Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence: Coming Home to Hood River

11. “Ninety Percent Are Against the Japs!”: Veterans and Their Families Return

1 5 9 I t took some bravado to return,” observed Mam Noji in early 1945. Members of his family were among the first to return to their beleaguered valley after the government finally permitted Nikkei back on the West Coast in December. By January, however, only one out of six Nikkei had left the ten government camps,1 and rumors of intimidating receptions discouraged others. Bold, early adventurers experienced bursts of hostility along the West Coast: “Terrorists” dynamited and burned the fruit packing shed of a Placer County truck farmer, the first of thirty attempts in that California county to frighten returning Nikkei. Three grocery clerks in South Pasadena, California, quit in defiance of their proprietor’s orders to serve Japanese customers, whereupon rising sun graffiti appeared on the market and a telephone caller threatened, “I’m going to shoot you on sight.” Also in California, someone fired shots at the Cressey home of a Nisei veteran who was entertaining another Nisei veteran in uniform. A barber in Parker, Arizona, ejected a wounded Nisei veteran from his shop. Las Vegas, Nevada, pronounced itself 100 percent anti-Japanese, views supported by the highest state officials. Anti-Japanese rallies took place in Brawley, California; Bellevue, Washington; and Gresham, Oregon.2 By late February, New York PM reporter Charles A. Michie would report that just five hundred had returned home to the West Coast and explained the low numbers as due to “details of removal from camps” and because “some E l e v e n “Ninety Percent Are Against the Japs!” Veterans and Their Families Return 1 6 0 C h a p t e r E l e v e n are plain damn scared.” Michie added that thirty-three thousand chose to head east and seventy-eight thousand still remained in the camps.3 A “Plague Spot” Hood River and its 11,500 valley residents were especially in the public eye. New York’s PM cited the farming community, along with California ’s Placer County and Washington’s White River Valley, as one of “three isolated plague spots in the Northwest” for “ruthlessly resisting efforts of American citizens to take possession of their own homes.” The Pacific Citizen , published by the Japanese American Citizens League, named Hood River one of two national sites of “undemocratic” anti-evacuee movements . A writer for the Saturday Review of Literature labeled Hood River a “test area” where prejudice against Nisei ran the highest and, according to the War Relocation Authority, attracted the most national interest. A local merchant and community activist writing for Asia and the Americas, Arline Winchell Moore, classified the situation as “one of the most shamefully un-American programs of persecution of a minority group ever witnessed in this Land of the Free.”4 William Worden, writing in the Saturday Evening Post, described the effects of infectious wartime paranoia: “War hysteria, old economic resentments and fear for lucrative jobs or contracts combined with simple race fanaticism to make easy the job of the professional anti-Japanese drum beaters. The disease was infectious.” He highlighted Hood River as his first example.5 Despite such censure, anti-Japanese attitudes persisted. “Ninety percent are against the Japs!” Hood River mayor Joe Meyer blasted in a stunning pronouncement. “We trusted them so completely while they were here among us, while all the time they were plotting our defeat and downfall. They were just waiting to stab us in the back. . . . We must let the Japanese know they’re not welcome here.” American Legion Post No. 22 continued its anti-Japanese campaign, predicting bloodshed if Japanese returned. Rumors spread that one Nikkei had already been beaten and that “reception committees” at the train depot would discourage returning evacuees. Stationery notes displayed a photo of an orchard valley with “There Is No Room in This Picture for Japs” imprinted beneath. One Legionnaire, a local wholesaler opposed to affixing “Jap names beside American names on any list,” added his own searing questions: “Would you move into a Jap community? . . . Would you marry a Jap (Ameri- V e t e r a n s a n d Th e i r F a m i l i e s R e t u r n 1 61 can born or not)? . . . Are you willing to see Jap communities grow and enlarge in our cities to the point where their clannish, slavish economic cancer fouls the life...