Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Resilience: The Fear of What Comes Next

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Today, on Resilience, we explore what happened when Japanese Americans were told they were free citizens once again. Given only a train ticket and twenty-five dollars, the incarcerated did not know what awaited them once they left. Would they be able to return to their West Coast homes and communities? Or perhaps it would be easier to make a fresh start in a new city. But who would give them jobs? Were there people willing to help an entire population of people who had been, for so long, vilified by their neighbors, the media, and the government? Kimi Cunningham Grant joins us again to read from Silver Like Dust. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to the 11th episode of Resilience. As World War II came to an end, camp officials and the military police began to empty out the incarceration camps. Japanese Americans who had spent three years shut away behind barbed wire fences felt uneasy. Given only a train ticket and $25, the incarcerated did not know what awaited them once they left. Would they be able to return to their West Coast homes and communities? Or perhaps it would be easier to make a fresh start in a new city. But who would give them jobs? Were their people willing to help an entire population of people who had been for so long vilified by their neighbors, the media, and the government? So today, let's explore what happened when Japanese

Americans were told they were free citizens once again. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Even before Germany and Japan officially surrendered in September of 1945, the signs were pointing to the end of the war. At many of the incarceration camps, regulations were being lifted or at least relaxed. Often young Nisei were allowed to come and go from camps with more regularity. An army volunteer incarcerated at Topaz explained, after you volunteered for the army, you could go out anytime. You just tell them you want to go at a certain date and you can go. My fiance was allowed to go because she was going to go to a school and she was accepted. As long as you could get room and board as well as your tuition, then you were allowed to go out.

Those were the two groups that were able to get out. At the camps, Nisei were encouraged to join the army or to leave and look for jobs in nearby cities. After Kimi Cunningham Grant's grandmother got married, she and her husband shared a small space together in the barracks at Heart Mountain. Here's Kimi reading from her book, Silver Like Dust. My grandfather began dreaming of life after Heart Mountain. I don't think we should return to California, he announced one day. Obachan looked up from her position on her cot. She was sewing herself a smock for later in her pregnancy, one of her two maternity shirts.

She'd bought the fabric, a soft yellow calico cotton, at the Heart Mountain dry goods store. Because it won't be the same, you know, my grandfather continued. People won't want us there. They never have. And if you thought it was bad before, imagine how it will be when the war ends. Plus, he added, pausing, we need to get out on our own. Start life on our own terms, the two of us. Obachan said nothing. While she desperately longed to return to her old home and old life, to the way things were, the house on Pico Street with Papa's camellias, the buzz of shoppers, the thick smell of shoyu in Little Tokyo, part of her must have realized that the life she had known before the war would never return.

Many Japanese Americans felt the same way. They wanted to return home, but they knew it would be difficult. They knew it might be easier to start fresh somewhere else. And once the war was officially over, Executive Order 9066 lapsed as the government could no longer claim there was a threat to national security. After the war, the objective of the War Relocation Authority changed. They were no longer overseeing camps, so they turned to another goal. And their goals were this, dispersing the Japanese American population widely across the country and discouraging them from living in insulated communities.

And as I mentioned earlier, if incarcerees could demonstrate their loyalty via signing up for the army or proving acceptance to a university or receiving an offer of employment and housing, they were eligible for indefinite leave from camp. They were not, however, allowed to return to Military Area 1 on the west coast of the United States. The War Relocation Authority began to print and distribute promotional brochures and pamphlets to entice Japanese Americans to resettle in different cities like Chicago or Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Detroit, or New York. Imagine today the United States government trying to print brochures telling Italian Americans should come settle in St. Louis, Missouri. That same concept translated to modern day might seem ridiculous, but that's exactly what was happening in 1945.

They couldn't stop Japanese Americans from heading back to the West Coast totally, but they tried to influence them to move somewhere else. Some people, especially the Issei, move somewhere else. Some people, especially the Issei, resisted leaving camp until they were forced to do so. And it wasn't because they loved living. Their conditions were deplorable. But it was safer to them than the unknown. They had no money. They had no home. They had nowhere to go. And they remembered and felt the incredible racism and discrimination they had faced when they were living in their West Coast communities before they were incarcerated. Eventually, by March of 1946, six months after the end of World War II, every Japanese incarceration camp in the United States was closed.

