To the editor: I just read Capt. Lettunich's letter carried in your Readers Referendum June 19. Apparently the captain either has not been associated with the American-Japanese he speaks of, or his association has been so close that he has allowed it to close his eyes to certain facts.
He states that there has been no discriminations shown toward Americans of German or Italian descent which "is as it should be" and I agree with him. However, had these Americans of German and Italian descent adopted the same attitude the so-called American-Japanese did, it would probably have been an entirely different story.
The results Japan achieved at Pearl Harbor were largely due to espionage by Japanese who chose Hawaii as their home and they and their offsprings were considered and accepted as good Americans. These same "Americans" not only provided Japan with information that made the attack possible, but participated actively in furthering the Japanese cause at the time of the attack. If Japan had succeeded in getting as far as the Pacific coast, I believe that a great many American-Japanese there would have done the same without a moment's hesitation. Apparently the officials charged with the defense of our country felt the same way.
I don't say that all American-Japanese are traitors. No doubt there are quite a number that are completely loyal to the United States and an injustice will be done if they are denied the right to return to their homes and take up where they were forced to leave off when the government found it necessary to relocate them. A far greater injustice will be done to many more if we allow a reoccurance of Pearl Harbor. Merely defeating Japan is not going to insure peace with her, as was very clearly demonstrated some 25 years ago in Germany. Every precaution should be taken to see that Japan is in no position to make another try. In my mind, keeping all Japanese out of areas where it would be possible for them to carry on with espionage in any form is, while maybe a very small detail, one of those precautions.
If these Americans of Japanese descent could be segregated the problem would be solved; but this is next to impossible. I think that in the best interests of all concerned these Americans of Japanese descent should make the best of a bad situation, and if possible return to the old country at the earliest convenience. I doubt very much if I could ever accept them again as a neighbor in any sense of the word; and I believe that there are a great many who feel the same way.
PFC M.L. McMASTERS JR., China, July 2, 1945, Army Air Force, c/o Postmaster, N.Y., N.Y."
San Francisco (Special) - . . . [Quoting Charles F. Miller, Supervisor, Northern California area of the War Relocation Authority]:
"All major problems incidental to resettling evacuated people of Japanese ancestry in this area have been solved or are at a stage where they can be turned over to the individual communities. Responsibility for the welfare of its citizens and law-abiding aliens rests with each community. These returning people, moved from their homes by military order early in 1942 and who began their return when the military ban was lifted Jan. 2, 1945, have the same rights and legal status as people of any other ancestry in this country."
Less than 60 per cent of those evacuated from Northern California have returned to the west coast, the others having relocated in other parts of the United States.
Principal problem facing the returnees is the national bugaboo - housing. While a small percentage of the resettlers are still living in temporary quarters such as the South Gate public housing dormitories in San Francisco, it is expected all will be able to find other housing before the district offices close.
All persons of Japanese ancestry who placed their household furnishing and other goods in storage in government operated warehouses must arrange to reclaim them immediately, said Miller. The warehouses will be emptied as quickly as possible and any goods remaining after March 15 will be sold and the proceeds turned over to the U. S. treasury.
More than half of persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and citizen, who served in the armed forces during World War II came from the continental United States and the majority of them from California, Miller also revealed.
Quoting from an official count made by the war department, Miller said that 11,825 Japanese-Americans were inducted from the mainland as compared with the 10,707 inducted in Hawaii during the period July 1, 1940 through June 30, 1945. Enlisted personnel from Hawaii numbered 10,598 and officers 109 as compared with 11,683 enlisted personnel and 142 officers from the mainland.
"Since the time the count was made," said Miller, "hundreds more of the Nisei have entered the service. During the war the Japanese-Americans served in all theaters. Service was not confined to male persons of Japanese ancestry. Many young women served with the army nurse corps and the WAC. Just the [sic] day 11 girls of Japanese ancestry flew to Japan to become the first WAC members to land there."
Male Japanese-American service personnel have served in Japan for months and others are in training at the army language school at Fort Snelling, Minn., for future service during the occupation of Japan."
SAN FRANCISCO - War Relocation authority, the war-time guardian of over 100,000 alien and native-born Japanese-Americans, is planning to go out of business not later than Jan. 2, 1946, says W.R. Cozzens, WRA's deputy director in charge of its western operations.
