After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Army took control of the Islands and habeas corpus was suspended. Rumors of sabotage by Japanese immigrants ran rampant, though after investigation, Naval Intelligence, the FBI, and Military Intelligence all agreed that none in fact took place. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox nevertheless recommended removing all Japanese aliens from Oahu and interning them on another island. Once President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which permitted the mass incarceration on the mainland, Knox began pressing to remove all people "of Japanese blood"-including citizens-from Hawaii to the mainland. Roosevelt also wanted to remove all 140,000 Hawaiian residents of Japanese ancestry, saying "I do not worry about the constitutional question-first, because of my recent order [E.O. 9066] and second because Hawaii is under martial law." ³

Memo from Delos Emmons to John J. McCloy, April 29, 1942.

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Several hundred Issei men were interned in Hawaii, and over 800 were sent to Justice Department camps on the mainland along with 100 German aliens. But General Emmons and Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy argued that mass removal was impractical and would paralyze the economy and war effort in Hawaii. Emmons apparently trusted the intelligence reports that found no threat warranting large-scale detentions. He dismissed "fantastic" rumors promulgated by the territory's "highly emotional and violently anti-Japanese" U.S. Attorney:

I talked with Mr. Taylor at great length several weeks ago at which time he promised to furnish evidence of subversive or disloyal acts on the part of Japanese residents to me personally or to my G-2. Since that time he has, on several occasions, furnished information about individuals and groups which turned out to be based on rumors or imagination. He has furnished absolutely no evidence or information of value.

War Department memo authorizing removing Japanese Americans from Hawaii to the mainland, July 17, 1942.

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Then in July 1942, Roosevelt authorized removing and detaining on the mainland 15,000 Japanese immigrants and citizen offspring in Hawaii, who were "considered as to be potentially dangerous to national security." Key leaders questioned the legality of the move. The Justice Department objected to transporting U.S. citizens thousands of miles for imprisonment. McCloy stated, "There are also some grave legal difficulties in placing American citizens, even of Japanese ancestry, in concentration camps." Secretary of War Henry Stimson was more blunt, writing, "A number of them [American citizens] have been arrested in Hawaii without very much evidence of disloyalty, have been shipped to the United States, and are interned there. McCloy and I are both agreed that this is contrary to law."⁴

Under pressure, Emmons did begin sending Hawaii Japanese into distant detention, choosing two categories to remove from the Islands: 1) "primarily for the purpose of removing nonproductive and undesirable Japanese and their families from the Islands," and 2) "largely a token evacuation to satisfy certain interests which have advocated movement of Japanese from the Hawaiian Islands."4 Put more directly, he was bowing to political pressure.

The first two groups of Issei and their children were shipped to the mainland in July and December 1942. Almost half of the citizen children were under the age of nineteen. One of those children who suddenly found herself shivering at the Jerome incarceration camp in December was Sarah Sato. Her father had been detained, it seems because he had served in the Japanese military. Sarah was not quite eighteen. Her parents did not appoint relatives as her guardians because they did not want to separate the family. To Sara, the Japanese were the enemy, but the I.D. she carried saying she was a U.S. citizen did not prevent her from being "shoved into camp" along with her parents.

Sarah Sato explains how her family came to renounce their citizenship.

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Bitter about their unjust treatment, Sarah and her father demanded answers rather than say "yes," "yes" to questions no. 27 and 28 in the loyalty questionnaire administered to all the camps in 1943. Because qualified answers were considered "no," "no," the family was sent to the Tule Lake segregation center for Japanese Americans designated as disloyal. Caught up in an impossible situation, the family took an even more dire step, for the sake of family duty:

My mom answered yes, yes on 27 and 28. But with my dad, I told him, because Dad and Mom didn't sign my guardianship over to my aunties and I was forced to go into camp, he had to write what I told him. It was his turn to, so, he and I both said, "Give me the reason for interning Dad." And then for 28, we said, we'll answer 27 after we got the answer for 27. For that, Dad and I got blackballed. And then, we got sent to Tule, so the whole family went to Tule. …Dad told them the reason why he wanted to go to Japan was because he was worried about his father. For that they made him renounce [his citizenship]. Mom said she was renouncing because she was going with Dad. And I said I'm going because if I don't go, then my parents would be separated. So for that I got my renunciation. So when people say only "no-nos" were renounced, that's not true. I wrote to my auntie Edith and my auntie Helen, and I said, "I'm going to Japan with Mom and Dad because if I don't go, Dad would be sent alone and I don't know what's going to happen to him."

