The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (21 page)

From behind barbed wire in Crystal City as a teenager, Edison made speeches, urging young Japanese Americans to not give up on their country. “This internment is against our constitutional rights. We’re American citizens, and as American citizens we should not have been put into camps,” Edison told his fellow students. “If you were in Los Angeles, and you were taken into prison, and they found out that you were not supposed to be in prison, they would let you go and give you a letter of pardon. We need that pardon.”

With those words, Edison became the first Japanese American from inside an internment camp to ask for official redress. Edison believed that the way to prove his loyalty as an American was to claim his right—and the rights of other Japanese Americans—to challenge the internment of the Japanese and their children on the basis of race as un-American and unconstitutional.

The family of Alan Taniguchi faced similar disagreements. In the early 1920s, Alan’s father, Isamu, an immigrant from Japan, worked as a farmer on the San Joaquin Delta near Stockton, California. In those days, the delta farms were remote and inaccessible by automobile. The only access to the four-hundred-acre farm where Isamu grew tomatoes, melons, cauliflower, and other vegetables was by pack boats that plied the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers. In 1922, Sadayo, Isamu’s wife, pregnant with her first son, moved to a boardinghouse in Stockton owned by Isamu’s parents. Alan was born there, but his given name was not Alan. Sadayo named her son Yamato, an ancient name for the spirit or soul of Japan. A second son, Izumi, was born in 1926.

Isamu had a keen mind, a strong back, and skillful hands. As a boy in Japan, he was schooled in the art and philosophy of horticulture. As a result, his farming business in the United States prospered.
The family moved to Brentwood, halfway between Stockton and Oakland. Isamu and five other Japanese farmers started the Brentwood Produce Association, which built its own packing plant to process and ship produce directly to markets. In 1932, Isamu cross-pollinated two varieties of tomatoes, which were shipped by the Brentwood co-op to the East Coast market at favorable prices. While many Americans suffered during the Depression, the Taniguchi family prospered. Isamu’s success was the realization of a long-held dream.

After Pearl Harbor, the lives of the Taniguchis followed the predictable pattern. Around noon on March 7, 1942, all four members of the family, plus a farmer who was boarding with them, were gathered at the table for lunch at their Brentwood home. Two FBI agents arrived at the door. Isamu was not surprised. All of his other partners in the co-op had been arrested. Isamu’s suitcase was already packed. One of the agents was older, calm, and experienced. The other was young, with red hair and a spring-loaded temper.

The young agent pointed to the table, spread with a typical Japanese lunch of fish, rice, and assorted vegetables, and blurted, “This is why you’ll never be Americans. You are Japs and have to have Jap food.”

Isamu sat silent and still. His family followed his lead. But the boarder, a Japanese American, could not contain his anger. “You’re no different,” he shot back. “With your red hair and temper, you must be Irish. You eat your potatoes, cabbage, and corned beef. Does that make you less of an American?”

The older agent sent the other outside and finished the search himself. By then, Isamu and Alan had already turned all contraband items—shortwave radios, cameras, rifles, and swords—to the constable’s office. The agent found nothing. Wordlessly, Isamu picked up his suitcase and was taken to the county jail in Stockton. Alan, then nineteen and a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley, dropped out of school and came home to take his father’s place.

Isamu was granted the usual hearings, and the charges against him were unsurprising. On the farm, Isamu had an incinerator that he pulled behind a tractor to burn brush. In the hearing, Isamu was accused of sending smoke signals to the Japanese with the burning brush. In addition, FBI agents suspected Isamu of arranging six-foot-by-twenty-five-foot muslin sheets, used for protecting tomato beds from frost, in arrow shapes that were supposedly pointed toward military installations. He denied all charges.

Nonetheless, Isamu was classified a dangerous enemy alien, and the family was separated. After his arrest, he was taken to the Silver Avenue Detention Center in San Francisco, then to the Santa Fe Internment Camp, and subsequently transferred to the internment camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico. While Isamu was incarcerated in Lordsburg, on July 27, 1942, 145 issei prisoners arrived at the train station near the camp. Armed guards instructed the prisoners to walk the two miles to the entrance of the camp. Shiro Kobata, fifty-eight, had suffered from tuberculosis, and Hirota Isomura, fifty-nine, had a spinal injury that slowed his walk. Both men fell behind on the march to the camp. A guard, armed with a twelve-gauge shotgun, believed they were attempting to escape and ordered them to halt. When they kept moving, the guard took aim and killed them both.

