The Betrayal: The Japanese American Incarceration in Force

Written by Jeff Suzuki & Nigel Chandler. Edited by members of the Los Gatos Anti-Racism Coalition.

PUBLISHED JANUARY 23, 2026

This article examines the beginning of the Japanese American Incarceration, as it developed from Executive Order 9066 to the removals of those with Japanese ancestry in Santa Clara County to the Santa Anita Detention Facility. 

Left-hand picture: Esther (on right) with her siblings, Mary & Joseph, in 1956. Right-hand picture: Esther (on left) with her siblings in 2016.

Esther Nozaki Hashimoto: A Personal Account

On the evening of December 3rd, 2025, we, the authors of this article, had the honor of interviewing Esther Nozaki Hashimoto, a survivor of the Japanese American Incarceration.1 With the interviewee 102 years old and the Incarceration over 80 years ago, there were often questions she was unable to answer due to forgotten details. This is to be expected—most people have trouble remembering many details from 10 years ago, let alone 80. We are also obliged to note that some of Esther’s accounts do not align with current and well-accepted historical accounts, either due to the incompleteness of existing historical accounts or the imperfect memory of the interviewee. Esther was in high school when she and her family were ordered to leave behind their home in Mountain View to report to the Santa Anita Detention Facility in Arcadia, California. She would subsequently be transferred to Heart Mountain Concentration Camp in Wyoming. Esther’s story will be referenced throughout this installment and in future installments in this series.

At a spry 101 years old, she was lively. After almost two full hours of answering our questions, she exhibited no signs of fatigue, with the same clarity of mind as when we started. During the interview, she was accompanied by her daughter, Lori Hashimoto Smith. Hearing of our project, Lori had reached out to us to schedule the interview. Furthermore, Lori was an essential part of the interview itself—as one of the people most familiar with Esther, she provided insight and clarifications to her mother’s comments.

Esther was born on May 20th, 19242 Some may ask why we did not interview a person who lived in Los Gatos at the time of the Japanese American Incarceration. With Esther eagerly volunteering her perspective and no personal connections to other survivors who resided in Los Gatos at the time, we decided to interview Esther while we had the opportunity. If any of our readers know of any potential interview subjects, please reach out to antiracism.lg@gmail.com! in San Francisco, California, Esther is one of three Nisei children raised by Issei parents. The term “Issei” (` literally “First Generation”) refers to immigrants of Japanese descent born outside of the United States, while the term “Nisei” (二世, literally “Second Generation”) refers to the children of Japanese immigrants born in the United States.
Esther’s Issei father initially immigrated to the United States, arriving in San Francisco in the early 1900s. There, by chance, he rented a room from a Seventh-Day Adventist woman. To spread the gospel, she offered him bible studies. And he, a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant eager to learn English, accepted. He had come to the United States a Buddhist, and was shortly after baptized a Christian. While conversions to Christianity were not uncommon among Japanese immigrants,3https://religionnews.com/2022/04/29/how-religion-played-a-role-in-wwii-incarceration-of-japanese-americans-and-how-it-helped-them-survive-it/#:~:text=About%20a%20quarter%20claimed%20affiliation,been%20inspected%20for%20subversive%20material. Approximately a quarter of Japanese Americans incarcerated identified as Christian. Esther’s father went further than most, dedicating his life to serving as a minister in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. 

Esther’s mother, on the other hand, was involved in the church before she had ever met her future husband. She received a high quality education in Japan, becoming fluent in reading, writing, and speaking Japanese, English, and Chinese; she would later use her skills to serve as the secretary to the president of the Japan Union Conference of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, one of many international bodies of the church at the time.4https://www.adventistyearbook.org/entity?EntityID=10408 Originally organized in 1917, the Japan Union Conference remains active with a membership of 15,058, as of June 30, 2024. Aside from belonging to the same church, Esther did not recall any specifics about how her parents had met, other than that “they [the church] felt sorry for my dad, you know, for being single.” Thanks to her church connection, Esther’s mother crossed the ocean from Japan to the United States, ultimately marrying Esther’s father. Typical of some households of the time, she became a housewife upon marriage. 