Sarah explains that she was never disloyal.

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After years in impoverished and war damaged Japan, Sarah eventually regained her U.S. citizenship along with thousands of other renunciants. Sarah had renounced her citizenship not because she was disloyal to her country, but because she was loyal to her family. Mass internment on the Islands was prevented not because anyone "worried about the constitutional question," but because Hawaii Japanese met economic and military needs. Like the 120,000 Japanese Americans on the mainland, the 2,000 detainees of Hawaii lost their freedom not because they posed a danger, but because they were victims of politics and circumstance.

I think it was in late '70s or early '80s when I wrote to the State Department and the FBI to get our records to show my kids. I said, "No way did Grandpa and I say that we were disloyal." And they said, "That's right." But you think the other people would believe? So, it took me a long time. Then, after I got my kids, I thought, you can't be bitter. But I told them they have to learn to stand up for what they think is right. Don't get killed doing it because that was the foolish way. But from the time they were little, we put in lots of Japanese objects here to show them that they can still have the Japanese face but they were Americans.

War Relocation Authority publication about "resettlement."

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So reads a pamphlet entitled New Neighbors Among Us, published by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the agency in charge of the Japanese American incarceration camps. Government officials realized from the outset of the mass removal that they would need to release the detained Japanese Americans into free society or take on managing a permanently dependent population.

In spring 1942, the WRA and its director Dillon Myer began to initiate regulations for releasing "unquestionably" loyal Japanese Americans from the camps. (Some had already gone out as temporary field workers or for college.) The initial leave program was extremely cumbersome, requiring applicants to fill out copious paperwork and obtain security clearance in Washington, D.C. Before they could be freed, detainees had to show that nothing in their record made them a potential threat to national security; they had to find a community that would not object to their presence; and they needed to obtain certain employment and a place to live. But the bureaucratic process took so long that job and housing offers often vanished.

Detainee leaving Manzanar incarceration camp, California, 1943.

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The conditions for obtaining what the WRA called "indefinite leave" favored young Nisei, who were urged to be good ambassadors for their people. As Nisei men and women left for college, military service, or jobs in the east, the demographics in the camps shifted toward the elderly and the very young. The Issei who managed to leave the camps had even more difficulty finding work than their children did. Countless former business owners lost dignity by having to take low-paying work as domestics.

WRA officials encouraged those Nisei who obtained security clearances to move to the Midwest and East Coast. They believed that scattering Japanese Americans among white inland communities would force them to "Americanize" and thus break up the West Coast Japantowns that existed before the war. The WRA warned released detainees not to speak Japanese or even congregate in their new communities. Because the released Japanese Americans were sent to locations far from their homes and support networks, the already difficult task of making their way became even more daunting.

Letter from Mayor LaGuardia of New York, April 21, 1944.

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Some cities and states expressed open hostility toward accepting former detainees, and longtime foes of Asian immigrants like the American Legion vocally opposed the presence of any Japanese Americans anywhere. The mass removal and detention had played right into the hands of anti-Japanese forces. By declaring all people of Japanese descent so potentially dangerous they had to be locked up, far from other Americans, the government had strengthened fears and opposition. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York (himself the son of Italian immigrants), argued, "If it was necessary to evacuate them from their homes originally and put them in a concentration camp, what justification is there for turning them loose in Eastern cities at this time?"

In an attempt to smooth the reintroduction of the detainees into free society, the WRA produced public-relations photographs and pamphlets like New Neighbors Among Us, which assures readers that industrious Nisei had "dropped into scattered communities without causing an economic or social ripple…most are American citizens, educated in American schools…speaking English well and Japanese poorly if at all, thinking and acting like other Americans."

Chicago became a primary destination, in part because of the labor force shortage. The first official WRA "resettlers" arrived on June 12, 1942; a year later there were 1,500 in the city. Relocation offices opened in Chicago, Cleveland, Little Rock, Salt Lake City, New York City, Kansas City, and Denver. Groups like the Society of Friends (Quakers), the YMCA, Salvation Army, and other sympathetic volunteers assisted Japanese Americans exiting the camps by helping to allay public fear and secure jobs and housing.

