After Camp - Greg Robinson

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for rapid loyalty hearings for Japanese Americans) took a leading role in aiding resettlers and in advocating for their rights. Public opinion, as reflected in media accounts, was overwhelmingly positive. The Detroit News editorialized in 1944, “There are now numbers of Japanese here, migrants from the Pacific coast, whose records have been sifted and who should be regarded and treated as loyal friends in the war against Japan.”15The following year, the Detroit Free Press ran a positive article on the approximately 2,000 Japanese Americans, whom it termed “all American citizens who speak our own language,” living in Detroit. The article featured an interview with Mrs. Terry Koyama, who praised the treatment she had received in Detroit and expressed optimism about her future: “The dispersal was good because we used to live too close together on the West Coast, anyway. Now we're more spread out and we have a better chance—without the old prejudices.”16

      Still, both anecdotal evidence and the records of the WRA's Detroit office, which was responsible for finding jobs and advocating for the newcomers, testify to widespread patterns of discrimination. When the Yoshiki family left camp for Detroit in 1944, one family member who traveled ahead to find housing called a local hotel to reserve a room. When he appeared at the hotel, however, the hotel's owners—shocked to discover that Mr. Yoshiki was Japanese and not Polish, as they had assumed from his name—refused him lodging.17 Educational discrimination was also palpable in the Detroit area. At the outset of war, administrators at the University of Michigan made a confidential decision to limit admission of Nisei students to a quota of twenty-seven per year, spread among the university's different faculties. When challenged on its discriminatory policy, the university denied that it had established any quota, and defended its policy on the pretext that the FBI and army refused to grant clearances (a transparent falsehood in view of the fact that the Military Intelligence Service language school was on campus, housing Nisei students and instructors, and that the university simultaneously hired more than 200 Nisei employees to take up menial-labor jobs on its grounds). Even after all government controls over Nisei students were abandoned in fall 1944, the university maintained its discriminatory policy.18

      Employers and labor unionists also were mixed in their reactions to Japanese Americans. The local chapter of the AFL-affiliated Teamsters Union (following national policy) was extremely hostile to Nisei and refused to allow them to join the union or to support their employment in the trucking industry. The leadership of the CIO was supportive—United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther even joined a delegation to ask the Detroit Housing Commission to open public housing to Japanese Americans—but local activists were often recalcitrant. In Ann Arbor, the CIO refused to accept Japanese Americans in a factory producing defense material. Similarly, in April 1944, Tom Nakamura, a resettler from Jerome, was hired by the Palmer Company, a Detroit war plant. When he appeared for work, employees staged a walkout to protest the hiring of a Nisei. Although swift action by the local Fair Employment Practices Committee and local CIO officials limited the action to a single day and ensured Nakamura's continued employment, the incident revealed the existence of widespread, if subtle, currents of anti-Nisei sentiment.19

      The experience of Issei and Nisei in New York forms an interesting contrast with that of their Michigan counterparts. The community in Detroit, created as a result of the wartime migration, was close-knit and composed mainly of industrial and other blue-collar laborers. In contrast, the experience of resettlers in New York City during the 1940s reflects the larger narrative of the city's distinctive Nikkei (ethnic Japanese) community. Like the larger city itself, the Big Apple's Nikkei population was notable as early as the nineteenth century for its demographic and occupational diversity, a culture of cosmopolitanism, and pol itical and artistic effervescence. In stark contrast to its Pacific coast counterparts, the New York community was also marked by lack of group cohesion and a readiness to absorb transients and new arrivals. Both these salient characteristics—cosmopolitanism and political/artistic self-assertion—were accentuated with the coming of World War II.

