The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (20 page)

From time to time in class, Sensei Yamashita reminded Sumi and the other Americanized nisei, who were born and educated in the United States, that they lacked the traditional Japanese virtues of honor, sacrifice, and courage.
Wagamma no tairiku no nisei
, he called them, which meant “spoiled American nisei.”

Like the other nisei in camp, Sumi was torn between the opposing stereotypes of her generation, American-born children of Japanese parents: Were they 100 percent loyal to America, or were they a racially marginalized minority with questionable commitment to the United States? Though framed as a black-and-white choice, the issue of loyalty was less certain, more a riddle than a given. As with other nisei in the camp, Sumi’s answer to this conundrum had to be found in personal circumstances far beyond her control, as much rooted in Japan as in the United States. On November 11, 1943, Tokiji sent a message through the Red Cross to his daughters in Japan: “All reunited in good health. Will repatriate. Wait and be good. Be obedient to Uncle and Aunt. Take good care of Grandmother until we join. Regards to relatives.”

Sumi’s fate was decided. In his petition requesting repatriation, Tokiji made plain his reasons. He described the “mental shock and disappointment” of years of harsh internment in all-male camps. “I am sixty-seven years old and I have no other desire than to be repatriated to Japan to spent the rest of my life in my father-land,” he wrote. Sumi’s desire to stay in America counted for nothing. Nobu realized that her husband needed plenty of space and time to heal from the effects of internment. The only way for Tokiji to become sound in mind and body was to leave America and return to Japan. Nobu supported his decision.

In Crystal City, Sumi felt bewildered and alienated. As part of the Texas curriculum, Sumi and the other students had social studies, which included lessons in citizenship. It was baffling to read the
freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights—the freedom of religion, of speech, of the right to assemble, of protection against unwarranted searches and seizures—from inside the confines of what the Japanese called the Crystal City Concentration Camp. Everything about her life seemed a contradiction of the promises of citizenship. “None of it added up,” said Sumi. “I thought of it as another lesson in
gaman
. Nothing to do but persevere.” Many people, maybe even most people, would have become embittered by Sumi’s circumstances, but she made it a point not to struggle unnecessarily with unresolvable dilemmas.

After Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans serving in the US military were reclassified as 4C—enemy aliens—and many were discharged. Their weapons were taken from them, and they were imprisoned in internment camps, as were their disgraced issei parents. Then, on February 1, 1943, Roosevelt lifted the military ban on Japanese Americans and approved the formation of the 442nd all-nisei combat team. “No loyal citizen should be denied the democratic right to exercise the responsibilities of his citizenship, regardless of ancestry,” Roosevelt said.

The key word in Roosevelt’s statement was
loyal.
Only nisei were eligible for military service. After Roosevelt’s decision, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) distributed loyalty questionnaires to every internee over the age of seventeen in all of the camps, issei and nisei alike. The tests were mandatory, and the purpose was twofold: to identify dedicated nisei for military service and to determine the loyalty of both issei and nisei. The list of questions was long, but the ultimate test of allegiance came down to yes-or-no answers to the final two questions, 27 and 28.

Question 27, distributed to nisei men, read, “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?” For women and all issei internees, question 27 was slightly different: “If the opportunity presents itself and you are found qualified, would you be willing to volunteer for the Army Nurse Corps or the WAAC?”

Question 28, worded the same for all respondents, read, “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese Emperor, any foreign government, power or organization?” Japanese nationals were asked to give up allegiance to the country of their birth and swear allegiance to a country—the United States—that had imprisoned them. Some wondered if they would be without a country if they answered yes, since Japanese were not allowed to be naturalized citizens of the United States.

