Coercing Allegiance
Friday Book Club
Pay attention to your ghosts if you want to know a better age
~ Julian Saporiti (aka No-No Boy), Crystal City[1]
President Franklin Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy speech declared the existence of “a state of war…between the United States and the Japanese Empire” because of “the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan [on Pearl Harbor] on December 7, 1941” less than 24 hours earlier.[2] The first public report about the attack came in a Hawaii-based NBC radio reporter’s call to the network’s New York office while bombs were still exploding in the background. Within minutes radio stations throughout the nation were carrying the news. As John Okada wrote in the preface of No-No Boy:
The moment the impact of the words solemnly being transmitted over several million radios of the nation struck home, everything Japanese and everyone Japanese became despicable.
Within minutes after Roosevelt’s proclamation, young men were lining up at military recruitment offices throughout the United States.
One was Fred Korematsu, a 22-year-old from Oakland, California, who wanted to sign up for the National Guard and the Coast Guard. He was turned away; his name and the way he looked disqualified him. Korematsu was a Nisei, one of tens of thousands of second generation Japanese-Americans. His parents were Issei, first generation Japanese immigrants to the United States.
According to a short biographical sketch written by his daughter, after Korematsu was rejected for military service,
He underwent minor plastic surgery to alter his eyes in an attempt to look less Japanese. He also changed his name to Clyde Sarah and claimed to be of Spanish and Hawaiian descent.
Korematsu trained to become a welder in an Oakland shipyard, where he quickly moved up to become a foreman. But his attempted ruse did not hold up. He was
…suddenly fired from his job due to his Japanese ancestry…On May 30, 1942, he was arrested on a street corner of San Leandro, California and taken to San Francisco county jail.[3]
His “crime” was violating Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which empowered the Secretary of War (now called Defense) to exclude selected “residents” from “transportation, food, shelter, and until other accommodations as necessary…to accomplish the purpose of this order.” It was issued three months earlier, on February 19, 1942 – just 73 days after Pearl Harbor. The fearful riptide of irrational, xenophobic hate finally caught Korematsu in its pull.
Although Japanese Americans were never explicitly mentioned in the order, it referenced “December 7 and 8, 1941.” There was no mistaking for whom the order was intended.
Large numbers of Japanese immigrants started coming to the United States in the late 19th century. While prejudice and suspicion commonly greeted immigrants of varying ethnicities and national origin, what separated many Issei was the fact that many did not come with the intention to stay.
A widespread goal was to earn money and return to Japan. That, combined with a physically perceived “otherness,” often made their communities more insular than those of other immigrants. They often faceddiscrimination, summed up by the slur “Japs,” especially in western states. The California Alien Land Law of 1913 went so far as to prohibit any Issei from owning land.
American roots deepened among Nisei in the only home they knew – along with their respective third- and fourth-generation descendants, Sansei and Yonsei. Their aspirations were gradually distancing from those of their Issei parents. Still, economic and social realities didn’t make life easier despite being, by virtue of their places of birth, American citizens.
The Constitution made that clear, as did a Supreme Court decision in the late 19th century. Wong Kim Ark, born in the United States to Chinese immigrants, returned to the United States after visiting China when he was 21. Authorities in San Francisco tried to deny his reentry, arguing he was not a citizen. His legal challenge reached the Supreme Court in 1898.
Justice Horace Gray, writing for the 6-2 majority in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, cited the 14th amendment,[4] which
…in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States.
None of that mattered, however, after Pearl Harbor. An immediate national hysteria fueled widespread panic and fear of additional Japanese attacks. People of Japanese descent were immediately suspect, especially in western states.[5]
Executive Order 9066 granted unprecedented authority for the military to direct federal, state, and local police and legal personnel to indiscriminately round up and indefinitely detain anyone suspected of being Japanese. Ten concentration camps were hastily built in isolated, sparsely populated locations west of the Mississippi River. The camps were hastily constructed with drafty, wooden barracks that had dirt floors surrounded by barbed wire and armed guard towers with weapons facing inward.
