STEVEN OKAZAKI
Deru kugi wa utaeru. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Japanese Americans heard that proverb a lot in 1942, when their president ordered 140,000 of them forcibly removed from their homes by soldiers with guns and government guys in suits and herded (as in transported in livestock trucks and put into horse stalls) into “the camps.”
The government designated them “assembly centers” and “relocation centers,” which sounds like a church gathering followed by witness protection.
Most Japanese Americans called them “the camps,” and they weren’t talking about a place where they ran around in shorts and made lanyards. My Uncle Chico, who drove a semitrailer truck for a living and didn’t tolerate bullshit, referred to them as “god damn concentration camps,” which, minus the “god damn,” is how the US government labeled them early on until they realized how bad it sounded.
They’re usually referred to as “the internment camps,” which seems accurate when you read the dictionary definition of internment as “the state of being confined as a prisoner, especially for political or military reasons.” While that sounds plenty serious, a lot of Japanese Americans (I’ll sometimes refer to them as JAs from now on) feel it’s too soft. It makes what happened seem justifiable for a nation at war; it doesn’t explain why they needed to incarcerate whole families; and it doesn’t capture the injustice, humiliation, and devastating impact the experience had, and continues to have, on the JA community. Which is to say that internment doesn’t reflect the racism of it all.
I think of them as the prison camps where my mother and father (who hadn’t met yet), grandparents, aunts, uncles, and two cousins were sent because they had Japanese faces. Faces that made white people uncomfortable. Faces white people didn’t trust to stand next to them in the grocery store, to be on their kid’s baseball team, or sit next to in church. Faces they twisted into ugly caricatures with slanted eyes, buck teeth, bad haircuts, and big round glasses to make them feel okay about fucking them over, taking away their homes and businesses, and crushing the little bit of dignity they’d worked so hard to acquire. Since JAs hadn’t committed any acts of espionage or sabotage, it could only have been because of their faces.
When FDR signed Executive Order 9066 and the mass incarceration of “all persons of Japanese ancestry” was implemented, virtually the whole country—liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, and every religious denomination except the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Quakers—either supported it or remained silent. California’s attorney general, Earl Warren, later chief justice of the Supreme Court and revered civil liberties champion, vigorously pushed to strip “the Japs” of their rights and get them out of his state. He never apologized for it.
There was no one in the JA community to say, “Hey, this is wrong! Let’s get organized and refuse to go,” because immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, two months before the order was issued, the FBI picked up and imprisoned anyone who might say that: community leaders, teachers, priests, businessmen, judo instructors, and others. And if they had protested, the soldiers would have pointed guns at their heads, maybe beat the crap out of them, then thrown them into the special camp they built for troublemakers.
In Dorothea Lange’s powerful photographs of the mass evacuation, you see JAs of all ages with numbers pinned to their coats, standing next to their belongings, waiting to board buses and trains. They look lost and bewildered, but not broken or hopeless, as if they still believe in their country, even as they enter the camps surrounded by barbed wire, with machine guns pointed at them, in the middle of nowhere.
The nail that sticks up.
Three Japanese Americans refused to go. Minoru “Min” Yasui, twenty-five years old, was born in Hood River, Oregon. He was passionate and superpatriotic. As a good American (and attorney and former Boy Scout), he believed it was his obligation to oppose the government’s orders. He presented himself at a downtown Portland police station and demanded to be arrested. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that the government had the right to restrict the lives of citizens during wartime.
Gordon Hirabayashi, twenty-four years old, was born in Seattle, Washington. He was a college student and a registered conscientious objector supported by a community of Quaker friends. Stubbornly idealistic, he acted on principle and turned himself in to the FBI as an act of civil disobedience. He entered a plea of not guilty on “the basis that both the exclusion law and curfew were racially prejudiced and unconstitutional.” In a decision on the same day as Yasui v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld his conviction.
Fred Korematsu, twenty-three years old, born in Oakland, California, was the most unlikely of resisters. When his parents and three brothers gave up their home and flower-growing business and reported for evacuation, Fred stayed behind with his Caucasian girlfriend. His response was essentially, “I didn’t do anything wrong, so why should I have to go?” So he kept his head down and hid out, until the military police arrested him three weeks later in May 1942.
