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America hired Rev. Toru Matsumoto to head their Committee on Resettlement of Japanese Americans in order to coordinate efforts. With aid from the WRA, a coalition of religious groups formed the New York City Advisory Committee on Japanese Americans in May 1943, and organized a conference on resettlement. In 1945 the WRA and the fledgling New York chapter of the JACL came together to organize the Japanese American Coordinating Committee of New York City. After the WRA announced plans to cease operations, the Greater New York Citizens Committee for Japanese-Americans formed in November 1945, under the leadership of George Yamaoka (who shortly thereafter left for Tokyo to join the war crimes team) and Robert Benjamin.

      At the same time, New York's Japanese resettlers passed more easily into the city's intellectual and artistic mainstream. New York was certainly not without racism—the 1943 Harlem riot had baldly demonstrated racial tensions and the impact of discrimination—and the newcomers did face various forms of exclusion, as noted. Still, the cosmopolitan tradition of the city gave them a major assist. Almost immediately, art galleries and museums featured shows with Japanese American artists, while a select group of Issei and Nisei found employment in the creative arts: Robert Kuwahara created a daily syndicated comic strip, Miki; Yuriko Amemiya danced with Martha Graham and on Broadway; Ruby Yoshino toured as a concert singer; and Michi Nishiura became a costume designer. (Miné Okubo, as will be detailed in Chapter 4, made a career as an author/illustrator.) A constellation of visual artists, including such figures as Henry Sugimoto, Hideo Date, Hisako Hibi, Lewis Suzuki, and Hideo Kobashigawa, took up long-term residence in the city. Conversely, even if they faced difficulties with housing and employment, the character of the newcomers made their social adjustment easier. Unlike in other regions, the migrants were not primarily farmers with little experience of urban life. Rather, like their predecessors during the 1930s, the Nisei who chose to resettle in New York were educated, articulate, and wide-ranging in their interests and associations. A number of them, including Ernest Iiyama, Chiye Mori, Tak and Kazu Iijima, Dyke Miyagawa, Kenny Murase, Joe Oyama, Eddie Shimano, Ina Sugihara, and Nori Ikeda Lafferty, had been active during the prewar Popular Front years in political and activist groups along the West Coast (notably the Los Angeles and Bay Area Nisei Democrats clubs). Others, such as James Nakamura, Shuji Fujii, Carl Kondo, Bob Kuwahara, and Miné Okubo, were writers and artists who had staffed prewar and/or camp newspapers. They were able to parlay their experience into leadership roles in community institutions, most notably the Japanese American Committee for Democracy, in the process acting as liaisons between the WRA, social welfare organizations, and pro-immigrant groups such as the Common Council for American Unity and the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born.

      It is impossible to do justice in a brief sketch to the wide diversity of experiences of the thousands of Japanese Americans who migrated to Los Angeles after camp, but a summary view reveals that their circumstances were in some ways quite distinct from their counterparts in either Detroit or New York. First, the scale and timing of their entry and adjustment were very different. Because the West Coast did not even begin to open its doors until late 1944 and the WRA discouraged mass return, resettlement in Southern California was primarily a postwar process. However, the movement, once started, became a flood: by mid-1947 there were 28,000 people of Japanese ancestry in Los Angeles County (as compared with 37,000 before removal), making it the largest ethnic Japanese population on the continent.³⁵ Unlike in the other cities, the returnees were by no means the first Japanese Americans ever seen in the Los Angeles area: many were returning to areas where they had lived before the war, and in various cases resuming their prewar occupations or business ventures. By the same token, in returning home, they lacked the sense of exile or temporary residence that was felt by a large fraction of those who resettled in the East and Midwest.