Esther’s childhood was similar to that of many Japanese Americans prior to the Incarceration. When asked whether there was segregation in Mountain View, there was, in her words, “no segregation.” More specifically, she was referring to the lack of formal cultural exclusion in society. She had white friends and attended schools and churches with white people. Many Japanese Americans who were children at the time of the Incarceration, including those who grew up in Los Gatos, report having friendships with people of other races and experiencing equal treatment before they were incarcerated.5https://youtu.be/mVU7ZI4_zfI?t=918 One such example includes Robert Hideo Idemoto who grew up in Los Gatos before he and his family were forced to leave town when he was 10 years old. He recalled having friends in Los Gatos, including a classmate he met in Kindergarten with whom he still grabs lunch and dinner with. He also recalled having as his friends two twins named after the Greek goddesses Aphrodite and Athena. In fact, a few years after he left Heart Mountain and returned to Los Gatos, he won an election to become class president of Los Gatos High School.
However, it is important to remember that other forms of racism existed that were not as tangible to children who grew up in this period. The Nozaki family, along with every other Japanese American family in California, were effectively second-class citizens in other major areas of life. Firstly, her parents were denied any potential avenue to citizenship as Issei immigrants. As English-speaking devotees of a prominent Protestant Christian denomination, who had lived in the United States for decades, they may well have been considered ideal citizens. But the Nozakis were Japanese, and the U.S. government’s position was that Japanese “aliens” could never become American.

Secondly, the Nozakis were denied property rights under California law. As noted in the articles we previously published in this series, A Story of Resilience and The Roots of Removal, families like the Inouye family, who owned property in Los Gatos, were the exceptions that proved the rule. The Inouyes, who were given free choice of land from an agricultural employer who appreciated their work, were among the few Japanese who were able to place their land in the name of their children with U.S. citizenship–a “legal loophole” that would be closed in 1920. On the part of the Nozaki family, their experience was more typical. When asked about whether her family rented or owned a home in Mountain View, Esther simply said that “the Japanese were not allowed to own anything, you know.” 

 

The Nozaki family, along with every other Japanese American family in California, were effectively second-class citizens in other major areas of life. Esther’s mother and father could not become U.S. citizens. 

When asked about whether her family rented or owned a home in Mountain View, Esther simply said that “the Japanese were not allowed to own anything, you know.”

In Esther’s senior year of high school at Mountain View Academy, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, formally bringing the United States to war with Japan. In the aftermath, Esther and her family immediately became self-conscious about the targets painted on their backs: “You know, walking from home to high school, you could feel these eyeballs looking at you, you know, through the window. We felt very self-conscious,” Esther described in our interview. She recalled the pain she felt at how she and her family were treated by their neighbors, that “we were treated… you know, well, we were sensitive to being different.” Meanwhile, senior government officials contemplated what actions to take against people like Esther and her family.

Rights for Me, but Not for Thee

Pictured: Figure displaying the proportion of Japanese Americans in the continental United States, who were overwhelmingly concentrated in the state of California in 1940.6https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Geographical_Distribution_Japanese_Population_USA_1940_1.jpg
“The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on American soil, possessed of American citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted. 

…It, therefore, follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today. There are indications that these are organized and ready for concerted action at a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”

– Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, Head of the Western Defense Command, April 19437https://ushistoryscene.com/article/japanese-internment/
On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S. fleet stationed at the navy base of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. This attack initiated a chain of actions that culminated in the Japanese American Incarceration. 

Wartime conditions often make average people vindictive and, in this case, more racist and xenophobic than before. It perhaps makes some sense that a nation attacked by a foreign power would persecute the descendants of that power, even if such persecution is considered unjust. Emboldened by a wartime emergency, the United States had strong political incentives to persecute such populations in the name of national security. 

But in the days following the U.S. entry into the Second World War, it was not yet entirely clear who precisely would be targeted and what means would be used against them. German, Italian, and Japanese people all had substantial histories of discrimination in the United States–all were deemed worthy of suspicion after the U.S. entered the war. However, each community was internally diverse in its own right, divided by generation, legal status, and access to citizenship. Some individuals were foreign-born nationals with direct ties to the enemy states of Germany, Italy and Japan. Others were long-settled immigrants committed to life in the United States. Germans and Italians could, and often did, naturalize–the Japanese could not. Finally, there were their U.S.-born descendants, legally entitled to all the rights of citizenship under the 14th Amendment (at least on paper). 

Ultimately, the severity of the U.S. crackdown on each ethnicity in wartime was determined, in large part, by how American society had racialized and dehumanized each ethnicity over the previous century. By 1941, Germans and Italians had undergone a process of integration into the American “White race.” Most significantly, their children were considered constituents of that great American “melting pot”–they were “true” Americans who could be relied upon to fight against the country of their parents. 

Even if both ethnicities were White, they were still subject to suspicion. During the previous World War from 1914 to 1918, the United States developed strong anti-German sentiments, forcing German Americans to repress their own language and culture. After World War I ended, this anti-German sentiment lingered, then experienced a resurgence with the rise of Nazi Germany.8https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/german/shadows-of-war/ On the other hand, Italians were directly in the crosshairs of fresh anti-immigration sentiment before the war, as they were the largest foreign-born population in 1941.9https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/106/hr2442/text Almost entirely Catholic and stereotyped as criminals and political agitators, Italians were, in many ways, considered alien in the United States.10https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/italian-americans-and-their-communities-of-cleveland/chapter/chapter-6-anti-italian-sentiment-in-america/ And throughout World War II, thousands of foreign-born Germans and Italians indeed suffered unjust persecution at the hands of the U.S. government, while their children were essentially free.