      It is impossible to properly understand the wartime development of New York's ethnic Japanese population without a sense of the community's history. To summarize very briefly, the first Japanese immigrants arrived in the New York area during the late 1800s, and by 1920 the local Japanese community had swelled to 5,000-6000 people. While this represented only a tiny fraction of the city's population, it was enough to make New York's Nikkei community the fifth-largest in the nation. However, this community, unlike its counterparts on the West Coast and Hawaii, was not composed of farm workers or fishermen, but included merchants, domestics, office workers (many of whom worked for Japanese firms), and industrial laborers—notably shipyard workers.20 Even after the 1924 Nationalities Act cut off immigration from Japan and the city's Nikkei population contracted, Japanese citizens—consular officials, businessmen, ministers, students, and artists—continued to arrive as temporary residents, and sometimes for extended stays.

      In addition, throughout the prewar decades New York gained renown as a center for ethnic Japanese intellectuals, artists, and performers. The city was home at various times to such internationally known figures as scientists Hideyo Noguchi and Jokichi Takamine; writers Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann; dancer Michio Ito; soprano Hizi Koyke; and painters Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Eitaro Ishigaki, Chuzo Tamotsu, and Hideo Noda.21 Columbia University attracted a range of Japanese students, even as authors Roy Akagi (director of the nationally based Japanese Student Christian Association), Etsu Sugimoto, and Bunji Omura taught there. During the 1930s the community was also graced by the presence of dissidents from Japan such as Toru Matsumoto, Jack Shirai, Taro and Mitsu Yashima (Jun and Mimosa Iwamatsu), and Haru Matsui (Ayako Ishigaki), who found refuge in the city and built networks of friends and political supporters.22

      Nikkei communities in New York reflected the city's cosmopolitan flavor. Unlike on the West Coast, Issei faced no alien land laws or restrictive covenants. Affluent Japanese migrated away from the city center. (The 1921 New York Japanese Address Book lists a dozen suburbs on Long Island and Westchester County with Japanese residents.) Furthermore, New York society lacked the laws against intermarriage and many of the sexual stigmas that marked the West Coast. According to one community survey in the mid-1930s, at least one-third and possibly as many as half of community members married non-Japanese spouses.23 In turn, relatively few of New York's Issei residents brought their Japanese families to live with them. Thus, in addition to being the only Nikkei community of any size east of the Pacific coast, New York's was the only one in the nation where most residents were Japanese aliens and not their Nisei offspring.

      Although a few Nisei who subsequently achieved fame were raised in the New York region, such as activists Bill Kochiyama and Toshi Ohta Seeger and photographer Yoichi Okamoto, the city's Nisei population grew largely through internal migration. During the 1920s and 1930s educated Nisei from other parts of the country settled in New York, where they could more easily express their talents. Prominent among these were sculptor Isamu Noguchi, sociologist T. Scott Miyakawa, lawyer George Yamaoka, photographer Toge Fujihira, architect Minoru Yamasaki, activist Tokie Slocum, and journalists Larry Tajiri and Tooru Kanazawa. In addition, the city was home during the 1930s to a set of early Nisei book authors: memoirist Kathleen Tamagawa, novelist Kay Karl Endow (Karl Nakagawa), and poets Kimi Gengo and Kikuko Miyakawa.24

      The city's Japanese population was enriched by a number of social and financial institutions founded early in the century, including the Nippon Club (1905), the Japanese American Association (1907), and a series of newspapers, climaxing with the Nyokyu Shimpo newspaper (1911; a separate English-language journal, the Japanese American Review, was spun off in 1939). The community was likewise served by Christian churches and missions, starting with the Japanese Christian Institute (1899), plus the New York Buddhist Church, founded by Rev. Hozen Seki in 1938.25These organizations were operated in large part by employees of Japanese firms doing business in New York, with assistance from the Manhattan-based Japanese consulate, and tended to be conservative and pro-Japan in their viewpoint. They were counterbalanced by organizations founded by left-leaning Issei artists and intellectuals. Under the leadership of the pioneering Marxist Sen Katayama, leftist New Yorkers founded the Japanese Socialist (later Japanese Communist) Group in America in 1919, and the Nihonjin Rodosha Kurabu (Japanese Workers Club) a decade later.26

      In

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