In 1980, the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations (NCRR) was founded by Japanese American citizens from across the country. Among its founding principles were to petition the United States government for monetary and other redress for “each individual who suffered deprivation of liberty” during World War II and to “educate the general public about this tragedy so as to prevent such events from happening again.” The NCRR was joined in this fight by the Japanese American Citizens League, the National Council for Japanese American Redress, and members of Congress—white, black, and some, like Senators Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga of Hawai'i, who were themselves of Japanese descent.
Eight years of ultimately successful lobbying led to the passage by Congress of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. The legislation formally apologized on behalf of the people of the United States for the internment, stating that it was based not on legitimate security concerns but on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” A total of 82,264 surviving internees were each paid twenty thousand dollars in compensation, and the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund was established to inform the public about the internment. Five thousand dollars apiece was paid to 645 people of Japanese ancestry who had been living in Latin America when war broke out and whom the United States had forcibly deported from these countries and sent to internment camps in the United States. These Latin Japanese were not released from U.S. custody until February 1948, almost two years after Japanese Americans.
One of those determined NCRR members was Guy Aoki, who would later cofound Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA), which holds Hollywood to account for its casting and portrayal of Asian Americans. Guy, who is a friend of mine, graciously agreed to read my manuscript and vet it for inaccuracies. I am indebted to him for his wide knowledge of Japanese American history and culture, his persistence in confirming every fact, and his keen eye for detail. My thanks, too, to Tomoko Nagata and Marisa Hamamoto, who helped Guy with some of the Japanese-language phrases in this book.
I am equally grateful to National Park Service Rangers Rosemary Masters and Patricia Biggs at the Manzanar National Historic Site. Upon my visit to Manzanar, Rosemary recommended pertinent books, and later she sent me links to rare color photographs of wartime Manzanar and updated texts from the park’s exhibits. She also replied to my email follow-up questions, and her colleague Patricia Biggs, who wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the Manzanar riot, generously answered my questions on the subject.
Any study of Manzanar must begin with the foundational classic Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, but also instructive were The Evacuation and Relocation of Persons of Japanese Ancestry During World War II: A Historical Study of the Manzanar War Relocation Center by Harlan D. Unrau; Photographs of Manzanar by Ansel Adams; The Unquiet Nisei: An Oral History of the Life of Sue Kunitomi Embrey by Diana Meyers Bahr; Manzanar Martyr: An Interview With Harry Y. Ueno by Sue Kunitomo Embrey, Arthur A. Hansen, and Betty Kulberg Mitson; Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker by Karl G. Yoneda; Children of Manzanar by Heather C. Lindquist; Images of America: Manzanar by Jane Wehrey; Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family by Yoshiko Uchida; Nurse of Manzanar by Samuel Nakamura derived from My Memories of World War II by Toshiko Eto Nakamura; “The Manzanar Riot: An Ethnic Perspective” by Arthur A. Hansen and David A. Hacker (Amerasia Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1974); “The Problem People” by Jim Marshall (Collier’s, August 15, 1942); “Resistance, Collaboration, and Manzanar Protest” by Lon Kurashige (Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 70, No. 3, August 2001); “A Report on the Manzanar Riot of Sunday, December 6, 1942” by Togo Tanaka (War Relocation Authority document); Remembering Manzanar: A Documentary (National Park Service); and the archives of the Manzanar Free Press on Calisphere.org.
Details of life at Tanforan Assembly Center were drawn from The Kikuchi Diary by Charles Kikuchi, edited by John Modell; Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo; I Call to Remembrance by Toyo Suyemoto and Susan B. Richardson; Betrayed Trust by Motomu Akashi; The Invisible Thread by Yoshiko Uchida; and the archives of The Tanforan Totalizer at Calisphere.org.
For the history of Tule Lake Relocation/Segregation Center, I looked to Tule Lake Revisited by Barbara Takei and Judy Tachibana; Tule Lake: An Issei Memoir by Noboru Shirai; Encyclopedia of Japanese American Internment edited by Gary Y. Okihiro; and the WRA documents “Tule Lake Incident” by John Bigelow, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study, Part II: Period of Army Rule by Rosalie Hankey, “Tule Lake Incident: Sequence of Events: Sept. 30–Nov. 5, 1943” by Anonymous, and Semi-Annual Report, July 1 to December 31, 1943 by John D. Cook.
Anti-Japanese prejudice in California is examined in Chris Sager’s thesis “American Nativists and Their Confrontation with Japanese Labor and Education in California 1900–1930” (University of North Carolina Wilmington) as well as in Oriental Exclusion by R. D. McKenzie; The Japanese American Problem and Japanese in California by Sidney L. Gulick; and Prejudice: Japanese Americans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance by Carey McWilliams. General reference about the internment includes Born Free and Equal by Wynne Benti; Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment edited by Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro; America Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II by Eric L. Muller; Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps by Michi Weglyn; And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps by John Tateishi; Keeper of Concentration Camps by Richard Drinnon; Personal Justice Denied, Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians; and Unlikely Liberators: The Men of the 100th and 442nd by Masayo Umezawa Duus.
Densho.org was an invaluable resource, particularly its interviews with those who experienced the internment firsthand, and I feel it’s important to acknowledge their voices: Tokio Yamane (who suffered a brutal beating at the hands of security guards at Tule Lake in Chapter 12), Tamiko Honda, Norman I. Hirose, Grace F. Oshita, Fred Korematsu, Carol Hironaka, Mas Akiyma, Misako Shigekawa, Akiko Kurose, Bob Utsumi, Toru Saito, Jun Dairiki, Taneyuki Dan Harada, Doris Nitta, Hank Shozo Umemoto, and Kaz T. Tanemura.
My thanks to Julie Thomas, Special Collections and Manuscripts Librarian at California State University Sacramento, who provided maps of prewar Florin and helped me navigate the Florin Japanese American Citizens League’s Oral History Project, which provided rich detail on the lives of the people of Florin prewar, during internment, and postwar. These voices included Margaret Hatsuko Ogata; Alfred and Mary Tsukamoto; Jerry and Dorothy Enomoto; Myrna, Myrtle, and Teri Tanaka; Masatoshi Abe; Chizu and Ernest Satoshi Iiyama; Hideo Kadokawa; William Matsumoto; George Miyao; Fudeyo Sekikawa; Onatsu Akiyama; Aya Motoike; Florence Taeko Shiromizu; Eiko Sakamoto; Isao Fujimoto; Toshio Hamataka; Robert and Teresa Fletcher; Donald Larson; and Vivian Kara.