      That said, as in Detroit and New York, many resettlers in Los Angeles were newcomers. Large numbers of migrants who had lived in rural areas before the war now crowded into the city limits: Issei who had long resided in ethnic enclaves but had been unable to reclaim their property now settled in mixed areas where they were surrounded by non-Japanese neighbors. Nisei who had grown up largely among Japanese Americans, and then had been confined in all-Japanese camps during the war, now faced head-on the difficulties of living as a minority group. Even native Angelenos were often unable to return to their previous residences. In particular, the large prewar Japanese colony that had grown up around the canneries on Terminal Island in San Pedro had been, as one newspaper article described it, “the very pulse of prewar Japanese concentration around Los Angeles.”³⁶ It had been wiped out in February 1942, when the navy had taken over the island and expelled its Japanese residents on forty-eight hours' notice. The island remained a naval installation after the war's end, and its population was forced to disperse, though a significant hub of fishermen and naval workers relocated to nearby Long Beach.

      If the returnees held the advantage of familiarity with their surroundings, they also had a long-entrenched pattern of prejudice, newly inflamed by wartime passions, to combat. Public attitudes in Los Angeles were decidedly mixed, and the level of overall anti-Japanese prejudice is hard to quantify.³⁷ Still, various controversies reveal the extent of tension and bias. In late summer 1944, through the efforts of the Pasadena-based fair play group Friends of the American Way, Esther Takei enrolled at Pasadena Junior College (today's Pasadena Community College), thus becoming the first Nisei since Pearl Harbor to be admitted to a Pacific coast college. A group of twenty local whites, supported by the California American Legion, campaigned publicly to exclude her. However, the college's faculty and student councils voted unanimously to accept Takei, and the Pasadena Board of Education announced that it had no power to refuse her, with the result that she was registered.³⁸ Soon after, when the celebrated chemist Dr. Linus Pauling of the California Institute of Technology hired a Nisei gardener, the exterior of his Pasadena home was vandalized with signs calling him “Jap lover,” while a Japanese flag was painted on the house.³⁹

      The city's public stance on the resettlers was ambivalent at best. Mayor Fletcher Bowron, who had been a primary instigator of mass confinement and who had called in 1943 for all Nisei to be stripped of their American citizenship, made a public about-face. In January 1945, he announced that all returnees would be welcomed back to the city with their rights ensured, and he made a symbolic journey to Union Station to greet an initial group of returnees personally.⁴⁰ After a meeting with Bowron in September 1946, Mike Masaoka warmly praised the city under his administration as “the white spot of the country as far as unpleasant incidents connected with our return to our former homes is concerned.”⁴¹ Nonetheless, in January 1946, L.A. county manager Wayne Allen caused a widespread anti-Japanese backlash when he made a fraudulent public statement that 4,000 Japanese Americans were on the county relief rolls. In fact, this figure included not only the fewer than 1,000 individuals actually receiving relief funds (almost all of whom were elderly Issei barred by discriminatory state laws from receiving old-age assistance) but more than 3,000 Issei and Nisei families in emergency public housing whom the county manager imputed would all ultimately become a public charge. The Los Angeles Times quickly chimed in with a complaint that Japanese Americans were refusing employment offers, and pressed unemployed workers to take jobs as citrus pickers. The Hearst-owned Los Angeles Herald-Express proclaimed editorially that idle Japanese American men should be put to work on road labor or public projects and “shipped back to Japan” if they refused to take such jobs.⁴²

      At the same time, securing housing was a contested and fraught process for the returnees. As in Detroit, the war had brought about a huge migration of war workers, who had taken up all available stock. In particular, there was an influx of African Americans from the South, whose arrival rapidly doubled the size of the region's black community. As a result of discrimination by white landlords as well as the overall housing shortage, many of the black migrants had no choice but to settle in the emptied Little Tokyo district (redubbed “Bronzeville”), which took on many characteristics of a slum area: overcrowding, crime, and poor public services. Meanwhile, as in Detroit, tensions over housing and recreation led to racial rioting in summer 1943, when invading white servicemen targeted blacks and Mexican Americans for assault in the so-called zoot suit riots.

      As Japanese Americans began to return from the camps, the West Coast press voiced real fear of conflict between the returnees

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