Some people were able to return home. For example, Mary Tsukamoto, who later became the first Japanese-American teacher in California's Elk Grove School District, and her husband and daughter Marielle returned to Florin, California to their grape farm. Their farm had been cared for by a man named Bob Fletcher when they were gone. He was an agricultural inspector who quit his job and cared for the grape farms of Japanese Americans while they were incarcerated. And you'll remember from previous episodes, we talked about how successful many Japanese Americans were in the agricultural industry, particularly in California.

Bob Fletcher managed 90 acres of farmland for three families. And while they were incarcerated, he paid down the mortgages and taxes on the farms in order to keep them afloat. He was told he could keep any extra profits, but he only kept half and set aside the rest for the families when they returned. The Tsukamoto family moved back into their home and housed three to four other families with them in their house until the other families got on their feet. Mariel Tsukamoto said, I remember three or four families living with us until they could get settled and my dad would have them help on the farm.

We would pool all of our resources and women would take turns cooking. I remember a lot of people. We would literally sleep on the floor with a blanket and the children slept in the hallway. I think there must have been 14 to 15 people living in a tiny two-bedroom house. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs.

Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's my girl in the studio! guests and lots of laughs. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. and wherever you get your podcasts. were badly overgrown and the people they had asked to care for their valuables or businesses had long since abandoned them. Issei who had worked for decades to cultivate a profitable profession for themselves were forced to rely on charity for help and they found themselves taking jobs as janitors or gardeners or other low-wage positions on which it was difficult to support a family.

And it wasn't like because the war ended that people's latent racism disappeared overnight. Signs began to pop up all over businesses along the West Coast saying, Japs not wanted. At schools, Japanese American children were not allowed to participate in sports or other activities with white children. And even the heroic men of the 442nd were immune. Decorated Captain Daniel Inouye of the famous infantry stopped in San Francisco to get a haircut. And even in his military uniform, he was turned away and told, you're a Jap and we don't cut Jap hair. Captain Inoue, by the way, lost an arm during the war and received a Congressional Medal of Honor.

And then he went home to Hawaii to practice law. And when Hawaii became the 50th state in 1959, he became one of its first representatives in the U.S. Congress and then became elected to the U.S. Senate several years later, meaning that he had been elected to Congress by some of the men who had once supported the executive order to imprison him. In the 1970s, Senator Inouye came to national attention as a member of the Senate Watergate Committee. And in the 1980s, he was the chairman of the Senate Iran-Contra Committee. He was the Senate's President pro tempore from 2010 until his death in 2012. President pro tempore is a job in the Senate in which it is somebody's job to act as the official head of the Senate if the Vice President is ever not there, which for a lot of the day and it was boring for them. They didn't really have anything to do. Now vice presidents do other things and they mostly visit Congress when there is a tie-breaking vote. Otherwise, some of those duties fall to the Senate majority leader or the president pro tempore of the Senate. In 2013, Senator Inoue was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

And he is the first and only United States Senator who has received both the Medal of Freedom and the Medal of Honor. While Japanese Americans endured the hardship of starting over from scratch, the post-war economy helped. It was flourishing and it kept the demand for labor, goods, and services at a high. Additionally, after the war, the West Coast saw an increase in minority populations migrating to the area, especially Mexican Americans, and Japanese Americans no longer stood out as much as acceptance of minority groups began to grow. So again, it wasn't like the racism completely went away, but the need for laborers superseded exclusionary labor practices. Another way to say that was, we need workers more than I need to try to exclude you. Although many Japanese Americans were beginning to find work,

housing continued to be a significant issue for many people. Prior to the war, approximately 36,000 Japanese Americans resided in Los Angeles County. People slowly started to move back. The government estimated that by the fall of 1945, about half, 12,000 to 15,000 people would return to LA. There was a housing shortage before the war, and that was not alleviated after the war. New migrants to the city, GIs returning home, influx of Japanese Americans coming back, all of these things contributed to the housing shortages in Southern California. So the government set up temporary housing and many returning Japanese Americans were forced to live in hostels, hotels, and in various trailer

installations. Additionally, racial housing regulations continued to put restrictions on where Japanese and other people of color could rent or purchase homes. City organizations did what they could. Churches, community centers, and Japanese language schools housed people and provided things they needed to get back on their feet. In late October of 1945, Kimiko Kami and her 13-year-old son, Harold, went by the nickname Hal, left Heart Mountain to return to Los Angeles. They were unable to reclaim their house next to the laundry business that the family had operated in Hollywood before the war. And instead, their final destination became a temporary trailer installation operated by the federal government. The trailer felt like anything but home, not just because of its

