Johnston, a courtly veteran hotelier accustomed to catering to the rich and famous, might seem an unlikely choice to voice bedrock American values in dark times. But that’s exactly what he did when World War II broke out, and the U.S. government decided to house diplomats from the Axis countries of Germany, Italy, and eventually Japan at his luxurious hotel.

Thanks to the Greenbrier’s meticulous records, maintained over the last four decades by on-site historian Robert Conte, Johnston emerges as a patriot who exhorted his employees to serve America’s enemies with courtesy and respect, even when their neighbors and countrymen were vilifying them.

Loren Johnston rallied the staff of West Virginia’s Greenbrier Hotel, exhorting them to treat their diplomatic prisoners with the same consideration they’d offer any other resort guest. Courtesy of the Greenbrier.

“You may all rest assured,” he wrote his staff of several hundred shortly after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, “that our Government has a very good reason for everything they request us to do, and it is not our privilege to question. It is our duty to serve these people for the duration of their stay in the best possible manner.” His hotel crew responded with alacrity, performing the countless behind-the-scenes jobs that guests only notice if something goes amiss. Their unstinting efforts exemplified the work so many Americans did to unite the nation in the face of crisis.

What Johnston asked his team to do was difficult because it was unpopular. For years in the U.S., a debate had raged between interventionists who wanted to confront fascist and totalitarian threats, and isolationists led by the America First Committee, who were determined to stay out of another world war. When bombs fell at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war on Japan, and days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the U.S. As a result, the isolationist argument collapsed over a matter of days, and in its stead arose another animating, if ignoble, national sentiment: hatred of a common enemy.

Newspapers’ vitriolic headlines, editorials, and racist caricatures of buck-toothed Japanese fanned the flames of animosity, especially against the two most reviled men in America: Ambassador Kichisaburō Nomura and Special Envoy Saburō Kurusu, who had been sitting in Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s office as the bombs rained down on Hawaii. They were two among hundreds of Axis diplomats living and working in the nation’s capital. Fearful of envoys’ ongoing communications with home, the Roosevelt administration made a controversial decision to send these foreign nationals and their families to remote luxury hotels. The primary goal of this plan was reciprocity—the hope that good treatment of enemy diplomats here would engender the same for American counterparts trapped overseas. (It did not.)

This roundup, detention and eventual repatriation of more than a thousand Axis diplomats and dependents, little remembered today, was a cause célèbre that rocked the nation and enraged many Americans. “May I ask why our government deems it necessary to pamper the delegation of Yellow Rats by housing them at one of the country’s finest winter resorts?” fumed one Washington state resident to Senator Monrad Wallgren. A railroad executive from New York wrote to Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles: “As a patriotic American for many generations, [wouldn’t] any old wooden shack be good enough? Why coddle German and Jap prisoners who are all bitter enemies of our country, and who would ruin us if they had half a chance?”

Sheltering Axis diplomats wasn’t popular among angry Americans, who flooded the Japanese Embassy with vitriolic letters after the Pearl Harbor bombing. Courtesy of the U.S. National Archives & Records Administration.

Two rural luxury hotels immediately signed on during their quiet winter off-seasons: the Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, tasked with housing the Japanese, and the Greenbrier in nearby West Virginia, which took in the Germans and Italians. Fay Ingalls, owner of the Homestead, recalled the government’s request as more “in the nature of a command”—but Johnston responded more enthusiastically, writing to a friend that “we immediately enlisted.”

