After Camp - Greg Robinson

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soldiers and some other minor exceptions) until the end of 1944, when the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Endo that the government had no authority to hold a concededly loyal citizen without charge. In response, the army lifted its blanket exclusion orders in January 1945, although it substituted thousands of individual exclusion orders for inmates it suspected. Almost immediately, most of the remaining camp inmates began to return to the West Coast despite the efforts of the WRA, which feared violent backlash from white racists, to use various administrative devices to slow the flow of such return. Though resettlement east of the Rockies did continue at a slower pace, by mid-1947 the majority of the mainland ethnic Japanese population was once again settled on the Pacific coast. As those who had first moved east out of camp returned to their former homes the Japanese populations of the Midwest and East Coast began to decline, although significant pockets remained east of the Rockies, especially in the large cities.

      Whatever their destination, the former camp inmates attempted to rebuild their lives under difficult and trying circumstances.6 Despoiled of most of their property during removal and psychologically scarred by their unjust confinement, they entered their new communities with little in the way of resources. Despite the wartime economic boom, they experienced widespread poverty and economic discrimination. In the prewar era, Issei and Nisei were largely self-employed in agriculture or as small shopkeepers, or worked for family businesses. Forced during removal to give up their shops and the land they owned or leased, most were unable to resume their former positions. Even those with significant educational or professional experience were forced to work for white families as gardeners or domestic servants, or to take low-status and menial-1abor jobs.7Unlike the prewar era, though, numerous Nisei, notably veterans, ultimately managed to secure jobs outside the community as teachers, corporate employees, and civil servants. By 1960, the median income of Japanese Americans exceeded the national average.

      Housing was an equally difficult problem. Japanese Americans were confronted by shortages made worse by poverty and widespread racial discrimination, especially on the West Coast. Most Issei and Nisei, unable to resume their former leases or to borrow money to buy land, were forced to resettle in urban areas. There officials charged with aiding resettlers attempted to steer the newcomers, especially single Nisei, into taking domestic service positions, since they would thereby be provided board. Those with the means to buy homes and hotels opened space for lodgers. For others, community groups formed hostels to ease the housing problem. However, none of these efforts could begin to absorb all the newcomers. Instead, thousands of resettlers in cities such as San Diego, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and San Jose were forced into substandard housing, generally in or alongside black and Latino neighborhoods. Ultimately, greater prosperity plus the decline of restrictive covenants led masses of Nisei to migrate to suburbs and more affluent districts.

      Although the resettlers were warned by the WRA and the FBI to fit in as much as possible and to promise to stay away from other Japanese Americans on leaving camp, they were brought together into Japanese enclaves both by internal factors such as religious observance or the desire for community and by external factors such as ethnic-based hostility and exclusion by whites. During the resettlement period, Japanese Americans took up some of their old community institutions and also developed new ones.8While the Japanese consulates that had anchored the prewar Little Tokyos remained shuttered, Japanese Buddhist temples and Christian churches reopened their doors in large numbers, and business groups mushroomed. Outside the West Coast, community hostels and interracial organizations such as the YMCA served as main recreational centers, providing libraries and game rooms for social events. The Japanese American Citizens League, although resented by many former inmates for its wartime policy of collaboration, was left as the sole ethnic organization of any size in the postwar years, and large numbers of Nisei joined newly constituted or reformed JACL chapters (Issei were not accepted as members until several years later). In addition to pol itical advocacy, JACL chapters organized social events, dinners, and sports leagues—especially basketball and bowling, the two unofficial Nisei national pastimes.

      A main focus of community attention was journalism. Within months after the opening of the camps a series of newspapers, predominantly Japanese-language but with greater or lesser amounts of English content, started up operations. Los Angeles's bilingual prewar dailies Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi resumed publication, and soon afterward San Francisco's prewar Nichi Bei Shimbun and Shin Sekai morphed into a pair of new weekly journals, Nichi Bei Times and Hokubei Mainichi. Resettlers in the Mountain West were served by a trio of small-scale newspapers that had continued to publish during the war, Salt Lake City's Utah Nippo and the Denver-based Colorado Times and Rockii Shimpo. In New York a new journal, Hokubei Shimpo, took pride of place. The ethnic newspaper that attained the highest local circulation was the Chicago Shimpo, whose progressive political outlook, in both its Japanese and English sections, attracted large-scale community attention (both positive and negative). During these same years, a set of all-English weekly newspapers started up, including Crossroads in Los Angeles, Northwest Times in Seattle, Progressive News in San Francisco, and Nisei Weekender in New York City, though most soon folded. In addition, Nisei Vue, a short-lived glossy quarterly magazine, started life in 1947. It was succeeded by Scene, which had a longer run (1950-57). The premier Nisei publication was the Pacific Citizen, organ of the JACL, which was published under the dynamic editorship of Larry Tajiri. Although the Pacific Citizen lost the near-monopoly of the Japanese American press that it had enjoyed during the war, it remained a forum for news and opinion on a nationwide scale.

      One clear area of division between the West Coast and the rest of the country was the level of race-based harassment and bias. To be sure, Nisei in many areas faced insults or were refused service in stores, and job discrimination was widespread throughout the country. However, both anecdotal evidence and records testify to more widespread patterns of ethnic-based hostility and exclusion by West Coast whites, which remained unchanged into the postwar period. There were thirty-eight documented instances of terrorism against resettlers in California over the months that followed the opening of the West Coast, including sabotage of equipment, torching of barns, and shots fired into houses. Local WRA officials were forced into action in support of returnees. They lobbied newspapers to offer positive coverage of Issei and Nisei, protested harassment and violence, and looked into allegations of racial discrimination.

      Furthermore, unlike in the rest of the country, the ugly climate on the West Coast was reflected in official policy. State public assistance bodies generally refused to fund or direct the absorption and adjustment of the resettlers. Instead, local WRA offices, which lacked staff and funding for such tasks, were forced to take up the burden of organizing private charity. Washington State governor Mon Wallgren maintained that Japanese Americans were not welcome in his state.9 In contrast, California governor Earl Warren called for full and positive public compliance with the return of Japanese Americans to their old homes once the army lifted exclusion. Yet, as will be noted more fully later in this volume, Warren also signed various discriminatory legislative measures designed to discourage Issei and Nisei from returning. In 1943 the California legislature allocated funds for escheat suits to enforce the long-dormant Alien Land Act against Japanese immigrants “ineligible to citizenship” and take away the property they had acquired. The legislature meanwhile enacted a new law forbidding all Japanese immigrants to hold fishing licenses.

      Despite these overall national and regional patterns, there were significant variations in the experience of resettlers in individual cities throughout the country. A close review of the progress of resettlement reveals both surprising similarities and differences, all of which complicate easy distinctions between resettlement on the West Coast and that outside. By way of illustration, let us compare Japanese American resettlement in three key urban areas, Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles. While very divergent pol itically and economically, each of these three areas served as a regional economic center, and each underwent important demographic shifts during World War II, including massive inmigration by southern white and African American war workers. All three, notably, were scarred by large-scale rioting and interracial conflict during summer 1943.

      The initial resettlement of Japanese Americans from the camps to the Detroit area followed in its outlines the larger patterns of migration. Just over 3,000

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