temporary nature that felt a little like the barracks at Heart Mountain, but also because Kimiko and Hal were separated from the rest of their family. A few months before Kimiko and Hal departed for Los Angeles, Thomas, Kimiko's husband, and Albert, her oldest son, left Heart Mountain without them. Albert was a high school senior and he left to finish his final year at Hollywood High School. He went to school and did chores for a family in Hollywood in exchange for room and board, and Thomas left for the Pacific Northwest where he got a job with the railroad. Kimiko and Thomas intended to regain stability for their family, but it ended up taking a few years before the family was fully reunited. Kimiko's son Hal remembered that time. He said, eventually my mom

ended up as a live-in housekeeper for this Caucasian family in Sherman Oaks. So this Sherman Oaks family had a nice house and in the back of the house right next to the garage was a separate unit that had a full bath and sleeping quarters. So that was where my mother and I spent about the next year and a half. And eventually, Kimiko and Thomas were able to save up and purchase a new dry cleaning business. The family moved into the home behind it. Hal was able to attend Hollywood High School like his brother had before him. He played basketball and baseball, and he was eventually drafted into the army during the Korean War. And like Kimiko and Thomas, many formerly incarcerated Japanese Americans forged ahead,

determined to move on. Because Japanese Americans weren't just rebuilding their lives, finding work and housing, enrolling in school programs, they also had to start processing what had happened to them. But it was common to not talk about it. People who had been incarcerated kept their experience in the camps a secret from even their own younger family members. They didn't want to pass on the painful memories. The Japanese term shikata ganai translated to, it cannot be undone. Here's Professor Banai speaking about the generational trauma and her mother's silence. And then after she died, we found in her room a box full of memorabilia from camp that she had never told any of us about. Dance cards and albums and all of these different things.

And so even though she knew that this was something that we were really involved with, she had never shown that to us. And so there was a silence that makes me really, really sad. The loss of our Japan towns and our community endures. You can go, for example, here in Seattle, you can find a map of what the international district looked like before the war. And there were all of these Japanese businesses. And now they're not there. Before the war, they said something like 70% of the stalls at Pike Place Market were run by Japanese American farmers. And they were all gone.

And so I think that there are enduring legacies of the incarceration. It will never come back again. I mean, something as small as there's this thing called manju, they're little rice cakes. We're losing all of the shops. They're closing one by one. And those things mean a lot to me, but it's a loss of culture. The loss of language.

My parents didn't want to teach us Japanese. You know, we didn't learn Japanese. And shoot, that would have come in so handy for me as I was growing up. But I think that there was a real movement to become less Japanese, to assimilate and to move away from the culture. All of those are, I think, enduring losses. enduring losses. And I say that though, also mindful of the wonderful culture that I've also inherited as well. We lost a lot of that, but a lot of it I know still lives in me. I think it's so terribly important that my children learn about this. Hal remembered spending his time after incarceration trying to blend in as much as he could.

When he was an adult, he grew more curious about the history that he had lived firsthand. After he retired from his 30-year teaching career, he heard about the creation of a Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. He went to a meeting in 1990 and immediately got involved. When it opened its doors in 1992, he had already spent two years donating his time there. Hal was eventually recognized with a Halo Award from the Japanese American National Museum in 2020 at age 88 after 30 years of volunteering there. In a 2019 interview, Hal said of his time volunteering, it changed me because now I feel like I'm a lot more Japanese American, whereas before, I thought I was probably just American. And when I was growing up, I was much more American than Japanese. I believe I'm much more Japanese than many years ago. And while many Issei and Nisei who were incarcerated

chose to move on, to bury their experiences and raise their own children to be as assimilated as possible, it was the next generation called Sansei who were raised in the 1960s and 1970s who would ultimately push for the conversation about Japanese-American incarceration to continue, both at home and in front of Congress. both at home and in front of Congress. Join me next time when we talk about what Congress ultimately decided about Japanese-American incarceration. Thanks for joining me today. I'll see you again soon. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. If you enjoyed this episode,

would you consider leaving us a rating or review or sharing a link to it on your social media? All of those things help podcasters out so much. Here's Where It Gets Interesting is written and researched by executive producer heather jackson our audio engineer is jenny snyder and it's hosted by me sharon mcmahon see you again soon you