Here's Where It Gets Interesting - 9066: One Signature Changed It All, Episode 1

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

When FDR signed executive order 9066, he upended lives and forever altered the course of American history. With the stroke of a pen, more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry would be forced from their homes, jobs, schools, and lives. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for total fund savings adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. On a sunny Sunday morning, Daniel Inouye was up early as was his family's custom. He dressed for church, turning on the radio to keep him company. In the distance was the vast Pacific Ocean, the water that had carried his family to Hawaii decades before. He could see Pearl Harbor, named after the pearl oysters that native Hawaiians harvested there.

And then Daniel heard it, the voice of the radio announcer. He leaned in. This is no test, he heard the announcer say. Pearl Harbor is being bombed by the Japanese. I repeat, this is not a test or a maneuver. Japanese warplanes are attacking Oahu. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Daniel felt a pit in his stomach.

The announcer continued, this is not a test. This is the real thing. Pearl Harbor has been hit. We can see the Japanese planes. Daniel's family arrived in Hawaii from Japan in 1899 after a fire had broken out in the home of his great-grandfather, Wasaburo. The fire damaged the neighborhood, and the village decided that Wasaburo must pay the equivalent of $400 in Japan, but not paying the debt was unthinkable. Wasaburo sent his son Asakichi away from their village in hopes of finding employment elsewhere. Asakichi approached a recruiter who was offering $10 a month in pay if he was willing to leave behind everything

he knew and sail across the Pacific to the islands of Hawaii. Asakichi and his wife brought their young son, Hayataro, with them on board the ship bound for Hawaii. They tried not to think about the faces of the two daughters they had to leave behind, the tears they tried to hold back, the firmness in their hugs. To dwell on it would do nothing. Asakiji, his wife, and his son spent 15 days in cramped, contaminated quarters until at last, the bright green of the Hawaiian Islands crested the horizon. Asakiji signed a five-year contract to work at a sugarcane plantation.

When his contract was up, he would have earned $600, enough to pay the debt of his father. Azakichi worked for 15 hours each day on the plantation, the hot sun above him, the volcanic earth below. The company that employed him required that his family shop at the company's store, funneling profits into their pockets and keeping their employees from getting ahead. Asakichi and his family believed they could live frugally and that their hard work would pay off his family's debt. But by the end of every month, But by the end of every month, he was left with only one or two dollars. By the end of his fifth year of work, he had paid off only one quarter of his father's debt.

He had no choice but to swallow the ache for his little girls and to sign another five-year employment contract. One morning, unable to sleep and longing for home, Asakichi thought of the bathhouses he had enjoyed in Japan. Here, in the shacks that were company housing, there was no place to luxuriate in the warm water. So he decided to build one. Soon he was up at 2 a.m. building the fire and filling the tub, earning one penny per bath each person soaking for five minutes before hopping out and making room for the

next person. Too slowly Asakichi chipped away at his father's debt, a debt that took him 30 years to pay. His son Hayataro was four when they arrived. Schooling for him was sporadic, as he attended only when he was not needed at the family bath business or the sugarcane field. It took Hayataro eight years to finish elementary school. He didn't complete high school until he was 25. Hayataro met and married his sweetheart, Kame, an orphan who had been raised by Methodist

missionaries. One year later, she gave birth to a baby who was born dead. When the midwife who delivered him couldn't revive him, she pressed Hayataro into service. Bring ice water, she yelled. The midwife held his lifeless blue body upside down, smacking him on the backside. Kame was exhausted, but adrenaline now coursed through her veins. The new father thundered up the stairs, the bucket of icy water sloshing his ankles. The midwife stroked cold water across the baby's forehead and neck, whispering a will to live into his tiny

ears. Life descended into his lungs and miraculously he began to cry. Kame held her baby, tears dripping onto his now warm head. Daniel, she whispered after the man in the Bible who survived the lion's den. Daniel, Kame believed, was a man of great courage. Too soon, her son would have a chance to live up to his name. Daniel Inouye was the first of four children, children who grew up tremendously poor, but who rarely realized it. Everyone they interacted with was of the same economic status, and it mattered little if they went to class without shoes because no one else had shoes either.