The same could not be said for the children of Japanese immigrants, who would be thrown in concentration camps along with their parents. Japanese Americans were orders of magnitude more alienated and dehumanized than their German and Italian counterparts, as discussed in our last article The Roots of Removal. For the better part of a century, White people had increasingly feared Asians as a cultural, economic, and geopolitical threat, as bringers of the so-called “Yellow Peril.” This fear bore fruit in the form of laws that barred entry of additional Asian immigrants and rendered Asians who were already in the country second-class citizens.

For the better part of a century, White people had increasingly feared Asians as a cultural, economic, and geopolitical threat, as bringers of the so-called “Yellow Peril.”

This dehumanization went beyond prejudices typically observed in religious or cultural differences, especially compared to other European ethnicities. Asians—the Japanese in this case—were widely depicted as sub-human, routinely compared to rats, bats, and other vermin.11https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/8332/ After Pearl Harbor, unofficial “Jap Hunting Licenses” circulated around the United States, declaring “open season” on hunting the Japanese in the United States and abroad.12https://web.archive.org/web/20110928210613/http://clioweb.org/openseason/index.html These licenses, reminiscent in the style of today’s bumper stickers, provided reminders that there was “no limit” on the number of “Japs” they could “hunt or trap.”13https://web.archive.org/web/20110928210613/http://clioweb.org/openseason/index.html While killing Japanese Americans was obviously illegal, this sort of propaganda was not merely bravado; U.S. military personnel eventually carried this hunter’s mindset into the Pacific Theater, where troops frequently mutilated Japanese war dead and collected trophies from their body parts.14https://www.webcitation.org/60qayJ6nA?url=https://doc-0s-1o-docs.googleusercontent.com/docs/securesc/ha0ro937gcuc7l7deffksulhg5h7mbp1/ii7d704je452pc3b184aifn0nft8ub2e/1313028000000/16875855194702050732/*/0B-5-JeCa2Z7hN2ZkMWRiNmYtN2M4Ny00YjQ2LWJlMjYtZGY0NmMxMzM5NzQ2?e=download Life magazine prominently featured a picture of a woman next to a gift from her boyfriend fighting in the Pacific Theater–a real human skull.15https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/human-trophies President Roosevelt received another gift from a member from the House of Representatives–a letter-opener fashioned from the forearm of a Japanese soldier.16https://time.com/archive/6788113/religion-honor-after-death/ There was no meaningful equivalent to this pattern of behavior in the European theater of the war.
Pictured: May 22, 1944, Life magazine Picture of the Week. The caption at the bottom reads, “Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you-note for the Jap skull he sent her.”17https://time.com/3880997/young-woman-with-jap-skull-portrait-of-a-grisly-wwii-memento/
Pictured: One of many “Hunting Licenses,” which reads “Hunting License Issued to [Name]. Open Season for that vile stinking viper known as the Jap-Snake. Will be recognized by that hissing s-s-s noise that sounds like ‘so sorry please’ ... Warning - Do not turn your back as this animal is noted for Back Stabbing! Signed - Viper Exterminating Society.”18https://www.jamsj.org/manabu/grace-izuhara
However, not all attitudes toward the “Japanese race” were hostile. For example, many Americans were aware that Nisei, Japanese who were born in the United States, were highly assimilated into American culture. While a common adage of the time warned that “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” living examples to the contrary were given space in the mainstream news. In 1939, two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, one newspaper article reported on the opening of “The Pavilion of Japan,” constructed for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. The journalist observed that “American Japanese girls, in the ceremonial costumes of their ancestors, speak of the exhibit with American accents and are living examples of the meeting of the East and the West… ‘Sayonara! Come again!’ is the gracious word of your hosts as you leave this enchanting place.”19https://hub.catalogit.app/new-museum-los-gatos/entry/54840af0-737d-11ee-b590-073641f6ed54?query=Pavilion%20of%20Japan  

Just two years later, the American press would openly debate whether “American Japanese girls” like these–and their entire families–should be sent into concentration camps. 

The First Wave of Crackdowns

With the dogs of war unleashed, the United States first acted against the foreign-born nationals of each ethnicity. In fact, years before the outbreak of war, intelligence services in the government prepared lists of Japanese, Italian, and German nationals who would be removed from society in the event of a war.20https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Custodial%20detention%20/%20A-B-C%20list/ Within a few hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents arrested 736 Issei on these lists. Even though Germany and Italy were not yet at war with the United States, FBI agents also arrested a number of foreign-born Germans and Italians.

Separate from the Japanese American Incarceration, the FBI arrested approximately 17,500 Japanese American individuals as part of the Custodial Detention Program.

