Infamy (3 page)

“What is this book?” an agent asked.

“This is my parents’ New Testament in Japanese,” said Mary. “We are Methodists.”

In Petaluma, California, Jahachi Najima packed his suitcase after he heard that his friends, other prominent Japanese, had been arrested. His daughter, Irene, was at home when the FBI came, along with local police, in a long black limousine.

“Where’s your father?” one asked.

He was working on the ranch, his ranch. Irene went out to get him and when he came back to the house the FBI men immediately put him in handcuffs.

“Would you permit me to change my clothes?” he asked.

They took off the handcuffs and let him put on a business suit. When Irene asked where they were going, she got no answer. Irene and her mother spent days making phone calls and visiting jails to find Najima. They finally found him at the Presidio. After a few more days they were able to visit him. As they left he said, “This is war. We may never see each other again.”

Another “dangerous” person picked up after December 7, Edward Oshita, owner of a small factory making miso, left his house assuring his wife, Grace, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. This is America.” In Hood River Valley, Oregon, home to 130 American Japanese farming families, FBI agents arrived in town at 3:00 a.m. on December 8. They ransacked homes and took away a dozen community leaders, including Tomeshichi Akiyama, president of the local Japanese Society. His son George was in the United States Army, one of 3,188 Nisei serving in the armed forces the day before Pearl Harbor was attacked.

Barry Saiki, a senior at the University of California in Berkeley, watched as the FBI took away his father in Stockton. “Wait,” the old man said, handing his son an envelope. “You may need these.”

Inside was a small stack of U.S. war bonds.

*   *   *

The FBI roundup of first-generation American Japanese aliens, the Issei, was not unexpected and its lists were not particularly sophisticated documents. Hysteria about spies and saboteurs had been building on the West Coast and in Washington, D.C., for years. On August 1, 1941, the
Washington Post
had published a “Confidential report on Japanese activities in California.” The paper said, among other things, that Japanese consulates were forcing Issei and Nisei farmers to move near oil wells, instructing them to be prepared to attack them if war came; that 90 percent of Japanese fishermen were actually Japanese naval officers and seamen; and that cooks, butlers, and laundrymen were expected to “cripple vital utilities, bridges, and tunnels.”

There were stacks of reports like that in government offices, going back decades before Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded all Asian immigration by reinstating a 1790 naturalization law that reserved citizenship for “free white persons of good character.” During the 1924 debate, Ulysses S. Webb, California’s attorney general, testified before Congress, saying of Asians, particularly Chinese and Japanese: “They are different in color; different in ideals; different in race; different in ambitions; different in their theory of political economy and government. They speak a different language; they worship another God. They have not in common with the Caucasian a single trait.” Ten years after that, as political and economic relations between the United States and Imperial Japan were deteriorating, a secret State Department investigation concluded that if war broke out between the countries, “The entire [American Japanese] population on the West Coast will rise and commit sabotage.” In October of 1940, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox presented President Roosevelt with a fifteen-point program for what should be done if war with Japan came. The twelfth recommendation was: “Prepare plans for concentration camps.”

The reports reaching the president and his principal aides were totally and ridiculously false, but some of the same stories were circulating in newspapers and on radio. One set of stories in California journals said that Japanese and Japanese Americans were moving to surround ports and U.S. naval bases and Army Air Corps installations, along with defense plants.

What was true and was reported on the front page of the
Los Angeles Times
under the headline “Japanese Put Under F.B.I. Inquiry Here,” on November 13, 1941, was that Justice Department officials and FBI agents had been interviewing leaders of Japanese and Japanese American organizations since at least early October. They had taken truckloads of business records to look for donations to charities and other organizations back in Japan. Local officials in West Coast states had been doing the same thing for years. In Hood River Valley, Oregon, for instance, in 1937 Sheriff John Sheldrake deputized and paid white residents to spy on the valley’s Japanese families.

After the
Times
article appeared, the Los Angeles office of
Time
magazine reported, in a confidential and calm memo back to New York, “Southern California’s Japanese colony is on edge over the prospect of wholesale firings in the event of … war.” The memo went on to state that “most work as agricultural laborers or fishermen. In Los Angeles proper they are principally employed as gardeners or servants. They have all lived here for a long time … and the great majority are loyal.” But reasoned words in memos did little to stall the inflation of the number of names on the “suspicious persons” lists compiled by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

The FBI arrest lists were bolstered by names collected by Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Ringle of the Office of Naval Intelligence, who spoke Japanese and had obtained the membership rolls of the small American offshoots of the Black Dragon Society, a Japan-based group that was formed in 1901 to spy on Russia, Korea, and Manchuria before the Russo-Japanese War. He had also built his own informant network with the cooperation of the pro-American JACL. Most of the FBI names, the businessmen, clergymen, doctors, and editors, even martial arts instructors, were no more than what could have been, and often were, the patrons and donors at a Chamber of Commerce dinner. They simply disappeared on December 7 and the following days.

The FBI, with the approval of the Justice Department back in Washington, had made up so-called A, B, C lists. Those categorized “A” for unspecified reasons were immediately arrested and incarcerated. Fishermen who owned boats and radios, prosperous farmers and small merchants considered to have some influence in Japanese communities were on the “B” list. The “C” list was more random, including anyone who had made a donation to a Japanese organization or charity or a few who were denounced by neighbors and friends, both Caucasian and
Nikkei
.

The Reverend Fuji Usui of San Diego was on an “A” list. His daughter, Mitsuo, went to St. Mary’s Church in San Diego that Sunday morning, and while she was gone the FBI had searched the house, leaving it a mess. When she arrived home she found her mother crying in a corner, hysterical. “They took Papa!” her mother shouted. “They chained him and numbered him like an animal.”

