February 1942:San Francisco Examiner Announces Exclusion Order
On December 7, 1941 (December 8 Japan time) the forces of Imperial Japan attacked the United States, Thailand and European possessions throughout Asia and the Pacific. All of these attacks were surprise operations carried out while Japan was both technically at peace and enjoying diplomatic relations with its victim countries. Over the course of the next two months Japanese forces made clear that in their wider war they would be no more bound by international law than they were in the war they had already been fighting in China for four years. They used a combination of atrocity, terror, and daring ingenious tactics to overwhelm and overrun the unprepared forces of the west, many of whose leaders had regarded the Japanese threat with open racial contempt.
In the span of just over two months the popular image of Japanese had gone from that of undersized, self-important children to that of invincible raging beasts. For resident alien Japanese in America and their American children the shift would have fateful and disastrous consequences.
Initially, the reaction toward the Nikkei (People of Japanese descent living in America) after Pearl Harbor was somewhat subdued. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, there were prominent calls for restraint. On December 8, the Los Angeles Times editorialized the Nikkei on the Coast were "good Americans, born and educated as such." In response to a question about the feasibility of the ethnic cleansing of the West Coast, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover replied that he thought it was both unnecessary and illegal. Moreover both his FBI (which had conducted illegal raids into one or more Japanese consulates before the outbreak of war) and Naval Intelligence had concluded by February that Japanese Espionage in America had effectively been destroyed. General John L. DeWitt, on whose recommendation the "evacuation" program would eventually be undertaken, at first dismissed talk of such actions as "damned nonsense", declaring that "An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen."
Nevertheless, the authorities were not naive about the possibility of subversive activities in their midst. They had been monitoring the immigrant communities of all possible hostile countries for years and quickly moved in to arrest those it thought might be potential sources of trouble. In addition to some 2,000 Nikkei they also arrested 14,000 Americans and resident aliens of German and Italian ancestry. Even this relatively measured approach created a climate of dread and uncertainty for some Nikkei families.
The Saitos of Aberdeen, Washington were one such family. Aberdeen, a small logging town on the West Coast of the Olympic Peninsula perhaps best known as the home of Kurt Cobain, had no other Japanese family. As a result, the Saitos were completely integrated into the local community and had very little contact with their ancestral culture. In part this was because Ransaku Saito, the head of the family, was rather atypical of Japanese immigrants to the United States. As the eldest son of a large land owner and village head as well as a former army officer, his future in Japan was financially secure. However, Ransaku fell in love with America and especially its ideals. When he decided to move to the US, he began his study of English by trying to understand the original English language version of the Gettysburg Address. He named his sons for American heroes: Lincoln, Morse and Perry (the last for Commodore Matthew Perry, who opened Japan to the world with a bluff of force) and forced them to memorize the Declaration of Independence and embrace the ideals it expressed.
Due to the racist immigration laws then in effect Ransaku could never become a citizen of his beloved adopted country, but his children, born in the United States, were automatically citizens and they were raised to love their country. However, this family, isolated from the larger Nikkei community and patriotic to the point of blindness became one of the first victims of the FBI's sweep in the initial days after Pearl Harbor. This may or may not have had something to do with one of their former neighbors in Aberdeen, but whatever the case, the effect on their lives was devastating. Fate was at least somewhat merciful in that Ransaku passed away before his beloved America was attacked by his homeland. However, that made things just a bit harder for those he left behind.
On the day of Pearl Harbor, Ransaku's widow, Natsu, was living with her children Dahlia (16) and Morse (15). Her eldest son, Lincoln was studying for the ministry in Japan and she had no idea what would become of him. Two days later she had more pressing things to worry about as she was abducted off the streets in the FBI round-up. She was held incommunicado for months, her two teenaged children having absolutely no idea where their mother was or if she was even alive. In order to deal with the situation, he second son, Perry elected to drop out of college to take care of his younger siblings. Six decades later Morse still wanted to know why the FBI had taken his mother from him when he was a boy and left him to ponder her fate for so long. He filed a freedom of information request and was eventually given a file of about one hundred pages. On almost every page aside from the words "Matsu (sic) Saito", every single word is blacked out. Every one. The FBI will still not reveal why they thought it necessary to abduct this woman without charge. It will not even hint at why they might have suspected her of disloyalty or, why if they did, they eventually approved her release from internment so she could teach Japanese to American military officers.
