1941 and 1942: The Days That You Remember

What are the days that you remember? Birthdays, weddings, and graduations may immediately come to mind—days that are associated with the most joyous occasions. At other times, the most memorable days might be ones that evoked fear, anguish, and sorrow.

Reflecting upon this question in the context of Asian American history, I think about the Japanese American students who had to leave their colleges and universities soon after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. This is a day that many Americans know as the “date which will live in infamy,” as President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it in a speech.

February 19, 1942, is a day we should also remember. On this day President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It set in motion the forced removal of Japanese Americans on the West Coast to assembly centers and subsequently internment camps in remote areas of California, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Arkansas, Wyoming, and Idaho. The incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were US-born, took place without due process. Long-standing anti-Japanese hostility, racism, and wartime hysteria enabled this denial of justice.

World War II alliances also dramatically changed the status of Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Asian Indians in the United States. The repeal of discriminatory legislation, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, and participation in US military service provided pathways to naturalization. Wartime needs provided new employment opportunities for Asian Americans. These, too, are days we should remember.

At the same time, anti-Asian violence and erasure persisted. Wartime alliances with specific Asian nations did not protect Asian Americans from racism. The impounding of over one hundred of Dorothea Lange’s photographs of the Japanese American evacuation and the internment camps, photographs that portrayed Japanese Americans as Americans and as human beings, concealed this injustice. In the 1980s, internees demanded an apology and redress. They wanted us to listen to their experiences and to learn from them so that this history would never happen again.

JUSTICE DENIED

After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, if you are a Japanese language teacher, Buddhist priest, newspaper editor, or business leader, you are swiftly targeted as an “enemy alien.” You may be among the 1,300 men who are arrested in Hawai’i and the US mainland within forty-eight hours of the Pearl Harbor attack.¹ If you are Yoshiaki Fukuda, who was born in Japan, studied the Konko faith that emphasizes interdependence at a seminary in Okayama Prefecture, and founded the Konko Church in San Francisco in the 1930s, you are apprehended and you are forced on board a train without knowing your destination. The view outside is blocked by shades on the windows. You are “watched constantly by sentries with bayoneted rifles.”²

You try to protect your family’s resources in order to survive what may happen next. In Oakland, a Japanese American store owner places a large “I AM AN AMERICAN” banner on the storefront.³ Japanese banks close and the bank accounts of Issei, the immigrant generation, are frozen.

If you are twelve-year-old Donald Nakahara, you walk with your father, a newspaperman, to a bus stop in San Francisco. Your father is on his way to help Japanese Americans in San Jose. This will be the last time you see him. Your father is arrested, held at a local detention center, and then sent to several camps with other Japanese American community leaders. You will hear from him through a few letters. From these letters, you will learn some things, but not others. You know that your father suffered several strokes in various detention facilities. That he was in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and Camp Livingstone, Louisiana. You think he died in Bismarck, North Dakota, but you are uncertain. Not knowing compounds your grief.⁴

If you are Japanese in Hawai’i, you are not forcibly relocated on a mass scale because, unlike the Japanese on the US mainland, you have a history of close connections with local leaders. There are also practical and logistical impediments, as your community makes up 37 percent of the local population.⁵ You live under martial law, however, and you are required to carry a registration card at all times and comply with travel and work restrictions.

If you are Japanese on the US West Coast, even if you are second- or third-generation, General John L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command recommends your removal, declaring that “the Japanese race is an enemy race” and “racial strains are undiluted.”⁶ In San Francisco, you observe that the text of Executive Order 9066 does not name the Japanese American community. However, the April 1, 1942, notice posted at First and Front Streets makes clear in large, bold, and capitalized letters that these are “INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY.” In this title phrase, the word “JAPANESE” is highlighted in even larger-sized font. In the fine print it says that “all Japanese persons, alien and non-alien, will be evacuated from the above designated area by 12:00 o’clock noon Tuesday, April 7, 1942.”⁷ You might be an orphan or mixed race. So long as you have Japanese blood, these instructions apply to you.

You are forced to go to one of seventeen assembly centers or “reception centers” located in fairgrounds or horse racing tracks. You are instructed to bring only what you can carry and what has been authorized by the US Army, such as bedding, linens, toiletries, enamel plates, and eating utensils. You cannot bring all your clothes, let alone furniture and other household items. Knowing this, some people come to your home looking for bargains. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston watches her mother break her heirloom china before giving it away to a bargain hunter.⁸ Her mother’s actions speak volumes: They cannot take everything away from me, from my family.

