Navy Lieutenant Baldwin reported that "The fact that two Niʻihau Japanese who had previously shown no anti-American tendencies went to the aid of the pilot when Japanese domination of the island seemed possible, indicate likelihood that Japanese residents previously believed loyal to the United States may aid Japan if further Japanese attacks appear successful." Lt. Baldwin's report was dated January 26, 1942. Its context was a deliberate crash onto the Hawaiian Island of Ni'ihau by a member of the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service just a few hours following the second wave of attacks on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. To that extent, it was less the attack on Pearl Harbor itself and more the reactions of a pair of Japanese people living on an American possession that prompted the campaign to segregate Japanese-Americans via something called Executive Order 9066.
But the seeds of the racism against Japanese-Americans preceded the twentieth century. After Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1882, the United States agricultural industry lobbied Japan to send laborers to the sugar cane fields in Hawaii and the fruit and vegetable farms in California. Denied access to American labor unions, the Japanese workers in 1903 joined with the Mexican farm laborers to wage the first successful agricultural strike in California. With increased earning opportunities, the new Japanese-Americans bought up poor and undeveloped land ignored by white farmers and turned these lands into profitable enterprises. The white backlash did not blink. Mob violence forced many Japanese-Americans from their farms and soon enough the race hate became institutionalized, with many communities forbidding the marriage of Asians to white people. As the Japanese military developed into a force with which to be reckoned, many in the United States called out the Japanese-Americans as a "yellow peril" and as "agents of evil."
Not all the fear of Japan itself was unwarranted. The Imperial Nation had invaded China and much of Southeast Asia by the late 1930s. In 1940, the U.S. State Department commissioned a Detroit businessman named Curtis Munson to investigate the loyalties of Japanese-Americans living in the U.S. The Report on Japanese on the West Coast, or Munson Report, ultimately concluded that there was "a remarkable, even extraordinary degree of loyalty among some of this generally suspect ethnic group, but there were some that remained loyal to their home country, Japan, and its Emperor."
As a result of President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, authorizing the exclusion of Japanese-Americans from the rest of the United States, U.S. General John Dewitt was charged with carrying out the operation. General DeWitt, Military Commander of the Western Defense Command, went on to issue a series of over one hundred military orders applying exclusively to civilians of Japanese ancestry living in the West Coast states. The sole basis for DeWitt’s orders was ancestry; he was often quoted as stating: “A Jap’s a Jap. It makes no difference whether the Jap is a citizen or not.” He further masked the issue of citizen rights by using the term “non-alien” to refer to United States citizens in all of his written orders.
Shortly after entering the war, the United States discovered the need for Japanese language specialists and started to recruit men and women of Japanese ancestry for Military Intelligence Service, for the Office of Strategic Service, and for the Office of War Information. Japanese American soldiers in Asia and
the Pacific Islands worked primarily as translators, but engaged in combat whenever the need arose. It has been said that the Japanese American soldiers, by obtaining crucial military intelligence, helped to shorten the Pacific war by two years.
But the seeds of the racism against Japanese-Americans preceded the twentieth century. After Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1882, the United States agricultural industry lobbied Japan to send laborers to the sugar cane fields in Hawaii and the fruit and vegetable farms in California. Denied access to American labor unions, the Japanese workers in 1903 joined with the Mexican farm laborers to wage the first successful agricultural strike in California. With increased earning opportunities, the new Japanese-Americans bought up poor and undeveloped land ignored by white farmers and turned these lands into profitable enterprises. The white backlash did not blink. Mob violence forced many Japanese-Americans from their farms and soon enough the race hate became institutionalized, with many communities forbidding the marriage of Asians to white people. As the Japanese military developed into a force with which to be reckoned, many in the United States called out the Japanese-Americans as a "yellow peril" and as "agents of evil."
Not all the fear of Japan itself was unwarranted. The Imperial Nation had invaded China and much of Southeast Asia by the late 1930s. In 1940, the U.S. State Department commissioned a Detroit businessman named Curtis Munson to investigate the loyalties of Japanese-Americans living in the U.S. The Report on Japanese on the West Coast, or Munson Report, ultimately concluded that there was "a remarkable, even extraordinary degree of loyalty among some of this generally suspect ethnic group, but there were some that remained loyal to their home country, Japan, and its Emperor."
As a result of President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, authorizing the exclusion of Japanese-Americans from the rest of the United States, U.S. General John Dewitt was charged with carrying out the operation. General DeWitt, Military Commander of the Western Defense Command, went on to issue a series of over one hundred military orders applying exclusively to civilians of Japanese ancestry living in the West Coast states. The sole basis for DeWitt’s orders was ancestry; he was often quoted as stating: “A Jap’s a Jap. It makes no difference whether the Jap is a citizen or not.” He further masked the issue of citizen rights by using the term “non-alien” to refer to United States citizens in all of his written orders.
Shortly after entering the war, the United States discovered the need for Japanese language specialists and started to recruit men and women of Japanese ancestry for Military Intelligence Service, for the Office of Strategic Service, and for the Office of War Information. Japanese American soldiers in Asia and
the Pacific Islands worked primarily as translators, but engaged in combat whenever the need arose. It has been said that the Japanese American soldiers, by obtaining crucial military intelligence, helped to shorten the Pacific war by two years.
One such Japanese-American, the owner of this website, joined the United States military after being released from a California internment camp in 1944. After his discharge from the service, he climbed Mount Fuji, studied architecture at Berkeley, and eventually developed 690 commercial and residential projects in Marin County and Oakland, California. This gentleman is now ninety years old. He is the proud parent of three children and four grandchildren.