This episode would seem to suggest that the FBI and the US government more generally were erring well on the side of caution in their roundup efforts. Nevertheless, this relatively measured approach toward the Nikkei community did not last long. The primary reason for this was the utter devastation of smug racial conceits by the Imperial Japanese military in the opening days of the war.
At the time of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, many commentators compared the shock to something like that received when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The truth is that that shock was not even close to Pearl Harbor for despite the best efforts of Al Qaeda, they have been unable to duplicate their success for more than a decade. Japanese forces on the other hand, carried all before them for nearly six months. In just the weeks between Pearl Harbor and the issuance of Executive Order 9066 the Allies endured one calamity after another.
Guam fell on December 10th. The same day Japanese naval aviators sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and heavy cruiser Repulse, the cream of the British Pacific fleet. The garrison on Wake Island surrendered on December 23. Hong Kong fell on December 25. They occupied Manila without a fight on January 2. They captured Kuala Lumpur on January 11. On January 23 they captured the Australian base at Rabaul and began improving it for a drive further south. On February 15, Singapore, the possession Churchill had dubbed the "Gibraltar of the East" fell with the largest surrender of British personnel in history. Following their victory, they began a premeditated and largely indiscriminate slaughter of Singaporean Chinese, with a death toll estimated at between 5000 (Japanese Foreign Ministry) and 70,000 - 90,000 (former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew). Finally, on February 19 (February 18 Washington time) Japanese naval aviators, many of whom had been involved in the attack on Pearl Harbor, carried out a raid on the northern Australian port city of Darwin.
Humiliation of the West: Lt. General Arthur Percival surrenders Singapore. Winston Churchill referred to this as the "worst disaster" in British History.
Before Pearl Harbor: Political Cartoon By Dr. Seuss expressing the contempt most Americans felt toward Japan's military capacity. The Japanese fleet had sortied two days before this cartoon appeared. As Americans were to discover, they were packing a good deal more than pie when they did.
After Pearl Harbor: British cartoon reprinted in the New York Times Magazine in 1943. It reflects the fear and loathing Japan's initial victories inspired in the Allies, depicting Japan as a towering unstoppable beast.
With America and its allies suffering defeat after defeat at the hands of these monstrous Asian supermen, many began to look for a reason other than the obvious conclusion that we were being pummeled by an enemy we refused to take seriously. As racial resentments increased, many people took comfort from an American version of the Dolchstosslegende employed by German nationalists to explain away their defeat in the First World War. In this story, it was not American incompetence or Japanese ability that was responsible for our defeat. It was the treachery of the Nikkei. They had abused American tolerance and enabled their countrymen to inflict a humiliating defeat upon us. Such rumors had cropped up almost immediately after the disaster at Pearl Harbor, but they were given the weight of official sanction with the release in late January 1942 of the first of what would become an endless series of post-mortems on the disaster. This report that went out over the signature of Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts, alleged, without any supporting documentation, that Hawaii-based espionage agents, including Japanese-American citizens, had provided crucial aid to the Japanese fleet and made their overwhelming victory possible.
Two days after the release of this report, General DeWitt suddenly found himself reconsidering his earlier assertions about the Nikkei. He noted, "a tremendous volume of public opinion now developing against Japanese of all classes, that is aliens and non-aliens." By "non-aliens" he meant, of course, American citizens.
