Executive Summary.

I intend to write a short summary of the salient points of my notes, once completed.

This is going to take the form of a sketch of a history of the Japanese American internment from the perspective of research material prior to developing outlines for the Black Box Factory stories. It is not intended to be a full book review or a historical treatment of Mr. Reeve’s work, but a simple set of notes I think might be useful or otherwise important to the development of the Black Box Factory world, in particular the first story detailing how that world came about and what it actually means.

It hasn’t quite been a year since I scrawled my notes down and began the long process of procrastination for this particular reference. I got carried away and sidetracked by other work.

I’d intended to write this as a review, but instead I’ll just run up what I think are the salient notes and page numbers.

Introduction

• “Relocation Centers” = “Concentration Camps” – xv
• Immigration Act 1924 – prevented citizenship for migrants, required – xvi
• This story is not about Japanese Americans, it is about Americans, on both sides of the barbed wire – xvi
• Not a series of isolated events … goes back to the treatment of Native Americans, persecution of British loyalists, enslavement of Africans – xvi
• “it seems there is always the possibility of similar persecutions happening again” – xvii
• at the time … Concentration Camps were underreported or misrepresented – xvii
• “pioneer communities” euphemism of the day – xvii
• FDR … did not want the incarceration debated as a political issue- xvii
• Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCarthy, “Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”
• Lt. Gen. John DeWitt – a fool; Col. Karl Bendetsen – pathological liar; both bigots who drove the internment process – xvii
• “A Jap is a Jap! There is no way to determine their loyalty.” – xix
• DeWitt – Who’s Who in America, 1944: I “conceived the method, formulated the details, and directed the evacuation of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from military areas.” – xix
• Villains:
  • California Attorney General, Ed Warren
  • Secretary of State, Cordell Hull
  • Secretary of War, Henry Stimson
  • Assistant Secretary of War, John McCloy
  • ACLU founder Roger Baldwin
  • Supreme Court Justices, Tom Clark and William O. Douglas
  • Journalists, Randolph Hearst, Walter Lippmann, Edward R. Murrow, hundreds of other raving journalists – xix
• This story’s themes: racism and greed, injustice and denial – xx
• In Camps: Cub packs, Boy Scout Troops & baseball leagues – xx
• “What pushes America forward and expands our liberty is not the old Anglo-Saxon Protestant values of the Founders, but the almost blind faith of each wave of immigrants … We are a nation of immigrants … who … were often hated because they were not like us until they were us.” – xxi-xxii
• Notes:
  1. FDR used the name “Concentration Camp.”
  2. Internment – legally only applies to regulation of aliens but recently has come to mean detention of both aliens and citizens during the war. Additionally, it has been used to describe the incarceration without trial of terror suspects in Northern Ireland, notably with reference to Operation Demetrius, August 9th 1971, but not exclusively.
  3. Nikkei – citizens and aliens living in US
  Issei – aliens – first generation – Japanese born but US resident
  Nisei – second generation – citizens born in US
  Kibei – men and women born in the US who were sent back to Japan to be educated before returning to the US – xxiii
• Introduction written by Richard Reeves, October 2014 – xxiii

Chapter 1 – Pearl Harbor.

• Daniel Inouye; Saburo Kido – p1
• Despite patriotic words from Japanese language US newspapers, soon after the attack hundreds of Nikkei arrests across US:
  NEBRASKA, Mike Masoka, speaking to 50 or so members of small Japanese community, two FBI burst into church, cuff him, take him to city jail. Saburo Kido called Sen. Elbert Thomas of Utah to have Masoka released & put on a train to San Francisco. Aboard the train, a Cheyenne Wyoming police officer took one look and arrested Masoka again. Sen. Thomas intervened a second time and had two soldiers escore Masoka to San Francisco – p2-3
• Masoka was one of over 1,200 community leaders on “Suspect Enemy Aliens” lists of FBI compiled w/ the Census Bureau. Many arrested without charge within 48-hours of the attack, mostly West Coast and Hawaii; 13 women.
  Joe DiMaggio’s parents, Italian aliens, were not incarcerated in California, concern of publicity surrounding “Joltin’ Joe,” the American League’s Most Valuable Player – p3-4
• FDR had told his AG, Francis Biddle, to take it easy on Italians, a bunch of opera singers, however Ezio Pinza, a famous opera singer. NYT headline “Ezio Pinza Seized as Enemy Alien; FBI Takes Singer to Ellis Island.” He suffered some kind of breakdown and is eventually released, never charged. Was one of 126 aliens held at Ellis Island – p4
• Difference between Asians and Europeans – Europeans could naturalize, Asians could not – p5
• Dr. Edward Alsworth Ross, Stanford sociology professor on Japanese:
  1. They are unassimilable
  2. They work for low wages and thereby undermine the existing work standards of American workmen
  3. Their standards of living are much lower than American workmen
  4. They lack a proper political feeling for American democratic institutions – p5
• Takao Ozawa, case reached Supreme Court, Nov. 192, was ruled ineligible for citizenship because he was ‘not a free white person.’ – p5
• Yoshiko Uchida, a Christian girl, home from Church on Sunday after attack, FBI waiting & had searched house seeking her father, a Mitsui Export executive. He arrives home and reports the mess as a burglary, then police arrive with three FBI and arrest him. He’s held for five days in a jail at the Presidio with about a hundred others before being shipped to a federal prison in Missoula, MT, meanwhile his family’s bank accounts are frozen – p6
• Self-note: Dachau, Belsen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, all have evil weight to their names in everyday English, but not the locations of Internment/Concentration Camps in the US.
• A number of searches and seizures follow, homes ransacked, such as Vashon Island and Bainbridge Island, confiscating .22 rifles, radios, Japanese language texts, anything is suspicious. People are arrested and disappear without notice for days until families can locate them – p 7
• Washington Post, August 1, 1941, “Confidential report on Japanese activities in California,” claiming Japanese Americans being forced into preparations for war on behalf of Imperial Japan– p 8-9
• Ulysses S. Webb, CA AG: asians “are different in color; different in ideals; different in race; different in ambitions; different in their theory of political economy and government. …they worship another God. They have not in common with the Caucasian a single trait.” [1924]
  Secret State Dept. investigation: (in event of war) The entire American Japanese population on the West Coast will rise and commit sabotage.
  Sec. Navy, Frank Knox, 15-point program, plans for concentration camps – p 9
• ABC lists, similar to British concentration camps: Those targeted for immediate arrest, those with particular attributes (with boats and radios, prosperous farmers, people with any influence), anybody with low-level connection to Japanese organizations, charities, or who had been denounced – p 11
• Pleas for tolerance and calm, Gov. Olson: “The American tradition of fair play has been observed. All the organs of public influence … have discouraged mob violence…” – p 17
• Japanese American stores closed by Police, press whipping up hysteria, mob disorder; some teachers refuse to allow Japanese American students participation in the morning pledge of allegiance – p 18
• Reasons of selfishness and profit underlie some effort to “get rid of the Japanese” – p 20
• Advertising: “Slap The Jap With Iron Scrap / Burma-Shave”; Dr. Seuss’ anti-Japanese American cartoon; numerous false rumors begin – p 21