There will be some 20,000 aliens and undesirable "detainees" and "excludees" left in the big relocation center at Tulelake, Cal., on the Oregon line, but by the end of the year they will all be turned over to the department of justice for detention until such time as they can be shipped back to Japan where, for some strange reason, they have expressed a desire to go. By and large these "deportees" are the older Japs and their wives plus their oldest children and families who own or will inherit property in Japan.
Of the American citizens of Japanese ancestry who are electing to remain in the United States, nearly 45,000 have already been cleared from the three eight western camps or assembly centers, as they are now called. They have been leaving the camps at the rate of over (unreadable) a week, but with the closing of the camp schools this month there will be an augmented evacuation, permitting WRA to go out of business by the end of the year.
If the pattern set thus far holds good, less than 50 per cent of the Japanese-Americans will return to the west coast areas where they lived before the war. Half of those cleared from the WRA centers up to June 1 have sought to make new homes in other parts of the country. They have settled in every state in the union, South Carolina being the last one to receive a WRA evacuee. While they have scattered widely, biggest concentrations are in Denver, St. Louis, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Chicago, Cleveland and New York. Many of those going to the Manhattan area are California farmers who expect to hoe out new existences on the many truck farms supplying the metropolis.
Before clearing any of its charges, War Relocation authority has tried to do a job of giving information as to what conditions will be in every part of the country, says Cozzens. Then it is up to the individual to decide where he wants to go to make his new home.
WRA provides railroad transportation to destination, plus a three dollar a day allowance for means enroute and a stake of $25 for each individual up to a maximum of $100 for each family on which to begin the new life.
Many of the Japanese-Americans have some money of their own. Purchases in relocation center cooperative stores show that, because average individual spending was usually 50 per cent greater than camp earnings during the period of detention.
Some 8000 Japanese families owned property - farms, stores, homes, barber shops, machinery or house furnishings which were kept in storage by WRA. This property was largely held in California and the owners have had a natural desire to come back and claim it after their clearance from the camps, if only to dispose of it before moving on to new locations. But to many who were born in California and have lived here all their lives, the urge to come back and pick up where they left off is strong.
The problems of wartime living have been too much for some. Getting gas rations, food ration books, overcoming the opposition of other Americans who view all people of Jap extraction as enemies even though they are native born citizens, is more than they can cope with. They try to get back into the camps to be taken care of for the duration, but the WRA is having none of them. It impresses on every departing detainee the fact that once he leaves camp, he's on his own.
WRA officials have of course taken a terrific beating on the whole program, but it was admittedly one of the toughest jobs of the home front war effort. The three to four year detention of these Japanese-Americans, for their own protection, will have cost the United States between 175 and 200 million dollars by the time the WRA winds up its operations."
Bulletin
Washington (UP) - Director Dillon S. Myer of the War Relocation Authority said Wednesday his agency is without authority to intern American citizens of Japanese ancestry for more than brief periods unless they are charged with being disloyal or subversive. Myer, for the second consecutive day, defended before a Dies subcommittee the Relocation Authority's program of releasing loyal Japanese.
Washington (UP) - A Dies subcommittee Wednesday recalled Director Dillon S. Myer of the War Relocation Authority for further questioning on Myer's angry charges that the subcommittee is stirring up racial disunity and endangering American prisoners in Japan.
The subcommittee, which is holding hearings on the conduct of Japanese relocation camps administered by the War Relocation Authority, is expected to give its reply to Myer's accusation that it is "betraying" the democratic objectives which this nation and its allies are fighting to preserve."
(In Watsonville Wednesday afternoon, a State Senate interim committee on the Japanese question was conducting a hearing at the city hall.)
Myer opened his blast Tuesday by accusing the subcommittee of giving wide circulation to "half truths, exaggerations, falsehoods...distortions and downright untruths" about the relocation centers. He said the policies of his organization have a significance "which goes far beyond the geographic boundaries of this country," and declared that its program is undoubtedly being watched closely in Japan "where thousands of American soldiers and civilians are held as prisoners and internees."
He said the subcommittee conducted its eight-week inquiry so as to give "maximum publicity to sensational statements," and insisted that the problem has such grave international complications that it should be approached "thoughtfully, soberly and with maturity."
He said the subcommittee's procedure was providing the enemy with material "which can be used to convince the people of the Orient that the United States is undemocratic and is fighting a racial war."
Chairman John Costello, D., Calif., interrupted Myer's criticism to ask whether the WRA wanted to censor all releases issued by the subcommittee. Myer said he believed in a "free press," but contended that he should have been consulted at the beginning of the investigation, that committee statements should be submitted to a WRA accuracy check, and that a WRA representative should be allowed to sit in at all hearings to verify statements of witnesses.
