Life Behind Barbed Wire

INTRODUCTION

1 During the Second World War two dramatically different scenarios confronted persons of Japanese ancestry in the United States and the territories of Alaska and Hawai‘i. Many knowledgeable Americans now understand that in the continental United States and Alaska, their resident persons of Japanese ancestry, identified as the Nikkei, became involuntary victims of a tragic and gross violation of civil liberties and personal freedom. They suffered a mass expulsion from their homes and confinement in ten incarceration centers for periods ranging from months to, for many, three years. It was military necessity, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared on February 19, 1942, when he signed Executive Order (EO) 9066 authorizing this action. Forty years later, in 1982, a government commission charged with investigating the actions following upon this order concluded that the stated rationale had not been justified. The root historical causes, it elaborated, had been “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”1 It was at this point that President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which proferred a presidential apology and required a $20,000 monetary redress payment to the surviving persons affected by that 1942 presidential order. In the Territory of Hawai‘i, the picture was dramatically different. There was no mass incarceration in the Islands, although the secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, argued for one, and President Roosevelt, in effect, ordered it. What did take place, in all three places—Hawai‘i, Alaska, and the continental United States—was a priori systematic arrest and confinement , referred to here as “the internment,” of initially preselected nationals of Germany, Italy, and Japan, starting on December 7, 1941. Relatively few people are aware of this internment episode, and Yasutaro Soga’s Life Behind Barbed Wire focuses on this important, intriguing, and engrossing Beyond the forbidding fence Of double barbed wire, The mountain, aglow in purple, Sends us its greetings YASUTARO (KEIHO) SOGA* INTRODUCTION TETSUDEN KASHIMA 2 kashima chapter of World War II. At that time, he was sixty-eight years old and had lived in Hawai‘i for forty-five years since his initial emigration from Japan. As an immigrant Japanese national, he was an Issei, or first-generation Nikkei, and on that December seventh, he was also managing editor of the Nippu Jiji, a Hawai‘i Japanese vernacular newspaper. For these reasons, and not because he had committed any criminal or other untoward acts against the United States, the Hawai‘i military authorities immediately arrested him. How was this possible? This introduction attempts to deal with this question and situates Soga’s internment account within the Nikkei World War II experience that includes both the mass incarceration epic and the separate and distinctive set of actions that resulted in the internment of foreign nationals designated as “alien enemies.” These two events are related like complementary tiles of a panoramic mosaic depicting the United States imprisonment picture during World War II. Soga’s work is important because it brings to light a personal and heretofore little understood internment experience that took place during the dark days of World War II. Moreover, Soga’s own story reveals the important interplay between the internment and incarceration as it affected Nikkei from both Hawai‘i and the continental United States, the latter hereafter also referred to as the Mainland. This introduction, will then, start with Yasutaro Soga’s internment experience, touch on the larger incarceration epic, and briefly examine an Issei writer’s style. The Internment Experience Although Soga’s actual narrative begins on December 7, 1941, preparations for his arrest started years earlier. What follows in this section provides the background to the Issei transferral from Hawai‘i to the Mainland . In the 1920s, various United States military and government officials became concerned about Hawai‘i’s position as a vulnerable and strategic outpost in the midst of the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. Navy, even at this early period, was also interested in Japan’s military and political activities. Then, starting in the 1930s both the navy and the army indicated a growing concern about the activities of the Issei. For example, President Roosevelt in August 1936 wrote to his chief of naval operations: “One obvious thought occurred to me—that every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the Island of O‘ahu who meets these Japanese ships [arriving in Hawai‘i] or has any connections with their officers or men should be secretly but...