After Camp - Greg Robinson

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the question of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, After 1949 he largely ceased to publish research on either group, although in a series of brief book reviews he made a limited attempt to engage the new scholarship on government actions during World War II. Curiously, he made no public comment in support of the redress movement that grew up in both countries in the 1970s and 1980s. Whether his turning his attention to other projects following his return to the United States in 1949-50 was based on a sense that he had completed his work or on the feeling of being stymied by the complexity of the problem is impossible to know.

      To conclude, what can we make of the contributions of Forrest LaViolette? An unorthodox academic in his research and career trajectory, he nonetheless held to a strict objectivity in his writing. His approach aroused strong disagreement among later scholars. Ann Gomer Sunahara criticized his impersonality as false objectivity.

      When Forrest E. LaViolette wrote…in the 1940s, wartime censorship hindered his efforts. In addition, as a sociologist LaViolette was primarily interested in the exile of Japanese Canadians as a social phenomenon, one that paralleled a similar exile of Japanese Americans. Accordingly, he accepted the explanation of the government of the day—that it had merely responded to a mistaken but overwhelming surge of public opinion in British Columbia. LaViolette was unable—or lacked the interest—to determine how that surge of public opinion materialized, or how it came to be translated into the repressive policies applied to the innocent Japanese.44

      On the other hand, Rolf Knight credited LaViolette with putting racial issues on the table amid a hostile postwar climate:

      In retrospect, the era was the golden age for obscurantist social science and retailored history.…Whole fields of enquiry had been silenced by self-imposed taboos and it became bad form even to mention whole classes of events. When a book like Forrest LaViolette's…arose in class discussion it was sniffily dismissed as unscholarly—meaning that it stuck its nose into a topic which then had been expunged.45

      What is more difficult to understand is why LaViolette was such a weak reed in the defense of Japanese North Americans against official race-based wartime exclusion and discrimination. On one hand, he was clearly supportive of Japanese Americans and gladly joined in community life. Believing that he could help the Nisei by giving them guidance so that they could more easily be absorbed into mainstream society, he was a generous mentor and friend. In the prewar years, he also took their side, recommending to those in the larger society that they foster assimilation of minorities to bring an end to racial prejudice. Yet out of his interest in the abstract question of resettlement, and perhaps also his fear of alienating orthodox academics by pol itical activism that could appear to slant his work, he remained aloof from overt political activity, despite his behind-the-scenes presence in the fight to protect Japanese Canadians from postwar deportation. Worse, he remained an outspoken apologist for official confinement of ethnic Japanese, even as concerned citizens in both nations deplored the wartime policy and the former inmates campaigned for reparations. Still, both for its qualities and for its ambivalences, LaViolette's work merits further study.

      3. Japantown Born and Reborn

       Comparing the Resettlement Experience of Issei and Nisei in Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles

      The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the unleashing of World War II in the Pacific wiped out the thriving Japanese communities on the Pacific coast of the United States. In the weeks that followed the onset of war, military officials on the West Coast became increasingly terrified of a Japanese invasion. They proceeded to single out the region's Japanese American population as potential spies and saboteurs on the basis of their ancestry, and called for the mass “evacuation” of both Issei and Nisei from the West Coast.1 The movement was further fomented and abetted by white nativist organizations and agricultural and commercial groups, who saw an opportunity to rid themselves of their long-despised economic competitors, and by opportunistic politicians. The fact that there was no documented case of any disloyal activity by any person of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, and that two-thirds of the community's members, the Nisei, were American citizens did not ease the fears of their panicked neighbors. Rather, as West Coast defense commander General John DeWitt stated, the very absence of evidence only proved that a concentrated campaign of subversion had been prepared for the future. Anyway, DeWitt insisted, it was impossible to tell a loyal Japanese American from a disloyal one. “A Jap is a Jap,” he told his War Department superiors, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. McCloy and Stimson soon overcame their initial doubts about the necessity and constitutionality of mass removal of Japanese Americans, and brought the matter into the White House.2

      In response to the pressure from the military and West Coast political leaders, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (who had his own prejudices against ethnic Japanese) signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Under authority of this order, the army forcibly expelled all residents of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast during the months that followed. In the process, the vast majority of families lost their property or were forced to sell it at fire sale prices. Once removed from their homes, the Japanese Americans were placed in a network of “Assembly Centers,” stockades in disused fairgrounds and racetracks where the Japanese Americans were housed in converted horse stalls and animal pens and treated by army administrators as prisoners. After several weeks or months, they were then transported under guard to a network of ten government-run “relocation centers” in remote desert areas or swamplands in the interior, where they sweltered in summer and often froze in winter. The inmates lived in hastily constructed tar-paper barracks, one room to a family. Health and sanitary facilities in the camps, particularly at the outset, were primitive. The War Relocation Authority, the government agency created to supervise the camps, deliberately kept food and salaries for all inmate workers at levels below that of the lowest-paid American soldier.3

      Although War Department chiefs privately conceded as early as 1943 that there was no military necessity for continued confinement of the mass of the inmates, West Coast military commanders, under pressure from anti-Japanese American politicians and media barons, long refused to reopen the excluded areas to people of Japanese ancestry. Furthermore, the government's mass removal policy convinced important elements of public opinion nationwide that the inmates represented a danger. There was therefore significant opposition to resettlement, and no strong wave of sentiment in their favor.

      The WRA gradually developed a parole system of sorts, to permit inmates to leave camp without mobilizing hostile public opinion against them. After filling out a compulsory “loyalty questionnaire” and being adjudged “loyal” by a joint military board, individuals were eligible to obtain “leave permits” to resettle outside the West Coast excluded area. The process remained slow and cumbersome—not only did candidates have to have offers of jobs and housing, but the WRA had to ensure that local public opinion was favorable to entry of Japanese Americans. The majority of Japanese Americans, unable to return home and unwilling or unable to resettle elsewhere, remained confined in the camps for the balance of the war. Nevertheless, approximately one-fourth of the confined Issei and Nisei did gain official permission to leave camp during these years and settle outside the West Coast. This first wave of resettlers was composed mostly of Nisei in their late teens or twenties who left camp to join the military or take up outside employment. In addition, a group of Nisei college students were authorized to take up scholarships at colleges east of the Rocky Mountains under the auspices of a newly created private welfare agency, the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council.4 As these pioneers put down roots in their new communities, they were joined by siblings and friends, and in some cases parents and other relatives. The largest populations remained in the Mountain West or moved to the industrial cities of the East and Midwest. Chicago, in particular, became a population center: from a prewar community of some 400, the Windy City's ethnic Japanese population reached 20,000 by 194546, while an estimated 25,000 took up at least temporary residence during those years. The WRA was responsible for finding jobs and advocating for the newcomers, a task that was taken over by private church and local welfare groups after the dissolution of the agency in mid-1946.5

      The West Coast remained closed to Japanese Americans (apart

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