"Just how would we conduct hearings with the witness answering questions from one chair and you butting in from the other?" Costello asked.
Meanwhile, the House received a resolution, passed unanimously by the Senate Tuesday, ordering the segregation within the centers of Japanese of "questionable loyalty."
Sens. Kenneth McKellar, D., Tenn., and Chapman Revercomb, R., W. Va., demanded that administration of the camps be transferred immediately from the WRA to the army and asked the Senate Military Affairs Committee to sponsor such legislation."
LOS ANGELES (UP) -Director Dillon S. Myer of the War Relocation authority Tuesday credited battle heroism of Japanese-Americans serving in the U.S. army with softening the opposition to their return to the Pacific coast.
Myer, speaking at an interfaith meeting sponsored by the Pacific Coast committee on American Principles and Fair Play, praised the group for determination to settle the Japanese problem in this country "through processes of reason and in a Christian spirit."
"In the past several months the temper of public opinion on this issue has been changing rapidly and unmistakably," Myer said. "Some private organizations that formerly advocated total exclusion and mass deportation of Japanese-Americans have softened and modified their attitudes.
"This change has been brought about, I am convinced, primarily by the magnificent combat record of Japanese-American boys in the uniform of the U.S. army. They have fought their way up the peninsula of Italy, usually in the very forefront of the action, taking desperate chances, wiping out machine gun nests, harassing the enemy from all sides, driving him relentlessly back toward the Alps."
Myer said the 100th infantry battalion, made up of Japanese-American boys from Hawaii, and received 1000 Purple Hearts, 44 Silver Stars, 31 Bronze Stars, nine Distinguished Service Crosses and three Legion of Merit medals among the total of 1300 troops that have served in the unit.
The 100th battalion is now part of the 442nd regimental combat team, Myer said, made up of thousands of Nisei from the mainland, including many evacuated from the west coast.
"Today there are well over 10,000 American men of Japanese descent in the U.S. army uniform," Myer said, adding that they are serving in Italy, Burma, China and the South Pacific islands against "the fanatical hordes from the main Japanese islands."
Some heroes among these soldiers, he added, are "more American by far than the people who shipped scrap iron and oil to Japan" before Pearl Harbor."
Only the possibility of serious harm to the nation could justify the compulsory uprooting of the thousands of American-born Japanese who are to be removed by the army from Pacific coast areas in which sabotage or aid to the enemy might be disastrous. The possibility did exist, and the presidential order for removal was imperatively needed. This is the opinion of calm thinkers who have the utmost regard for the civil rights of citizens.
"Unprecedented" is one of the terms of criticism voiced by the American Civil Liberties union. But unprecedented also is the residence in a vital combat zone of many thousands of American born individuals who are claimed as citizens by the country of their parents.
Few governments would have waited as long as the United States in trying to find a fair method of dealing with a section of the population so many of whom are open to suspicion as to their loyalty. For several weeks officials and ordinary citizens alike have sought a remedy that would preserve every peacetime right of every citizen and respect the undoubted fiction that the Japanese-American community on the Pacific coast was 100 per cent loyal.
Such a solution simply was not in the realm of possibilities. The presidential order, giving the army authority to evacuate all aliens or citizens deemed of doubtful trustworthiness in an emergency, is the only workable plan put forward.
Now that the order has been given, it should be made effective in the shortest possible time. Japanese-Americans and Japanese aliens too, should be moved to inland points where they can best prove their loyalty to the United States by following the calling in which so many of them are proficient, agriculture. Thus they may help fill a national need and at the same time be self-supporting.
At the war's end, those Japanese-Americans, or even their alien parents, who have clear records on the books of our war department, will have won higher standing as Americans than they have been able to attain under the burden of dual citizenship which the Japanese government has forced upon them.
Their acceptance of the present inconvenience and of the tasks assigned to them will be the best evidence of loyalty. Kindly, generous treatment of them in their new status and cooperation at all points with the army in its problem will similarly give evidence of the loyalty of Americans in general to free and honorable traditions."
(From San Francisco Chronicle)
Dillon Myer, director of the War Relocation authority, says Japanese-American evacuees from the west coast should be permitted to return to their homes as soon as the military situation warrants. We believe Director Myer is an idealist without a sense of the practicalities and in this case is dead wrong.
