Independence Day, 1942. Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that the nation would celebrate not in the fireworks of make-believe but in the death-dealing reality of tanks and planes and guns and ships. We celebrate it also by running without interruption the assembly lines, which turn out these weapons to be shipped to all the embattled points of the globe. Not to waste one hour, not to stop one shot, not to hold back one blow—that is the way to mark our great national holiday in this year of 1942. As he spoke, submarine USS Triton ejected two torpedoes from its payload, sinking the Japanese destroyer Nenohi in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska.

While 188 sailors churned in icy death, presumably it was a warm summer day 3,000 miles south across the Pacific, a soft breeze lifting with white gulls across a blue bay, pleasant sunlight dappling the Mills College campus, gracious lawns and tree-lined paths sweeping toward stately buildings. Kay, still at large in Oakland, wrote to the family in Tanforan about a crowd that gathered that day on the lawn outside of Lisser Hall for an open discussion on race relations, convened by Leila Anderson, general secretary of the Cal Berkeley YWCA. The day was strategic, the discussions urgent—although as Kay admitted, she was the singular oriental face in a sea of educated white folks, one last Japanese, her temporary independence protected by a dedicated core of good guys in opposition to the recent evacuation of her people.

The key organizer of this July 4th F.O.R. Day was a young man named Caleb Foote. Foote was a recent graduate of Harvard, former editor of the Harvard Crimson, and a pacifist, chosen by A. J. Muste to open a branch of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Northern California. Until his conviction for violation of military service, Foote would work relentlessly—researching, traveling, organizing, and writing on behalf of conscientious objectors and incarcerated Japanese Americans. Exchanging correspondence with Kay in camp, one tattered form letter has survived with Foote’s handwritten note at the bottom: Thanks loads for the Christmas greetings. I’d like to hear from you in detail on the points above. You have been one of my best informants. Caleb.

Informants. Perhaps the cultural anthropologist in you raises your eyebrows, but then, you’ll sigh, this was 1943. I admit, unlike encountering gee, golly, swell, oh boy oh boy, or O’Reilly, I fidgeted over informant. But under these circumstances, who was going to write about or for us, if not those others?

At the very same time that Kay was sipping Cokes with anxious academics and vociferous pacifists at Mills, sociologist and demographer Dorothy Swaine Thomas was organizing her cohort for a study of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement under the auspices of the Yamashita family alma mater, Cal Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania. With the generosity of the Rockefeller, Columbia, and Giannini Foundations, and the cooperation of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), War Department, Western Defense Command, and Fourth Army, this study, known by its acronym JERS, produced two very informative volumes: The Spoilage and The Salvage, published by UC Press in 1946 and 1952. The Spoilage was coauthored with Richard Nishimoto, and The Salvage with the assistance of Charles Kikuchi and James Sakoda. The authors make clear the difficulties of gathering information within any prison:

Constant efforts had to be made to guard against betrayal of informants . . . To their fellow evacuees, “research” was synonymous with “inquisition” and the distinction between “informant” and “informer” was not appreciated. Consequently every one of our evacuee staff members was stigmatized, or in danger of being stigmatized . . .

Despite the provocative conditions and limitations of this study, its three-year scope from 1942 to 1945 reveals a sense of immediate pain, not remembered but lived in deep frustration and contained anger. In 1945, the war was over and the study ended, and those lost years were irretrievable. Years later, we retrieve the irretrievable.

Of course you recognize the slippery path between opportunity and advocacy. If a bad thing was going to happen anyway, why depend on only diaries or letters or mere memory to keep the truth? Why not gather and organize documentation as events transpired? Social science could analyze the data, unravel the consequences, dictate appropriate future policies. So many years later, I find these justifications preposterous; the most fascist regimes have been known to keep the most meticulous accounting of their crimes. And how creepy is it to request from the National Archives the War Relocation Authority files of the Yamashita siblings and then to receive several hundred pages of incarceration documents systematically saved? A precise record and evidence of injustice served. As for the JERS archive, it is stored in the UC Bancroft Library and consists of 379 reels of microfilm, 336 boxes, 84 cartons, 36 oversized volumes, 6 oversized folders—all for a total of 250.5 linear feet of stuff. Chronologically, the miles of barbed-wire fences that corralled my family preceded the 250.5 linear feet of paper, but something in my gut tells me that the logic of this is skewed, that the science of the social had long before measured and interred the cornerstones and the supporting stakes. The very possibility of corralling a people into some kind of single tribe was born in the idea of having discovered them in the first place.

Ishi, that intuition in my gut is that which you long ago recognized as a critical de-centering, the gaze of another unmasked. This is the dance my folks and those who came to their aid danced together in a dark time of war and justified injustice.

They: These people are loyal. Race has nothing to do with loyalty.

Us: Yes, look how loyal we are! Please notice what kind of loyal.

They: Only such a group of people can be this loyal in this way. They are culturally loyal.

Us: Yes, yes, loyalty flows in our very blood and is our birthright.

They: But more importantly, their loyalty has been cultivated on American soil; it’s a fully assimilated loyalty.

Us: Our loyalty is fully assimilated.

This is perhaps a dance that could not have been otherwise, but it is a dance that forever defines my folks, narrates who we become.