At this point, the activities of another person from Aberdeen, Washington began to weigh heavily upon DeWitt. Karl Bendetsen (born Bendetson), a truly bizarre individual of Jewish descent who changed his name and adopted the lineage of a different man in order to hide his own ancestry, who had, for a time, operated a law office just a few doors down from the store the Saitos had run before the war, had been preparing a report on the activities of the Nikkei on the west coast. It was, to put it bluntly, a combination of paranoid fantasies, gross distortions and outright lies.
At one point in his report, Bendetsen made much of the fact that one government raid of a Nikkei property had uncovered 60,000 rounds of ammunition, rifles, shotguns and maps, without ever noting that the property in question was a sporting goods store. Later DeWitt (a weak-willed man who was known to hold the views of the most passionate man that had spoken with him recently, and presumably was hearing quite a lot from Bendetsen at this time) asserted that there had been no fewer than 760 suspicious radio signals emanating from the west coast during the period after Pearl Harbor. When the Federal Communications Commission reviewed DeWitt's "evidence" they found that all of them, ALL of them, could be accounted for and there was nothing suspicious at all. Writing of the US Army's Western Defense Command, one of the technicians involved in the review wrote:
Frankly, I have never seen and organization that was so hopeless with radio intelligence requirements. the personnel is unskilled and untrained. Most are privates who can read only ten words a minute. . . . It's pathetic to say the least.
But, as historian David M. Kennedy wrote, "by this time the facts were no protection against the building gale of fear and prejudice."
Soon, influential figures in the media were calling for something to be done about the Japanese problem. Walter Lipmann wrote "Nobody's constitutional rights include the ride to reside and do business on a battlefield." Of course, the west coast was not then and never would be a "battlefield", but no one wanted to let little things like facts get in the way of a good hysteria. Westbrook Pegler, another influential journalist later wrote:
The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now, and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.
Even Doctor Seuss, a generally liberal and tolerant man, who had blasted Americans for their indifference to the suffering of foreigners, and produced scathing cartoons denouncing the negative effects of racial prejudice on the war effort, joined in the assault on Japanese Americans.
Dr. Seuss cartoon urging Americans to put aside prejudice and work together to end the war
Dr. Seuss cartoon urging that Japanese-Americans be treated as foreign hostiles. This cartoon appeared on February 13, 1942. Six days later President Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 authorizing the forcible removal of Japanese Americans and resident aliens from the West Coast.
Thus, despite what was, in retrospect, fairly obvious overkill in the roundup of Nikkei of suspected loyalty, the push to do something more, to, to put it bluntly, carry out the ethnic cleansing of America's west coast grew stronger and stronger until finally on February 19, President Roosevelt issued executive order 9066, an order that had been prepared for him by none other than the Saitos old Aberdeen neighbor, Karl Bendetsen.
For the Saitos, this order became something of a mixed curse. Though it meant that they, like all people of Japanese descent (including even the Moyer family in the next town, who, as the name suggests, were half-Anglo-American) would be forced to abandon their homes and pay their own way to concentration points with nothing more than what they could carry, it also meant that the FBI no longer had a reason to keep Natsu locked away incommunicado. Whether it was because they were aware that she would only be moved to a detention facility, or if they were finally satisfied that she represented no threat, they released her in time for her to oversee her family's trip to Olympia and eventual internment at Tule Lake concentration camp.
For those of you who don't know about the concentration camp system, Tule Lake was where they sent two classes of people: the folks from the Pacific Northwest and the hard cases, the Kibei. The Kibei were the youth that had been sent back to Japan to have a "proper" Japanese education. They were indoctrinated into the whole mythos of the Emperor and the divine land. They were, by and large, the small minority of Nisei who wanted to fight for Imperial Japan and they considered anyone who didn't to be a traitor.