If respondents answered those two questions yes-yes, it was considered proof of their loyalty to the United States. If they answered no-no, they were considered disloyal. Prior to the mandatory tests, the two reasons given for the mass incarceration of the Japanese were that military advisers believed they posed a security threat, and Roosevelt needed a pool of internees to trade for Americans in Asia. With the implementation of the tests, the government added a third: recruitment of Japanese American soldiers to join the fight in Europe and Asia. For issei parents, the prospect of their American-born children fighting for America against Japan represented a crucible. Nisei wrestled with their allegiance to the country of their birth and their duty to their parents. Despite the conflict, more than 75 percent of nisei answered yes to both questions and were forever branded “yes-yes boys.” Many joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the all-Japanese unit whose slogan was “Go for broke.” Those in the less than one-quarter that answered the questions no were equally branded “no-no boys.” Inside the camps, the loyalty tests became the most acrimonious chapter of the Japanese internment.

In the winter and spring of 1943, as military recruiters poured into Crystal City and other camps to register nisei men for the 442nd, internees were indignant and defiant. In every bungalow, parents of drafted nisei viewed the recruitment as a conspiracy to deprive them of their children.
Mary Tsukamoto, a nisei teenager, wrote, “People walked the roads, tears streaming down their troubled
faces, silent and suffering. The little apartments were not big enough for the tremendous battle waged in practically every room.” On the walls of camp barracks, anonymous poems appeared. One poem read:

The cream of the crop—

Nisei soldiers—raised

By wrinkles on the parents’ brow.

In Crystal City, the battle between father and son and of brother against brother was particularly evident in the quarters of the Uno family of Los Angeles. George Uno, a native of Sendai, Japan, was nineteen years old when he immigrated to the United States in 1905. In 1912, he married Riki Kita, and they had ten children.

When war broke out, their eldest son, also named George but known as Buddy, was working for the Japanese army in Shanghai as a liaison between the army and foreign correspondents. Like the other Uno children, Buddy was born in the United States and had a typical nisei upbringing. He went to junior high in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles, not far from where Sumi grew up in Little Tokyo. He loved Hollywood movies. At the age of nine he saw his first film,
Three Jumps Ahead
, starring Tom Mix and his horse, Tony. As a senior at Compton High School, a primarily white school, Buddy worked for
Rafu Shimpo
, the Japanese newspaper of Los Angeles. His column, “A Nisei Melodrama,” which offered opinions on social and cultural matters, was published in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.

As a child, Buddy felt marginalized by racism. At twelve, when the Uno family lived in Utah, he was rejected as a member of the Boy Scouts because of his race. In the 1930s in Utah, Japanese Americans were denied access to public swimming pools and sat in the balconies with African Americans in movie theaters.

Over time, Buddy grew curious about his Japanese heritage and in 1939 moved to Shanghai. When the war between Japan and the
United States began, Buddy was an employee of the Japanese Army Press Bureau and was named editor of the government-controlled
Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury.
He wore an army uniform and brandished a military sword. One lieutenant colonel in the Japanese army described Uno as a “Yankeefied Japanese officer.” After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Buddy wrote an editorial that proclaimed, “The year 1942 will be remembered as a year of emancipation for the peoples of East Asia, for during the brief twelve months, through the consistent victories of the Imperial Nipponese Armed Forces, millions have been released from the shackles of Anglo-American imperialism.”

The Japanese army transferred Buddy to Bunka Camp in Tokyo, where American prisoners of war were held. At the camp, he attempted to coerce POWs into writing anti-American radio scripts for broadcast. Many POWs testified that Uno was abusive. George H. Henshaw, an American POW, wrote of Uno in his diary, “He threatened us with everything from a firing squad to the tortures of a Gestapo dungeon if anyone ever dared to question an order from this camp again.”

Given Buddy’s activities in Japan, the FBI of course profiled his father in Los Angeles. Agents made several trips to his home after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Kay Uno, the youngest of the ten children, remembered the moment on December 7, 1941, when she learned about Pearl Harbor. She was nine years old and on her way to Sunday-morning service at the Church of Christ, where the Uno family regularly worshipped. “We were in the car, going to church, and the radio was on and said that the war had started,” Kay wrote in an essay published in
A Fence Away from Freedom.
Her father turned the car around and went back home. Her brothers wanted to go outside to find out more about what was happening in Hawaii from their friends, but Riki, their mother, ordered them to stay inside: “You boys, you cannot go anywhere.”