If you are a Japanese American undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, like Yoshiko Uchida, who was born and raised in Berkeley, you must leave your campus as well as your childhood home. Uchida cannot bring her pet collie, Laddie, to the horse stall that is the makeshift housing for her and her family at Tanforan Racetrack, which has been repurposed as an assembly center. In desperation, she sends a letter to the student newspaper, the Daily Californian, pleading: “I am one of the Japanese American students soon to be evacuated and have a male Scotch collie that can’t come with me. Can anyone give him a home? If interested, please call me immediately.”⁹ If you are a Japanese American college senior, like Uchida, you miss your commencement by two weeks. Her undergraduate education ends unceremoniously with the Tanforan mailman handing her diploma, rolled in a cardboard container, to her in a horse stall.¹⁰

The process of your dehumanization has begun. Your name is replaced by a number. For Miné Okubo, that number is 13660. The number is supposed to identify her, but it conceals more than it reveals. It belies her family’s immigration story of her father having been a scholar and her mother, a calligrapher.¹¹ In the United States, her mother became a housewife while her father worked in a candy shop, and later as a gardener and landscaper. Her mother encouraged her to pursue her interest in art. Okubo completed her undergraduate degree in art and her master’s degree in art and anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, while working as a seamstress, maid, farm laborer, and tutor. She received an incredible honor, a fellowship to study in Paris under artist Fernand Léger. Upon her return to the United States, she worked with the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project on mural projects, including those at the Oakland Hospitality House and Fort Ord. From 1940 to 1941, she curated two exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1942, Okubo is given tags to wear that bear the number 13660.

There are guards surrounding the assembly centers and barbed wire all around you. The stench is awful. The heat can soar to 120 degrees. You have no privacy whatsoever. The walls are flimsy, if there are any walls at all. The toilets have no partitions. You spend your time worrying, getting angry, feeling melancholy. Humor, imagination, play, and beauty remind you that you are human. Internees hold a fly-catching contest and the winner “proudly” displays a gallon jug filled with 2,426 dead flies.¹² They vie for the “honor” of being assigned to the stall once occupied by the legendary racing horse Seabiscuit. There is so much dust in this place that a young internee imagines “a mole digging his burrow” that is “ten feet up in the air.”¹³

Some non-Japanese Asian Americans help you by looking out for your homes and your businesses. They include Filipino American Johnny Ibarra, who took over the farm of his former boss, Yoshio Ando, in the Santa Clara Valley near San Jose, California, charging a token sum to cover the property tax bill.¹⁴ In Whittier, California, the family of Korean American Mary Paik Lee looked after the property of a Japanese American family who were their neighbors.¹⁵ On Bainbridge Island, Washington, Filipino American employees Felix Narte and Elaulio Aquino did the same for the Kitamoto family farm until the family could reclaim it.¹⁶ However, others direct their hatred of Japan toward you and take advantage of your forced eviction and removal.

If you are married to a non-Japanese American, you may be anxious like Mary Ventura, née Chiyo Asaba, who is a native of Washington State. She and her Filipino American husband, Mamerto Ventura, have built a life together in Seattle’s International District. At first, they politely request exemption for mixed race couples. When their requests are denied, they hire a lawyer and file the first known courtroom challenge in the United States to Japanese internment. Mary Ventura insists on her loyalty and devotion to the Constitution and its laws. Federal district court judge Lloyd Black rejects her claim, setting a dangerous precedent.¹⁷

Judge Black cites his ruling in Ex parte Ventura to dismiss the case of University of Washington student Gordon Hirabayashi, who challenged the War Department’s curfew for violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Lawyer Minoru Yasui also believes that these military orders are unconstitutional, and he violates the curfew order in order to challenge it in court. Fred Korematsu is arrested for defying evacuation orders and not reporting to a relocation center. All three convictions will be upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1943 and 1944.