These arrests continued more or less until the end of the war under the so-called “Custodial Detention Program.” Separate from the Japanese American Incarceration, the FBI arrested approximately 17,500 Japanese American21 We use the term “Japanese American” to refer to Issei, even if they did not possess American citizenship. In our view, using citizenship to evaluate if they deserve to be called American is wholly unproductive. Japanese immigrants were legally barred from becoming American citizens until 1952, several years after the end of the war. By the time of the Japanese American Incarceration, virtually all Issei had been in the United States for decades. individuals on these lists without charges nor access to legal counsel. A few of these were American-born Nisei. Many were held in either federal prisons or special camps, and many remained there even after the concentration camps for the Japanese American population at large began to close in 1945. 

Over the course of the war, the FBI also arrested 14,000 immigrants of German and Italian ancestry. While Japanese Americans represented a disproportionate share among those arrested, the Custodial Detention Program was not an explicitly racist program, as it almost entirely targeted foreign nationals born in Japan, Germany, and Italy: all wartime enemies. Some unfortunate children witnessed agents barge into their homes and arrest their parents. One daughter of an Italian immigrant, Lucetta Berizzi, remembered how agents stormed in, telling her father to change out of his pajamas and get dressed before taking him into custody.22https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/proclamation-2527-internment-italian-americans German, Italian, and Japanese communities were traumatized by experiences like these, watching their parents or neighbors dragged from their homes without any justification given.

Pictured: A record generated for Giuseppe Protto, one of the “enemy aliens” interned during the war under the Custodial Detention Program.23https://njahs.org/enemy-alien-files/online-exhibit-enemy-alien-files/detained-and-interned/
Shortly after the arrests started, many people in power recognized the arrests as unjustifiable. As is true today, non-citizens of the United States had a right to due process, which these arrestees were denied. These arrestees, totaling over 30,000 people, did not receive any reason or justification for their arrests. No formal charges were brought against them, and they had no access to legal counsel. As U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle would put it in 1943, the identification of these individuals as potential agents was largely based on “unreliable hearsay and other varieties of dubious information,” and Biddle himself recommended that all the names on these arrest lists be expunged.24https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Custodial%20detention%20/%20A-B-C%20list/ Regardless, those arrested remained in prison.

Foreign-born nationals who were not arrested under the Custodial Detention Program faced other security measures as the nation prepared for war. Roughly one month after the Pearl Harbor attack, the federal government ordered all German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants to carry photo-bearing “enemy alien registration cards” at all times. Personal belongings, such as radios and firearms, were to be confiscated by local police. To travel more than five miles from home, an immigrant needed to apply for a travel permit. Police departments across the United States relayed these new restrictions.25https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/judiciary.house.gov/files/2016-04/Christgau090319.pdf

On January 9th, 1942, the Los Gatos Times relayed the following announcement from Los Gatos Police Chief Lyman Feathers:26https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=LGT19420109.1.1&e=01-01-1942-01-03-1942-194-en–20-LGT-1-byDA-txt-txIN-Japanese—-1942— Los Gatos Times, January 9, 1942, pg.1.

 

ATTENTION!
ENEMY ALIENS AND PUBLIC
Police Chief Lyman Feathers announces the following latest order regarding short wave radios, cameras and guns of enemy aliens and asks that the general public be familiar with the provisions:

All enemy aliens or people who have enemy aliens in their household or on their property who have radios with short wave, cameras or guns of any kind must turn them in to the nearest police office or to the sheriff without further delay. […] Penalty for failure to surrender radios is confiscation of the personal property with possible internment in concentration camps for the duration of the war, Chief Feathers said.

Japs Lead Axis Allies

Feathers revealed that Japanese aliens are leading their German and Italian allies here in complying with the order, the latter partners showing some reluctance in surrendering the contraband property.

Permit To Travel

Enemy aliens are all persons born in Japan and all persons born in Germany or Italy and not naturalized. Such persons living in Santa Clara county must file an application with the San Francisco office of the US attorney general a week in advance before they can travel out of their home community. Otherwise aliens are permitted to continue their customary movements to stores, churches and public buildings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This announcement from the Los Gatos Police Chief provides insight into the political environment at the time. Firstly, at this stage, the announcement indicates that government authorities did not formally consider “Japanese aliens” to be more dangerous than their German and Italian counterparts. Rather, the announcement grouped them all together as enemies of the state, going as far as to call Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants “allies” and “partners” with one another. The Issei, who were all legally unable to naturalize at this point, received the same orders as non-naturalized German and Italian immigrants. Secondly, the Los Gatos Police Chief presented a penalty for those of any ethnic background who failed to surrender their contraband: internment in concentration camps for the duration of the war. In hindsight, this threat to send people to concentration camps is dripping with irony–every Japanese American in Los Gatos would still be sent to the camps, even if they had complied more eagerly than their German and Italian neighbors.