The incident intensified Isamu’s sense of disillusionment. Always quiet, Isamu grew insular, and that summer he decided to request repatriation to Japan for himself, his wife, and his American-born sons.

By then, Sadayo, Alan, and Izumi were interned in the Gila River Relocation Camp in the desert of Arizona, where temperatures rose to 125 degrees in the summer and dropped to 30 degrees in the winter. Sadayo and her sons lived in a crowded barrack with communal toilets. The rules of the camp required all of the thirteen thousand internees to be in their barracks by nine with lights out by ten. Guards in sentry towers had orders to shoot anyone who approached within twenty feet of the fence.

Izumi, Alan’s younger brother, worked as a timekeeper for the
Block 66 mess hall, tracking the hours of the people who worked there. Mealtimes at Gila River were busy and chaotic, as thousands of people filed into the mess hall to eat food prepared by untrained cooks. Izumi and Alan referred to the food as “slop suey.” Worse than the quality of food was the loss of traditional Japanese family meals. Instead of gathering around a family table, they were crowded in a mess hall with thousands of others. Conversation was impossible, table manners forgotten.

On April 23, 1943, Izumi was in the mess hall when Eleanor Roosevelt arrived for a camp inspection, accompanied by Dillon Myer, national director of the War Relocation Authority. Eleanor was on a mission from FDR. Earlier that month, Roosevelt had received a letter from Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who reported that morale among Japanese American internees had dangerously declined. While internees had “first accepted with philosophical understanding the decision of their government,” Ickes told Roosevelt that these imprisoned Americans, charged with no crimes, were now bitter. “I do not think that we can disregard the unnecessary creation of a hostile group right in our own territory.”

As Eleanor toured the camp, hundreds of Japanese American teenagers, including Izumi, surrounded her. She told them that she was proud of their resourcefulness. In the challenging desert terrain, internees raised livestock and produced enough vegetables to feed the entire camp. On-site was a camouflage-net factory, where nineteen-year-old Alan worked, that manufactured enough nets for the US Army.
“Everything is spotlessly clean,” Eleanor later wrote in her report. “The people work on their whitewashed barracks constantly, and you can see the results of their labors.”

The first lady experienced the unrelenting dust storms in Gila River that turned everyone’s hair white and eyes red. “It chokes you and brings about irritations of the nose and throat,” she wrote. With Myer at her side, Eleanor toured every facility essential to the camp’s life: the wards in the hospital, the barracks that had been set aside for nursery and elementary schools, a high school, a library. She
noted that the tiny living quarters were decorated with paper flowers, poems, and paintings.

Eleanor witnessed as well evidence of the declining morale of the internees. In Gila River, as in other camps, the loyalty test had sparked outrage. In her report to FDR, she argued that it was time to disband the camps and allow the Japanese to return to their homes. “To undo mistakes is always harder than to create them originally, but we seldom have foresight,” Eleanor told her husband. “Therefore, we have no choice but to try to correct our past mistakes.”

In March 1943, one month after his visit to Gila River, Myer publicly called for an end to the relocation camps. He reported that they were too expensive to build and maintain and said that in his opinion the Japanese Americans, as a group, no longer constituted a military threat. “After many months of operating relocation centers, the War Relocation Authority is convinced that they are undesirable institutions and should be removed from the American scene as soon as possible,” wrote Myer. “Life in a relocation center is an unnatural and un-American sort of life. Keep in mind that the evacuees were charged with nothing except having Japanese ancestors; yet the very fact of their confinement in relocation centers fosters suspicion of their loyalties and adds to their discouragement.”

While Roosevelt agreed with Eleanor and Myer that the incarceration should end as soon as possible, his military advisers warned that subversive activities among Japanese and Japanese Americans were still a danger to the war effort. Roosevelt again sided with the military advisers. The internment dragged on.