The national American Civil Liberties Union, which had close ties to President Roosevelt, refused to act. However, Ernest Besig, the director of the Northern California ACLU affiliate, broke from his national office, approached Fred, and asked him if he would be willing to be a test case to challenge the legality of the mass incarceration. Fred said yes, and an extraordinary attorney named Wayne M. Collins took his case.
Fred hadn’t evaded the camps as a moral stand. He just didn’t show up with his suitcase when he was told to. Why should he have?
He acted for himself and maybe for his girlfriend. He imagined himself an individual, with rights, the same rights as every other citizen. This was bold in 1942. People of color didn’t do that. Fred Korematsu was a nail that stuck up.
So he was hammered down. He was tried and convicted, losing at every step of the way—at federal court in San Francisco, at the appeals court, and at the Supreme Court. He was sent to join his family at the Tanforan Assembly Center near San Francisco, and at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. He had rocked the boat and brought unwanted notoriety to his family. In camp, he was shunned as a troublemaker who’d made all Japanese Americans look bad. After the war, as his family restarted their flower business, he drifted from the community, married, had two children, worked as a draftsman, and served as president of the local Lions Club.
Forty years after Fred’s arrest, a law professor at the University of California, San Diego, Peter Irons, and a researcher, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, discovered clear evidence that the US government attorney who had argued Korematsu v. United States before the Supreme Court in 1944 had deliberately lied, suppressed, and distorted evidence about the threat that Japanese Americans posed. With a team of young JA attorneys by his side, Fred Korematsu made national news when his conviction was vacated by the US District Court in San Francisco.
Fred didn’t fit the image of a civil rights hero. He was shy, a bit awkward, and he mumbled. He wasn’t comfortable talking about what happened. His life had been made harder because of it. But there was steadiness and confidence in the way he carried himself, always sharply dressed, clutching or smoking his pipe.
After forty years, he was embraced by a JA community that saw itself and Fred differently. He became comfortable speaking in public and inspired people with his straightforward honesty. He became a civil rights hero. His pursuit of justice resonated with the racial, ethnic, and social issues of the present. He spoke out against the targeting of Muslims and people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent after 9/11 and against the detention without due process of prisoners at Guantánamo. An elementary school, middle school, and high school were named after him. In 1998, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States.
The camps devastated the economic and social life of the Japanese American community. Ten years after the war, they still couldn’t live, work, get their hair cut, or go bowling where they wanted. Seventy-five percent of JA men were self-employed, which means no one would employ them, except to mow their lawns or clean their houses. Twenty years after, the community began to thrive, build their own churches, establish their own baseball teams and bowling leagues, go to their own dentists and barbers, and raise families.
Then, gradually, the community stopped thriving. Before World War II, Japanese Americans represented the largest Asian population in America. Now we are among the smallest, the only Asian ethnic group that has shrunk instead of grown in the past twenty years. The community survives, but the trauma brought on by the camps, which broke down the family structure and undermined the psyche and aspirations of the JA people, both individually and as a community, is still being felt generations later.
Political hysteria and fear of immigrants continue to threaten our humanity. Asian Americans are confronted by the same ugly stereotypes or “poof”; they’re invisible in the media. The other day, I heard a popular NPR host refer to China’s economic rise as a “Chinese Pearl Harbor.” Asian faces still make people uncomfortable. The big and little slights are a constant, often in the most progressive settings. People who don’t see themselves as prejudiced express concern about Asians getting into the top universities.
Do we accept this kind of racism because it is so pervasive, or too minor to make a big deal about, or because we don’t want to lose our job or personal relationships over it? It’s painful and awkward whether we act on it or don’t, but not acting is condoning it.
All Fred Korematsu wanted was to walk down the street with his girlfriend. My father just wanted to be seated at a restaurant. I want people to stop asking me where I’m from (Venice, California). And my fifteen-year-old daughter wants her life’s choices to be determined by who she is and what she’s capable of, not what box she checks off. We can make things better. Just make sure you bring plenty of nails.