Schools in Hawaii were segregated not by race per se, but by language. In 1853, before the Inouye family arrived, 97 percent of the population was Native Hawaiian. By 1924, when Daniel was born, only 16% of the population was Native Hawaiian. The result of the massive influx of foreign laborers from Japan, China, the Philippines, Portugal, and Korea who worked in the sugar and fruit industries. The schools, called English Standard Schools, had admission requirements, and children were expected to speak near-perfect English in order to attend. This made school out of reach for many children of immigrants. To give their children a better chance at attending school, Hayataro and Kame began speaking only English at home.

Daniel made it through elementary school and went on to high school, where he learned that only English at home. Daniel made it through elementary school and went on to high school where he learned that he loved U.S. history. It was full of adventure and human progress. It was full of adversity and people who overcame it. He learned to play the saxophone and took a Red Cross first aid class, eventually teaching first aid lessons all over the island.

He joined the ROTC band at his school and on December 6, 1941, he bolted out of the dance in an effort to make it home before his 10 o'clock curfew. The next morning, Daniel's boyish face would no longer stare back at him in the mirror. What he saw instead was a young man hardened by what he had seen, a face that was courageous despite extraordinary adversity. For that morning, December 7, 1941, bombs would rain down on Pearl Harbor didn't come out of nowhere. It was actually born from a long conflict between Japan and China. In the early 1930s, Japan was suffering an economic recession, not unlike the one that plagued the United States and other countries

during the Great Depression. Looking for a way to bolster their economy and expand their land control, Japan set its sights on the region of Manchuria, which had natural resources like coal, minerals, and agricultural products. But invading China to take control of the region would be seen by the world as an act of war. To get around this, two Japanese army men staged a foe attack. An attack they could blame on the Chinese in an effort to justify an invasion. They placed explosives near some train tracks, tracks that were operated by a private Japanese company.

This caused a small explosion, but not one that did extensive damage. In fact, a scheduled train passed by the site on the slightly damaged track not 10 minutes later and no one was hurt. But the staged event gave Japan the opening they wanted. They blamed Chinese nationalists for the incident, using the explosion as an excuse to retaliate and invade the Manchuria region. The morning after the explosion, the Japanese army opened fire on the Chinese garrison nearby as a response to the alleged Chinese attack on the railway. The Chinese troops were outmatched against the more experienced Japanese. When the fighting stopped, over 500 Chinese soldiers had been killed,

while Japan lost only two. It took the Japanese army only a few short months to take control of the entire region. The Chinese army was untrained and unprepared, and they did not have the resources to resist the Japanese. This is Carry the Fire. I'm your host, Lisa Laflamme. Carry the Fire, a podcast by the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation featuring inspiring personal stories about what happens when world leading doctors, nurses, researchers, and their patients come together to ignite breakthroughs.

Carry the Fire launches Monday, January 27th, wherever you get your podcasts. True Crime fans will love Crime House True Crime Stories, a Crime House original podcast. Every Monday you'll experience the most notorious true crime cases from that week in history, all linked by a common theme. From serial killers to disappearances to unsolved murders and so much more. Follow and listen to Crime House True Crime Stories, an Odyssey podcast in partnership

with Crime House Studios, available now an Odyssey podcast in partnership with Crime House Studios, available now on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. While the U.S. was not happy about the invasion, President Herbert Hoover was hesitant to do much about it. Instead, the U.S. Secretary of State Henry Stimson wrote the Stimson Doctrine, which was basically a set of diplomatic notes sent to both China and Japan. The gist of the Stimson Doctrine said that the United States did not recognize any changes that Japan was making in China that would alter our access or ports or our ability to trade with China or other Pacific territories. The United States had a tremendous love affair with China at this time.