A newly created War Relocation Authority builds ten internment camps: Tule Lake, California; Minidoka, Idaho; Manzanar, California; Topaz, Utah; Jerome, Arkansas; Heart Mountain, Wyoming; Poston, Arizona; Granada, Colorado; Gila River, Arizona; and Rohwer, Arkansas. They are located in desert and swamp areas with extreme conditions of heat, dust, wind, and cold. A young George Takei is not yet famous for portraying helmsman Hikaru Sulu of the USS Enterprise on Star Trek. He and his family are interned at Camp Rohwer in the swamps of Arkansas. His father is able to convince camp commanders to let the teenagers hold dances with a record player brought in by the guards. Takei is too young to attend the dances, but he listens to the music through the wall. The bayou seeps under the barbed wire fence, and cypress trees grow out of this water. He watches his father carve a sculpture from the root of a cypress tree and learns an important lesson about the meaning of resilience, that it is “the ability to find beauty in an ugly situation.”¹⁸

There are times that violence erupts among internees, such as in the Poston and Manzanar camps. This violence stems from fear, tensions, and suspicions regarding the presence of inu, or spies. There are guards in towers with guns. You have been told that you were put in these camps for your own protection. Then why, you wonder, are these guns pointing inward instead of outward?¹⁹

After all this, Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) men who are seventeen or older are given an “opportunity” to demonstrate their patriotism by serving in the US armed forces. You are asked to fill out a form also known as the “loyalty” questionnaire. Question 27 asks if you are willing to serve in combat duty wherever ordered. Question 28 asks if you are willing to swear allegiance to the United States and to renounce your allegiance to the Japanese emperor. What does “willingness” mean when you are incarcerated without due process?

Some of you become part of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a Japanese American segregated unit. The segregated 100th Infantry Battalion from Hawai’i joins you. You are on the front lines of some of the bloodiest battles in Europe, such as the rescue of the Texas “Lost Battalion” in France. You are one of the recipients of over 4,000 Purple Hearts, 29 Distinguished Service Crosses, 588 Silver Stars, and more than 4,000 Bronze Stars. Your segregated unit is among the most decorated units in the war.²⁰

An estimated six thousand Nisei also serve as linguists as part of the Military Intelligence Service. They include John Okada, who is interned at Minidoka camp in Idaho, and subsequently trains to become a Japanese language translator at the Military Intelligence Service Language School in Minnesota. Okada earns the rank of sergeant as a translator and interpreter. About a decade later, his writing will immortalize the experience of the conscientious objectors who answered “no” to questions 27 and 28 in the loyalty questionnaire. His novel will be titled No-No Boy.²¹

During the war, there are other ways to leave the internment camps. You may leave to do much-needed agricultural labor in Idaho, Colorado, and Utah. Or you might attend college in the East or Midwest. The beginning of the end of internment and the closure of the camps is what results from Mitsuye Endo’s successful challenge to this injustice in a December 1944 Supreme Court decision.²² Endo, the chief plaintiff, was born in Sacramento. At the beginning of the war, she was a twenty-two-year-old typist for California’s Department of Motor Vehicles when she was fired because of her Japanese ancestry. She and her family were then interned at Tule Lake camp in California. In July 1942, she petitioned Judge Michael J. Roche of the United States District Court in Northern California for a writ of habeas corpus to obtain her release. She was an American citizen who was interned without charge for any law violation and without a hearing. Judge Roche denied her freedom, but a lawyer from the War Relocation Authority met with Endo in camp, offering her freedom on the condition that she not return to the West Coast. Endo refused and continued to be incarcerated while her case was under appeal. On December 18, 1944, in Ex parte Mitsuye Endo, the US Supreme Court unanimously rules that the government cannot detain citizens who are loyal to the United States.

The announcement that internment camps will close within a year creates panic, anger, confusion, and anxiety at Tule Lake. Initially, less than two dozen internees apply to renounce their US citizenship. In the subsequent weeks, you may be one of the thousands who join them. The injustice of internment, coercion by Japanese nationalists, and parental pressure to keep families together create complex and divided loyalties that motivate renunciation. You had thought that renunciation of your US citizenship would give you and your family members more options for resettlement. But then you learn that Japan is losing the war. Now you and your family face the prospect of deportation to a devastated Japan.²³ You did not fully understand the implications of your actions. You realize that you have made a grave mistake. The herculean efforts of lawyer Wayne Collins, who dedicates most of his career to defending Japanese Americans affected by the war, helps the majority get their citizenships restored. In some cases, this process takes over two decades.

