ASIAN AMERICANS

In the  mid-1800s, the state of California, being concerned about Asian immigration, produced more legislation against Chinese immigrants than against African Americans. (The Union victory of the Civil War had halted slavery from expanding into the Western expansion, opening the door to immigrant labor for particularly dangerous, and low paying jobs.) Jim Crow laws were created to chip away at the civil right and liberties of Asian Americans, immigrants and anyone who wasn't white. From the 1850s until the 1960s, Jim Crow legislation attacked their rights to due process (the right to testify in court), which had the same effect as legalizing the murder of non-whites, since witnesses to those crimes could not legally testify in court. Jim Crow laws denied people of color their civil rights to hold office, vote, marrying a Caucasian (miscegenation), receive an education, employment, consume alcohol, and choosing where they live. Jim Crow laws also forced segregation. 

'By 1880, Chinese immigrants, brought in by the railroads to do the backbreaking labor at pitiful wages, numbered 75,000 in California, almost one-tenth of the population. They became the objects of continuous violence. The novelist Bret Harte wrote an obituary for a Chinese man named Wan Lee:

Dead, my revered friends, dead. Stoned to death in the streets of San Francisco, in the year of grace 1869 by a mob of halfgrown boys and Christian school children.

In Rock Springs, Wyoming, in the summer of 1885, whites attacked five hundred Chinese miners, massacring twenty-eight of them in cold blood.'

- A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn.

Like California, many other states had anti-miscegenation laws targeting Asian groups, making it illegal for them to marry white partners. The Expatriation Act was struck down by the Cable Act of 1922, but still maintained that women who married "aliens ineligible for citizenship" (Asian men) would still lose their citizenship.

In Februrary 1942, after the Pearl Harbor attack, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 giving the army the power, without warrants or indictments or hearings, to arrest all 110,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Men, women and children were taken from their homes, forced into relocation and incarcerated under armed guards for over three years. Their homes, businesses and property were seized and never returned. 

March, 2020 - I am Lani Miki Tanaka. I was born in 1961 in Los Angeles. My father was Michio Mickey Tanaka born in Santa Monica, California in 1928. My mother was Mildred Midori Kawasaki Tanaka born in Lanai, Hawaii in 1934. My father’s parents came from Maui, Hawaii. My grandparents were Henry Tanaka and Alice Nakamura Tanaka. 

The story is that my grandfather told my grandmother that he was going to the mainland to seek his fortune and that he would be back for her in a year. They would get married and move to the mainland. And so he did and they did. 

I learned about the internment, I think in about 3rd grade history. I had a very progressive teacher. We studied “Afro Americans” and also first learned about what the government did to the Japanese Americans on the west coast.  Reading about it in my history book brought instant shame. I was the only Japanese kid in my class.  I did the math and realized that my dad’s parents, my dad and my uncle must have all been interned. They had never talked about it.  I confronted my father that evening at dinner. He started to tell me stories about it. He had fond memories of the internment. He was only around 13 years old. Manzanare is also where he met George Nojima his oldest and best friend. 

Growing up we went on yearly fishing vacations up the coast sometimes all the way to Vancouver, with the Nojimas. We often stopped at a place Uncle George and my dad called “camp” to take pictures. It was weird because there wasn’t much there. This was before any memorials were built on the site. At that time there was a sort of dilapidated watchtower and some barbed wire. 

My grandmother on the other hand hated Manzanar. It was terrible. She really hated the food and the way they lived. Also, she was bitter that my grandfather, without telling her sold the family business, “Tanaka’s Produce” on Montana Blvd. in Santa Monica a year before the war ended. She was especially mad because they had just put in expensive refrigeration before the internment. 

My grandfather was in Arizona most of the war. He was in a hospital. My Uncle Eddie, who was older than my dad apparently toured the Midwest with his band. I have only seen a picture of him playing the guitar in a cowboy hat. In front was a dancing girl in a hula skirt.  My mom was very young during the war. Since she was in Lanai an island of over 900 Japanese and an overall population of around 3200. So, the Japanese were not interned but had a curfew.

AIKO YOSHINAGA WAS 17 when her high school principal called her and 14 other Japanese-American students into his office. It was April 1942 in Los Angeles. Yoshinaga was an honors student, two months from graduating, with dreams of college and becoming a dancer and a singer. The principal had other ideas. “You don’t deserve to get your high school diplomas,” Yoshinaga recalled him saying, “because your people bombed Pearl Harbor.”

Earlier that year President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, creating the path to imprison more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans who lived on the West Coast. Government officials would claim it was a “military necessity” to create “internment camps,” as they were known. Some military leaders used perkier euphemisms: “relocation centers,” “wayside stations,” “temporary homes,” “havens of rest and security.”

Yoshinaga arrived that spring in the “wayside station” in Manzanar, Calif., 250 miles from home. When she stepped off the bus, she saw armed soldiers. Maybe they’ll shoot us, she thought to herself; no one would even know. Officials ordered Yoshinaga to fill a sack with hay for her bed and go to her assigned barrack. She shared one room with her new husband and five of his family members. (Yoshinaga had eloped rather than separate from her high school sweetheart; her parents ended up in a camp in Jerome, Ark., 1,800 miles away.) The room had a single bulb, a stove, some cots and blankets. No running water, no kitchen. The hastily constructed wood walls invited sand and dirt during dust storms, biting winds in the winter.