In Japanese American communities across the United States, there was a similar zeal to demonstrate patriotism and loyalty. Many turned over firearms and other weapons even before being ordered to do so.27https://mohai.org/collections-and-research/search/item/PI/-%2328032/?searchQuery=Discrimination&Asian_(Q&A)&Stevens&Thompson_Ski_Co_&Nelson_Mill_Co_&Merrihew&Anderson&Bushnell&Sons&Bros_&modules%5B0%5D=item&modules%5B1%5D=collections&modules%5B2%5D=library&pageNum=26 Some Japanese Americans volunteered to serve as informants to the government, promising to identify suspicious individuals in their community.28https://densho.org/catalyst/of-spies-and-gmen/ Despite their efforts to prove their loyalty to the United States, there was one big problem: they were still “Japs.”

The Court of Public Opinion

Pictured: Newspaper articles hailing the start of the Japanese American Incarceration.29https://scalar.usc.edu/works/circus-route-books-project/media/newspaper-oakland-california
“I don’t want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty… It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty…”

– Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, Head of the Western Defense Command, April 194330https://densho.org/catalyst/5-alarming-similarties-between-anti-syrian-refugee-rhetoric-and-justifications-for-world-war-ii-era-mass-incarceration/
For the first two months of the war, U.S. security measures had only targeted foreign-born immigrants from Germany, Italy, and Japan. While many of these policies were considered by contemporaries to be excessive and impractical, especially the Custodial Detention Program, these policies had retained some degree of restraint, since the children of these foreign-born immigrants retained their rights as U.S. citizens. But as war fever and paranoia gripped the public, White Americans across the country felt that the government had not gone far enough.

For many, there remained a traitorous race still allowed to live among them: the “Jap.” Unsubstantiated conspiracy theories circulated about Japanese Americans, including one that they had given vital information to the Empire of Japan ahead of the Pearl Harbor attack.31https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japanese-american-incarceration Already predisposed to viewing Japanese people as subhumans incompatible with American society, people across the nation began to openly advocate for expelling those of Japanese ancestry from their communities.

The United States considered two courses of action during this time. The first course of action involved relocating and imprisoning all Issei, the so-called “Japanese aliens.” The second course of action involved imprisoning their American-born children alongside them.  These Issei in question were not suspected of any individual wrongdoing. After the initial wave of arrests following the Pearl Harbor attack, the government believed that the remaining Japanese American population did not pose a significant security threat.32https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japanese-american-incarceration After all, if they were individually suspected of anything, they would have already been arrested under the Custodial Detention Program. The question for the American public was now whether they should imprison ordinary people without any evidence of disloyalty. These included people like the mothers and fathers of the Inouye and Nozaki families.

Generally, editorials defending the rights of the Issei were few and far between. But some defenders did exist. For example, on February 1, 1942, the Seattle Times published an editorial defending their Japanese residents:33https://www.postalley.org/2023/01/16/understanding-the-times-how-the-japanese-internment-was-reported/
“The question of what to do about resident Japanese is not one to be lightly weighed or dismissed with a hand toward concentration camps. Most of these people have been among us for many years: self-supporting, law-abiding members of our several communities. Thousands of them are American-born and, if of age, are American citizens.”
But ultimately, public opinion was dead-set against the Issei, with the vast majority of the American public demanding that the federal government contain the “alien” threat. Politicians like Washington state governor Arthur B. Langlie reported that residents overwhelmingly agreed that enemy aliens should be evacuated immediately.34https://downloads.densho.org/ddr-densho-56/ddr-densho-56-657-mezzanine-06a422dfc7.pdf By March 1942, the American Institute of Public Opinion reported polling results showing that 93% of Americans supported “moving Japanese aliens (those who are not citizens) away from the Pacific coast.”35https://downloads.densho.org/ddr-densho-56/ddr-densho-56-657-mezzanine-06a422dfc7.pdf The sheer weight of public opinion thus made the expulsion of the Issei from their communities virtually inevitable. Once the Japanese American Incarceration was underway, even civil liberties organizations demurred from defending the Issei: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) exclusively focused its legal efforts on defending the rights of their American-born Nisei children.  However, the fate of the Nisei was more contested and debated. Here, the American press became the mouthpiece for both the anxieties and the sympathies of white Americans towards the Japanese American population living in the United States. Some commentators did rally to support their neighbors, and considered most of them to be loyal citizens, worthy of the same constitutional protections afforded to their white neighbors.36https://www.postalley.org/2023/01/16/understanding-the-times-how-the-japanese-internment-was-reported/ But many others simply did not care.

