Colorado's Japanese Americans: From 1886 to the Present

10: December 7

D E C E M B E R 7 P A G E 85 On the night of Friday, December 5, 1941, a handful of Denverarea Nisei met at the Japanese Association Hall to hear Utah-born Mike Masaru Masaoka. Only weeks earlier he had been hired by the national Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in San Francisco as its executive secretary. Masaoka was on a recruiting mission. He was seeking support for the young and inexperienced organization of West Coast Nisei whose leadership was deeply concerned about what would happen to Japanese Americans if war should break out between the land of their birth, citizenship, and loyalty and the land of their ancestry. On the West Coast there was growing alarm as Washington and Tokyo appeared to be on a collision course because of American anger over Japanese aggression in China. Masaoka, in his autobiography They Call Me Moses Masaoka, wrote of his stop in Denver: “Right after c h a p t e r t e n D E C E M B E R 7 D E C E M B E R 7 P A G E 86 Thanksgiving I packed a suitcase and took the train for Salt Lake City en route to Denver, Greeley, Cheyenne, and points East. The reaction I encountered among Nisei in those towns was widely mixed. In some areas there was virtually no real awareness even among Nisei of worsening U.S.-Japan relations, little concern about what might happen to Japanese Americans in case of war. That was understandable. The integration of Nisei in many inland communities was well advanced , and many felt no need for JACL, which of course had been my position in Salt Lake City some years earlier. In Denver’s small Nisei group, I found it difficult to stir up much interest in JACL.” In another chapter of his book Masaoka wrote, “I spoke about the Japanese American Citizens League’s efforts to make the public aware that we were Americans, and about our need to win the recognition and backing of officials at all levels of government. On a map tacked to a wall, I pointed out the location of JACL chapters already in existence in inland areas and the places where I hoped new chapters would be formed, drawing circles of emphasis around places like Cheyenne, Denver, Pueblo, Scottsbluff, and North Platte. Inadvertently I was also outlining potential military targets—Cheyenne and Denver were the sites of air bases, Pueblo had a strategic steel mill, and North Platte was a railroad center.” On Saturday, December 6, Masaoka boarded a train for North Platte. The next day, December 7, Masaoka was addressing some fifty or sixty Japanese Americans—probably the largest gathering of Nisei in the history of the area—who had been assembled by Kano, the Christian minister. Masaoka was in the middle of his presentation when two federal officials, who did not identify themselves, broke up the meeting and took Masaoka to the local jail. Only later did he learn that, without warning, Japanese navy planes had bombed the Pearl Harbor U.S. naval base in Hawaii with heavy loss of ships and life. D E C E M B E R 7 P A G E 87 On the West Coast, the impact on Japanese American communities of this act of war was almost instantaneous. Federal authorities accompanied by local officers quickly appeared at the homes of hundreds of Issei community leaders and took them away. The Nisei— U.S. citizens—were not detained but fear, confusion, and anger were widespread. The hostility toward Japanese that had lain dormant for decades until Japan invaded China surfaced in angry and alarmist press treatment. In Colorado the Japanese were largely spared the West Coast’s harassment. But Nisei and their alien parents watched anxiously as the cry for “getting rid of the Japs” grew in California. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the Army to designate certain “military areas” from which “any or all persons” could be excluded. General John L. DeWitt established a prohibited zone that included the western half of California (later extended to include the entire state), the southern half of Arizona, the western halves of Oregon and Washington, and all of Alaska. And “any or all persons” effectively meant “all persons of Japanese ancestry,” “both alien and nonalien ”—and never...