Chapter 8
Shortly before Gordon Hirabayashi’s trial date in October 1942, a jailer appeared outside his cell with an older Japanese man. It was a little after midnight, and most of the men in the cellblock were asleep. Gordon was just drifting off himself. Then he did a double take. “Hey, that’s my dad!”
Gordon had been told that his mother might be summoned to testify in his trial, but he had not expected to see his father. He was shocked by his father’s haggard appearance.
Federal agents had awakened Gordon’s father, Shungo Hirabayashi, and his mother, Mitsu, early that morning at the Tule Lake camp in Northern California. They’d been traveling all day, and they were exhausted.
Mitsu Hirabayashi had been taken to the women’s tank upstairs. When the cell door closed behind her, she looked around nervously. Despite the late hour, the room was brightly lit. Women in green prison uniforms were sitting on metal benches reading or standing around in clusters, chatting casually as if at an after-church social.
Mitsu noticed an old upright piano in one corner of the room. Some of the keys didn’t work, but she sat down and plinked out a tune. Immediately the women gathered around and began to sing. A bit embarrassed by the attention, Mitsu said, “Somebody else play. All I know are some songs like this and church hymns, and you don’t want to hear church hymns.”
The women replied, “No, no. Nobody plays here. You play.”
And so she played, deep into the night, as the women stood behind her and sang along.
The next morning, the jail’s matron brought Mitsu a prison uniform and told her to change into it. Mitsu refused. “I’m not a criminal. I’m a witness. I shouldn’t be here in the first place.”
When the matron persisted, Mitsu demanded to see Gordon’s lawyers. The matron quickly backed down, and the other women in the tank looked on with admiration. Mitsu Hirabayashi—like her son—was nobody’s fool.
On Tuesday, October 20, Gordon’s trial commenced, with Judge Lloyd Llewellyn Black presiding. The case was reported in The Seattle Times under a headline that employed a racist term that was widespread at the time: Curfew Trial of Jap Started.
It turned out to be a short and somewhat farcical affair. After the jury was sworn in, the prosecution called Gordon’s father to the stand.
Shungo was nervous. He had never been in a courtroom. His English was far from fluent, and his answers, barely audible, were hesitant and unclear.
The judge asked, “Is there anyone here in this place who can interpret for the witness?” Nobody stepped forward.
Gordon looked around the room. The only other Japa-nese or Japanese American people he saw were his parents. “Well, I can interpret for him,” he said, “if you’ll accept the defendant.”
The judge hesitated but agreed.
Gordon approached the stand. “Where were you born?” the prosecutor asked. Gordon translated the question into Japanese.
His father replied. “In Japan,” Gordon translated.
“Do you have any children here in the United States?”
“Yes.”
“Is one of them here?”
“Yes.”
“Can you point to your son?”
Shungo, looking confused, pointed in Gordon’s direction. Gordon smiled, turned to the judge, and said, “Well, in regards to that question, apparently he’s confirming that I am his son.”
When the prosecution rested, Gordon’s attorney, Frank Walters, called Gordon to the stand. Quietly and calmly, Gordon gave an account of his experiences growing up in America. He’d been educated in public schools, he said. He’d spent much of his teenage years working on his parents’ farm, driving tractors and delivery trucks.
He had never been to Japan. He’d been an enthusiastic member of the Boy Scouts of America—an assistant scout master, in fact. He was a Christian, a Quaker most recently. He’d played baseball in high school, was the vice president of the University of Washington YMCA. All in all, he’d had a pretty typical American upbringing.
When the judge dismissed Gordon from the stand, witnesses from the community came forward and testified to his good character. Then Walters rose again. He argued that Executive Order 9066, the subsequent exclusion orders, and the military curfew order deprived Gordon of his liberty without due process of law and thus violated his rights under the Constitution.
When the defense rested, the judge prepared to read the jurors their instructions. He turned to them and said, “You can forget all the talk about the Constitution by the defense. What is relevant here is the public proclamation issued by the Western Defense Command. You are to determine this: Is the defendant a person of Japanese ancestry? If so, has he complied with the military curfew and exclusion orders, which are valid and enforceable laws? It is your duty to accept the law as stated by the Court.”[24]
Ten minutes later the jury returned their verdicts: guilty on both counts.
