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CHAPTER 1 Lessons in Citizenship W HEN JOE NORIKANE was in third grade, his family moved from Yuba City to Walnut Grove, California. Before the move, Norikane had been one of only four Asian children in his school, but he never felt out of place and was never aware that his ancestry could differentiate him from the other kids. He participated in school plays, had Caucasian friends, and got along fine. When the family moved, his father took him to school in Walnut Grove for the first time. He said, “Joe, this is your school. It’s the Oriental School.” Norikane did not know what “Oriental” meant, but he quickly observed that every child had black hair and that no children had “white” hair at all. It took him a while to understand what segregation meant and to recognize this place as a segregated school.1 Norikane’s introduction to race-based segregation typified the gradual process by which Nisei children came to understand the contradictions between the ideals and the limits of their American citizenship in a socially and racially segregated world, even though statistically it was unusual for Japanese American children to attend segregated schools. Japan and Japanese Americans, with the assistance of Theodore Roosevelt, fought successfully for the rights of Japanese American children to attend the mainstream public school system when the San Francisco School Board threatened segregation immediately following the historic San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The agreement held until 1921, when, in response to a growing population of children of Japanese immigrants in agricultural communities in Sacramento County, the state legislature approved an amendment to the California State Education Code that allowed school districts to create separate elementary schools for “Indians, Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian children,” adding Japanese children to the list of children that could be segregated in elementary school. The only schools in California that took advantage of the amended education code were in Sacramento County. “Oriental” schools were located in Florin, Walnut Grove, Isleton, and LESSONS IN CITIZENSHIP 15 Courtland, where populations of Japanese families were heavily concentrated in agricultural communities.2 Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino children attended “Oriental” schools in these communities until they graduated the primary grades and advanced to integrated high schools. Legal segregation for Nisei was sporadic and short lived, lasting only from 1921 until 1947, when Westminster v. Mendez ended race-based segregation in California schools.3 The significance of Norikane’s experience was not the literal circumstances under which he learned about race-based segregation. The significance is that as Nisei grew up in a variety of circumstances and came to an awareness of race at different times in their lives, each had to decide for him- or herself how to reconcile the realities of racism with the promises of equal American citizenship. No two Nisei learned the limitations of their citizenship in the same way growing up as children , so no two responses to their wartime loss of rights were exactly the same. Norikane experienced the shock of being separated by race in grade school at a time when he did not know what racial difference meant and while he was learning about American history, the Constitution, and the ideals of American citizenship. This dichotomy makes his story a convenient and poignant analogy for many other Nisei, despite the fact that their individual experiences varied greatly. Some did not experience segregation on a massive scale until 1942, when they saw others who looked just like them locked up behind fences in places that looked remarkably like prisons. Then they soon found themselves in the same places, wondering what crimes they had committed by simply looking Japanese. When their shock, disbelief, and humiliation soon turned to guilt, anger, and, for some, resignation, all detained Nikkei, or Japanese Americans , had to reconcile for themselves the reasons that they were locked up without being given the rights of due process they knew were part of the American justice system. The parallel story is the gradual process by which Nisei also learned what it meant to be citizens of the United States. Despite living in a world in which Nisei might not be able to swim in the community pool or sit anywhere they wished at a movie theater, or, in more rare circumstances, when they were sent to school with only “Oriental” children and no white children at all, Nisei learned in school that they were 100 percent Americans. They learned that Americans have rights under the Constitution...

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