The next year, Yoshinaga gave birth to her first child at Manzanar in a hospital ward she shared with half a dozen other women moaning in labor. Then, after months of waiting for permission to visit her ailing father, she and her infant daughter traveled by train for five days, most of them spent sitting on her suitcase, to arrive just before his death.

After the war ended, Yoshinaga received $25 and no clues on how to reassemble her life. For the next decades, she was too consumed by survival to dwell on the injustices she and her family had faced. It wasn’t until the late 1960s, after she’d divorced, remarried, divorced again and raised three children as a single mother, working various clerical jobs, that she joined the activist group Asian Americans for Action.

If you want to understand our history, the Japanese-American activist and writer Michi Weglyn told her, go to the archives. And so Yoshinaga did, initially focusing on her family’s history in the prison camps. But one set of documents in the National Archives in Washington led to others. And one to two days a week turned into five and six, up to 12 hours a day, sometimes accompanied by her third husband — her true love, as she would say — Jack Herzig, a former Army paratrooper.

Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga, as she was known after her marriage, stood all of five feet tall, with softly curled hair streaked with gray and Jackie O. eyeglasses the size of saucers. She dressed practically, slacks and sweaters, for her days in the wood-paneled reading room, a cart by her side filled with boxes from the stacks. She brought a purse, a brown-bagged lunch and her own copy machine. And, document by document, she took poorly indexed artifacts from the War Relocation Authority and other government agencies and read, copied and knit them together in her mind and in her meticulous filing system cross-referenced by date, location and subject.

In 1981, she applied to be a researcher with the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, created by Congress to uncover the motives behind Executive Order 9066 and to document its impact. By then, Herzig Yoshinaga had already accumulated about 8,000 documents. Her two-bedroom apartment had sprouted filing cabinets and cardboard boxes stacked five and six high. A bathtub became a repository. The dining-room table disappeared under copies of internal memos, cables, war reports.

Then one day in 1982, she picked up a 6-by-9-inch black book from the corner of an archivist’s desk. It looked much like the 1943 published report by Gen. John DeWitt, who proposed and oversaw the evacuation of Japanese-Americans during the war. But the one in Herzig Yoshinaga’s hands was a bit smaller and not bound at the spine. As she flipped the pages, she saw pencil markings around sentences that never appeared in the final report. The War Department had long claimed the military lacked time to hold hearings to distinguish loyal Japanese-Americans from the disloyal ones (in fact, no incident of espionage by Japanese-Americans was ever uncovered). In this version of the report, though, DeWitt acknowledged that time had nothing to do with his plan. Instead, he wrote, it was “impossible” to distinguish one Japanese-American from another. The military would never be able to separate “the sheep from the goats.”

Herzig Yoshinaga already knew that Peter Irons, a lawyer with whom she later collaborated as he sought to reverse wartime convictions of Japanese-Americans, had uncovered records showing that War Department officials had insisted on revisions to DeWitt’s original report, because it countered their public rationale for imprisoning Japanese-Americans. She knew, too, that the department had ordered all copies destroyed. But one copy, she remembered, had gone missing. Now it was in her hands. “I nearly hit the ceiling,” Herzig Yoshinaga said later, describing that day.

Her finding became key evidence in the commission’s report, "Personal Justice Denied," published in 1982 and ’83. It concluded that the “internment” was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” (Herzig Yoshinaga pushed the commission, and later the public, to use the term “concentration camps” to describe the experiences of Japanese-Americans, a majority of them United States citizens, imprisoned without cause or trial, behind barbed wire, surrounded by watchtowers and armed guards.)

The report led to President Ronald Reagan’s issuing an apology in 1988 and to restitution payments of $20,000 for each survivor. Herzig Yoshinaga’s discovery also helped Irons and his co-counsel Dale Minami in their 1983 successful effort to overturn the criminal conviction of Fred Korematsu, a welder who had defied orders to report to an “internment center,” as well as those of Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui in similar cases. (In 1944, Korematsu unsuccessfully challenged Roosevelt’s executive order before the Supreme Court. It wasn’t until last year that the court agreed that Americans cannot be forcibly relocated on the basis of race.)

Despite the victories, wounds remained. Among those for Yoshinaga and some of her high school classmates was the one inflicted by their principal. One former student asked the Los Angeles school board — whose members included Yoshinaga’s son-in-law, Warren Furutani — to make amends. And so, one October Saturday in 1989, Yoshinaga and about a dozen of her classmates, all in their 60s, stood inside Los Angeles High School in optimistic blue caps and gowns, with pinned carnations. They listened to an apology from the school board. A classmate led them in the old school cheer. And they walked one by one across the stage for their diplomas. The date on those diplomas was June 26, 1942. That was the day that, in a different atmosphere, under different political leadership, each one of them would have stepped out into a new life. One filled with choices and with freedoms.