By the end of December, the initial contingents of diplomats arrived at each hotel, infuriating many local residents. When White Sulphur residents cried foul, Mayor William Perry, who also served as the Greenbrier’s purchasing agent, addressed a town meeting. “We, and I speak for every person in our town, are happy to have this privilege of doing our part during the war crisis,” he insisted. “Our whole tradition here in White Sulphur Springs is one of patriotism and support of our government.” Outraged residents of nearby Lewisburg also demanded a public meeting, where they heard from Charlie Spruks, a top State Department official in its protocol division. Spruks expounded on the noble goal of reciprocity but changed few minds. “Over at White Sulphur Springs,” wrote the Charleston Gazette, “the regular clientele has been chased out so that the delicate bluebloods representing Hitler’s superior Nordics will not have to breathe the same air of plebian Americans whose habits of paying their bills and cussing an enemy to his face show plainly they are not born to the aristocracy. Here is a West Virginia resort … given over to as deceitful and rascally a flock of hired bravos as ever worked the doublecross.”

A native Vermonter, 64-year-old Johnston had managed high-end properties in Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Florida. At the latter he once refereed a four-man golf match that included John D. Rockefeller, Sr., then the world’s wealthiest man. Johnston was also an amateur photographer who donated all proceeds from his exhibitions to local charities. Though his establishments attracted an upscale clientele the heavyset, genial Johnston, who joined the Greenbrier in 1928, was an empathetic boss much beloved by his staff. Pronouncements from on high, no matter how well meaning, only have effect if people listen—and Johnston’s staffers took his words to heart.

Every day, bookkeepers and housekeepers, movie operators and telephone operators, painters and waiters, musicians and masseurs and others performed admirably under difficult conditions. To pass the time diplomatic guests dined on fine food, shopped, swam, and played table tennis and board games. But the diplomatic families quickly grew bored—and some took special pleasure in complaining.

In February 1942, when Italian diplomat Alberto Rossi Longhi criticized the hotel’s cleanliness, Johnston asked its chief housekeeper, 70-year-old Mary Florentina Harrington, to respond. Having been employed by the resort for nearly three decades, she had contemplated retirement previously but had stayed on to help during the detainment. She told Johnston that Rossi Longhi “has been overheard to say that we have only one vacuum cleaner for the whole house. For my part I would not feel obligated to tell him that we have many Hoovers and four large drum vacuums.” She added that “we have tried in every way to avert any unpleasantness, anything that would cause repercussions on the other side.”

It wasn’t only employees who held their tongues. On-site federal agents did too. State Department agent John O’Hanley confirmed Harrington’s stance: “Rossi Longhi said that he had a sore throat attributed to the [dirty] rugs in the lobby but, on my word of honor, I saw him walking around in all the rain that day with one of his boys. I didn’t mention this to him, of course.”

At the outbreak of World War II, the U.S. Government detained Axis diplomats at luxury resorts, hoping to limit their outside contacts. These German detainees stayed at the Greenbrier in West Virginia. Courtesy of the Greenbrier.

Just as Mussolini forever chafed under Hitler’s boot, so too did the Italians at the Greenbrier resent the arrogant Germans—and in the spring, the State Department shipped the Italians to the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, replacing them with the Japanese so the Homestead could reopen to the public for its spring season. But the Germans and the Japanese got along even worse than the Germans and Italians had, and the move re-inflamed local residents. Johnston got wind of a special town council meeting and immediately tipped off O’Hanley: “I very clearly stated to those who have approached me that under no circumstances is the Greenbrier to be included in any protest or any comment that may be considered or made public.” Though the council soon issued a resolution that “doth hereby protest most vigorously to the Japanese Enemy Aliens being interned in or near said Town,” the die was cast.

Once again, Johnston privately offered eloquent encouragement to his staff:

A great many millions of people are serving their governments under greater hardships than any of us have known up to this time, so I bespeak your continued loyalty and assure you of my keen appreciation … It must be remembered that this country is in a grievous war which will affect each and every one of us no matter what our work may be, and in order that we may properly perform our service we must be polite and patient, helpful to each other, and do our full duty.