Kay’s brothers shared a love of model airplanes, which hung from their bedroom window and over a table where they worked. George
had sent the plans for one of these models to Buddy, the oldest brother, in Japan. On February 1, 1942, when agents came to the house to arrest George, they removed all the model planes from the house and told George he was considered a spy because he sent airplane plans to Buddy in Japan. An innocent gift to Buddy was now evidence of George’s disloyalty.

Shortly after George’s arrest, Riki and the children relocated to the Santa Anita racetrack, not far from Los Angeles. As Kay remembered, they stayed in a tar-paper barrack on the parking lot, the scent of manure from the horse stalls wafting through the tar paper. Later, while the children moved to Camp Amache in Colorado, George, classified as a dangerous enemy alien, shuttled through a succession of camps: Missoula, Fort Lincoln, Lordsburg, and Santa Fe.

In Camp Amache, one of his sons, Ernest, known as Ernie in
the family, turned eighteen and answered yes-yes to the loyalty questionnaire. With his voluntary application for the 442nd already signed, Ernie traveled to the Santa Fe Internment Camp to seek his father’s blessing. American surveillance officers at the Santa Fe camp monitored the painful meeting of father and son. George listened as his son explained his decision to join the US Army. After a prolonged silence, George told his son he disagreed with his decision. The battle was joined between father and son.

As a Japanese man, George Uno was trained to believe that a soldier goes to war with the idea that he will never return. “You should go and be prepared to die,” Uno told his son. When Ernie was shipped out with the 442nd to fight in Italy, he left believing that his father wanted him to die. Many years later, George explained that he only wanted Ernie to recognize that if he joined the military, he should be prepared for death.

For Ernie the decision to become a US soldier wasn’t easy. He felt particularly let down by President Roosevelt. One year after Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, leading to the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, Roosevelt urged the formation of the 442nd. Ernie understood what was on the line for
him and other Japanese Americans. The issue was whether Japanese Americans would fight and, if necessary, die for America. The paradox was that Roosevelt asked loyalty of a disenfranchised group of people—people like Ernie, who’d been stripped of their rights as Americans. Ernie decided to pay the price of Roosevelt’s loyalty test. It was personal. He felt it was his duty to fight for America to counterbalance the actions of Buddy, his brother who fought on the side of Japan.

Two other Uno brothers, Stanley and Howard, also answered yes-yes to the loyalty questions. They were among the earliest nisei volunteers in the Military Intelligence Service, two of more than six thousand Japanese Americans performing secret operations in the Pacific. Like the other volunteers, Stanley and Howard translated and deciphered enemy codes. The men in this service were known as Yankee samurai. World War II historians have credited the work of the MIS in the Pacific with shortening the war by approximately two years.

As Ernie felt the need to atone for Buddy’s loyalty to Japan, so did Howard and Stanley. In a letter to his younger brother Robert, Stanley urged him to join the US Army and fight for the country of his birth rather than side with Japan and his disloyal brother. “I tell you that I love this country, above any and all things which may be on this conflicted world,” Stanley told Robert. “I am unashamed of my love. On the contrary, I am proud.”

As in the American Civil War, when brothers from the North fought against brothers from the South, so it was with the Uno brothers. Stanley expressed his fury with Buddy for fighting alongside the Japanese. He vowed that, if given the chance, he would destroy Buddy. “We infantrymen live by the ghastly phrase of ‘kill or be killed,’ ” Stanley wrote. “To uphold the American principles by which I live, I will fight even Buddy.”

When Stanley wrote the letter, Robert was a teenager interned in Crystal City with his father, his mother, his sister Kay, and his brother Edison. Edison was two years younger than Sumi, and a nisei leader
in camp. Easygoing and good-looking, Edison was elected class president every year he was in school. Even in the face of arbitrary internment, Edison urged his peers to value their American citizenship and to stand against what he labeled their “too Japanese-y” issei fathers.