WRA resettlement image, 1944, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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By 1943, the WRA stepped up efforts to move people out of the camps, as the military necessity justification faded and legal challenges to the incarceration neared the Supreme Court. To encourage frightened and economically strapped people to leave the camps, the WRA published photos and booklets depicting Japanese Americans comfortably settled in Midwestern homes. Sleek refrigerators and shiny bathtubs appear in WRA photos to tempt detainees long deprived of such comforts.

The post-incarceration experiences of Japanese Americans interviewed by Densho vary considerably. Several report that they encountered no discrimination, and that Midwesterners they met in Minnesota or Ohio towns were kind. Others recall being forced to work long hours for low pay, or being turned away from apartments with "for rent" signs when the landlords saw their Asian faces.

Peggie Nishimura Bain had great difficulty finding housing after leaving camp.

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Peggie Nishimura Bain became depressed and desperate as she and her teenaged daughter searched for an apartment on the south side of Chicago. They had access only to the worst accommodations (Peggie will not forget the bedbugs and cockroaches). Finally a Jewish friend invited them stay with him, but the landlady ordered them out.

The WRA did not offer to find anyplace. They give you an address and they say, "Well, you go and see if you can rent the place." And they kept calling me because they wanted to take a picture of me so they could send it back to the camp saying what a wonderful place Chicago was and how nice it was to be out and relocated. So I told them the next time they called me, I said, "I'm being thrown out of the apartment, so come and take a picture of that." They never bothered me after that.

Matsue Watanabe was sponsored out of camp to work for a family.

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Matsue Watanabe describes her work experience in the Chicago suburb of Evanston after her siblings helped obtain a sponsor for her:

Most of the times, yes. You would work as a domestic for them to earn your room and board. And they usually pay you some extra. Most of my friends that came out from camp ... they were working for three dollars a week, and they would have to baby-sit quite late at night and then do their studies after that. Other people that I know currently, they did the same things in Ohio and other places. But I was very fortunate because I had a family that didn't make me baby-sit, and she paid me ten dollars a week. I was a rich lady.

Nobu Suzuki left camp for Spokane, Washington.

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Back in Washington State, Nobu Suzuki tells how a man refused to sell them gas for their drive to Spokane when they left the Minidoka, Idaho, incarceration camp. And she shares a story about a vigilante group that tried to drive her family out of the house that the Quakers helped them buy:

The Friends found this nice big brick house with a plate glass window in the front room. One night, this real estate agent from the area came by and threw a big rock through it, and then boasted in the beer parlor that he was going to come and force us out of this house. A Catholic priest heard about it and he let us know. And we told our friends about it, and they came that night and were sitting in the living room. They were all white people. When this gang that this man gathered from the beer parlor came walking down the street, we could hear them. But when he came to the door, it was opened by one of our friends. He invited him in and said, "Let's talk about this." Of course, that wasn't what he wanted. But he came in and looked around. He didn't say much, excepting that he didn't want us there and that he had a crowd of people outside who didn't want us there either. And then he left. He was grumbling but they all went away.

Nobu and her family felt safe in their nice big brick house, confident that most of the neighbors would accept them. Resolutely turning their backs on the dark years of detention, Nobu and thousands of other Japanese Americans set about rebuilding their lives on the other side of the fence.

How the military classified men of Japanese descent shows the stages of suspicion exhibited by the U.S. government. Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the War Department refused to let Japanese Americans enlist and discharged many already in the service. (The Military Intelligence Service Language School and 100th Battalion of Hawaii were exceptions.) Draft-age Nisei on the West Coast found themselves imprisoned in camps by summer 1942, assumed disloyal because of their race. Then in January 1944 -- in what some saw as adding unpardonable insult to injury -- the War Department began drafting Japanese Americans detained behind barbed wire. To report for combat duty, young Nisei men passed military sentries guarding the camp gates. As they went off to defend democracy, their parents and siblings remained on the other side of the fence.

Over 30,000 Nisei joined the military service and many fought in brutal combat with the 100th Battalion and 442nd Combat Regimental Team. The government had created the segregated Japanese American infantry unit to counter Japanese propaganda about discrimination inflicted on citizens of Japanese heritage. The move was supported by the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) as a way for Japanese Americans to show their patiotism. Over 1,000 Nisei volunteered directly from the incarceration camps, seeking to prove their loyalty and perhaps win release for their parents and siblings. But some balked at the notion of fighting and dying for a government that unjustly treated them as criminals rather than citizens.