The harmonious relationship between labor and management—and the cordial relations between hotel workers and their guests that it engendered—didn’t go unnoticed by on-site federal agents. “The attitude of your entire personnel reflects the love and devotion they have for you, for they have followed to the letter your instructions that these various Nationals be treated as if they are your customary guests,” wrote O’Hanley, who added that his team felt the same way. “I know that each man, like myself, will be singing the praises of the Greenbrier and the hospitality of yourself long after our present guests are returned to their native lands.” The camaraderie and graciousness even seemed to rub off on other agents. “I hate Germany and Hitler with all my might,” admitted one border guard, “but working with these people, for my life, I cannot hate them!”

Behind the scenes, tedious and often tense negotiations for the diplomats’ release dragged on for more than six months; it was the summer of 1942 before the diplomats finally sailed home. Japanese nationals traveled to Mozambique, where they were exchanged with Americans arriving from Japan. There, news correspondent Masuo Kato met up with an old friend, AP reporter Max Hill. After swapping stories of their respective confinements—Kato’s luxurious life at the Homestead and Greenbrier versus Hill’s mistreatment—Hill said, simply, “I am proud of my country.” America’s detainment of the Axis diplomats ranked as the gold standard, far kinder than the treatment afforded U.S. envoys abroad by the Italians, Germans and especially the Japanese, who imprisoned and tortured some journalists and businessmen.

The Germans sailed across the Atlantic to the exchange point of Lisbon. One evening, the young son of an embassy secretary entertained the group by singing a song he’d learned from the border guards at the Greenbrier: “Deep in the Heart of Texas.”

In the end, it was the hotel staffers who were most responsible for the top-notch service captives like that boy received, and the unlikely bonds it forged: Unsung Americans—men and women, black and white and brown, old and young, native and foreign born—pitched in to do the right thing at the right time. Taking direction from their boss Loren Johnston, their fight to do what was right demonstrated American willpower at its finest—the spirit and determination that propelled America to win the war.

The post The West Virginia Hotel Workers Who Ironed the Sheets of Their Enemies appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Coincidentally, this February 19 marks the 75th anniversary of FDR’s Executive Order 9066 setting up the camps. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in upstate New York is devoting an entire exhibit to FDR’s internment decision and its impact on the lives of internees for the first time in the library’s illustrious history.

The exhibit, “Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans In World War II,” will be ready for public viewing February 19, and will run through Dec. 31, 2017. In the meantime, it is worth reflecting on President Roosevelt’s role in and his reasons for setting up the internment camps. Trump, after all, described Roosevelt as a revered leader who was nonetheless responsible for setting up the internment camps. The then-presidential candidate suggested that if one of America’s greatest presidents could take such a step to defend lives, then Trump reasonably could crack down on Muslim Americans for the sake of security if he were to win the White House.

The internment decision represents one of the great paradoxes of FDR’s three-plus terms as president. Roosevelt was not just an architect of the New Deal but also a champion of human rights and individual liberties here at home and around the world as the crisis of World War II encroached on the United States.

Faced with the growing power of fascist militarism, Roosevelt declared in his 1941 Four Freedoms address that “the mighty action that we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all the things worth fighting for.” Indeed, he then cited “the preservation of civil liberties for all” as one of these fundamental democratic values that was worthy of national sacrifice.

The puzzle of his presidency is how a man so responsible for defending freedom against the totalitarian menace—whose wartime addresses stirred millions of people to defend the cause of liberty—could simultaneously authorize and implement one of the greatest civil liberties abuses in American history.

In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the political pressures on Roosevelt to take drastic action against Japanese Americans on the West Coast metastasized. Popular fears of imminent air raids, widespread espionage and land invasion combined with entrenched anti-Japanese racism, especially in California, Oregon, and Washington state, into a combustible mix in the uncertainty that defined the days following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Railing against any American officials who had the temerity to defend Japanese Americans as loyal citizens, the Los Angeles Times denounced all people of Japanese origin as “snakes” who posed imminent dangers to communities on the Pacific coast. Anti-Japanese voices grew louder as concerns soared that cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle—would come under enemy attack. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron warned residents that, “Right here in our own city are those who may spring to action at an appointed time in accordance with a prearranged plan wherein each of our little Japanese friends will know his part in the event of any possible attempted invasion or air raid … We cannot run the risk of another Pearl Harbor episode in Southern California.”