At the Hillyard Laundry in Spokane, Washington, the war was much on the minds of the Shiosaki family. Because they lived east of the Columbia River, they were outside the exclusion zone, and for this reason they were not forced to leave their home and business.
But they all feared that at some point Kisaburo might be taken away, as had so many other Issei men. At night, the family sat around the kitchen table making contingency plans. If Kisaburo were to be arrested, Tori and the kids would have to run the laundry themselves.
Fred’s older brother, Roy, who ran a laundry in Montana, had been drafted in early January 1942, during a brief period between the attack on Pearl Harbor and when the Selective Service stopped drafting Japanese Americans. Fred resolved that as soon as he turned eighteen, he, too, would follow his brother’s lead and sign up. For now, he was keeping that to himself.
At least things were looking up at the laundry. Customers drifted back, and soon they had more business than they could handle. One day, Will Simpson, the newspaper editor, came in carrying a bundle of grubby white work shirts. The family hadn’t seen him since the day after Pearl Harbor, when he’d shut his door in Kisaburo’s face.
“I can’t find anybody to do my shirts right,” Simpson said. “Would you do them?”
Kisaburo paused, savoring the moment. Then he put on a mournful face, shook his head sadly, and said, “Jeez, sorry. I’m just too busy.”
That August, straight after his eighteenth birthday, Fred took a bus downtown and strode into a Selective Service office, eager to sign up for the US Army. But, living as he did in a mostly white community outside the exclusion zone, he had missed one vital piece of information.
The War Department had decreed that Japanese Americans were ineligible to serve in the US military and were to be classified 4-C—“enemy aliens”—by their local draft boards.
When Fred told the young officer behind the desk that he wanted to enlist, the man stared at him blank-faced for a moment and then said, “You can’t sign up. You’re an enemy alien.”
Stunned, Fred replied, “No, I’m not! I was born in America. I’m a citizen.”
“Well, the War Department says you’re an enemy alien, so you’re an enemy alien.”[25]
Fred staggered out onto the sidewalk, shocked and devastated.
As he rode the bus home, he brooded on what had just happened. It defied common sense that a native-born American could be considered either an alien or an enemy, that simply placing the characters 4-C next to his name on a draft card meant that he couldn’t serve his country.
Looking around, he saw that the only people on the bus anywhere near his age were all young women. Nearly all of Spokane’s young men were off to war. He sank a little lower in his seat, wishing the driver would hurry up so he could get home.
By December 1942, five million US servicemen were away from home, but the military was still straining to build a fighting force large enough and powerful enough to wage war both against Japan in the Pacific and in Europe, where the United States had joined Britain and France in the war against Nazi Germany and its allies.
Ever since Pearl Harbor, Japanese American leaders in Hawaiʻi and on the mainland had been lobbying the government to allow Nisei men to enlist. It just didn’t make sense to have tens of thousands of men idling their time away in Hawaiʻi or behind barbed-wire fences in the American West.
Beginning in early January 1943, memos began circulating among the War Department, the Selective Service, army intelligence, and the FBI about the possibility of allowing Nisei men to volunteer for a segregated, all–Japanese American combat team.
On February 1, President Roosevelt made it official, signing a memo to the secretary of war, Henry Lewis Stimson, that read, in part, “Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry. A good American is one who is loyal to this country and our creed of liberty and democracy. Every loyal American should be given the opportunity to serve this country.”[26]
As soon as Fred Shiosaki heard about the new, all–Japanese American fighting unit, he wasted no time. He took another bus downtown and walked into the same Selective Service office where he had been told he was an enemy alien the previous August.
This time there was a woman sitting behind the desk.
“What’s going on?” Fred asked.
The woman smiled and replied, “Well, all you have to do is sign up and you’re in.”[27] She handed Fred a pen and a piece of paper. He glanced at it, signed, thanked the woman, and headed for home.
The whole thing had taken only minutes. Back at the laundry, Fred paused for a moment before opening the front door. He knew his parents weren’t going to take the news well and that his father was going to be angry.
In the Shiosaki family, as in many Japanese American families, the father was the head of the household, the decision maker. Kisaburo would expect to have been consulted about something as momentous as his son going off to war.
Fred took a deep breath, opened the door, nodded at his parents behind the counter of the laundry, and said nothing.