Colorado's Japanese Americans: From 1886 to the Present

15: After the War

A F T E R T H E W A R P A G E 146 The months after the Japanese surrender in September 1945 were, for Japanese American exiles from the West Coast, almost as stressful as the weeks that led to the evacuation. There were so many questions. Should we go back home? But back home to what? Where will we live? Our jobs and businesses are gone; how will we support our families until we get re-established? How will we be received by friends and people we did business with? Would we be smarter to stay where we are in places like Denver? And what is our future here? The Japanese American Citizens League, which had been unable to block the evacuation but somehow survived the war years, now sought to establish a program to help their people cope with the future. Saburo Kido, the wartime president, spent long nights thinking about what should be done. His primary concern was to ensure that the wartime sacrifices of Japanese Americans—the civilians whose c h a p t e r f i f t e e n A F T E R T H E W A R A F T E R T H E W A R P A G E 147 lives had been disrupted by forced relocation and the men who had fought and died for their country—must not have been in vain. A national convention would be necessary to present ideas for a postwar program to Japanese Americans. The most practical site—one that was central with a good mix of evacuees and unevacuated natives —was Denver. Kido asked the fledgling JACL chapter in Denver to host the meeting from February 28 to March 4, 1946, only six months after the war ended. Locals went to work—wartime newcomers to Denver like Min Yasui and his brother-in-law, Tosh Ando, along with Mits Kaneko, Roy Takeno, Bessie Matsuda, George Ohashi, George Furuta, Masako Takayoshi, Merijane Yokoe, Taki Domoto; natives like George Masunaga, Tak Terasaki and his wife, Michi, Dr. Tom Kobayashi and his wife, Haruko, Dr. Takashi Maeda and his wife, Bea; and a host of JACL leaders who had been scattered nationwide by the evacuation. Kido presented a fourteen-point postwar agenda, many of which seemed impossible goals to the Denver gathering. They were the following: (1) Naturalization and citizenship rights for all persons of demonstrated loyalty to the United States without regard to national origin, race or creed. [The Walter-McCarran Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 abolished the Oriental Exclusion Act of 1924 and eliminated race as a barrier to naturalization.] (2) Reparations for the losses suffered by Japanese Americans in the Evacuation. [In summer 1988 Congress passed the Redress Bill under which the United States apologized for the injustice of the evacuation and gave $20,000 to each survivor.] A F T E R T H E W A R P A G E 148 (3) Stay of deportation for Japanese nationals, primarily businessmen , stranded in the U.S. during the war. [Deportation suspended.] (4) Urging creation of a federal Department of Human Relations and Minority Problems. [Such a department has not been created, but various movements have advanced the rights of minorities.] (5) The federal government should continue to discharge its obligations to the evacuees. [The government has promoted a new understanding of minority rights.] (6) The constitutionality of alien land laws should be challenged in the courts. [Alien land laws have been eliminated.] (7) The constitutionality of the evacuation, specifically the basis for arbitrary discrimination against one group of American citizens, should be re-examined in the light of known facts and without the pressure of wartime hysteria. With regard to the seventh item, Congress named a blue ribbon commission in 1980 to, as President Jimmy Carter said, “expose clearly what has happened in that period of war in our nation when many loyal American citizens of Japanese descent were embarrassed during a crucial time in our nation’s history.” The commission’s report to Congress in 1982 said in part: The promulgation of Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it— detention, ending detention and ending exclusion—were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political...