A group of Army officers, fearing that invasion was imminent and under pressure from nativists in the Western United States, pressed the White House to remove and incarcerate Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Roosevelt was kept abreast of the fast-moving debate about the fate of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, and the voices in support of internment proved far louder and politically and militarily more potent than the arguments made by interment’s opponents.

A member of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Harley Kilgore (D-WV), sent Roosevelt letters from Americans protesting the ongoing presence of Japanese people within the United States as a grave threat. “I am enclosing herewith a few samples of the types of protests which I am receiving from persons very distant from the Pacific Coast with reference to the dangers of Japanese and other inhabitants of that vicinity,” Kilgore wrote the president. “It is my sincere belief that the Pacific coast should be declared a military area which will give authority to put [residents] … under military law, permitting their removal, regardless of their citizenship rights, to internal and less dangerous areas.”

The most vigorous dissent to incarcerating Japanese Americans came from Attorney General Francis Biddle and Assistant to the Attorney General, James H. Rowe, Jr. But even as they argued admirably against evacuation and incarceration, the Justice Department’s leaders conveyed to the president some sense of the popular racism, war hysteria, and economic motivations that would ultimately overwhelm the debate and set in motion FDR’s executive order. Biddle wrote Roosevelt:

“A great many of the West Coast people distrust the Japanese, various special interests would welcome their removal from good farm land and the elimination of their competition, some of the local California radio and press have demanded evacuation, the West Coast congressional delegation are asking the same thing and finally Walter Lippman and Westbrook Pegler recently have taken up the evacuation cry on the ground that attack on the West Coast and widespread sabotage is imminent.”

When Biddle and other Justice Department officials were assured by the Army that the military and not Justice would be responsible for implementing and running the camps, they withdrew their opposition to Roosevelt’s executive order. That order, numbered 9066 and signed on February 19, 1942, did not explicitly mention the Japanese, but there was no question that it targeted people of Japanese ancestry for removal rather than people of German and Italian origins.

The decision was hardly motivated by legitimate threats to the national security of the United States. Almost all historians have concluded that there was no evidence in the early 1940s—and that no evidence has emerged in the seven-plus decades since—showing that Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans were acting as spies or that they were part of a larger plot aiding the Emperor’s war effort. The notion that national security considerations justified the camps is simply contradicted by the voluminous historical evidence to the contrary..

“There is no evidence that [the Japanese government] had any success” recruiting spies in the United States to advance its war aims, historian Greg Robinson, author of By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, has pointed out. “The American occupation authorities in Japan after the war who studied captured Japanese documents found no evidence of any giant spy rings among American citizens of Japanese ancestry.”

Roosevelt, a product of his times, regarded the Japanese with the racist suspicion shared by countless of his fellow Americans. A close student of public opinion, and attuned to the military, political, and popular pressures to incarcerate Japanese Americans and suspend their rights as citizens, he issued the executive order without much apparent forethought or agonizing about the fraught moral questions and human costs of his action. Roosevelt subscribed to decades of anti-Japanese racism that pervaded early 20th century American culture. Just as the nation’s 19th century political leaders could speak eloquently for democracy and sing the praises of individual freedom while also defending the institution of slavery, Roosevelt gave hope to the world’s victims of fascist militarism and rallied millions of Americans to defend democracy while simultaneously authorizing the complete suspension of rights of an entire group of people based on their race. One historian has rightly called the internment camps “the most tragic act of his administration.”

During the 1980s, a committee established by the U.S. Congress to investigate the history of the internment camps concluded that they amounted to “a grave injustice” born out of “racial prejudice, war hysteria, and the failure of political leadership.” The most glaring abdication was the failure of Franklin Roosevelt to defend the rights and liberties of tens of thousands of his fellow citizens as he was pulled along by the tides of hysteria and racism 75 years ago this February.