The prefaces of The Spoilage and The Salvage are instructive in laying out the intent of the study. Thomas and Nishimoto explain that spoilage refers to those Japanese Americans who were repatriated to Japan, stigmatized as disloyal to the United States, and segregated at the Tule Lake Center. Salvage refers to those Japanese Americans “whose status in America was, at least temporarily, improved through dispersal and resettlement in the East and Middle West . . . many participating directly in the war effort.” There was a third classification, residue, to include the net effects of spoilage and salvage; that is, those classified as spoilage who anyway were reabsorbed into a more tolerant America; those as salvage were individuals who failed to assimilate into the American workforce through resettlement, plus those who remained in the camps until the war’s end in 1945, when they were forced out finally to homelessness. If the designation informant bites, think about the garbage narrative here invoked. Waste, debris, trash, wreckage, refuse. I note here that The Residue is a third volume yet to be written.

The Yamashitas were for the most part the salvage. By the end of 1943, the seven siblings had left or were in the process of leaving Topaz. Chizu and her husband Ed and little son Kiku, who the family called Kix, moved to harvest sugar beets on a farm in Idaho. Kay found a job in Philadelphia to work for the Quakers and Nisei Student Relocation. Iyo married Min Tamaki and headed for Chicago, then Philadelphia. Tom got into the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and John into the seminary in Evanston, near Chicago. Kimi’s husband Bob left to teach Japanese language to American soldiers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, with Kimi and daughter Martha following later; son Ted left for college in Saint Louis. Susumu and Kiyo had the most difficult time leaving camp, and the records show that Sus was blacklisted as a kibei and former employee of Mitsubishi. By the end of the war, Sus and Kiyo had three children, two of them born in Topaz. Sus left pregnant Kiyo and two daughters behind in Topaz and went to find work while enrolling in the New York Technical Institute. Mother Tomi took up painting and became a student of the artist Chiura Obata. Despite the circumstances, for the first time in Tomi’s life, she found herself released from constant labor. I realize that because of this gradual dispersal—this process of salvage—our archive of letters exists, the family network constantly tugging and crossing the desert camp Topaz, that jewel of a garbage dump. With this history in mind, the meaning of salvage anthropology for me takes a strange turn: not to salvage physical, narrative, linguistic, or practiced artifacts, but to salvage what is understood to be American.

On June 1, 1942, a month before the Independence Day discussions at Mills College, Caleb Foote wrote to John Nevin Sayre at the Fellowship of Reconciliation in New York:

I was very much interested and stimulated by what you wrote me about Bayard Rustin, and I feel some similar tactics must be adopted by us at this time when our democracy is going down the spout and a “ghetto psychology” created among both the Japanese minority and the Caucasian majority. What should these tactics be? One part is speaking out, even more openly than we have. Another, it seems to me, is direct non-violent opposition to carrying this program out. My imagination is very poor on the latter point, but I can think of a few examples, such as camping outside one of the evacuation camps, sharing their living conditions and privations, and perhaps picketing the gates; or even lying down across the entrances so that army and other evacuation officials would be made to realize what they are doing . . . If some young people could be brought out from the East and Middle West, so that we could have, say, a total aggregation of 25, given some careful training by someone like A.J. . . . My own feeling is that many more of the Japanese should be doing what Gordie Hirabayashi is doing in Seattle—going to jail rather than obeying the evacuation orders. But obviously we cannot call upon them to do this unless we also are prepared both to offer them a way out and an example. I also have a feeling we might do better to go to jail for something like this than for violating Selective Service Act.

Caleb Foote’s proposal for direct non-violent opposition did not happen, though its possibilities were alive and planted for the future. And yet I wonder what might have happened had twenty-five young people laid their bodies across the gates of Tanforan or Topaz. I imagine that this event would have been a great failure, but I want to embrace the young man who urgently and passionately proposed such action. Foote and Rustin believed that their pacifism was made of the boldest stuff of human integrity and courage, or it was nothing.

But to return to Foote’s request from Kay for information. Kay and others contributed in large and small ways to the results of his research to create a pamphlet entitled Outcasts! Foote believed that decisions made on the basis of racism could not ultimately hold up in a court of law based on rights under the Constitution. The legal apparatus would turn to evidence, and the evidence demonstrated what Japanese Americans seemed primed to represent: the most loyal and democratic Americans on Earth. Other pamphlets about the Japanese evacuation were written and distributed, but no other so clearly connected Japanese American evacuation to the racism of Jim Crow, anti-Semitism, and the larger context of social justice and incarceration, while also anticipating future struggles for legal redress.

Our liberties and the sincerity of our repudiation of the monstrous doctrine of a master race depends upon our success in removing from our legal system the possibility that under any circumstances any Executive can have the awful power asserted by the President in the order of February 19, 1942, a power intended to be used against the members of one particular race, but nonetheless applicable in stormy years to any unpopular minority. That way lies death to our democracy.

Foote prefaces Outcasts! with the header “The Tyranny of a Word,” the word being Japs, an enemy label that negated and disparaged our citizens, our Americans of Japanese descent. But what about the designations outcast or dispossessed, refugee or salvage? These words, utilized by advocates and anthropologists to provoke action and empathy, also defined the shame of the Japanese American self, crafted in a dance of loyalty and disloyalty and finally performed in order to survive.