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After Camp. Greg Robinson
Читать онлайн.Название After Camp
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520952270
Автор произведения Greg Robinson
Издательство Ingram
In addition to those arrivals listed by the WRA, the city's midcentury ethnic Japanese population was swelled by the arrival of various former camp inmates who had initially resettled elsewhere (and thus did not appear on resettlement registers). For example, Fred Korematsu, who unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of mass removal in the U.S. Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States, originally resettled out of camp in Salt Lake City, but then moved to Detroit in 1944 to join his older brother Hi Korematsu. Furthermore, some Nisei who had not been confined in camp decided to make Detroit their home. The architect Minoru Yamasaki, future designer of the World Trade Center, who had spent the war years in New York, was hired in 1945 as chief of design for the architectural firm of Smith Hinchman & Grylls, and took up residence in Detroit. Another transplanted New Yorker, sociologist T. Scott Miyakawa, entered the area in 1944 after he was hired as a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan. At the same time, a small colony of Japanese Canadians who had suffered official removal from Canada's west coast resettled in Windsor, Ontario, where they interacted with the nearby Detroit community.
In the vast majority of cases, the Japanese American newcomers had never previously lived in or even visited Detroit (whose prewar Japanese population was limited to a few dozen individuals—103 as of the 1930 census). Those who settled in outlying rural areas were almost exclusively employed in farm labor. Inside the city the newcomers took up all sorts of jobs. A large percentage of Issei of both sexes worked as domestics or gardeners; Nisei women also found work as stenographers and secretaries, and Nisei men were also employed as dishwashers in city restaurants and as blue-collar workers in the city's dominant automobile industry and allied trades. The Ford Motor Company, which had hired Issei engineers since the 1910s and was traditionally known for friendliness to African American labor, became a major employer of Nisei resettlers, as did the Chrysler Corporation. Kustu Ishimaru and Gilbert Kurihara worked as auto mechanics in garages, while Bill Kitamura was employed by the Detroit Street Railway. Other big employers of Nisei labor included the Briggs Manufacturing Company, the Essex Wire Company, Gar Wood Industries, and the Ex-cell-o Company. Groups of younger Nisei attended college or studied in trade schools. Wayne University welcomed a number of Nisei students—including a class of fifteen cadet nurses preparing for military duty. Grace Hospital engaged a pair of Nisei physicians as residents. A half-dozen Nisei beauticians graduated from the Dermaway University of Hair and Beauty Culture in mid-1945.11
As time passed, a wider spectrum of skilled and salesclerk jobs opened up. By 1945, Frank Doi was hired as a dental lab technician, Grace Fujii was employed as a hospital social worker, George Kawamoto ran a photography studio, and Roy Setsuda was hired as an interior decorator. Others found public sector positions: Marie Doi was employed as a relocation officer by the WRA's Detroit office, while Roku Yasui worked for the city's Postwar Planning Division, and Jane Togasaki worked for the Michigan State Health Department. A few Japanese Americans went into business for themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Masujiro Ishioka, an Issei couple, operated an apartment house on Cass Avenue. Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Yasutake started a dry goods store in the suburb of Royal Oak. The most popul ar Nisei small business (capitalizing on popular stereotypes of Asian labor) was the laundry. George Akamine, Mas Hashimoto, and Tom and Jimmie Tagami and their families each opened cleaning establishments in Detroit. Few re-settlers were able to establish themselves in management or white-collar positions, although the community was served by a group of medical professionals such as dentists Kiyoshi Sonoda and Mark Kanda and optometrist John Koyama.
As in other cities, the task of aiding the absorption and adjustment of the resettlers was taken up by a coalition of the local WRA office with private church and welfare groups. As early as mid-1942, WRA resettlement director Thomas Holland and George Rundquist of the Protestant Council of Churches organized a Detroit Resettlement Committee under the lead of the Reverend Father James McCormick to help locate housing and jobs for the resettlers. In September 1943 (following the lead of Rev. T. T. Brumbaugh, a former missionary in Japan) the Detroit Council of Churches established its own United Ministry to Resettlers. The Council invited Rev. Shigeo Tanabe, a Nisei pastor from Washington State, to operate the ministry. In 1945, after the WRA announced plans to wind up its operations, local civil leaders formed the Detroit Committee to Aid Resettlers of Japanese Ancestry, which operated approximately through the end of 1947. Under the auspices of the United Ministry to Resettlers, Tanabe established Fellowship House, a Nisei hostel, at 130 East Grand Boulevard. The WRA subsequently opened a family hostel at 3915 Trumbull in July 1945 under the auspices of the Buddhist Church of Detroit. Rev. and Mrs. Shawshew Sakow were the hostel's managers. In addition to serving as temporary housing for the resettlers, the hostels served as recreational centers, providing libraries and game rooms where the newcomers joined together for social events. In addition, a Nisei committee formed at the International Institute in 1944. It arranged biweekly dances and ping-pong nights to encourage sociability. Young Nisei joined baseball teams, and a Nisei basketball club participated in an interstate tournament. As in other places, the most popular Nisei sport was bowling—in 1945 an entire Detroit-area Nisei bowling league was formed. In mid-1946 a Detroit chapter of the JACL formed, under the leadership of Peter Fujioka.12
Permanent housing remained the most troublesome item on the resettlement aid agenda—as a report of the Detroit Relocation Committee put it, “Housing was the ‘nightmare' of all newcomers to the city.”13 The wartime economic boom had brought such a huge influx of war workers, primarily African Americans and white southerners, that local housing stock was completely inadequate to contain them. (So explosive was the housing shortage that the opening of a public housing project for African Americans, the Sojourner Truth Homes, in spring 1942 had touched off mass demonstrations and threats of violence by mobs of local whites who insisted that they should be assigned the homes.) Community activists directed their attention to solving the housing problem. Jack Shimoda, a Japanese American businessman who had lived in Detroit during the prewar era, purchased a boardinghouse on Forest Avenue, which was filled with new arrivals. A number of resettlers obtained long-term housing at the city's YMCA, which also hired a cadre of Nisei workers. Nevertheless, in the end, many Japanese Americans were obliged to settle in decrepit housing in or adjacent to the city's African American neighborhoods, as white areas were all but inaccessible.
The question of discrimination was a complex one. Detroit was notorious in prewar years as a center of Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist activity, with right-wing leader Gerald L. K. Smith and the anti-Semitic “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin as the movement's most visible figures. During the war, existing racial tensions between blacks and whites had been exacerbated by rapid population shifts, which led to overcrowding and shortages of transportation, schools, and housing. These tensions exploded into violent confrontation in June 1943, when fights at the city's Belle Isle resort area ignited a large-scale racial riot. The riot lasted three days, claiming thirty lives (twenty-five of them African Americans), and gave rise to lasting tensions. That said, according to various accounts, Nisei in Detroit felt welcomed. For example, Pacific Citizen columnist Dale Oka, who resettled in Detroit in June 1943, stated that he was initially wary of how he would be accepted, but was soon put at ease:
The reception accorded me since my advent to this area has surpassed my most optimistic hopes. Perhaps I belong to that fortunate few who found their relocation paths strewn with flowers of welcome instead of thorns. But I prefer to believe that the great majority of us have discovered their new lives to be similarly pleasant and encouraging.14
Liberal and religious groups in the city mobilized to aid Japanese Americans. As noted, the Detroit Council of Churches (which as early as spring 1942 had passed an official resolution deploring