The post Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Act of Infamy Against Japanese Americans appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One man stayed downstairs to guard the elevator while the rest snuck upstairs using skeleton keys to make their way to the back rooms. They brought along a safecracker—a convicted felon sprung for one night to help them—as well as local policemen and FBI agents, who set up patrols outside during the operation. Once the safe was open, Ringle’s crew photographed its contents item by item, putting everything back in place before leaving the building.

Though the United States had not yet entered the war, it had launched fledgling espionage efforts with an eye toward the possibility. The Navy had chosen Ringle to assess the Japanese threat in 1940 because he had previously lived and worked in Tokyo and was one of only a handful of U.S. sailors who could speak Japanese. He had gone on to build a network of contacts on the West Coast, determining which cultural organizations were harmless and which might be dangerous.

As a result of the break-in, Ringle made two key discoveries. The first was that he now possessed the consulate’s list of agents and secret codes. The second was that the Japanese government distrusted the Nisei, the generation born in the U.S. to Japanese immigrants, and was thus unlikely to make use of them as spies.

Ringle’s discoveries that night should have been powerful enough to prevent internment of Japanese Americans during the war. But, in wartime, his knowledge would prove an insufficient weapon against manufactured hysteria and deference to the Army.

After the devastation of Pearl Harbor, the Chief of Naval Operations assigned Ringle to write a report on the loyalty of U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry. He delivered a 10-page report six weeks after the attack stating that “the entire ‘Japanese Problem’ has been magnified out of its true proportion,” largely due to racial prejudice. “[T]he removal and internment in concentration camps of all citizens and residents of Japanese extraction … ,” he wrote, would be “not only unwarranted but very unwise.”

It was an insightful, detailed assessment. And nearly all of its recommendations would be ignored.

The story of the detention of nearly 120,000 residents of Japanese descent during World War II has become a mythic narrative, giving Americans the impression that the internment was an inevitable error born of simple ignorance and fear. Acting in haste after Pearl Harbor, the story goes, U.S. officials had no idea that concentration camps would be unnecessary and counterproductive.

But, in fact, senior cabinet members and the president himself had accurate information, and some did not favor internment.

The cinderblock jail at the Tule Lake Segregation Center in northern California, which held Japanese American prisoners during World War II internment. Photo courtesy of Andrea Pitzer.

Long before the attack, the federal government had developed a plan for the treatment of enemy aliens in the event of war: targeted individuals would be rounded up and detained by the FBI, then provided a hearing before a review board, which would determine whether they should be given liberty without restriction, liberty on parole under the supervision of a sponsor, or continued detention. Just three days ahead of Pearl Harbor, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt—who also held the official position of assistant director for the Office of Civilian Defense—announced that noncitizens with “no criminal nor anti-American record” had nothing to fear in the event of war and would not be interned.

In the wake of the bombing, the government stuck to its plan at first. Ringle worked with FBI agents coordinating arrest squads in the hours after the attack, capturing those known or suspected to be spies from his lists. Restrictions and extra guards were put into place in sensitive military areas.

But other voices spread disinformation. A week later, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who had advocated internment long before Pearl Harbor, accused Japanese Americans in Hawaii of betraying the nation, announcing without evidence that outside of Europe, “the most effective Fifth Column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii.”

On December 19, the man put in charge of the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command, Lieutenant General John DeWitt, first declared his intention to exile all Japanese Americans over the age of 13 from the West Coast. But he initially balked at his subordinates’ request to detain the entire Japanese American community, saying, “An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen.”

As he worked on his report after the bombing, Kenneth Ringle had the support of presidential advisor Curtis Munson, who advocated a measured response. The Washington Post concluded near the end of January that “The Alien Program Is Working Well,” noting that only those actually suspected of espionage had been arrested.