On February 20, 1942, the Los Gatos Times shared its official position that California was teeming with potential traitors whom they called “Japanese fifth columnists:” 37https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=LGT19420220.1.7&e=01-01-1942-01-03-1942-194-en–20-LGT-21-byDA-txt-txIN——–. The newspaper segment shown below is an unsigned editorial, unattributed to any author. During this time, such unsigned editorials were considered official newspaper positions. Los Gatos Times, February 20, 1942, p. 4, accessed

“Can We Be Too Proud To Win This War?

It is possible that the people of the United States can be too proud to win this war. Too proud to be humble enough not only to admit that we can learn something from the enemy but to profit by that knowledge and experience. A lack of humility plus complacency can lose this war. In every conquered country enemy fifth columnists have played a leading role yet with that lesson before us plus the knowledge of what transpired at Pearl Harbor we dilly-dally along with the enemy alien situation here in California where Japanese fifth columnists are as thick as bees.

[…]

But there are plenty in California and they should be moved out. And the surest way to be certain that none will remain is to transfer all Japanese away from the coast states.

To include American citizens in such a move is regrettable but each of us must be ready to do what is required for the defense of our country and if this be demanded of loyal citizens to make the sacrifice willingly will be their way of contributing a service to the war effort of the United States. If we don’t act promptly and firmly the consequences may be too serious to rectify later.

And who was it who said ‘pride goeth before a fall?’”

 

 

 

 

 

 

To readers who have read our previous installment, The Roots of Removal, the argument of this Los Gatos Times editorial may seem eerily familiar. Like California’s first governor, who stated in 1851 that a “war of extermination” with the “Indian race” must be expected “with painful regret,” the editorial takes on a similar tone of pity and guilt regarding the Japanese American Incarceration, remarking that “to include American citizens in such a move is regrettable.” For a society that considers itself a beacon of freedom, liberty, and human rights, a kind of defensive rhetoric is frequently deployed to justify otherwise unjustifiable acts: “We are under attack. Our hand has been forced, and there is no choice but to take such harsh and necessary steps to ensure our safety.”

On the other hand, there were other Americans at this time who did not bother to put on any pretense of guilt for the proposed plan to remove Japanese American citizens to the interior. Some supported the Incarceration even as they admitted the vast majority of those incarcerated were innocent. As influential Seattle Times columnist Henry McLemore would so bluntly put it:

“I am for immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior, either. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room in the badlands. Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it.

Sure, this would work an unjustified hardship on 80 per cent or 90 per cent of the California Japanese. But the remaining 10 or 20 per cent have it in their power to do damage–great damage–to the American people. They are a serious menace and you can’t tell me that an individual’s rights have any business being placed above a nation’s safety.

If making one million innocent Japanese uncomfortable would prevent one scheming Japanese from costing the life of one American boy, then let the million innocents suffer.”38https://densho.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Documents_SPW.pdf

In the end, the cold hard numbers revealed that a clear majority of Americans supported incarcerating all Japanese Americans, regardless of citizenship. However, the incarceration of Nisei American citizens was clearly more controversial than the incarceration of only Issei. While 93% of Americans supported the incarceration of the Issei alone, 59% supported incarcerating the Nisei alongside them.39https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/main/us-public-opinion-on-japanese-internment-1942 Almost a quarter of Americans (24%) stated they would be explicitly against incarcerating the Nisei. 

With the government under pressure to act against the entire Japanese American population, many major government officials understood how this “move away from the Pacific Coast” would be implemented, and expressed serious reservations about the plan. The U.S. Attorney General, Francis Biddle, thought that the mass incarceration of the Japanese Americans would be neither effective nor legal, a view shared by the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, at least at first. However, other Army officials, including the Deputy Secretary of War, supported universal incarceration. 

With powerful figures in the Federal Government divided on the question of Incarceration, all eyes fell on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the decades prior, FDR had a well-documented history of anti-Japanese prejudice informed by the racialized thinking of the time.40https://fdrfoundation.org/5081-2/ In the 1920s, he praised California’s laws barring Japanese people from owning land, arguing that it prevented “the undesirability of mixing the blood of the two peoples.”41https://rasmusen.org/special/Roosevelt_Macon_Telegraph.htm Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Editorials for the Macon Telegraph: April 30, 1925.” Five years before the outbreak of war, he proposed that the government surveil Hawaii’s Japanese American population for suspects, who “would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble.”42https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Franklin_D._Roosevelt/

 

 

Executive Order 9066 is perhaps the greatest example of a formally “race-blind” policy that was, in fact, racist. 

 

The Executive Order did not name Japanese Americans explicitly, but it was enacted with the sole purpose of targeting them.