As people were rounded up and summoned to appear at collection sites with little notice – much like Jews in Germany had been for years – their property and businesses were abandoned, destroyed, or, more often than not, paid for with pennies on the dollar or promissory notes never honored. Most had nothing but what they had on them. If they were “lucky,” with at least one suitcase.
By war’s end, more than 120,000 persons were interned, 60% of whom were American citizens. The benign-sounding, legal euphemism “Japanese evacuation” stripped Americans and legal residents of their constitutional rights and protections.
As World War II widened, those once denied serving in the American military were given the option to fight. Some in Europe, where their physical features would stand out and not be confused as possible enemies, others for intelligence services in the Asian theater.
Echoing the experiences of Black soldiers serving in segregated forces going back to the Civil War, Japanese Americans were among the most decorated and suffered much higher percentages of combat causalities as compared to white soldiers. And they came home to the same prejudice and disrespect they believed they were fighting against.
A newly created War Relocation Authority prepared a loyalty questionnaire to determine “friend” from “foe.” Only those who “passed” were considered for military service. Two questions were of particular importance:
No. 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?
No. 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the Untied States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?
Not a word about the Constitution. Many who answered no to the first feared being sent to fight Japanese relatives, in some cases, their own brothers.
Those answering “no” to both questions became known as no-no boys. Many could not reconcile how they and their families were being treated and then fight on behalf of the government inflicting the injustice they experienced. Others had philosophical or religious reasons grounded in pacifism.
Most were sent to formal prisons filled with convicted criminals, including murderers and violent social deviants. They were shunned by their oppressors, considered to be the lowest rung of each prison’s internal social hierarchy.
Nothing is more difficult, and nothing demands more character, as to find oneself in open opposition to one’s time and loudly say: No.
~ Kurt Tucholsky[6]
Fred Korematsu fell into a middle ground between answering the loyalty oath questions affirmatively and being a no-no boy. He was both “evacuated” and convicted of the crime of violating Executive Order 9066 on September 8, 1942.
He was convicted, without proof, of possibly being one of many – also never identified or proven – that he was possibly “radio-signaling enemy ships from shore, prone to disloyalty” [emphasis added] and was jailed due to “military necessity.” First held in an old horserace track in California, he was later sent to a concentration camp in Topaz, Utah.
He filed a court challenge. Korematsu v. United States made its way to the Supreme Court. The legal brief submitted by the United States included a quote from the congressional testimony of a manager of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association in part to justify the executive order:
We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons…We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man…If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we don’t want them back when the war ends, either.
The conviction was upheld by a 6-3 vote in 1944. Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black narrowed the legal questions to technicalities and semantics,
Regardless of the true nature of assembly and relocation centers – we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps, with all the ugly connotations that term implies – we are dealing with specifically nothing but an exclusion order. To cast this case into the outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented merely confuses the issue. [Emphasis added]
Dissenting opinions in notorious cases like Korematsu, Dred Scott, Plessy, and more recently, Loper, while immediately on the losing side, tend to be more significant seen with the scope of history. Such is the case with each of the three Korematsu dissenting opinions.
Justice Frank Murphy noted the majority’s reasoning…
…falls into the ugly abyss of racism…Justification for the exclusion is sought, instead, mainly upon questionable racial and sociological grounds not ordinarily within the realm of expert military judgment…drawn from unwarranted use of circumstantial evidence…No adequate reason is given for the failure to treat these Japanese Americans on an individual basis by holding investigations and hearings to separate the loyal from the disloyal, as was done in the case of persons of German and Italian ancestry…I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism…it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution.
Justice Owen Roberts was just as blunt:
I dissent, because I think the indisputable facts exhibit a clear violation of Constitutional rights…the case of convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp, based on his ancestry, and solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States….I need hardly labor the conclusion that Constitutional rights have been violated.