But in the background, other dramas were unfolding. U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle closed the Mexican and Canadian borders to all incoming Japanese individuals, and authorized raids of Japanese immigrant homes without warrants. In the days after Pearl Harbor, many Japanese Americans lost their jobs and lived in fear of violence or arrest. It was particularly bitter that white Americans accused Japanese immigrants of disloyalty, when U.S. court decisions had universally barred them from receiving citizenship for decades.

By the end of January 1942, two factions had emerged. The Roberts Commission, appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to investigate Pearl Harbor, delivered its report on January 23, making vague allegations of “Japanese spies.” The Commission did not distinguish the nature of the spying or whether it was committed by U.S. citizens or aliens. Yet rumors of espionage were seized on by opportunists to inflame prejudice across the country. The governor of California, Culbert Olson, announced that his state’s residents “don’t trust the Japanese, none of them.” In mid-February, journalist Walter Lippmann argued in a column that the lack of any real sabotage by Japanese residents along the coast to date was actually evidence of a future planned attack.

Pushed by zealous staff members, DeWitt requested control in early February over all citizens and aliens in zones established under his command. That spring, he would reverse his statement about an American citizen being an American citizen, explaining that, “A Jap is a Jap.”

Meanwhile, Ringle’s supporters pressed the case for restraint. On his side were crucial cabinet members: despite harsh measures taken against some noncitizens under his authorization, Attorney General Biddle backed measures focused on aliens rather than citizens. Even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a man not known for moderation, agreed that calls for universal internment rose out of political pressure rather than necessity.

Japanese graffiti on the interior wall of a farmer’s shed in Tulelake, California. The shed originally housed Japanese American detainees during World War II. Photo courtesy of Andrea Pitzer.

Ringle turned in his assessment just days after the Roberts Commission filed its report, and it appeared that FDR agreed with Ringle’s supporters. But with Navy leadership unwilling to oppose the Army, by the time Ringle’s assessment wound its way to the White House three weeks later, public outrage and DeWitt’s demands had interceded.

Though Eleanor Roosevelt still stood against internment, her husband ultimately sided with DeWitt. On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, sealing the fate of not just Japanese aliens but also of some 70,000 Japanese American citizens of the United States. The Ringle Report had failed to block the Army’s drive for mass internment. But it would return to play a role in postwar events.

The shift toward internment began with the division of the exclusion zone into segments, in which Japanese American residents were given as little as two days’ notice to prepare for departure to temporary detention centers—mostly improvised camps at fairgrounds and racetracks. The War Relocation Authority was soon established, and before the end of 1942, purpose-built camps had been set up in isolated locations around the country, from Arkansas to Wyoming.

As Japanese Americans were forced from the West Coast, they had to sell their businesses and belongings, while the community argued over whether or not to protest. Nisei journalist James Omura condemned the policies of relocation and internment, drawing the wrath of Japanese American cultural organizations that did not want to appear disloyal to America. Other Japanese Americans launched legal challenges to the curfew and exclusion orders that barred them from their rights as citizens. The most famous among them, Korematsu v. United States, became the landmark Supreme Court case on the question of wartime internment.

When Korematsu was heard in 1944, a government attorney alerted U.S. Solicitor General Charles Fahy to the existence of the Ringle Report, noting that failure to acknowledge it in his filings to the Supreme Court “might approximate the suppression of evidence.” But Fahy ignored this warning and directly indicated to the court that all U.S. government and military assessments were unanimous in support of internment.

The Supreme Court expressed discomfort with mass internment’s failure to address individual guilt or innocence, but was already prone to defer to the executive branch and military leaders in wartime. Unaware of the additional evidence which had been withheld, the court accepted the Army’s argument of the “military necessity” of detention.

The public and the Court would not learn of the solicitor general’s omission until decades later, when a reporter discovered material in archived files. By then, Ringle was dead, with a funeral wreath sent to his widow by the Japanese American community in honor of his efforts to protect them.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that his report, which should have settled the question of universal internment, became the central piece of evidence used by the original plaintiffs to demand justice in court. And it would take three more decades until acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal wrote a public repudiation in 2011 of his predecessor’s actions in Korematsu.