The military situation might now warrant the return of every Japanese clothes cleaner to his former west coast establishment and every Japanese strawberry farmer to his west coast strawberry patch. But this is only half of it, the theoretical half. The other half is the social situation, the practical half.
These people should be returned to their homes when both military situation and the social situation warrant. That will not be before the Japanese war is over. While west coast boys are fighting the Japanese, the west coast, socially, is no place for anyone of Japanese origin. There would be nothing but trouble. While we may lament the fact, we have to recognize it as a practical fact that hotheads would show Myer where his gentle theories get off.
Because hundreds of Japanese, both alien and American-born, resided in the Pajaro valley before their exclusion last spring on orders of the army, local residents will watch with interest the progress of measures now before the state legislature concerning post-war handling of the Japanese population.
We learn, from our discussions with various persons, that local people are divided in their ideas about the problem. Some believe the Japanese should be allowed to return and take up their activities - largely agricultural pursuits - from where they left off. Others favor their return but with privileges lessened - in other words, merely as farm workers. A third group is vehemently opposed to their return at all.
The best over-all view of the ticklish situation which we have read to date was set forth by Miller Freeman, the magazine publisher of Seattle, and The Register-Pajaronian agrees with his thoughts. In a recent letter to the Christian Science Monitor, Mr. Freeman wrote:
As a result of the strange vagaries of American law, the Japanese who are American citizens enjoy that status merely by the accident of birth. They did not ask to be Americans. They took no obligation to be Americans. They have not even foresworn the dual citizenship which Japan maintains for them.
Some American-born Japanese are loyal to America, but among their ranks are many who are not. Unfortunately, the loyal share the onus which treason and espionage and treachery have brought to all of them.
When the war is won, must the Japanese come back from the inland areas to bitterness, suspicion and hatred won for them by traitorous elements among them, and the failure of the loyal to prove their loyalty?
Solution must be found for this problem - and it should be sought most assiduously by those Japanese who are loyal Americans, aided by all who intelligently seek the welfare of the United States and future peace on and along the Pacific.
It is not enough for Japanese Americans to buy bonds and prate of loyalty. Words spoken and oaths sworn by Japanese tongues will bear little weight with the American people so long as Pearl Harbor reverberates in American memories.
The stain must be wiped out by actions:
Let Japanese who would enjoy American citizenship denounce the Japanese program for the enslavement of East Asia.
Let there be an end to the Japanese-language schools, dedicated to the training of American citizens in allegiance to Japan.
Let the loyal drive out those who bring shame upon them by traitorous activities.
Let every Japanese repudiate the doctrine of the divinity of the Emperor of Japan and denounce him as the dishonored foe of civilized mankind.
Let us on our part seek the means by which to prevent persons of alien heart from winning American citizenship based on birth alone, and without assumption of those duties and obligations which that citizenship imposes.
This is not persecution - for persecution offers no solution to the problem.
Neither is the cry "persecution" an answer to the call to thoughtful, tolerant recognition and consideration of the problem."
(Editor's note: Itsumi Oita, co-winner of the American Legion Armistice Day oratorical contest, was invited to contribute a guest editorial this week and to express the feelings of the Americans of Japanese ancestry in regard to the war.)
Although this article is my own opinion, I know that I speak for all the Japanese American students in Watsonville high school when I say that loyalty to the United States, the country in which I was born and which I love, is foremost in my mind. Words are sometimes poor instruments of expression. We have no divided allegiance. We are for America.
We Japanese American citizens fully realize the great responsibility upon us to prove this loyalty by our actions.
Our parents came here from Japan many years ago. They came here because they wanted a better way of life, and they are not citizens only because the laws of our country bar them from that great honor. We, the second and third generations, are citizens; we are proud to be citizens of the United States. As citizens we are not only willing but eager to serve America in every way. Many of our brothers, over 2500 of them, are now serving in the United States army. We, too, when we are old enough, will serve. We, too, will fight for our country against our enemies, whoever they may be.
WITH THE FIFTH ARMY Italy (Special to Register-Pajaronian) - Sgt. Shigara Hirano of Watsonville, Calif., is returning to the United States from the Fifth Army in Italy with an adjusted service rating score of 85. A member of 442nd Japanese-American combat team, Hirano entered the service Oct. 22, 1941, and came overseas in May, 1944. He wears the European theater ribbon with four battle stars, the Purple Heart, American defense ribbon and good conduct medal. His parents live at 220-3-D, War Relocation center, Poston, Ariz.