Justice Robert Jackson, who, a couple of years later presided over an international court in the Nürnberg trials of the top surviving Nazi officials[7] is as clear today as it was then, especially considering today’s political and legal environment:
Korematsu was born on our soil, of parents born in Japan. The Constitution makes him a citizen of the United States…here is an attempt to make an otherwise innocent act a crime merely because this prisoner is the son of parents as to whom he had no choice, and belongs to a race from which there is no way to resign. If Congress, in peacetime legislation, should enact such a criminal law, I should suppose this Court would refuse to enforce it…
But a commander…is carrying out a military program; he is not making law in the sense the courts know the term. He issues orders, and they may have a certain authority as military commands, although they may be very bad as constitutional law…A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency…
The courts can exercise only the judicial power, can apply only law, and must abide by the Constitution, or they cease to be civil courts and become instruments of military policy…I do not suggest that the courts should have attempted to interfere with the Army in carrying out its task. But I do not think they may be asked to execute a military expedient that has no place in law under the Constitution.
Korematsu’s criminal conviction was overturned in 1983, it applied to his case only. Subsequent constitutional case law has not specifically overturned the majority opinion in Korematsu.[8] Is it any wonder the Trump administration cites this case in part to justify its agenda?
John Okada from Seattle, Washington, was a young internee assigned to the Minidoka War Relocation Centerin southern Idaho shortly after Executive Order 9066 was issued. He said yes to the two loyalty oath questions and served as a translator of Japanese military communications. He never talked about his experiences with his wife and children.
In 1957, he completed a novel, No-No Boy. In the preface of a 1974 reissue, Japanese American novelist Ruth Ozeki wrote it was “among the first of what has become an entire literary canon of Asian American literature.” Unable to find an American publisher, the novel was issued by an obscure English-language publisher in Japan and was quickly forgotten.
Until a small group of young Japanese American authors found in the early 1970s. They convinced the University of Washington Press to republish it. It was too late for Okada, though. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1971 at age 47 thinking his book was a failure.
Although he was not a no-no boy himself, the story he tells unveils the deep scars and tensions experienced by an entire community of victims and survivors of the internment era that have never been fully healed or resolved.
No-No Boy describes the first days of Ichiro[9] Yamada’s return to Seattle after spending two years in a maximum-security prison and the two years prior in an internment camp. He answered no to both loyalty oath questions when he turned 18. No-No Boy is something of a Bildungsroman, defined by Merriam-Webster as “a novel that deals with the formative years of the main character, and in particular, with the character's psychological development and moral education.”
Ichiro is a young man with no money, status, and can’t find a purpose in life or the confidence that comes with it. One of the first people he encounters on the street after getting of the arriving bus is a friend of his youth, Eto. A former internee and war veteran, he is proud of his service, first assuming Ichiro is a fellow vet until it dawns on him, “No-no boy, huh?”
Ichiro wanted to say yes…He shook his head once, not wanting to evade the eyes but finding it impossible to meet him...and the eyes he didn’t have the courage to face were ever present. If it would have helped to gouge out his own eyes, he would have done so long ago. The hate-churned eyes with the stamp of unrelenting condemnation were his cross and he had driven the nails with his own hands.
“Rotten bastard. Shit on you.” Eto coughed up a mouthful of sputum and rolled his words around it: “Rotten, no-good bastard.”
After making his way home, the contradictions of his life came into starkly blurred focus. His Issei parents arrived from Japan more than 30 years earlier with the sole intention of earning enough money from the general store in the front part of their home to return one day.
Ichiro is a young man with no money or status, one who can’t find a purpose in life or the confidence that comes with it. After with his release from prison, he encounters various people as he tries to find a future for himself. For a post-war Japanese American, life was ever uncertain with narrow prospects, more so for a no-no boy.
Although Ichiro’s father has resigned himself to the reality of never returning to Japan, his mother’s belief in the dream becomes an insanity Ichiro can neither accept nor change. She believes news about Japan’s defeat is propaganda, convincing herself that letters from relatives describing the post-war squalor are part of an elaborate charade.
Ichiro’s younger brother, soon to be 18, shuns both his parents and older brother, intent on joining the military to atone for the shame he feels about both.[10] Ichiro’s best friend, Kenji, is a fellow internee who fought, lost part of his leg. He bides his time with combined stoicism and intent to make the best out of every minute of life, knowing what is left of his leg is rotting as doctors slowly cut away the remaining inches to ward off his inevitable death.
