit.

Even “Americanized” Nisei were intimidated into learning Japanese ways and language—and waving Japanese flags. There were classes in martial arts, traditional Japanese tea ceremonies, and flower arranging. What went unnoticed in the camp was that the leaders and loudest voices of the pro-Japan groups—the Nisei and
Kibei
who were chanting for renunciation and expatriation—often were not themselves renouncing their American citizenship.

By end of the year, the number of Tule Lake prisoners applying for renunciation and expatriation had grown to almost two thousand. The camp was a nest of suspicion, terror, and confusion. Hundreds of the most fanatic young pro-Japanese
Kibei
joined with the so-called Sand Island Tough Boys transferred in from a Hawaiian internment center. The pro-Japan gangs were coercing residents with stories that the twenty military officers who processed the applications were telling the residents that they had two choices: renounce your citizenship or be sent out of the camp. As the government began making announcements about closing the camps, more and more Tule Lakers, afraid of going outside, applied for renunciation papers. As elders became more and more terrified that they would be in danger and separated from their families if they were outside, they were ordering or begging their children and grandchildren to renounce.

Finally realizing what was happening, the Justice Department announced at the end of the year that only American Japanese over the age of seventeen could renounce their citizenship. But it was too late—no one inside the camps believed the government anymore. In the end, 5,589 Tuleans, Americans, signed away their citizenship—and their rights as Americans. Seventy percent of the Nisei at Tule Lake were among the renouncers, most under unbearable pressure from the
Kibei
gangs, American soldiers, and their own alien parents in their closed, barbed-wire world.

The Justice Department continued to blunder through the end of the year. In the early morning hours of December 27, while soldiers surrounded the camp, forty armed border patrol officers pulled seventy suspected pro-Japan
Hokoku Dan
leaders out of their beds. They were dragged to Gate 3 and taken away in trucks, sent to Justice Department internment facilities, prisons, around the country. Predictably, even the most moderate of residents saw the seventy men as martyrs or heroes. More than a thousand people rushed to the gate, shouting “Banzai! Banzai!” and chanting about “the honor of internment.”

John Burling, the assistant director of the Justice Department’s Alien Enemy Control Unit, who had opposed the renunciation law, wrote in a Justice Department report, “It seems, at least in the light of hindsight, foreseeable that this group could be whipped up into a sort of hysterical frenzy of Japanese patriotism.” Sympathetic or not to the pro-Japanese
Hokoku
, hundreds of male residents, some as a means of self-protection, shaved their heads in the bozu style of the Japanese Imperial Army.

Conditions at Tule Lake were dismal at best and, at the time, renunciations of U.S. citizenship, forced or voluntary, seemed irreversible. Despite opposition from ACLU headquarters in New York and Los Angeles, Wayne Collins, the driven San Francisco attorney, eventually represented more than five thousand Japanese Americans incarcerated in the Justice Department prisons and WRA camps—including the hopeless people who had given up their American citizenship. Even in the ensuing decades, Collins’s style and accomplishments made an impression: in a 1985 issue of the
Pacific Historical Review
, John Christgau wrote on Collins in a piece aptly titled “Collins versus the World: The Fight to Restore Citizenship to Japanese American Renunciants of World War II.”

“These renunciants whom I represent,” Collins argued in a letter to the attorney general’s office in Washington, “have submitted to gross indignities and suffered greater loss of rights and liberties than any other group of persons during the entire history of the nation, all without good cause or reason. They have been misunderstood, slandered, abused and long have been held up to public shame and contempt … and now these internees, faced with the loss of citizenship rights, are confronted with a threatened involuntary deportation to Japan.”

In court, he argued, “Herr Hitler was guilty of abusing segments of [his] own citizenry for racial reasons. We are inured, however, to a like abuse of our own citizens by our own government.”

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Though more and more American Japanese were leaving the camps, their departures were not always easy. Regulation piled upon regulation as camp administrators were overwhelmed by paperwork coming from all directions. One of the first rules was showing evidence that Japanese Americans would not be living or working within twenty-five miles of a railroad line.

And for many of the evacuees, even younger ones, leaving the camps was almost as traumatic as leaving their homes. George Nakamura, who had been a student at Berkeley before being sent to Tule Lake and becoming an editor on the
Tulean Dispatch
, wrote, “Now that I have made plans to leave the project, I feel like staying a little longer. Life here has made me soft and indolent. I’m clothed, sheltered, and don’t have to worry about where my next meal is coming from. I feel I’ve become part of the dust.”

The old Issei, building Japanese gardens and pools framed by delicate little bridges, were caught between two worlds. The oldest evacuees, women and men who had worked from dawn to dusk all their lives, suddenly had something they never knew before, leisure. They had time now to relax and gossip and knit as they talked—or sip homemade sake and play the ancient Japanese board game Go.

One Issei at Heart Mountain, a man who had been wealthy, said:

I guess I’ll just have to go. I don’t want to go. I sort of like it here. My work is interesting. I have time for golf and fishing. I have lots of friends. I have no worries. My wife likes it here alright. My daughter has her friends. We’re used to it.

Difficult as it was for some to leave camp life, the departures continued. The breakup of the Matsuda family, the farmers from Vashon Island, Washington, began two weeks into June 1944. The Matsudas, their twenty-one-year-old son, Yoneichi, and daughter, Mary, had all signed “yes” on the Application for Leave questions 27 and 28. So as “disloyals” from other camps were being sent to Tule Lake, they had been moved from Tule Lake. Yoneichi Matsuda, who considered himself a Christian pacifist, still felt he had to fight and left for basic training in Florida in June. On his last day in camp, his mother prayed in front of the family.