By the war’s end, you are afraid of what awaits you outside the camps. If you are among those still left because you are elderly, have young children, or are unsure of how you will support yourself, you are forced out and issued twenty-five dollars. The West Coast has changed. Its population has grown. You may have no choice but to live in surplus army barracks supplied by the War Relocation Authority. They bear an eerie resemblance to the camps you had just left.²⁴

REVOLUTIONARY CHANGES

If you were not of Japanese ancestry, the days that you remember varied greatly, depending on who you were. In the 1930s, Japanese invasions mobilized Chinese American communities to aid their Asian homeland even before US entry in the war. The outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 inspired “Bowl of Rice” fundraisers from New York to Portland, San Francisco, and Santa Barbara that raised millions of dollars for China war relief. The son of Chinese immigrants, John Fong, was born and raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where his family owned a bakery and grocery store. He was twelve years old when his Boy Scout troop participated in a fundraising festival and parade in San Francisco. Parade-goers threw money in large receptacles built in the shape of rice bowls resting on platforms with wheels. Fong remembers: “We were assigned four scouts to each rice bowl, and we pushed that thing from City Hall on Van Ness to Market, and down Market to Grant and then up Grant until . . . Broadway.”²⁵

Chinese Americans also organized protests against the sale of scrap metal to Japan, where it was being recycled into war matériel. Fong recalls his parents participating in this effort: “Well, they went down to the docks one time because they were loading scrap metal. They were selling scrap metal to Japan. . . . So of course a lot of scrap metal came back as bombs. . . . My mother and father a couple of times went down there to demonstrate.”²⁶ Similar demonstrations took place in Oregon. In February 1939, several dozen Chinese American men, women, and children carried signs denouncing the loading of scrap iron onto the Norway Maru, a large Japanese freighter, at the Port of Astoria. Some of the signs read “This Iron Is For Bullets” and “Help Us Stop Slaughtering Innocents.”²⁷

Within hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan bombed and invaded the Philippines. Seattle native and Filipino American Dorothy Cordova was nine years old on that day. She remembers December 8th:

They started to bomb the Philippines. In fact, they bombed my mother’s hometown because they have an airfield there. I remember my cousin and I walking up Denny to go to the drugstore on the top on Twenty-Third, and all the time we were watching the sky . . . we were kids. We didn’t know what was going to happen.²⁸

The city’s preparation for possible future attacks also made an impression on her. In Seattle, if you wanted to turn on the lights at night, the windows of your homes had to have heavy curtains. Air raid wardens patrolled Cordova’s neighborhood to make sure their windows were fully covered.

After people started shaking their fists at both the Japanese and Filipino American children who rode the school bus, Cordova and other Filipino children were given buttons that said, “I’m a Filipino.” Her sentiments about Japanese American internment contrasted dramatically with those of her family members, who resented the attack by Japan that had “leveled” her mother’s hometown. Since she attended an elementary school with Japanese American classmates, she remembers feeling differently:

I didn’t think it was right; see, they were sending away my friends. I didn’t know their parents, but then my friends, the children, were going. I’ll tell you what was bad was listening to comments by my relatives who I really loved—always having to defend—I remember as a little girl the times that I would leave the room yelling, “That’s not fair. That’s not fair. They’re just kids.”²⁹

Enlistment figured prominently in Asian American memories of the war. Twelve thousand to fifteen thousand Chinese Americans served in the armed forces, in segregated and non-segregated units.³⁰ In May 1942, the US Navy allowed Chinese Americans to enlist as apprentice seamen. Previously, they had been restricted to work as mess stewards or cabin boys.³¹ Chinese Americans also enlisted in the Chinese American Composite Wing, created in 1943 as part of a joint US-China air effort. It involved sending planes and supplies to the Chinese Air Force and having their pilots trained by American aviators.³²

The largest concentration of Chinese Americans was in the 14th Air Service Group. Formed in Venice, Florida, in 1944, it consisted of nine units made up of Chinese American personnel. Of its fifty-four officers, twenty-one were Chinese American, two Korean American, and the rest white.³³ Chinese Americans enlisted for various reasons including enmity against Japan, the chance to be close to family in China, and the opportunity to be “accepted as equals of all other Americans.”³⁴ In 1944, Charles Leong wrote: “To GI Joe Wong, in the army a ‘Chinaman’s chance’ means a fair chance, one based not on race or creed, but on the stuff of the man who wears the uniform of the U.S. Army.” Many veterans similarly remember their enlistment as a way of giving Chinese Americans “a regular break” and a sense of “belongingness.”³⁵