It should come as no surprise that the vocal opposition within Roosevelt’s cabinet to the Incarceration did not gain traction. As Francis Biddle scheduled lunch with the president and wrote memos in vain attempts to dissuade the president, President Roosevelt pressed forward regardless. Ultimately, Biddle and Stimson would capitulate to pressure from the public and within the administration, opting not to publicly oppose President Roosevelt’s decision to sign Executive Order 9066 on February 19th, 1942.43https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japanese-american-incarceration While the executive order was formally a “race-blind” policy that would not name the Japanese explicitly, it would in reality be used exclusively against those with Japanese ancestry.44https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066 Now, with the stroke of a pen, the full weight of the federal government would be brought to bear on every Japanese American on the West Coast, without regard to gender, class, religion, or citizenship status. 

A Bitter Farewell

For the first few weeks after the executive order was signed, Japanese Americans were subject to “voluntary” evacuation orders from the West Coast, with “voluntary” meaning they could organize their own departure and choose their own destinations without any government escort so long as they left the military exclusion zones. Voluntary evacuation proved to satisfy no one. 

Firstly, many Japanese found it difficult to uproot everything to leave on such short notice; many operated farms and businesses that were difficult to sell off in a short amount of time. Many of those that did manage to sell were forced to sell their property for pennies on the dollar. Secondly, the government had justified the evacuation by “military necessity,” implying the Japanese Americans were a threat to national security. Residents of the states outside of the exclusion zones found it strange, at best, that a people who were deemed too dangerous to be allowed to live on the West Coast would now be allowed to become their new neighbors. Stories of would-be resettlers being turned away at the state border of Nevada, being thrown in jail, or being threatened by mob violence quickly circulated and discouraged Japanese Americans from moving away voluntarily.45https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Voluntary%20evacuation?_gl=1*8azjit*_gcl_au*MTM2NDA1NDY2OC4xNzYwNTk5ODQ4  

 

By March 27th, once the military had decided voluntary evacuations were impractical, this window of voluntary migration would be closed, and the military would forbid unauthorized movement within the military exclusion zones. These voluntary resettlers ultimately made up a very small portion of the overall Japanese American population (less than ~5%), managing to avoid forced migration to the concentration camps. Kikuye Inouye’s future husband, Henry Yamate, was among this small portion of the population who had managed to move out while the “voluntary” evacuation orders were still in place. 

 

Henry Yamate had been living in Monterey through the turbulent times leading up to Executive Order 9066. When they received notice of the exclusion zones and evacuation orders, Henry met with other family members who had been living nearby in the Santa Clara Valley to decide on their course of action. These other family members had acquaintances east of the new military exclusion zones, in Rocky Ford, Colorado, who encouraged them to move there for their safety and well-being. Henry’s family decided they would join together with their relatives in the Santa Clara Valley to make the long journey east as soon as they could.

Pictured: A Japanese American in Santa Clara County closing his strawberry greenhouse prior to the mass removal.46https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-151-128/?_gl=1*13biaqs*_gcl_au*NzU4NDQ2NTc5LjE3Njg3ODU4NDI.
Pictured: A message posted on the storefront glass of the Iseri Pharmacy in Los Angeles on April 11th, 1942. Its proprietors leave a haunting message: “Many thanks for your patronage. Hope to serve you in near future. God be with you till we meet again. Mr. and Mrs. K. Iseri."47 https://docsteach.org/document/iseri-drugstore/

Henry’s united family packed all of the belongings they could fit into two trucks, beginning the long trek east to Rocky Ford. Their journey was not smooth; all along the way, they would run into frequent mechanical issues due to how overloaded their trucks were. To save precious weight on the trucks, Henry was forced to abandon, among other belongings, a treasured collection of music records, burying the collection in the Nevada desert in hopes that he could some day drive back to recover them. When they had made it to Rocky Ford, locals had met them at the town’s border, warning them to keep driving and not to stop in their town. Despite these “warnings,” Henry’s family decided to stay. 

 

In this hostile atmosphere, work proved to be scarce once they arrived. They gardened, performed agricultural work as hired farm laborers, and did other menial work to get by. Henry’s son, Gordon Yamate, told the authors in an interview that he remembered the family feeling that they would have greater control over their lives outside the evacuation zones, even in such an unwelcoming and inhospitable environment. This critical decision to leave the western exclusion zones early allowed Henry Yamate’s family to avoid the concentration camps. The vast majority of Japanese Americans, on the other hand, were either unable or unwilling to move voluntarily during this short window of time.

Pictured: Evacuation notices posted in April 1942 in San Francisco, instructing Japanese Americans to report to the “assembly centers.”48https://www.nps.gov/goga/executive-order-9066.htm

After the exclusion zones were closed, the military quickly established so-called “assembly centers” near areas with large Japanese American populations, which were followed by ten more permanent “relocation centers” located largely within the western United States. In early April, the government began to post notices and instructions to “all persons of Japanese ancestry,” ordering them to evacuate to these assembly centers. The Nozaki family received their notice in Mountain View, and were instructed to report to what is today the Mountain View Caltrain station. Their assigned destination would be the Santa Anita Racetrack, then euphemistically called the “Santa Anita Assembly Center,” located in Arcadia, east of Los Angeles. Today, the camp is known as the Santa Anita Detention Facility. The Inouye family would receive similar instructions to the Nozakis, departing from Los Gatos.