This is author and historian Craig Nelson, who has written extensively about the region. We sort of viewed the Chinese as being little brothers to us, that they were struggling against the Japanese the way we had struggled against the English, and that they were on their way to establishing a republic like us. And part of this was because Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Delanos, made their money in China. And partly it was because Henry Luce, the head of Time and Fortune and all these important magazines had spent a childhood of missionary in China. Henry Luce was an American magazine tycoon who founded Time and Life and Fortune at Sports

Illustrated and was undoubtedly one of the most influential Americans of the 20th century. And Henry Luce was born in China. His parents were missionaries in the coastal province of Shandong, and Henry spent his entire childhood there. His experiences in China influenced his image of the country, and Henry Luce used his media empire to advance his agenda on a number of global issues, like U.S. policies towards Asia. Luce became a vocal proponent of the idea that the United States needed to do something about the Japanese occupation of China.

He organized aid groups to form United China Relief, which raised millions of dollars in donations from Americans to help the Chinese fight back against the Japanese. By July of 1937, Japan had expanded its forces in China to an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 men, and stationed most of them along the railways, which gave Japan control over the transportation of materials and resources.

There had been many small skirmishes between the Japanese and Chinese along an important rail line that connected Beijing with the port of Tianjin. But it had recently begun to subside until one summer evening on July 7th, when a Japanese soldier was absent during military drills. The soldier's commander demanded that they be allowed to search inside the nearby town of Wanping, which was ringed by a wall. The townspeople in the Chinese army stationed there refused to let them inside.

Tensions were high. The Chinese army sent off warning shots to the Japanese army, which further escalated the situation. And soon, the missing Japanese soldier was found somewhere else. But the damage had been done, and reinforcements began to arrive on both sides. Even when a ceasefire was declared the next day, the battle continued. The Japanese commander general ordered his forces to shell the town, and while the Chinese forces held out for a few days, in the end, they were forced to retreat. The clash, called the Marco Polo Bridge incident, is generally regarded as the start of the

military conflict that was waged between Japan and China from 1937 to 1945. Some historians even consider July 7, 1937 as the alternative starting date for World War II. We commonly use September 1st, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland as the start of the war, but Japan's war on China set off many dominoes in the East and had far-reaching consequences. Japan's war crimes in China were rampant and widespread.

They had mass killings. They had concentration camps. They used living people as targets for bayonet practice. They performed medical experiments just like Mengele and the Nazi camps. They had an entire bio-oweapon operation going on in Nanjing, the northern part of China. They blanketed them with poison gas, and it's estimated that they killed something like 10 million Chinese. On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army entered what was then the Chinese capital city of Nanking. Eyewitness reports by American missionaries and military officers, diplomats, and foreign correspondents describe a range of atrocities committed by the invaders.

They killed POWs, disemboweled and beheaded Chinese citizens and, according to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, raped an estimated 20,000 Chinese women and girls and murdered more than 200,000 people. One Japanese veteran of the invasion later said, There are really no words to describe what I was doing. I was truly a devil. The United States continued to criticize Japan, but they still hesitated to move forward with any economic sanctions or other repercussions. The primary goal remained safeguarding its own national interests in China.

It wasn't until Japanese forces took aim at French Indochina with the goal of capturing oil-rich areas of the East Indies, that the United States finally acted. Indochina currently comprises five countries, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. And in the spring of 1941, much of the region was controlled by France. Germany and Japan were already part of the Axis powers after they had signed a treaty in September of 1940. In 1941, Japan sent 30,000 troops into the city of Saigon and its forces to a naval base

in Vietnam about 800 miles from the Philippines, which was then a U.S. Commonwealth where American troops were stationed. The U.S. predicted, rightly, that Japan was setting their sights on an invasion of the Philippines. The United States finally decided it was time to take economic action against Japan. On July 26, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an executive order that froze Japanese assets in the United States and placed an embargo on scrap metal, oil,

and gas. An embargo is an official ban on trade or other commercial activity with a particular country. This is John Bailey speaking from the CBS newsroom in New York. Here is the Far East situation as reported to this moment. The Japanese have attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and our defense facilities at Manila, capital of the Philippines. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor from the air and all naval and military activities on the island of O'ahu, the principal American base in the Hawaiian Islands.