In 1941, third-generation Chinese American Maggie Gee withdrew from her studies at the University of California, Berkeley to work as an electrical draftswoman at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, where she charted the electrical wiring for the repair of damaged submarines. The war provided her with an opportunity of fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming a pilot like Amelia Earhart. She enrolled in flight school in Minden, Nevada, and became one of two Chinese American women in the Women Airforce Service Pilots. WASP transported military aircraft from one base to another within the United States and flew mock missions to train men about to go overseas for combat. Gee recalls that their passion for flying planes bonded the approximately 1,100 women pilots: “All we wanted to do is fly. That’s what made the organization so good, because everyone loved flying so much and they wanted to do it.”³⁶

Thousands of Filipino Americans rushed to their local recruiting offices but were initially turned away because they were aliens ineligible for citizenship. On December 20, 1941, President Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act, which allowed Filipinos in the United States to enlist in the armed forces. The initial plan to organize a “Filipino Battalion” had to expand to two regiments in order to accommodate the large number of enlistees. Regiment member Toribio Rosal explained that many of these Filipino men came to the United States when they were young, leaving their relatives behind. They felt that “it was their duty” and that it “was in their hearts” to go back to the Philippines and fight the Japanese.³⁷ Approximately seven thousand Filipinos joined the First and Second Filipino Infantry Regiments in 1942. The first regiment trained at Camp San Luis Obispo and then the Salinas Rodeo Grounds near Watsonville, California, where many Filipinos worked in agriculture. The second trained at Lompoc’s Camp Cooke.³⁸

Alex Aguinid recollected wanting to join the regiment because “when they were having meals, they always had rice,” and he needed to eat rice to maintain his stamina.³⁹ When Dixon Campos volunteered for the First Filipino Infantry Regiment, he didn’t see many soldiers his age. Many were in their mid-thirties and even their forties. Some lied about their age to stay in the army. Yet, he remembers their excellent physical condition: “I had a hell of a time trying to keep up with them. They were strong as an ox because, I guess, of their fieldwork. They could go on a twenty-mile hike. I’d be dying at the end of the twenty-mile hike. And they’d say, ‘Let’s go another twenty.’“⁴⁰ In their missions to the Philippines, they played an important role given their familiarity with the difficult terrain. They were also able to work behind enemy lines, collecting intelligence and engaging in sabotage.

Filipinos in the Philippines also served in the US armed forces. Although the Philippines was a commonwealth by 1941, it was not fully independent from US rule. After observers in the Philippines and the United States concluded that war in the Pacific was inevitable, President Roosevelt recalled Douglas MacArthur in July 1941, and asked him to lead the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE). USAFFE combined the US Army, Philippine Scouts, Philippine Army, Constabulary, and the Air Corps and placed them under US command. Filipino soldiers swore oaths to “bear true faith and allegiance to the United States of America.”⁴¹ One of the USAFFE soldiers was my Lolo, or grandfather, Braulio Ceniza. In a letter, he shared the following memory about his service:

My role was a hit and run tactic, a guerrilla warfare. We did not have sufficient arms and weapons to face the enemy. The [Japanese] were after us all the time and we tried to evade. Many of my fellow officers and enlisted men were caught by surprise and they were killed. . . . I was able to survive in spite of all those sacrifices, thank God.⁴²

After Japan colonized Korea in 1910, military service provided Korean Americans an opportunity to showcase their dedication to Korea as well as the United States. On December 7, a Korean Night program rehearsal took place in Los Angeles. The program’s purpose was to raise funds for war relief for Korean refugee families and volunteers in China. After someone shouted that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor and then called for war against Japan, everyone in the play cried out, “Teahan Toknip Mansee! (Long Live Korean Independence!).”⁴³

Korean American men served in the US armed forces, volunteered as emergency fire wardens, and worked in military construction. Women served in the Red Cross and the USO, and sold war bonds. Those who were able to speak the Japanese language worked in government agencies as well as on the Pacific War’s front lines as interpreters, translators, and intelligence officers. In 1941, Korean Americans organized the Tiger Brigade of the California National Guard in Los Angeles. Scholar Bong-Youn Choy participated in this Korean unit and observed that although many of the men were past the age of military duty, they still volunteered: “Every Saturday and Sunday afternoon, the Korean unit exercised for three to four hours in Exposition Park, Los Angeles. A similar unit was established in San Francisco and drilled at the War Memorial Auditorium every Sunday afternoon.” On April 26, 1942, the Tiger Brigade hosted a gala with representatives from Korean and American communities. Choy writes: “For many Koreans it was their first opportunity to see their countrymen in army uniforms since the Korean national armed forces had been forced to disband by the Japanese authorities in 1907.”⁴⁴

