LITMIR.BIZ

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and others who would resist being displaced—fears that were further fanned by unscrupulous whites as a pretext for further exclusion.⁴³ Then in February 1945, Rev. Julius Goldwater, a Buddhist priest who was the guardian of the Honjuwani Temple, prepared to restore the temple building to its Nikkei worshipers. He obtained an eviction order to remove a black Baptist congregation that had taken over space in the building previously leased by other parties.⁴⁴ The dispute threatened to explode intergroup relations. As a result, leaders of the WRA, the NAACP, and other groups met to try to resolve further disputes over property. Gradually, Issei and Nisei landlords resumed their residence and reopened their businesses. Prewar hotels were transformed into rooming houses for returnee families. Meanwhile, other previous area residents doubled up or sought temporary housing while they waited for the leases on their properties to expire.

      Again, as in Detroit, finding housing was largely impossible due to restrictive covenants in all-white areas, plus alien land legislation. In 1947, the Los Angeles Citizens' Housing Council organized a conference of more than a hundred organizations, which unanimously passed a resolution against restrictive covenants, and called for suspension of the Alien Land Act against the families of Nisei veterans.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, a majority of the city's landscape remained closed to Japanese owners and tenants. The largest fraction of returnees moved into housing, much of it substandard, in East Los Angeles's Hollenbeck Heights and Boyle Heights areas. This area, formerly a racially mixed area with a large Jewish population, was in the process of losing its non-Latino population. Some returnees found housing on North Broadway near Chinatown, or in Jefferson Park, while a new enclave formed in Sawtelle.⁴⁶ A large fraction of returnees took up residence alongside black neighbors in Watts. In the years after restrictive covenants were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, the largest fraction of the city's ethnic Japanese population moved into suburban Gardena.

      Meanwhile, an estimated 4,000 Japanese Americans were forced into temporary housing. A network of hotels was set up by private groups. For example, the American Friends Service Committee and the Presbyterian Church in the United States established the Evergreen Hostel in a former school for Mexican American girls on Evergreen Avenue. The WRA petitioned the city to open thirty housing centers but was authorized to create only five. In the end, the WRA and the Federal Public Housing Authority (FPHA) hastily set up temporary housing centers in former army barracks, mixed with trailers, in sites in Hawthorne, El Segundo, and Lomita.⁴⁷ In fall 1945, the Winona emergency housing project, made up of a group of converted trailers, was established by the FPHA in Burbank, and 1,300 Japanese Americans resettled there. After several months, a portion of the Winona residents found private housing, while others were moved to the camps with barracks. However, more than 500 of the residents were unable to find other housing. In March 1946, they were informed that the project was to be cleared, and some residents were expelled to other facilities. After protests by residents, they were permitted to stay on, and the majority ultimately purchased their trailers and moved off in them. The final group of 350 were relocated to a trailer camp leased by local Nisei in November 1947.⁴⁸

      Employment was another area in which Japanese American returnees had a particularly difficult experience. As in New York, part of the difficulty was due to official discrimination in city hiring. In January 1945 the County Board of Supervisors voted to bar Japanese Americans from civil service positions until at least ninety days after the end of the war, although its members admitted they had no legal basis for discrimination against those seeking the return of their jobs.⁴⁹ The Church Federation of Los Angeles protested the refusal of the county to employ Nisei, but the policy stood. In April 1945, the Board of Supervisors turned down Dr. Masako Kusayanagi's request to return immediately from leave to her job at General Hospital. Though there was a vital physician shortage, the County Board of Charities insisted that Dr. Kusayanagi (despite her three years of service as an accredited physician at two different WRA camps) was still to be deemed a student in residency, the level she had attained at the time of removal, and reported that all positions at that level were filled.⁵⁰ When Amy Nomi applied for a job at L.A. County Hospital in September she was turned away on the excuse of the board's decision. After Dorothy Okura placed first on her civil service exam as social worker with the County Board of Charities, the board claimed the privilege to hire the second-place finisher.⁵¹ Other public sector agencies were also touched by bias. A Los Angeles post office gained widespread attention when it refused to rehire a former Nisei employee who was a decorated war veteran, though other post offices, and the Board of Education, hired Nisei clerical work-ers.⁵² Still, as outrageous as such legal bias was, it served merely as a continuation of the notorious employment bars that had existed in prewar years, when only a few dozen Nisei had held civil service positions.⁵³