A second air attack has been reported. This one has been made on the Army and Navy bases in Manila. A naval engagement is in progress off Honolulu with at least one Black enemy aircraft carrier in action against the Pearl Harbor defenses. The planes are officially described so far as unidentified in these messages, although later reports that have come in from the press associations definitely identify at least two of these planes as carrying the emblem of the rising sun, the emblem of Japan. The Japanese had an idea of the United States as being people who were lazy and cowardly and only in it for money. They literally had the idea that all of us looked like monopoly banker people that were

all like sitting there, only engaged in the world to make money. So if they did this terrible strike, they were convinced that you could terrify the United States into giving up entirely on coming after the Japanese. The median age of the soldiers and sailors at Pearl Harbor was 19, meaning that a lot of people there were 16, 17, 18 years old. All of the officers were living on the land. They all had apartments and housing on the land. And it were these little kids that were on the ships when the attack actually came.

So when you hear famous stories of Pearl Harbor that one sailor tried chasing after the zero attack planes on a bicycle and another one tried throwing kitchen utensils at them. Well, if you think it's 17-year-olds, it all makes sense. It was a Sunday, so Americans didn't work on a Sunday, and they did it at dawn, so no one was up yet. And it was really a harbor full of little kids.

Children like Daniel Inouye. They were going to meet the most powerful fighters in Asia, and no one believed it was coming, and they couldn't imagine it. And it was just devastating how much they were able to destroy so fast. In fact, the Japanese couldn't believe it. They looked at what had happened. They had destroyed so many ships that they couldn't launch a third attack because so many things were on fire and there was so much smoke going up that they couldn't see it. The water was on fire. You would jump off the ship to get out of it into the water but then come up and the oil had leaked over all the water so the water itself was on fire.

Of course the Arizona is the most famous one that this happened to. But also there's a spectacular picture of the Shaw that's exploding because the Japanese bombs have penetrated into its storage for where it stored its own munitions. The civilian casualties were pretty low, 2,400. It was pretty much all military because it was so concentrated there at that time. President Roosevelt had just been in a meeting when he received the news that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. The secretary of the Navy burst in and let him know that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor and that more than 2,000 Americans were dead.

FDR had been working for weeks to negotiate some kind of peace in the Pacific. And now it was clear. None of it had worked. FDR said, quote, it was just the kind of unexpected thing that the Japanese would do, end quote. And at the very time they were discussing peace in the Pacific, the Japanese were plotting to overthrow it. The White House became a flurry of activity. FDR and his advisors spent the rest of the afternoon and late into the evening gathering

reports from Hawaii and planning the next steps. The night of the Pearl Harbor attack, Eleanor Roosevelt had already been scheduled to address the nation as part of her weekly broadcast. So it was her voice that Americans heard first. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm speaking to you tonight at a very serious moment in our history. The cabinet is convening and the leaders in Congress are meeting with the President. The State Department and Army and Navy officials have been with the President all afternoon.

In fact, the Japanese Ambassador was talking to the President at the very time that Japan's airships were bombing our citizens in Hawaii and the Philippines and sinking one of our transports loaded with lumber on its way to Hawaii. Whatever is asked of America, she said, we shall accomplish it. We are the free and unconquerable United States of America. Members of Congress met with FDR until after midnight. As the congressmen departed, a small crowd gathered outside the White House and began to sing, their voices raw and tearful under the dark sky. It wasn't the Beautiful. The next step for FDR,ressing Congress and asking for a declaration of

war against Japan. Roosevelt dictated his speech to his secretary, Grace Tully, and while we know it now is one of the most famous speeches made by a US president, it did go through some draft changes. Originally, Roosevelt had Grace write down the phrase, a date which will live in world history, which was later amended to the more reverberating, a date which will live in infamy. Shortly after noon on December 8th, FDR addressed Congress.