If the Ringle Report could not prevent the tragedies that had been suffered—the degradation of U.S. citizens, the financial losses, and mass dislocation—its reappearance did at least set the historical record straight.

The post In the Wake of Pearl Harbor, a Secret Intel Report Could’ve Stopped the Internment Camps appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Do you remember when we left Hawaii after dad died and moved to the family home in Kyoto?” my youngest aunt would say, referring to the brusque relocation of the three sisters and their mother immediately after their father died of a massive stroke four years before the war began.

They thought they were going home, but found themselves caught between two conflicting worlds. “Japanese soldiers would harass us at every train stop,” my aunt recalled, “taking away our rations because we were American, so we discovered how good the roots of weeds and grasshoppers were when we cooked them in shoyu and oil.”

“Yes, but the soldiers didn’t last long,” my mother would correct her, “all of them were sent to war—even the old men and young boys—except for those annoying intelligence officers who kept interrogating us. Food was gone, too. That’s why mother went to the family temple in Fukui where there was rice.”

“You two were so selfish then,” my oldest aunt would tell her sisters, “but you were young. After our sad dinners, I’d be upstairs and you thought I was asleep. You’d hide a small piece of mochi or nori and you’d grill it over the charcoal that kept the house warm. You didn’t realize the smell of any food woke the rest of us up, and we would hear you trying to be so sneaky … bad girls!” This would send them into gales of laughter.

The stories would cycle again and again, I would sit with my mom and her sisters at the light green Formica dining table, surrounded by banana trees and their lilting voices and laughter, feeling privileged to be a part of their closed group, rapt at each retelling. I’d use each of these times with my aunts and mother, by then in their 40s, to color a fuller picture of the Imamura family history—of lives torn apart and torn between homes, between identities, and between the two sides of the vast Pacific. Their oldest brother, a Buddhist bishop sent to California to start a temple and an institute for Buddhist Studies, would later help communities of other internees resettle into a country that had distrusted them, imprisoned them, and allowed their businesses and farms to be taken; the second brother, a Harvard graduate, married into a wealthy Japanese family (which meant taking their name) and helped lead their kimono factories before working as an interpreter in a U.S. consulate after the war. Their youngest brother, a Keio University graduate whose dream job as a political reporter for the Mainichi News transformed into an embedded war correspondent with the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia, would later focus on U.S.-Japan relations in his reporting and would build ties between the countries through his support of professional baseball.

Author’s mom and younger aunt who identified as Hawaii-born Japanese Americans. Photo circa 1930s.

 
The three sisters, for their part, worked in the English-language section of a women’s university library, keeping their bilingual skills up so that they would be ready to act as translators and coordinators for the Occupation of Japan, accompanying rising Japanese political leaders to the U.S. to be trained in the ways of democracy. Across their different careers, the Imamura siblings were all encouraged by their father to be the Bridge People: connectors fluent in the history, language, culture, and values of both nations, whose skills and perspectives made their roles connecting Japanese and American worlds both inescapable and honorable.

Though the laughter of my mom and aunts’ after-dinner conversations fills my memory, I remember just as well when they’d go quiet.

A hush would fall as my mom recounted how, as a high school student in Kyoto, she sat in her university class listening to the school intercom announcement of the Japanese offensive on a U.S. Pacific naval base.

“When I heard they had attacked Pearl Harbor,” she’d say, “I started to cry because that was my home. Through my tears I felt all of these eyes slowly turn towards me. I was American. They all suddenly realized it.”