Korean American individuals distinguished themselves through their valor. Colonel Young Oak Kim was a highly decorated US Army veteran of World War II and the Korean War. During World War II, he served with Japanese Americans in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and as a combat leader in Italy and France. He received his first Purple Heart after being wounded in action while working to destroy several enemy machine-gun nests near Santa Maria Oliveto, Italy, in September 1943. In 1944, Kim and Private First Class Irving Akahoshi volunteered to cross a German field and capture German POWs in order to gather information for the Liberation of Rome, actions for which they received the Distinguished Service Cross.⁴⁵

The daughter of Korean independence leader Ahn Chang Ho, Susan Ahn Cuddy, viewed her enlistment in the US Navy as an opportunity to honor her father’s legacy. Reflecting upon her motivations, she emphasized that “when you’re a Korean, and you have no country, and the Japanese are the predators, and you have a father who gave up his life for it, you go fight.”⁴⁶ She became the first Asian woman to enlist in the navy and serve as its first female gunnery officer.

Another watershed for Asian Americans was in the realm of employment. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 prohibited racial discrimination in employment. Given the labor shortages from so many men entering the armed forces, new work opportunities abounded, especially in war-related industries. The six major shipyards of the San Francisco Bay Area—the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, Mare Island Navy Yard in Vallejo, Naval Drydocks in San Francisco, Marinship in Sausalito, Moore Dry Dock Company in Oakland, and Bethlehem Steel in Alameda and South San Francisco—offered jobs that were previously unavailable to Asian Americans.⁴⁷ After graduating from Mills College in 1942, Jade Snow Wong was advised to look for work only among Chinese firms because of racial prejudice. However, Wong was able to find work as a clerk typist in the shipyards, summarizing and typing reports based on suggestions made by workers to management. Her work resulted in the shipyard supplying vitamins to ward off colds.⁴⁸

While the iconic image of “Rosie the Riveter” features a white woman wearing a red bandanna and blue work shirt and flexing her muscle, Asian American women were among the millions of women who worked in war-related industries during World War II. These work opportunities expanded Asian Americans’ sense of community. Maggie Gee’s forty-six-year-old mother, An Yoke Gee, worked at Kaiser Shipyards as a burner, cutting steel plate with a blowtorch. Maggie Gee characterized it as a “positive experience” for her mother: “She made non-Chinese friends for the first time, and it broadened her outlook on life. She was satisfied with being part of a Chinese community where she lived, but this allowed her to become part of a whole.”⁴⁹ Dorothy Eng remembered seeing many women from Oakland’s Chinatown going to and from work in the shipbuilding industry: “Matronly women who had never worked outside of their homes before got jobs as sweepers aboard ships. . . . I remember seeing them get off the bus, going home to Chinatown carrying their broom and having their hair tied.”⁵⁰

Asian American women recruited workers from their own families and communities. Such was the case with Manang Nene, a Filipino American friend of Evangeline Canonizado Buell’s step-grandmother, Grandma Roberta. She encouraged Roberta to find work at the Richmond Shipyards. This was the first time in her life that Roberta joined the workforce. After experiencing so much overt racial discrimination, this meaningful work gave her a “renewed energy and outlook on life in America.”⁵¹ Buell elaborated:

Grandma loved going to work in the shipyard. Not only did it give her something to do outside the home, she also felt gratified to be able to contribute to household expenses. Once I heard her say to Uncle, “Now we can afford to buy a new stove and a new phonograph.” She also felt proud that she was contributing toward the war effort, further boosting her self-confidence.⁵²

In the context of US wartime alliances with China, the Philippines, and India, and Asian American participation in the war effort, the public’s perception of specific Asian American groups dramatically shifted. The characterization of Chinese Americans as a yellow peril personified by popular villains Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless shifted to that of “good Asians” in a “good war.” Filipinos, once represented as uncivilized savages, had become brothers in arms. During the Bataan Death March in April 1942, some seventy thousand Filipino and American POWs marched to their incarceration after their surrender to Japanese forces in the Philippines, and thousands died en route.

