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GILA NEWS-COURIER SUPPLEMENT
ISSEI, NISEI, KIBEI THE U.S. HAS PUT 110,000 PEOPLE OF JAPANESE BLOOD IN "PROTECTIVE CUSTODY"
FORTUNE MAGAZINE, APRIL 1944
RELOCATION
Where the Tule Lake prisoners will end their days is less important to consider than what is to become of those "loyal" evacuees who are still in the nine other centers. Everyone deemed loyal, by the sifting process of registration and hearings, has been granted "leave clearance. " Fortified with a handful of official papers, a numbered registration card bearing his picture and fingerprints, an evacuee can set forth to the East. He gets his railroad fare, $3 a day travel money, and if he has no savings $25 in cash.
During the last twelve months, 17,000 evacuees have had the courage to go "outside. " They are, with rare exceptions, young and single, or married but childless. A Nisei has to muster considerable courage to go out into the society that rejected him two years ago. From behind the fence "the outside" has become vague, enormous, and fearful. The huddling together, which is resented, is nonetheless a cohesive, protective force, hard to overcome. As he leaves the soldier-guarded gate, the young Nisei is aobut as lonely as any human being could be; he faces even more prejudice than his father did as immigrant contract labor.
The most powerful magnets to draw him out are letters from friends who have already gone east. Those who have made the plunge usually report back to their friends enthusiastically. The people who have started a new--most of them from eighteen to thirty years old--are the pioneers. In the factories and in the restaurants and hotels, in the offices and in the kitchens where they work, they are building a future not merely for themselves, but for those who may follow.
When they write back, "We can eat in any restaurant in New York," they spread a little hope. Or, "I attracted very little attention on the train. " Or, "In Chicago, nobody seems to care that I have a Japanese face. " They tell of the church groups who are almost alone in providing some kind or[sic] organized social protection for those who relocate in cities like Chicago.
They are being sent "outside" wherever a not-too-prejudiced community provides opportunity. Seven WRA regional officers have staffs scouting for job prospects, talking to employers of farm and industrial labor, sounding out public opinion, and, in general, smoothing the way. Illinois has taken more relocated American Japanese than any other state--4,000. Most of these have found jobs in and around Chicago. Winnetka housewives compete for Nisei servants, and even the Chicago Tribune has been calm. Only Hearst howls.
Ohio's industrial cities have taken about 1,500 from the relocation centers. Although special clearances have been needed for the eastern defense area, a few hundred have already gone to New York City, and the stream to the northeastern states will increase steadily. Scattered throughout midwestern states like Wisconsin, Montana, and Iowa are hundreds more.
There are, of course, areas of resistance. Antagonism to WRA's evacuee is apt to increase, not diminish, when the European war ends and the casualty lists come only from the Pacific. Utah ahs taken about 2,000 evacuees-- mostly in Ogden and Salt Lake City, where at first they were quietly absorbed. But last month the state A.F. of L. petitioned Salt Lake City authorities to deny business licenses to people of Japanese ancestry. Two thousand have gone to Colorado, but recent campaigns like Hearst's in the Denver Post and proposed new discriminatory legislation keep the state aroused. Wayne W. Hill, a state representative in Colorado, wearing the uniform of a sergeant in the U.S. Army, got emergency leave from his camp last month to beg the Colorado Legislature not to pass a bill barring Japanese aliens from owning land. About to be discharged from the Army, he said, "I am just as willing to die a political death as I am to die in battle to preserve American freedom. " He was warmly applauded, but the House passed the bill; the Senate turned it down fifteen to twelve.
Arizona has had such a spree of race hating in the last year that WRA des not try to place people of Japanese ancestry there. A year ago the governor signed a bill making it impossible to sell anything--even a pack of cigarettes-- to a person of Japanese descent without first publishing in the newspaper, days in advance, one's intention to do so, and filing documents with the governor. The law was declared unconstitutional after a few months' operation. It was not aimed merely at the new WRA resettlers who number fifty-seven. It was intended to strangle Arizona's prewar Japanese American population (632), many of whom make a good living in the highly competitive business of vegetable farming.
With only 17,000 young, unencumbered, and fairly bold Nisei out on their own, the biggest and hardest job of resettlement remains. The supply of young people without dependents is not unlimited. Early this year the Army, which had previously accepted only volunteers,(*) decided to draft the Nisei, like Negroes for segregated units. This new turn of events will draw offa few thousand evacuees. But the most difficult problems are obviously the large families and the other people. Depending heavily on the well-known tightness of the family unit of its evacuees, WRA believes that many of the young men and women already relocated will soon bring their parents and small sisters and brothers out. Perhaps these Nisei who are so aggressively American themselves will not want their families held behind the fences.
However, in WRA centers there are hundreds of families with several young children, none old enough to leave alone. He is a courageous father who dares to start a new life with these responsibilities when, at the center, food, shelter, education, medical care, $16 a month, and clothing are provided. Farm families are often afraid to go to the Midwest to try a totally new kind of agriculture. And many feel that they are too old to start again as day laborers. There are the men who had retail, export, import, wholesale, commission businesses. The concentrated Little Tokyos in California made possible a whole commercial structure in which the Japanese provided goods and services for each other. Presumably there will be more little Tokyos to serve.
Even if the evacuees were allowed on the Pacific Coast tomorrow, they could not readily establish themselves in the old pattern. Quite apart from race prejudice, the gap they left had closed in two years. Except for the few who own land, they would have to build in California as patiently as they now do in the East. They have been more thoroughly dislocated then they realize as they think nostalgically about California.
No one can gauge how soon the prewar unwillingness to accept charity or government relief deteriorates into a not unpleasant habit of security. It is too much to expect of any people that their pride be unbreakable. Some of teh old farm women who were "stoop labor" all their lives, even after the Nisei sons' landholdings or leased acres became sizeable, have had the first rest in their history. Most of the old bachelors who had been day laborers frankly enjoy the security of the centers.
If the war lasts two more years, and if WRA has succeeded in finding places for 25,000 more Japanese Americans in the next twenty-four months (and WRA hopes to better that figure), it will be a job well done. That would elvae some 45,000 in the relocation centers, as continuing public wards, not to mention over 20,000 at Tule Lake and the Department of Justice internment camps. Whatever the final residue, 25,000 or 45,000, it is certain that the "protective custody" of 1942 and 1943 cannot end otherwise than in a kind of Indian reservation, to plague the conscience of Americans for many years to come.
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