Thus the Saitos were in a bad place. Some years ago I had the opportunity to meet Morse and spend the better part of a day with him. He recalled that at the time he went to Tule lake he spoke almost no Japanese. He was constantly bullied by the Kibei for being a traitor to the homeland. Still, he was one of the lucky ones. He was eventually rescued by a Christian group near Chicago that got him out and helped him to get an education. (The rule was that if you could get someone to take you in outside the "exclusion zone" of the west coast, then you were good to go. Turns out that only a handful of Christian groups were up to the task.) Moreover, it turns out that some influential people at Yale were really upset about the ethnic cleansing policies our government implemented and so Morse eventually got into Yale, despite a mediocre performance in high school.
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Natsu, whom the US government had interned and kept from her children for five months without allowing a single word about her fate, had the surreal experience of being asked by that government to prove her loyalty by serving it. Believe it or not, they asked her to be a teacher of the Japanese language to military officers. Can you imagine the gall? She told them that she could not. The problem was that because of the racist citizenship laws then in effect, no one born in Japan could naturalize as an American citizen. NO ONE. The upshot of that was that if she had taught in a military school, she would be subject to charges of treason in the only country that would then recognize her. So, rather than figure out how to give this woman citizenship, the military came up with another plan. They asked her if she would be willing to teach her native tongue at a local community college. She agreed.
It just so happens to have turned out that every single one of her students at the community college was a military intelligence officer. Still, she did it. They had given her the cover that she needed and she loved her adopted country. So she went ahead and did it. Her adopted country appreciated the deed so much that to this day they won't tell her son why they abducted her from the streets of Aberdeen, Washington.
The most ironic thing about the story of my friend Morse, is that he actually had the opportunity to attend a function at Morehouse College after MLK had been assassinated. MLK's father was in attendance and so was Earl Warren, whom most people remember as the Supreme Court Chief Justice who did more for the rights of black people than arguably any other SCOTUS chief in history. The thing is that he was also Governor of California at the time of 9066. He was one of the people who pushed it.
Morse actually confronted him on this (according to his testimony) and told him that for many years he wanted to punch him right in the mouth. According to my friend Morse, Warren told him "I can understand that. That was the worst mistake I've ever made."
The story of the Saitos is just one of the many of the Nikkei in America who were forced into camps for no reason but their race.
Executive Order 9066 (which, incidentally made no specific reference to Japanese ancestry) stood on the books until the presidency of Gerald Ford. During that entire time any given group of people could legally have been "evacuated" from their homes, deprived of their belongings and herded into camps in desolate wastelands as they waited for sanity to return.
Finally, in the 1970s and 1980s a movement to recognize the outrageous injustice of the internment got going and President Reagan signed a law that formally apologized and paid a modest compensation to those who had been interned.
Still the shadow of Executive Order 9066 hangs over us to this day. In the aftermath of 9/11 the execrable Michelle Malkin wrote a book defending the internment and calling for its use against American Muslims. North Carolina Congressman Howard Coble likewise sought to defend it, no doubt, with the possible applications of similar policies in mind.
In the decade since 9/11 Americans have watched, some with horror, some with indifference, some with contemptuous excitement, as the civil liberties and basic human rights of our fellow Americans as well as our enemies, have been eroded, ignored or abrogated. But so far, at least, we have not rounded up an entire group of people based on their ancestry. But, on this solemn anniversary, I think it prudent to remind ourselves that it could indeed happen again and that all that is stopping it is the fear of those who would do it that the American people won't stand for it. We must continue to keep that true. We must remember the ideals embraced by immigrants like Ransaku Saito must be applied universally or we shall find ourselves, once again betraying the very ideals that make us American in the first place.
This was a lesson that internee George Takei learned while he was behind the barbed wire fences of one of the camps. He recalls his father telling him:
Both the strength and the weakness of American democracy is that it is a true people's democracy. It can be as great as the people can be, but it can also be as fallible as people are. That just underscores the importance of all us to be actively engaged in the democratic process.
It is a lesson that we must never forget, nor the sacrifice of those who learned what happens when we do not.
George Takei recalling the lessons of internment
George Takei recalls his time in an American concentration camp.