These changes contributed to the passage of landmark legislation. Chinese Exclusion Acts were repealed and US naturalization rights to Chinese granted. The passage of the Luce-Celler Act in 1946 allowed Filipinos and Asian Indians to become US citizens. The War Brides Act of 1945 and the Alien Fiancées and Fiancés Act of 1946 facilitated thousands of Chinese and Filipino women to enter the United States as new brides. Their migration resulted in the growth of Asian American families and more balanced gender ratios.

Yet, anti-Asian violence and racism persisted. Korean American Mary Paik Lee recalled that even after Japanese Americans were interned, other Asian Americans feared going outside. Some endured beatings even in broad daylight. Acts of vandalism destroyed their cars and other belongings. Segregation continued for Filipinos in Stockton’s movie theaters.⁵³ When their employment in war-related industries ended, Filipinos returning to the San Joaquin Delta found that the only jobs available to them continued to be in the fields and domestic work.

While enlistment demonstrated Asian American loyalty to the United States, Chinese and Filipino soldiers encountered great suspicion. When a group of Chinese American soldiers entered the town of Fayetteville, Arkansas, they were immediately surrounded by police, questioned, and detained until a white officer verified their documentation.⁵⁴ Soldiers from the Second Filipino Infantry Regiment were refused service at a restaurant in Marysville located near their training camp in Northern California.⁵⁵

Filipinos in the United States who had joined the US military were eligible for GI Bill benefits, but like other veterans of color, they were barred by restrictive housing covenants from purchasing homes in white neighborhoods. As scholar Dawn Bohulano Mabalon points out, receiving the “worst postwar benefit package” were the more than 250,000 Filipino veterans who had joined the USAFFE in the Philippines, including her father, Ernesto Mabalon. The Rescission Act of 1946 declared that their service “shall not be deemed to be or to have been service in the military or national forces of the United States or any component thereof for the purposes of any law of the United States conferring rights, privileges or benefits,” even though President Roosevelt had promised them full equity with other veterans. Mabalon’s father considered the Rescission Act a deep insult, and my Lolo characterized it as a “cruel law.”⁵⁶

HISTORIES THAT WILL LIVE

In 1981, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians held eleven hearings across the country. More than 750 witnesses gave testimonies. Among them was Mary Kurihara, who delivered her husband’s, Albert Kurihara’s, testimony on his behalf because he had recently suffered a stroke. In it, he condemned the treatment of Japanese Americans:

Sometimes I want to tell this government to go to hell. This government can never repay all the people who suffered. But, this should not be an excuse for token apologies, I hope this country will never forget what happened . . . and do what it can to make sure that future generations will never forget.⁵⁷

The commission concluded that internment was a grave injustice and that Executive Order 9066 resulted from race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. In August 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, apologizing to the Japanese American internees and offering $20,000 to survivors of the camps. In 1998, Fred Korematsu received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton. Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui received this honor posthumously in 2012 and 2015.

Nevertheless, these histories have been and continue to be vulnerable to erasure. The photography of Depression-era migrant farmworkers and sharecroppers by Dorothea Lange, one of the great documentary photographers, is well known, but her photographs of the Japanese internment during World War II are not. Although the federal government commissioned these photographs, almost all, approximately 97 percent, were never published. Instead they were suppressed during World War II, with a US Army major writing “Impounded” across some of the prints. At the end of the war, the army kept the internment photographs in the National Archives, out of public view. How can you see, study, and reflect upon histories that you didn’t know were there?

In 2006, Lange’s photographs were finally published in the book Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, edited by historians Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro. Many of these photographs were in print for the first time. Gordon writes that these photographs “unequivocally denounce an unjustified, unnecessary, racist policy,” in addition to showcasing Lange’s skillful use of photography to express “human feelings and relationships.”⁵⁸ What might have, and probably could have, shared the humanity of Japanese Americans, was kept out of view.