God, this is a difficult time for all of us. We know Yoneichi-san carries the burden for our family and for all other Japanese families to fight with courage and bring honor to our community. Guide and protect him. May his battles be fought with a pure heart. We know You will be with him wherever he goes.… Amen.

Mary cried for a day, thinking, “My only brother goes off to fight a war for a country that is keeping us imprisoned like criminals.”

A month later, she applied for training in the United States Cadet Nurse Corps and was accepted at Jane Lamb Memorial Hospital in Clinton, Iowa. Before she was scheduled to go to Clinton, her parents told her that they had applied to be transferred to Minidoka because they had Japanese friends nearby in Idaho, Japanese who had not been incarcerated because they lived away from the West Coast. Mary and her parents took a bus east to Pocatello, Idaho, before her parents boarded another bus to Minidoka.

While walking down a street in Pocatello, Mary was attacked in front of a barbershop—there was a
NO JAPS ALLOWED
sign in front—and the barber came rushing out and grabbed her in a choke hold, holding something against her throat, saying, “I oughta slit your throat from ear to ear you goddamned Jap!” She thought he was going to do it, but a friend of his across the street shouted, “Hey, Ken, knock it off!”

A month later, finally on her way to Clinton, Mary suddenly realized she was free, writing back to her parents, “It was like being in heaven.… It was incredible—the sense that I could walk anywhere I wanted to, and enjoy the flowers, the grass, and hear the birds.”

Soon after that, Mrs. Matsuda, who was fifty-two, was offered a job at a vegetable cannery in Ogden, Utah. Her husband, sixty-seven, said that she should go and she did, holding her leave pass and crying and praying at the camp gate. In November, Mrs. Matsuda wrote to Mary, who had just turned twenty, “This afternoon when I opened your letter, your picture dropped out. It was such a wonderful picture showing how you are getting along so fine with your white friends.… I will watch you become a great nurse. That is all I ask.”

Granted leave before being shipped overseas, Yoneichi traveled, illegally, to Vashon to check on the family farm. He could not find Mack Garcia, the Filipino workman, or Sheriff Hopkins. The place was run-down, but it was still there. He then went to Minidoka. He and Mary were both visiting at the same time. They were both in U.S. Army uniforms and camp residents could not stop staring at them. Then Private Matsuda was off for Maryland and then a nineteen-day freighter trip to Marseille, France, as a replacement in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

Other young people at the camps were also looking ahead to the rest of their lives. Stanley Hayami graduated from the Heart Mountain High School on May 11, 1944, and, at last, he got all As on his final report card and made the school’s honor roll. He wrote, “Man, do I feel swell! ’member I thought I had T.B. or something, well I don’t! Dr. Robbins looked my X-ray over and told me that there’s nothing wrong with my lungs—so I guess I’ll go on to college! Or the army.”

Hayami remained an enthusiastic and optimistic young man, writing, “I made up my mind on something else, too—I’m going into the artist-writer field. And I’m going to be the best artist in the world. (Even if my I.Q. is low.)” After his planned college graduation, he figured, “I’m going to bum my way around the world—So the world better watch out—Hayami is going to the top!”

Stanley Hayami put the 1944 valedictory address by his friend Paul Mayekawa in his diary. It was titled “Citizenship Carries Responsibility,” and in Mayekawa’s speech he asked, “What are we, you and I? Are we Japs, simply in a sense as General DeWitt declared, ‘A Jap is a Jap?’ … As evidenced by General DeWitt’s remark, there are some Americans who judge us only by our appearances.” Despite the color of their skin, Mayekawa asserted that “by right of birth in the United States, we are Americans.”

Still, Mayekawa went on to say that “evacuation has proved, however, that we cannot take citizenship for granted. We, the Japanese-Americans, in not establishing ourselves as firmly in the American way of life as we had thought, must now reaffirm our loyalty to our country and prove ourselves worthy of our citizenship.” Yet, at the same time, he warned his audience not to forsake their Japanese heritage, since their heritage “may be the means by which we … further develop and enrich the American culture, for is not America made up of the various cultures of many nations?”

He acknowledged that graduates would be going their separate ways soon, to work or to college, though he stressed that “there are also those among us who will go into the armed forces. These persons, besides hastening the day of final victory, will constitute what I believe will be the greatest single factor in the re-establishment of the Japanese-Americans in such a definite and permanent place in the American life that issues, such as the evacuation, shall never again be necessary.”

The class of 1944 at Manzanar High School graduated that same June. Their yearbook,
Our World
, looked almost exactly like any other yearbook in the United States. It was seventy-six pages long, gave short bios of the 169 graduates, including names of the high schools they attended before being forced to leave their homes. There were photos of all the teachers, athletic teams, cheerleaders, and clubs. The kids were all Japanese Americans, of course, boys growing out of their suits and bobby-soxers in saddle shoes.

The first pages of the yearbook began, “Since that first day when Manzanar High School was called into session, the students and faculty have been trying to approximate in all activities the life we knew ‘back home.’” On the drama class page there were photographs, taken by Ansel Adams during the weeks he had spent at the camp, of student actors in
Growing Pains
by Auriana Rouveral. The play was described in the program as “the story of a typical American home.”