The rest of the country was glued to their radios. Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. And it concluded six minutes later. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us God. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan A state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire. Before the day was through, Congress approved a joint resolution declaring war on Japan. Roosevelt addressed the nation again on December 9th during a radio fireside chat

saying in part, we are now in this war. We are all in it, all the way. Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. Hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounded up nearly 1,300 Japanese American community and religious leaders, arresting them without charging them with a crime and freezing their assets. The FBI searched the private homes of thousands of Japanese-American residents on the West Coast, seizing items that were considered contraband, like shortwave radios. Suspicion of Japanese-Americans increased. West Coast newspapers, military leaders, and political figures, including then California

Attorney General Earl Warren, all said, quote, there was no way to distinguish loyal Japanese Americans from the potentially disloyal Japanese Americans. Away from the West Coast, politicians in cities and states were also beginning to make public statements. Idaho's governor, Chase Clark, was particularly vicious, publicly saying, quote, a good solution to the Jap problem in Idaho and the nation would be to send them all back to Japan and then sink the island. FDR's military advisors recommended removing people of Japanese descent, both immigrants and U.S. citizens from the West Coast, as a safeguard against the potential for espionage and sabotage.

Roosevelt had shown a lifelong hostility towards people of Japanese ancestry. Greg Robinson, who is the author of By Order of the President, writes, FDR had a long and an unvaried history of viewing Japanese Americans in racialized terms, that is, as essentially Japanese in their identity and emotional allegiance. The Office of Naval Intelligence kept tabs on Japanese communities as early as 1936, and Roosevelt escalated it from there by ordering lists of Japanese Americans in Hawaii to be recorded just in case they ever needed to be rounded up in an emergency. And in 1940 Congress enacted the Alien Registration Act

which required adult resident aliens to register annually with the government. Hayataro and Daniel Inouye walked out the door of their small home and into a world that was forever changed. They saw not the white smoke of practice drills in the harbor, but the black smoke of a real attack. Above them, three planes, silver with red dots on the underside of the wings. Fools! Hayataro screamed at the planes.

Fools! The Red Cross called, asking for Daniel's urgent help providing first aid. They'll kill you, his mother cried. Hayataro put his hand on his wife's arm. Let him go," he said. Daniel was 17, and it was he who picked up the first civilian dead in the Pearl Harbor attack. An elderly neighbor had been mistakenly hit by U.S. anti-aircraft shrapnel. Daniel found another young woman holding a baby, both of them gone.

With the courage of men twice his age, Daniel helped open a medical clinic and a morgue at an elementary school, and for the next five days, he barely slept. He rescued a woman whose lower legs had been blown off, rendering her unable to walk. He sifted through the rubble of burned-out buildings, recovering body parts and looking for survivors. He did his best to get all of a person's corpse into one box. For his work as part of the now activated Civil Defense Command, Daniel was paid an astounding to him sum of $125 per month. He was still attending high school, so in the months that followed the attack, he went to classes during the day, slept for two hours before dinner, and then worked overnight from

6 p.m. to 6 a.m. at the aid station. While Daniel was manning the first aid station on Oahu in 1942, Norman Mineta was just a boy of 10. He loved baseball and boy scouts and his parents were deeply involved in their Methodist church in the Bay Area of California. The first generation of Japanese immigrants called themselves issei, or first generation, and their children were nesei, or second generation. Both Norm and Daniel were part of this nesei generation, born American citizens. In January of 1942, Norm's father sat his children down and said, I don't know what's going to happen to your mother and me, but just remember,

all of you are U.S. citizens and this is your home. There is nothing anyone can do to take this away from you. A few weeks later, with a flick of his pen, FDR signed Executive Order 9066. And six weeks after that, men with guns were at the door of Norm's home. I'll see you again soon. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. I'm your host and executive producer, Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buckparks.

And our audio producer is Craig Thompson. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or a review or sharing our new series 9066 on social media? All of these things help podcasters out so much. I'll see you next time. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy!

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