Ichiro meets Kenji’s father who explains how his neighbor’s son, who joined the army prior to Pearl Harbor, told of his experiences and the shame he felt
…to see his family which was in a camp enclosed by wire fencing and had guards who were American soldiers like himself. And how he had been present when the soldier bitterly spoke of how all he did was dump garbage and wash dishes and take care of the latrines. And the soldier swore and ranted and could hardly make himself speak of the time when the president named Roosevelt had come to the camp in Kansas and all the American soldiers in the camp who were Japanese had been herded into a warehouse and guarded by other Americans soldiers with machine guns until the president named Roosevelt had departed.
Ichiro encounters the spectrum of post-internment experience. He can’t escape one simple, obvious fact:
…when one is born in America and learning to love it more and more every day without thinking it, it is not an easy thing to discover suddenly that being American is a terribly incomplete thing if one’s face is not white and one’s parents are Japanese of the country Japan which attacked America…
But thoughts like these had limits, as Ichiro soon learned when in a nightclub enjoying the temporary escape of a drink with Kenji. A Black veteran enters the club predominantly filled with Japanese Americans gets kicked out, then
A Japanese beside Kenji shouted out sneeringly: “Them ignorant cotton pickers make me sick. You let one in and before you know it, the place will be black as night.”
“Sure,” said Jim Eng [owner of the bar], “sure. I got no use for them. Nothing but trouble they make, and I run a clean place.
When they leave, Kenji
…drove aimlessly, torturing himself repeatedly with the question that plagued his mind and confused it to the point of madness. Was there no answer to the bigotry and meanness and smallness and ugliness of people?
As Ichiro tries to find his place, he regrets his decision to be a no-no boy. Perhaps he should have said yes; there was no escaping prejudice either way. He might even have been lucky enough to be killed or have the confidence of an impending death sentence, like Kenji.
He tries to blame his situation on the insanity of his mother and the simple pliability of father. Yet the irrational hate he felt for both, he realizes, wouldn’t have changed a thing. No matter how much he tried,
There was no lie big enough to cover the enormity of his mistake.
After bringing Kenji to the Portland, Oregon veterans’ hospital, where he will die, Ichiro has a job interview in Portland that might get him out of Seattle to begin a new, anonymous life. But even a job offer from a sympathetic, “one in a million” white employer doesn’t seem right. He knows he can’t run from his past. He must find a way to reconcile with it, knowing he might never do so.
As Okada summed up Ichiro in a letter to his publisher in 1956, both the author and protagonist share the same unchanging obstacle.
America is the only home that he knows and there is some comfort in the thought that his own mistake was no more detestable than the mistake of the nation which doubted him in the moment of crisis.
When Okada died in 1971, his widow tried to get his papers and unpublished novel accepted by UCLA. Tragically, when they showed no interest, she burned them all in despair. One can’t even speculate about what treasures may have been lost forever.
No-No Boy is all that remains of Okada’s written legacy. One that thankfully lives on today.
Fred Korematsu, unlike Ichiro, found a way to make peace with himself: by never relenting, whatever the costs, to “Stand up for what is right!” After the war he moved to Detroit, met and married his wife, a native South Carolinian.[11]
They moved to San Francisco in 1949 to raise a son and a daughter. Korematsu remained a staunch civil rights activist for the rest of his life. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton in 1998. In the wake of September 11, 2001, he spoke forcefully against the discrimination of Muslim and Arab Americans. He died at age 86 in 2005.
In 2010, California declared January 30 as an annual celebration of his legacy, Fred Korematsu Day. His daughter Karen now leads the The Fred T. Korematsu Institute, “a national education advocacy organization committed to advancing racial equity, social justice, and human rights for all.”
My interest in the internment of Japanese Americans goes back to lectures from a constitutional law class I took in college. When I lived in California in the mid-1990s, my best friend and I drove from Los Angeles up the Pacific Coast, then across Yosemite National Park before turning south along the eastern Sierra Mountains.