Another “A” list Issei, Yutaka Akimoto, was an officer in two Japanese civic organizations in Stockton. Police and FBI agents came through the door of his house with leveled submachine guns. His twenty-one-year-old son, George, a college student, watched as the government men searched the house. Among the things they took was his mother’s Japanese knitting manual—knit one, purl two—thinking it might be a codebook. The next time the family heard from Akimoto, he was in a Justice Department camp in Bismarck, North Dakota.

The knock on the door of Sally Kirita in San Diego came in the night. The local sheriff and FBI agents took her father away without a word. It would be two and a half years before his family saw him again.

Nearby, the agents came for Margaret Ishino’s father. A junior at San Diego High School, Margaret watched as they searched the house. Her mother was in bed, having just given birth to Margaret’s brother, Thomas. An agent ripped the blankets and sheet off the bed to see if anything was hidden there. Her father, knowing friends had already been arrested, had packed a suitcase; the FBI took that as a sign he was a spy preparing to flee.

Those community leaders, Issei, were shipped to twenty-six Justice Department facilities, prisons, around the country. More often than not, their families had no idea where their husbands and fathers were being held or even whether they were alive. West Coast
Nikkei
—aliens and citizens—were stripped of civic leadership. Thousands of women and children were without means of support; their situation was made worse when Japanese aliens and Japanese Americans learned that their bank accounts had been frozen the day after Pearl Harbor.

*   *   *

Lieutenant Commander Ringle, whose intelligence reports had circulated in Washington, was possibly the American who knew the most about Japanese living in the country. Long before Pearl Harbor, the navy had assigned Ringle to check the security of naval bases in the three states bordering the Pacific Coast. Ringle, who had been attached to the United States embassy in Tokyo for three years, had a network of friends and local informants in Tokyo and in the Japanese communities of California, Oregon, and Washington. Those people, the American Japanese, helped him uncover a spy ring in 1941 organized by an Imperial Japanese naval officer named Itaru Tachibana, whose agents included Toraichi Kono, the valet of actor Charlie Chaplin. Tachibana was arrested and deported. Ringle also managed a secret April 1941 break-in at the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles, which involved bringing in a professional safecracker from San Quentin State Prison. What Ringle learned from papers in the consulate was that the Japanese reporting to Tokyo did not trust either Issei or Nisei, describing them as “cultural traitors,” and expected them to side with the United States in any war. The same distrust of American Japanese was expressed in four thousand so-called MAGIC cables between Tokyo and Japanese embassies and consulates in the United States, messages that were intercepted and decoded by the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service. On January 30, 1941, for instance, a cable on intelligence warned against using Japanese Americans or aliens. Instead, Japanese consulates in the United States were urged to recruit “communists, labor union members, Negroes, and anti-Semites.”

Ringle first served on the West Coast for a year in 1936 and 1937—in that year a magazine published by the University of California speculated that American Japanese might be “slaughtered on the spot” if war came. Ringle was then sent back to Japan. He was brought back to California in July of 1940. He felt he understood the American Japanese, and he liked them, but he was hardly sentimental about Japan or about the Japanese in America, including his friends and informants—most of whom saw themselves as patriotic Americans and willingly reported to him about the “disloyal” minority in their community. As the roundups began after Pearl Harbor, Ringle wrote to his superiors in Washington.

The entire “Japanese Problem” has been magnified out of its true proportion, largely because of the physical characteristics of the people. It should be handled on the basis of the
individual
, regardless of citizenship, and
not
on a racial basis.… It is submitted that the
Nisei
could be accorded a place in the national war effort without risk or danger, that such a step would go farther than anything else towards cementing their loyalty to the United States.… The opinion outlined in this paragraph is considered most urgent.

There were obvious danger points, Ringle said, but he estimated that at least three-quarters of the Nisei were actively loyal and the great majority of Issei were very old, very tired, and tended to be passively loyal. He also pointed out that one group, the
Kibei
, whose Issei parents sent them back to Japan for education, had to be interned and their loyalties questioned and tested. “These people, the
Kibei
, are essentially and inherently Japanese and may have been deliberately sent to the United States as agents. In spite of their legal [American] citizenship, they should be looked at as enemy aliens and many of them placed in custodial detention.”

Ringle was, however, appalled at the idea of mass evacuation and incarceration; he later noted with some grim satisfaction that, after “careful investigations on both the West Coast and Hawaii, there was never a shred of evidence found of sabotage, subversive acts, spying, or Fifth Column activity on the part of the
Nisei
or long-time local residents.” The phrase “Fifth Column” was first used in the Spanish Civil War by a Nationalist general, Emilio Mola Vidal, as four columns of troops were fighting their way to Madrid to overthrow the elected Republican government. Mola Vidal stated he expected support from secret Nationalists in the Spanish military and government offices—a secret “Fifth Column” that would provide information to the Nationalist forces and rise up as combatants if needed.

In the end, Ringle concluded that perhaps thirty-five hundred Japanese or Japanese Americans in the United States posed potential security risks.

That information was pretty much ignored by the navy, because naval authorities considered homeland intelligence an army matter, and so it never got to army intelligence. It did, however, get to President Roosevelt, who had a personal spy service—financed by a secret White House fund managed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson—which included some government officials, businessmen, and journalists who reported to him and to him only. One of FDR’s private spies was a Chicago businessman named Curtis B. Munson, who was dispatched to the West Coast by John Franklin Carter, a secret FDR spy who was a syndicated newspaper columnist under the name “Jay Franklin.”

Munson, who conferred with Ringle and with the FBI, wrote to Carter and the president as early as November 7, 1941, saying “99 percent of the most intelligent views on the Japanese were crystallized by Lt. Commander K.D. Ringle.” Summarizing all of the reports, Carter wrote to FDR: