It began hours after news of Pearl Harbor reached the West Coast.
A rap at the door, a shoe on the door jamb, then FBI agents came inside, welcome or otherwise, to take away roughly one in 10 heads of a few hundred specific households — all men, all Japanese nationals.
Warnings were not given and explanations were not offered. But when that first wave of arrests came, word spread quickly. Everybody knew.
So two months later, on Feb. 19, 1942, the Japanese-American community in Southern California — the nation’s largest at about 35,000 — was less shocked than it was horrified by what came next: Executive Order 9066.
Signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 546-word document declared the government’s intent to treat the West Coast as a war zone, complete with powers that suspended some constitutional guarantees.
Soon, Japanese-Americans in the region were told to pack their things, sell or give away what they could, and prepare to be taken.
On Sunday, its 75th anniversary, we know that 9066 led to the confinement of more than 110,000 Japanese-American men, women and children. It’s widely viewed as a racially motivated, historical stain, a self-inflicted mistake.
We also know, today, that most of those people touched by 9066 survived it physically, if not emotionally or economically.
But on the day the order became public, nobody knew any of that.
It was only known that what had once happened to Native Americans, and what was happening again to Jews in much of Europe, was about to happen to Japanese-Americans — forced relocation.
“That was such a final kind of experience,” says Thomas Fujita-Rony, a Cal State Fullerton professor who teaches about what happened to Japanese-Americans during World War II.
“It was like, ‘OK. It’s over.’ What we were before the war, it’s over.”
‘Any or all’
Executive Order 9066 didn’t mention Japanese-Americans.
Roosevelt simply authorized military commanders to establish a zone “from which any or all persons may be excluded.”
The language meant any descendants of America’s new enemies, including Americans of Italian and German descent, could be targeted for expulsion. It also restricted movement for certain people. Guiseppe DiMaggio, father of Yankee star Joe DiMaggio, was barred from the San Francisco wharves where he’d made his living for three decades.
But while some Italian and German nationals were arrested and detained for a time, only Japanese-Americans were forcibly removed, en masse, and sent to War Relocation Authority incarceration sites, considered by many America’s version of concentration camps.
The first to be banished was a fishing community of about 3,000 people who lived on Terminal Island, near San Pedro. Their order to pack came on Feb. 25, 1942, less than a week after Roosevelt signed 9066.
“We were flabbergasted,” recalls John Marumoto, who grew up on Terminal Island.
Marumoto’s father, a fishermen, was among those Issei (first-generation) men arrested hours after Pearl Harbor. They were civic leaders and business owners; teachers, Buddhist priests, martial arts instructors. Eventually, the list grew to include poets, artists and even those who were expert in pruning Bonsai trees.
When the family’s order to pack came, the Marumotos already were devastated. They had no income, no friends, no contacts off the island.
They also had already watched their father and others disappear.
The men caught up in those first arrests had been kept briefly at the prison on Terminal Island and, a few weeks later, they’d been sent to another detention facility farther inland.
That day, the whole town came out to wave goodbye to buses carrying their husbands and fathers.
Marumoto remembers his sister, then 4, running to the bus and calling out to their father: “Don’t go with them. They’re going to take you away.”
“Then,” Marumoto says, “everybody started crying.”
John Marumoto, now 89, was just 14 that day. And like so many children who spoke more English than their parents, he was the new head of a household.
“Who was going to make any decisions?” he remembers thinking. “I’m too young.”
So, when their order to pack came, a week after 9066, Marumoto said they had one more question:
“Where were we going to go?”
American stories
Bacon Sakatani and his family reported to the Pomona Fairgrounds.
The land used for livestock shows and county fairs was one of several “assembly centers” that were hastily set up in Southern California in the weeks after 9066. Another operated at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia. They housed thousands of Japanese-Americans, against their will, until more permanent camps could be built in more distant, isolated locations.
Nobody knew how long they’d be kept, or how they might be set free.
Sakatani was 12 when his family arrived at the fairgrounds. One of the few items he brought was a baseball glove.
As he walked the land recently, the West Covina man, now 87, recalled playing softball surrounded by an 8-foot high chain-link fence. “If someone hit a home run,” he wondered “what happened to the ball?”
That they were playing ball in such a place — and living there — was still a shock.
Before the Pearl Harbor attack, most Japanese-Americans who lived in Southern California believed that when the seemingly inevitable war came they would be allowed to stay and help defeat the Axis Powers — Germany, Italy and Japan. Just like everyone else.
Two out of three were American citizens — born, raised and schooled here. They were as likely to be Christians as Buddhists. Many ran farms or businesses. They drank Coca-Cola; joined the Scouts, the YMCA.
How could they be the enemy?
For some neighbors, however, Executive Order 9066 provided a means to move aside a people they wished to see gone, for reasons that ran from bigotry to business.
“It was a chance to get rid of them,” says Art Hansen, a retired history professor who has edited a six-volume project on the evacuation kept at Cal State Fullerton’s Center for Oral and Public History.
Many prewar Japanese were thriving in the bustling downtown Los Angeles community of Little Tokyo, then the nation’s largest Japanese-American enclave.
They formed smaller communities in Long Beach and in the burgeoning suburban towns of Santa Monica, Culver City, Pasadena and Gardena, among others.
They worked on fishing boats and in canneries in places like Terminal Island, Huntington Beach and San Diego. They grew vegetables and raised chickens in the rural parts of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
But no matter where they lived, or how much they’d succeeded, all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast would be touched by 9066.
During the limbo after Pearl Harbor, their lives became increasingly restricted.
A dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed. New rules limited travel to within 5 miles of their homes. Their bank accounts initially were frozen and then later limited to pay only for basic needs. Their radios, cameras and guns were confiscated.
What started with the arrest of the elder men ended with every remaining man, woman and child of Japanese descent — from widows to orphans, on down to those with one-sixteenth Japanese blood — expelled from Washington, Oregon, California and southern Arizona. The banishments came in a series of 108 “exclusion orders” that followed 9066.
And it happened over the course of a few months.
Under suspicion
George Fujimoto Jr., the eldest son among George Toranosuke and Suni Fujimoto’s six children, began keeping a diary the day his father was arrested at their farm in north Riverside.
The elder Fujimoto was one of the men taken in the weeks between Pearl Harbor and before 9066.
“Twenty-eight Riverside Japanese aliens were rounded up in today’s raid; Mr Sanematsu & Pop included … Fortunately Pop was partially prepared.”
Deborah Wong, an ethnomusicologist at UC Riverside, has transcribed the diary Fujimoto Jr. kept in a pocket-size notebook from 1942 to 1948. Fujimoto Jr., a college student in 1942, wrote a page a day. Wong notes that he stuck to events, not feelings.
Fujimoto Sr. also kept a diary, and he chronicled the day of his arrest later from his jail cell in town. He was more effusive than his son.
“This is the first time I’ve been in jail. This is a very difficult experience for me. God sent me this experience as a lesson, so I shouldn’t complain that this is happening to me. I shouldn’t be sad …”
Fujimoto Jr.’s diary picks up the next day.
“Stayed out of school today to assume Pop’s duties & responsibilities. Went to Bank first thing after feeding hens wet mash to change Pop’s, Cha’s, and my check acct. to mine and Cha’s. Successful. Mr. & Mrs. Hiroto paid visit. Offered assistance.”
Riverside’s Japanese-American population was tiny then, about 200 people, but they were close-knit. The farmers picnicked together, worshipped at the town’s Japanese church and talked regularly on their phones.
After Executive Order 9066, their communications grew more intense.
“They knew what was coming,” Wong says. “They were tracking what was going on. They were in touch with other folks up and down the coast.”
American refugees
On an afternoon in spring 1942, June Aochi Berk walked home with her sister, Kay, to their Hollywood home. They’d just watched a movie.
That’s when they saw the message — a poster hung on a telephone poll.
“INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY …”
Thousands of exclusion orders just like it were displayed in Japanese-American communities on the West Coast, hammered to the walls of churches, temples and community centers.
The notices ordered people of Japanese descent — citizens and noncitizens — to pack their bags and report to local parks, churches and transit stations.
Berk, who is now 85 and lives in Studio City, remembers feeling confused, rooted on the sidewalk with her sister, ice cream melting in her hand. She was 10, but the poster made her think of a question no adult could properly answer.
“Why do they hate us? Why do they want to get rid of us?’ ’’
The exclusion orders made Japanese-Americans refugees in their own country.
Phil Shigekuni, now 82, remembers looking up and down his family’s block on 36th Place in South Central Los Angeles and seeing neighbors’ homes with furniture in their front yards. He was 8.
“That’s the one part I remember,” he says. “The trauma of having to let everything go.”
Berk’s family sold off what they could, found their dog Tippy a new home, and took what they could carry to a bus stop at Fifth and San Pedro streets on May 7, 1942.
When they arrived at the historic Santa Anita Park racetrack, the family of five learned their identification number and was ordered to fill canvas bags with hay. These would become mattresses.
Another detainee escorted them to their living quarters: Horse stall No. 54.
“It was a complete shock,” Berk says.
They slept with the stench of horse feces and urine. Horse flies buzzed around them as they ate. They stayed nearly five months.
A tag and a flag
Mary Adams Urashima writes a blog about Historic Wintersburg, detailing life in the most prominent prewar Japanese community in Orange County. About 2,000 Japanese-Americans lived in the county at the time.
She’s studied photographs of men and women who, in May 1942, were sent directly from Wintersburg to the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona.
Like all the others ripped from their homes and communities, the people taken that day wore the fluttering tags that denoted their destiny. The tags are tied with string to shirt lapels, belt loops, coat buttons.
“The photos are heartbreaking,” Urashima says. “You can see the anguish on the faces.”
Some people might not want to look at those photos or consider the consequences of Executive Order 9066, she adds, but they need to.
Yes, there was a real fear that the Japanese would strike at the West Coast after Pearl Harbor; but no evidence has ever been uncovered of spying or sabotage from Japanese-Americans.
“This is factual,” Urashima says. “The fact that this happened to people who were by a majority American citizens is something we need to pay attention to.”
Not everyone looked at their Japanese-American neighbors as enemies.
Friends and supporters did what they could: storing possessions, taking over leases, safeguarding farm property and businesses. They brought coffee and doughnuts the morning of departure.
Ike Hatchimonji lived in El Monte, and was 14 when he was taken.
He remembers his school principal calling him and his twin brother to the office the day he learned the Hatchimonjis were leaving. “He said how sorry he was. And he didn’t think it was right for us to be taken away from our home like that.”
The principal gave the boys a gift from one of the classrooms — an American flag.
“It was a great gesture. He considered us to be Americans.”
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