Just past the turn, we sought out the site of the largest internment camp, Manzanar. It took a while to find the site because there was nothing but dry, wind-worn scrubland. Eventually we found only a historical marker stuck in the middle of nowhere. That’s all there was.
There seemed to be little interest in commemorating the site; it was quite a contrast to the concentration camp sites I had visited in Germany. Since then, it has been turned into a historical site, part of the National Park Service, with a replica of one the barracks and a museum. Other sites have also been preserved and commemorated.
In 2000, the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II was dedicated in Washington, DC. Located in a small, obscure triangular block bounded by Louisiana and New Jersey Avenues and D Street NW, just a couple of blocks from Union Station, it, almost as Manzanar once was, could easily be missed by passers-by.
To me, in a city defined by historical monuments, this memorial is the most touching. Its understated, solemn beauty is accentuated by a resounding bell, a large horizontal metal column that can be rung with the push of a lever, creating a low resonance gently felt in one’s bones. It is the only one that comes to mind that specifically commemorates an injustice of American public policy against Americans.
It came years before the dedications of the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of African American History & Culture, both of which are much more comprehensive, celebrating achievements as well as commemorating historical injustices. But if you are ever in the city, it’s well worth seeking out as a reminder of what happens when America betrays its most cherished principles and ideals.
With the Trump administration’s war on the truth poorly disguised as an aspiration to ban the teaching of “divisive concepts” from schools and public spaces, I cannot help but fear that these stories will never be known by future generations. We see the potential consequences every day now already.
[1] Crystal City at 18:43 of video here.
[2] The first bombs dropped on Oahu, Hawaii, according to differing sources, between 7:48-7:55 am local time, which would have made it a few minutes before 1:30 pm in Washington, DC (The time difference between Hawaii and the Eastern Time Zone in 1941 was 5 ½ hours. Today it is 6 hours). The last bombs were launched less than two hours later, at 9:45 am, 3:15 pm in Washington, DC. President Roosevelt began his speech declaring war against Japan on December 8, 1941, at 12:30 pm, which was 7 am in Hawaii. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941. Japanese diplomats in Washington, DC were supposed to deliver an official message to Secretary of State Cordell Hull shortly before military operations began. They were delayed by technical issues until 2:30 pm, minutes after Hull received the first reports from Hawaii.
[3] An act now being repeated throughout the nation by secret police authorized by the Trump administration.
[4] 14th amendment, Section 1: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” [Emphasis added.]
[5] Not unlike the emotion and fear immediately felt in the U.S. after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
[6] „Nichts ist schwerer und nichts erfordert mehr Charakter, als sich in offenem Gegensatz zu seiner Zeit zu befinden and laut zu sagen: Nein.“
[7] In the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremburg, Jackson’s fictionalized counterpart, Chief Judge Dan Haywood, was portrayed by Spencer Tracy, a role that garnered him an Academy Award nomination.
[8] Much like the survivors of the Holocaust in the two decades that followed WWII, most internees did their best to hide their experiences from the public. Even the best movie about greedy opportunists who benefitted from internment polices, Bad Day at Black Rock didn’t include a single Japanese-American actor (but it did have one of the best fight scenes in the history of cinema). Some former internees were elected to Congress most notably Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), who fought with valor in Italy, losing use of one arm. He sponsored legislation to give a national apology and grant minimal reparations of $20,000 per internee after more than 30 years, racism encountered by Japanese-Americans still exists.
[9] In an odd coincidence, the most decorated and revered baseball player of Seattle baseball fans also has the first name Ichiro. Native Japanese player Ichiro Suzuki played 12 years for the Seattle Mariners and is a member of Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame.
[10] A Japanese American who served with valor in World War I, who was sure his service would protect him from the insanity of internment strikes an eerie parallel with German Jews who fought in the same war and met an even worse fate than he would.
[11] From his daughter’s biographical sketch: “At the time, anti-miscegenation laws prohibited interracial marriage in states including California and South Carolina, but mixed-race marriage was legal in Michigan.”