[Esther] recalled, “[we had to leave behind] a lot. We were allowed to go to the internment camp with just the suitcase with our clothes.”

Upon receiving the order to leave Mountain View and report to Santa Anita, the Nozaki family resigned themselves to doing as they were told. Esther said of her family’s attitude, “if they had to go, they would go, you know–they’re not going to fight.” She remembered that her family had to leave behind many valuables, including the family’s grand piano. She recalled, “[we had to leave behind] a lot. We were allowed to go to the internment camp with just the suitcase with our clothes.” 

The family still had a few white friends, who safeguarded some of the Nozaki family’s belongings prior to their departure from Mountain View. According to Esther, one of her childhood friends cried as she wondered why Esther had to leave. Ultimately, none of them came out to say their farewells when the Nozaki family boarded the  train bound south for the Santa Anita Racetrack.

Pictured: Japanese Americans arriving at the Santa Anita Detention Facility via train on April 5th, 1942.49https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-22-439/?_gl=1*e4x89k*_gcl_au*NzU4NDQ2NTc5LjE3Njg3ODU4NDI.

This article is part of the Coalition’s “Local Narrative Series on the Japanese Incarceration in Los Gatos.” 

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FOOTNOTES
1. With the interviewee 102 years old and the Incarceration over 80 years ago, there were often questions she was unable to answer due to forgotten details. This is to be expected—most people have trouble remembering many details from 10 years ago, let alone 80. We are also obliged to note that some of Esther’s accounts do not align with current and well-accepted historical accounts, either due to the incompleteness of existing historical accounts or the imperfect memory of the interviewee.
2. Some may ask why we did not interview a person who lived in Los Gatos at the time of the Japanese American Incarceration. With Esther eagerly volunteering her perspective and no personal connections to other survivors who resided in Los Gatos at the time, we decided to interview Esther while we had the opportunity. If any of our readers know of any potential interview subjects, please reach out to antiracism.lg@gmail.com!
4.
Originally organized in 1917, the Japan Union Conference remains active with a membership of 15,058, as of June 30, 2024. https://www.adventistyearbook.org/entity?EntityID=10408
5.
One such example includes Robert Hideo Idemoto who grew up in Los Gatos before he and his family were forced to leave town when he was 10 years old. He recalled having friends in Los Gatos, including a classmate he met in Kindergarten who still, to this day, grabs lunch with. He also recalled having as his friends two twins named after the Greek goddesses Aphrodite and Athena. In fact, a few years after he left Heart Mountain and returned to Los Gatos, he won an election to become class president of Los Gatos High School.
6.
7.

https://ushistoryscene.com/article/japanese-internment/

8.

https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/german/shadows-of-war/

9.
10.
12.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110928210613/http://clioweb.org/openseason/index.html

13.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110928210613/http://clioweb.org/openseason/index.html

14.

https://www.webcitation.org/60qayJ6nA?url=https://doc-0s-1o-docs.googleusercontent.com/docs/securesc/ha0ro937gcuc7l7deffksulhg5h7mbp1/ii7d704je452pc3b184aifn0nft8ub2e/1313028000000/16875855194702050732/*/0B-5-JeCa2Z7hN2ZkMWRiNmYtN2M4Ny00YjQ2LWJlMjYtZGY0NmMxMzM5NzQ2?e=download

15.

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/human-trophies

16.

https://time.com/archive/6788113/religion-honor-after-death/

17.

https://time.com/3880997/young-woman-with-jap-skull-portrait-of-a-grisly-wwii-memento/

18.

https://www.jamsj.org/manabu/grace-izuhara

20.
https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Custodial%20detention%20/%20A-B-C%20list/
21. We use the term “Japanese American” to refer to Issei, even if they did not possess American citizenship. In our view, using citizenship to evaluate if they deserve to be called American is wholly unproductive. Japanese immigrants were legally barred from becoming American citizens until 1952, several years after the end of the war. By the time of the Japanese American Incarceration, virtually all Issei had been in the United States for decades.
22.

37.

The newspaper segment shown below is an unsigned editorial, unattributed to any author. During this time, such unsigned editorials were considered official newspaper positions. Los Gatos Times, February 20, 1942, p. 4, accessed https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=LGT19420220.1.7&e=01-01-1942-01-03-1942-194-en–20-LGT-21-byDA-txt-txIN——–.

41.

 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Editorials for the Macon Telegraph: April 30, 1925.” https://rasmusen.org/special/Roosevelt_Macon_Telegraph.htm

48.