While in Gila River, Alan and Izumi Taniguchi received permission to visit their father in the Lordsburg camp in New Mexico. During the face-to-face meeting, Isamu demanded that both of them refuse to volunteer for the American military. Alan was nineteen, and Izumi was sixteen—one year away from eligibility for the draft. Even though both sons were born in America, had pledged allegiance to the flag, and had sung the national anthem, Isamu now demanded they put their loyalty aside and consider themselves as
young men without a country. Izumi bitterly refused. He told his father that he’d never even been to Japan and that his loyalty was to the United States. To prove his allegiance, Izumi vowed to join the US military as soon as he turned seventeen. Alan was more measured, but equally firm: he told his father that he would do whatever was necessary to stay in the United States, his homeland.

When Alan returned to Gila River, he confronted the infamous two questions: number 27, concerning his willingness to fight for America; and number 28, about forswearing allegiance to Japan. Alan wanted to answer yes-yes, but he could not bring himself to officially defy his father. He told authorities that, until his constitutional rights were restored and his family was released from internment, he would not answer the questionnaire at all. Officially, that made Alan a no-no, which meant that he was likely to be sent to Tule Lake camp in California, where internees considered “disloyal” were segregated and lived in punitive conditions. To avoid transfer, Alan formally asked the Religious Society of Friends, known as the Quakers, who had important contacts with the INS, to petition for his parole from Gila River so that he could resume his education. The Quakers were the only group in America that consistently opposed internment and offered protection for internees. They agreed to plead Alan’s case.

In the spring of 1943, shortly after Eleanor’s visit to Gila River, Isamu asked for a transfer to the Crystal City Internment Camp, where he was reunited with his wife and younger son. Alan, who was no longer a minor, refused to go to Crystal City, but Izumi had no choice. When his mother and brother left Arizona in May 1943 for Crystal City, Alan stayed behind in Gila River. A few months later, the Quakers negotiated Alan’s release. He moved to Detroit, where he lived with relatives and continued his education at the Detroit Institute of Technology.

In Crystal City, Isamu filed repatriation requests for himself, his wife, and Izumi. Alan traveled to Crystal City and told O’Rourke that his father was determined to return to Japan and explained he
was there to prevent his younger brother’s repatriation. By policy, visiting relatives of Crystal City internees met with their families only in the Visitor Center, where security officers monitored conversations. However, O’Rourke granted permission for Alan to stay with his parents in their bungalow during his visit, a privilege that O’Rourke did not ordinarily grant.

After Alan entered the camp, issei leaders summoned him to a meeting, where they accused him of disrespect for his father and betrayal of his Japanese ancestors. “Traitor,” they shouted. Alan was pushed to the ground and beaten. Undeterred, Alan picked himself up and told the issei leaders that there was no place for him or for his brother in Japan. They were American-born, they had their own lives to lead, and they would stay in America.

After the meeting, Isamu relented. He could not go against both of his sons. He withdrew his application for repatriation and gave Izumi permission to live in Detroit with Alan. As soon as Izumi was eligible, he volunteered for the US Army and joined the all-Japanese branch of the Military Intelligence Service.

Isamu and Sadayo stayed in Crystal City. Isamu worked as supervisor of the carpentry shop. He built tables and chairs, repaired walls, and constructed new buildings. In his leisure time, he devoted himself to the planting of gardens. Over time, he decided that the wishes of his American-born sons were paramount. “I want one thing only,” he told his sons in letters. “Peace.”

Near the end of 1943, as the Unos, the Taniguchis, and others struggled to reconcile their choices, news of the camp in Crystal City took center stage at a meeting in New York.
In a speech on November 11, 1943, at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, Attorney General Francis Biddle described a scene in faraway Crystal City that illustrated the high cost many Japanese Americans had paid to prove their loyalty. The speech was given to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and that day, the dining hall of the famed hotel was filled with rabbis. Biddle told his audience about a Japanese husband and wife interned in Crystal City who were among
169 Japanese repatriated in August 1943 to Japan from that camp. Both of the couple’s sons were being released from the internment camp because they had volunteered for the 442nd.