      The situation was scarcely better in the private sector. Throughout the postwar years, there were various reports of private discrimination. Although one industrialist with a cannery on Terminal Island had promised in early 1945 to employ 100 returnees, few office and factory employers rushed to open places for the returnees. An aluminum company that had hired a Nisei employee was forced to discharge him following a hate strike by other employees.⁵⁴ Once again, this did not represent a large-scale shift from prewar patterns of exclusion. The difference is that before the war, employment was available inside the community. Over the first half of the twentieth century, masses of Issei were able to use savings and community mutual aid funds to establish independent small businesses. Their Nisei descendants, despite a high average level of educational achievement, were all but unemployable in mainstream firms. Thus, apart from a small minority who secured executive positions working for Japanese firms, the Nisei were able to support themselves and their families by working for family or community-based enterprises (for which they were generally overqualified) or opening their own businesses. After the war, in contrast, Issei and Nisei found financing of new businesses unavailable, and there were no Japanese firms to take up the slack. Occupational downward mobility, at least in the short term, was the rule for Nisei as well as Issei. Former store owners were reduced to working as domestic servants, while truck farmers and market directors found work as gardeners and handy-men. Astoundingly, while less than 20 percent of Japanese American workers in Los Angeles region were employed by whites before the war, the total rose to approximately 70 percent afterward.⁵⁵

      To an even greater extent than in other cites, Issei and Nisei were thrown back on themselves and forced to join into ethnic-specific groups to respond to the difficulties facing them. A network of JACL chapters formed in the different Nisei enclaves, and Nisei veterans' groups attracted numerous community members. Postwar Los Angeles boasted two daily Japanese newspapers, as the prewar journals Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi resumed daily publication, while the progressive English-language weekly Crossroads debuted in 1948. By the same token, even more than in New York—and in marked contrast to Detroit—the resettlers in Los Angeles engaged with African Americans in daily life and community action, especially in Little Tokyo/Bronzeville. The center of interracial unity was Pilgrim House, a settlement house opened for African Americans in the vacated Japanese Union Church in 1943 and headed by Rev. Charles Kingsley. Kingsley took the lead in welcoming Issei and Nisei resettlers. Pilgrim House provided returnees with day care, athletic facilities, and crafts classes. Its Common Ground committee, headed by volunteer worker Samuel Ishikawa, helped resolve conflicts between Japanese Americans, blacks, and Chícanos.⁵⁶ Nisei activists responded in kind. Mary Oyama Mittwer crusaded for interracialism and denounced Nisei bigotry against other groups in her Rafu Shimpo column, “New World A-Coming.” Hisaye Yamamoto, hired as a columnist by the African American Los Angeles Tribune newspaper to serve as a bridge between the two communities, joined Wakako Yamuchi and other activists in founding a Los Angeles chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, and in 1947-48 the two organized a series of intergroup sit-ins and picket lines to desegregate the Bullock's department store lunchroom and the Bimini Baths, a swimming resort.

      Still, Hisaye Yamamoto and other writers complained that relations between the two groups in Little Tokyo/Bronzeville continued to “stink.” Discrimination by Issei shop owners and pressure from Nisei who sought to displace black residents led to resentment.⁵⁷ The ethnic Japanese press complained of a “Negro crime wave” in Little Tokyo/Bronzeville during 1946-47, and a merchants' group hired a pair of Nisei ex-GIs as security

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