The sisters’ cadence would also slow as they spoke of their eldest brother, Kanmo, painting the picture of a scholarly, quiet, and handsome man—the 18th generation member of our family to become a Buddhist bishop. His life, they would reflect, was the hardest from the beginning. Kanmo was born in Hawaii, but sent back to Japan when he was four years old to be raised as a bishop. His childhood was a lonely life at the temple without the family: tutored by priests and a step-grandmother who was distant and cold. He would tell me, years later, how he would walk alone between the temple and the house in the winter, the Sea of Japan’s cold air blowing through his priestly robes, wondering why he couldn’t be in Hawaii with his family. He would return to Hawaii to be the priest at the largest plantation temple in Wahiawa, and would realize his father’s dream of growing a temple and study center in California to support the Japanese community there.

Just as Kanmo started to expand the temple programs, the war began. Soon he found himself supporting Japanese-American families in the internment camps, helping those forced away from their homes over unfounded allegations of conflicting allegiances (especially ironic for those who had sons proving their loyalty with blood and body in 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe, a battalion where young Japanese-Americans prominently served). Three of my uncle’s children would be born in the sand-filled winds of the Gila River internment camp. At the end of the war, he saw his mission as providing shelter, food, dignity, and spiritual support to those released from the camps, often with nothing more than a train ticket and $30 in their pocket, to reclaim the businesses and farms taken from them. He would spend the rest of his life building interfaith study centers and programs for the disenfranchised, and returned to his birthplace to become the Bishop of the Headquarters of the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temples of Hawaii.

Author’s oldest uncle with his wife and first child at the Gila River Internment Camp.

 
The sisters spoke with reverence for their middle brother, Shinshi, too. The hard-working Harvard graduate, had dreams of working for the American government. His hopes were dashed—as fate would have it, he was the only of the siblings not born in Hawaii, and his Japanese birth disqualified him from service. His ambition took him elsewhere though— Shinshi would become the head of General Motors in Japan, another form of bridge-building.

The youngest brother, Tokushi, a basketball prodigy in his school days in Hawaii, had an improbable gig straight out of college: he was an American reporter embedded with the Japanese Imperial Army in Burma and Shanghai. Tokushi would go on to become the political editor for the Tokyo-based Mainichi Shimbun, one of the top newspapers in the country. But he didn’t forget his American roots, and spent his free time doing such things as recruiting Japanese-American baseball stars like Wally Yonamine for Japanese teams or coordinating a trip for Helen Keller, the first U.S. Goodwill Ambassador sent to Japan after the war. The bilingual jokester also managed to stay friends with his McKinley High School pals in Hawaii, and somehow remained the quintessential “local boy” among them, despite the miles that separated them. I still remember the bright energy that would fill the room whenever my aunts and mother spoke of him.

I knew the night was winding down when the sisters would turn to talk of their mother, a Buddhist bishop’s wife who herself came from a long line of bishops and abbots, poets and publishers, and military rulers from a Shogunate that rose in the 14th century and waned by the 17th.

“Do you remember her practicing for the citizenship test when we were growing up in Hawaii, memorizing the entire Emancipation Proclamation?” my oldest aunt would start, “It was so funny to hear her pronounce ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ and to hear her recite ‘…all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.’”

“Her favorite movie scene was in Gone With The Wind,” my oldest aunt would recount, “and Scarlett’s defiance when she says, “As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”

In Japan at the end of the war but desperate to return to Hawaii with her children, grandmother Kiyo Imamura made her way back to Hawaii—“the birthplace of the ‘Bridge People,’” as she called it—to end her journey.

My family is not alone, of course. All second-generation Americans reconcile the norms and values of their family’s culture and of American culture, to the enhancement of each one. Such bridge-building replenishes and enriches our national fabric, reminding us of the universal relevance of our core values and adding texture to the American story. In Hawaii, where the host culture of Native Hawaiians accepted waves of immigrants through interracial marriage and linguistic and religious tolerance, cultural bridge-building is practically the state’s mission statement. Hawaii may seem far away from the mainland, but it couldn’t be closer to the American understanding of how diversity creates strength and unity.

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