Numerous testimonies, creative nonfiction works, and scholarly resources exist so that we may remember and learn from internees’ experiences. These include Miné Okubo’s 1946 graphic memoir Citizen 13660, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s 1973 memoir Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment, Yoshiko Uchida’s 1982 autobiographical account Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family, and George Takei’s 2019 graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy.⁵⁹ In her introduction to the second edition of Desert Exile, scholar Traise Yamamoto emphasizes that Uchida wanted to use her writing to educate people, especially young people, and that she frequently gave talks to primary and secondary school groups.⁶⁰

These efforts challenge contemporary attempts to rewrite the historical narrative. In 1990, Assemblyman Gil Ferguson from Orange County, California, introduced a controversial and ultimately unsuccessful resolution that said “it is simply untrue that Japanese-Americans were interned in concentration camps during World War II.”⁶¹ He had previously opposed a resolution asking California schools to teach that the Japanese internment resulted from racism, wartime hysteria, and political failure, and not for military reasons.

In 2016, Carl Higbie, a prominent supporter of President Donald Trump, cited the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans as a precedent for an immigrant registry, using it as a justification for Trump’s proposal of a ban on Muslim immigrants to the United States. Since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, hate crimes and incidents against South Asian, Sikh, Muslim, and Arab Americans have spiked. Although these groups have unique identities and a long-standing presence in the United States, similar to Japanese Americans during World War II, their communities have experienced the dangerous impacts of being stereotyped as the enemy. Surviving Japanese American internees remain vigilant in the face of attempts to use their histories to justify further racial and religious profiling. And so should we.

The connection between these histories and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence during the COVID-19 pandemic is striking to John Tateishi, a former internee at Manzanar camp and the author of a 2020 book about the Japanese American redress movement. He notes a “feeling of déjà vu”: “People who attack Asians in the United States always target women, elders, or children, going after the most vulnerable most often, built out of so much ignorance.”⁶²

There are two days that I remember in relation to these histories. The first was in October 2017, the day my Lolo joined the over 250,000 Filipino veterans of World War II who have received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the US Congress. I was able to attend the ceremony held in the US Capitol Visitor Center together with my mother, Patria Ceniza, and aunt Lucita Ceniza. I brought with me a copy of my Lolo’s photo in his military uniform. He passed away in 2009.⁶³

Sadly, multiple attempts to pass Filipino veterans equity bills in Congress in the 1990s and early 2000s were unsuccessful. These bills would have revised the Rescission Act to recognize Filipino veterans’ World War II service for the purposes of military benefits.⁶⁴ However, a 1990 immigration law enabled Filipino veterans to naturalize and become US citizens. A 2003 act provided VA (Veterans Administration) healthcare. And a 2009 stimulus package gave a lump sum benefit of $15,000 to Filipino veterans who were US citizens, and $9,000 to non-citizens. These gestures of recognition have been controversial. Some Filipino veterans have been mired in bureaucratic red tape in their applications for the lump sum benefit, already a puny amount in contrast to what had been promised.

When the news broke about the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, some observers remarked that the “honor” had come too late. Only sixteen thousand to seventeen thousand Filipino veterans were alive by the time of the ceremony. I understood this criticism all too well. The Rescission Act and its legacies broke my Lolo’s as well as my own heart. My Lolo would have had to have lived until 105 in order to attend this celebratory event. Why did it have to take this long?

Nevertheless, our attendance at the ceremony was hardly in vain. I witnessed the beautiful diversity and strength of the Filipino veteran community, a community primarily composed of Filipinos but also our non-Filipino allies. I observed the tireless advocacy of Major General Antonio Taguba (retired) and other leaders of the Filipino Veterans Recognition and Education Project. I was overjoyed to see my mother receive a bronze replica of the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor on behalf of her father. And we congratulated the living Filipino veterans and their family members.

On that day I learned that it is never too late to honor the sacrifices and achievements of those who have come before us. It is never too late to remember those who have made history. And it is never too late to pick up the broken pieces of ourselves and to do what we can to right a wrong.

A second memory is more recent. In 2021, my husband Greg, our son Louis, and I visited the site of what was once the Tanforan Assembly Center. In the 1970s, the site transformed again into a shopping mall. Just outside the mall’s entrance is the Tanforan Assembly Center Commemorative Garden, which was dedicated in 2007 and funded by many former internees of Tanforan and their descendants.

A plaque explains that the garden memorializes a time when this site served as a temporary assembly center for 7,800 persons of Japanese ancestry who were forcibly removed and confined in the absence of criminal charges and due process of law. It reads: “May we honor this period of history by our remembrance and just action.”

Thus, Asian American histories of World War II intertwine with our present moment, and the days that we remember will live on.