In Defense of Justice: Joseph Kurihara and the Japanese American Struggle for Equality

Introduction

introduction What is there for us to be ashamed of being a Jap? . . . To live as Jap is the greatest pride we can enjoy in life, and to die as Jap under the protection of the Japanese Flag which has weathered through many national storms without a defeat for 2,600 years is the greatest honor a man can ever hope to cherish. I, in the name of the Niseis proclaim ourselves Japs, 100 per cent Japs, now, tomorrow, and forever. Tenno Hei Ka Banzai! Banzai! Banzai! Dai Nippon Teikoku Banzai! Banzai! Banzai! Zai Ryu Dobo Banzai! Banzai! Banzai! Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara proclaimed these incendiary words in 1942 while an inmate in Manzanar, one of ten U.S. concentration camps to which Japanese Americans were relegated during World War II.1 Kurihara, an American citizen who had served in the U.S. Army during World War I and was a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, had become one of Manzanar’s leading dissidents. His words reflected his stance in the middle of war and contrasted markedly with his attitudes and behavior prior to the war. Though Kurihara had felt the brunt of anti-Japanese hostility, especially in California in the decades before World War II, he had remained adamantly positive about the prospects of his own life in America. The forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese destroyed that perspective. This study recreates the story of Kurihara’s life to provide a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. From his youth and until World War II, Kurihara pursued a path that he believed (naively, I can say in retrospect) would enable him to live the American life, as envisioned in the Progressive Era phrase, “the promise of American life.” He enrolled in schools that offered a quality, Western-oriented education. He embraced Christianity, the essential source of Western cultural identity at the time, endured anti-Japanese hostility directed at him, and fought as a soldier in the U.S. Army during the Great War. This dogged pursuit of a place for himself as an American in the face of jarring discouragements enabled Kurihara to absorb Western modes of thinking and behavior. As a result, he was able to navigate his way in two cultural worlds, European America and Japanese America. With the entry of the United States into World War II and the consequent incarceration of the Nikkei (ethnic Japanese), whether resident aliens or American citizens, Kurihara’s attitude and behavior changed radically. His resulting disillusionment turned to bitterness when he realized that his status, both as a U.S. citizen and a combat veteran of World War I, was of no import to the government. For Kurihara this was betrayal by a country that professed the ideal of equality and justice. In 1944, after two years of incarceration because of his ancestry, Kurihara renounced his U.S. citizenship, and the following year, at the age of fifty, an age at which major cultural adjustments are problematic at best, he boarded a ship to Japan, a country he had never even visited. And he never returned to the United States, though he lived through another twenty years of profound changes in Japanese-American relations. So radical a change in circumstances and perspective provides a clear demonstration of the ways in which arbitrary acts of injustice can completely overturn the mindset of an avowedly patriotic person. As a youth and young adult, Kurihara not only pursued an American education , but in converting to Christianity, he chose not Protestantism but the more disciplined and authoritarian Catholicism. In doing so he also rejected the dominant religion among the Nikkei, Buddhism, which Caucasians in Hawai‘i considered an alien, even pagan, religion, while equating Christianity with Americanism and civilization.2 From his family, his schooling, and his religion, he internalized values and acquired knowledge and skills that he hoped would make him a productive, integrated, and accepted member of American society. From his parents he learned the value of work and perseverance. At school he learned the particulars of Catholicism and Christianity, and also the values and viewpoints of American and Western thinking, including American mannerisms and ideals. Years later, during his interrogation at one of the isolation camps for dissident Japanese Americans, he told his inquisitor, “[W]e were taught in school to think like Americans, live like Americans and standup and fight for our rights like Americans...