Frank Emi describes the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee

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Frank Emi stepped up as a leader of Heart Mountain's Fair Play Committee:

Early in January 1944, the army had decided to apply the draft into the concentration camps at more or less the suggestion of the Japanese American Citizens League. ...And when we heard about this, it was really unbelievable. We didn't think that the government would really apply the draft into the camps on the same basis as the free people on the outside… So when this came up, the Fair Play Committee… took it up and we started to hold mass meetings in the camp….And the third meeting, the third bulletin we issued was the one that became controversial because up to this point we had been informational and some of us decided we should take a stand and come right out and say that we're against this until our rights were clarified and our constitutional rights were restored… and we came out with the resolution that, "We hereby refuse to go to the draft if and when we are called," in order to contest the issue.

FBI report on the Fair Play Committee, April 24, 1944

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An FBI report preserved in the Densho Digital Archive contains the third bulletin of the Fair Play Committee (FPC), including the lines, "We are not being disloyal. We are not evading the draft. We are all loyal Americans fighting for JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY RIGHT HERE AT HOME."

"Loyal" is not how most of their fellow incarcerated Japanese Americans described the resisters. Community leaders accused them of casting a bad light on detainees seeking to gain the government's trust. The Heart Mountain Sentinel, the camp newspaper, urged compliance with government orders and denounced the FPC for "lacking both moral and physical courage." The JACL virulently condemned the resisters and the FPC as being un-American.

As a husband and father of two small children, Emi was not himself likely to be drafted. Nevertheless he took a moral stand. When questioned before his arrest by a War Relocation Authority officer named W.J. Carroll, Emi revealed his strong convictions:

Carroll: What are the requirements to be a member of the Fair Play Committee?

Emi: I don't know of any specific requirements. You have to be a citizen and consider yourself a loyal citizen to be a member.

Carroll: Is their interpretation of loyal American citizen mean that they should not answer their draft call?

Emi: No. I think every loyal American citizen should protect and uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.….

Carroll: Would you go or wouldn't you go? [if drafted]

Emi: I would go just as soon as my status and rights are clarified.

Carroll: How can you declare you are a loyal American citizen, then?

Emi: Taking the stand that I just told you, I believe that by doing that I am helping toward the rectification of the unconstitutional acts the government has committed.

Carroll: You already have a test case in court now. [Korematsu v. U.S.] How can you further help it?

Emi: That is my individual feeling. I don't feel that it should be left to some one else."

Frank Emi describes the draft resisters' trial

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The first sixty-three Heart Mountain resisters were tried and convicted of draft evasion in June 1944. More from Heart Mountain and other WRA camps followed them into federal penitentiaries. They served an average of three years. Emi and the other FPC leaders, along with sympathetic journalist James Omura, were also charged with conspiracy to encourage draft evasion. Omura was let off, but the FPC leaders were imprisoned at Leavenworth until they successfully appealed in 1946. In these trials, the courts refused to admit the constitutional defense, ruling only that the men had failed to comply with the draft orders. Emi recalls:

Well, the upshot of the trial was that after I guess maybe a week of it, we figured we had a pretty good case because our attorney was a very sharp constitutional lawyer, presented a very good case. But we heard that one weekend, this Judge Eugene Rice had gone duck hunting with the district attorney who was prosecuting us. So when we heard of that, why, our attorney said, "Well, you know, there goes your case. We'll probably have to take this up to the appellate court." And sure enough, that's what happened. We were convicted and sentenced to conspiracy, counseling others to resist the selective service law. And we were given the sentence of four years in a federal penitentiary. And we appealed that and the attorney had asked the judge to let us out on appeal into the camps, pending the appellate court's decision. But the judge called us... what did he say? "You're agitators, troublemakers," and refused to grant us any bail while the appeal was in process.

Gene Akutsu recalls being sent to a federal penitentiary

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A fair trial was hardly to be expected.¹ Some remember hearing the judge call them "those Jap boys." Gene Akutsu, a resister from the Minidoka incarceration camp in Idaho, was distressed to learn that he'd been appointed an arch-conservative defense attorney: "Unfortunately, I wound up with a lawyer who was the head of the American Legion. In a private office, the first thing he said was, 'You're a damn fool. I'll be darned if I'm gonna help you at all. You're up on your own, boy.'" Gene was convicted and sent back to his home state of Washington to enter a federal penitentiary. He speaks of the resentment expressed toward the draft protesters upon their release:

They decided that we will be sent to McNeil Island as a group so the entire group of thirty of us was put on a train at Boise and sent to McNeil Island. And as we approached the dock and we'd get into the boat and headed toward the island, I could look back and see …that was Seattle. A year and a half, two years ago because I looked Japanese, they sent me to an internment camp. Here it is, a year and a half later, they bring us back to a place only fifty miles away, put us into a federal penitentiary. Well, I felt bad then. I thought boy, this could never happen...

I think to this day, many of 'em don't want to talk about it. They don't want to be pointed out as a resister...And through the years, one by one they have passed on, too. Before we came out, through the grapevine we would hear that the vets were very much against us and they want to confront us, they want to do something about us. And we kept hearing those kind of stories and that kind of bothered me. Whether it's going to be a physical abuse or contact or whether it's verbal or what it is we didn't know. But then we tried to keep ourselves in good shape so that in case that we get into a fight, that we can protect ourselves some way or another.

Mas Watanabe explains his decision to serve.

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Another Nisei from Minidoka made the opposite choice when the question of serving arose. Though he was also angry about the violation of his rights, Mas Watanabe explains why he chose to volunteer:

It's very difficult to answer, because you grow up thinking you're a citizen, and you want to be a part of this society you're in, and then the weight of the rejection is something that was pretty unexpected. But when reality sets in, like the "Camp Harmony" and these little shacks in Minidoka, then real negative things start coming to your head, you know. "What the hell is this?" And it, I think it bothered a lot of us tremendously. You try to be a good citizen, you try to do what you're supposed to be doing, and the rejection is very difficult. …And to this day -- well, regardless of what people think -- I think we did the right thing in volunteering after being kicked in the butt….Because gee, if you're going to live here, you've got to be a part of society. You've got to do what is expected of you. And I had no problem volunteering. I don't know which was worse: being locked up in camp or going off to war. In my mind, barbed wires aren't very inviting, being penned up -- I guess we were too independent. I just didn't like being cooped up and looking at barbed wires and guard towers. That just wasn't for me.

Mas Watanabe speaks of the resisters.

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While fighting bloody battles in Europe, Mas and his fellow soldiers heard about the draft resisters back home and reacted as might be expected:²

I think what made it rough for us was... we called 'em the "no-no" boys, but we knew most of them quite well, and they were friends. And the timing, I guess more than anything else, was here we're losin' -- it was not just Bako and John, but there was Isao Okazaki, Bill Nakamura, Sat Kanzaki, Matt Tanaka, and a lot of real good friends that we lost. Here the Minidoka is listing those who went to camp prison or something. It was tough from one extreme to the other, and how do you weigh something like that, two entirely opposite philosophies? And I'm sure they thought they were doing what they thought was right, and we sure thought what we were doing was right. So it's just two opposite philosophies that were not melding together. So it's hard to say. I knew at the time we were very bitter, and mad.

In 1947, President Truman pardoned all the Japanese American draft resisters. The Japanese American community did not. For decades the 300 men-and often their extended families--were denounced and ostracized. Only in May 2002, after years of contentious debate, did the JACL in a public ceremony finally apologize for their vilification of the resisters during the war and acknowledge the principled stand the resisters took.

Oral historian Art Hansen assesses the resisters.

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A voice from outside the Japanese American fold, oral historian Art Hansen, gives his opinion of the resisters' place in history:

I think what the Heart Mountain resisters and the Fair Play Committee did was to take such an unpopular sort of action. When you figure this is a reviled ethnic minority who are penned into a concentration camp…the principal perceived enemy being of the same ancestry, this being in the throes of wartime and even having the leadership of their own community enjoining them to cooperate. To then in the face of this amassed power and socialization, to say no. And the important thing they did is the same thing as James Omura, they said no. And they were willing to pay the price that saying no meant. And it's a price that wasn't only paid in going to a penitentiary, but a price that was paid later on by finding themselves victimized by their own community after the camp experience. Why would they do it? Because there was a higher price and a higher sort of reward. …And I think this is the thing that reverberates now through not only the Japanese American community but throughout the mainstream community; that these people are well on their way to becoming recognizable American heroes. And I think in some quarters they already are but their heroism will only grow.