Exiled Within -- Internment Forever Altered Seattle's Japanese- American Community

Before the war, Shigeko Uno's world was a comfortable cocoon, centered on family and close friends in a "young matron" clique of Seattle's Japanese-American community.

Her family all worked in the prosperous White River Dairy started by her father. Supplier for 99 percent of the local Japanese groceries and restaurants (and a consistent gold-medal winner at the Puyallup Fair), the International District dairy was one of the largest Japanese-American businesses in town.

Uno remained largely insulated from the prejudice of the white world by living, as most Seattle Japanese Americans did, within the fold of the immigrant society's institutions: the Japanese language school, churches, sports clubs, ethnic support groups, bathhouses.

"We were so provincial, we weren't interested in worldly things. We were so contented with our lives," recalls Uno, now 76. On a trip to Japan in 1940, she was bewildered when asked about U.S. preparations for war. "We should have been analyzing things, reading the American newspapers. But we didn't."

Then, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. In one sudden blow, a world, a way of life, was lost.

The executive order, coming two months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, forced all Japanese Americans off the West Coast, leading to their internment in crude, desolate inland camps until they were released in February 1945.

The fallout from 9066 would change almost every facet of life for Seattle's post-war Japanese Americans and shape the community as it exists today: where they live and work, their status in mainstream society, the role of the old community institutions, whom they marry, bonds of friendships, even their sense of self.

The Unos' lives would reflect many of these themes: The family sold the dairy at a great loss, scattered after the war and plunged from prosperity to hardship, eventually being propelled into the white business world.

Pregnant Shigeko Uno, forced to let doctors induce childbirth a month early so she could be interned more quickly, would be transformed from sheltered housewife to assertive community leader.

It's true, says S. Frank Miyamoto, University of Washington sociology professor emeritus, that many of the social and economic changes would eventually have happened anyway. But cataclysmic events such as war accelerate the pace by a quarter-century or so.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the executive order that started it all. We asked both experts and ordinary people to talk about what it really meant to the Seattle-Japanese American community. How is it different today because of the experience? What might have happened if there had been no war and no camps?

A COMMUNITY IS DISMANTLED

With the war, Seattle's Japanese-American ghetto was gone. UW anthropologist Donna Leonetti, who has been studying Seattle's Japanese Americans since the 1960s, estimates that only 65 percent to 70 percent of them returned home.

As the war dragged on, a way to get out of camp was to find a job far from the off-limits West Coast. Whole Japanese-American communities grew up in what had been largely "uncharted territory" for them, in such places as Salt Lake City and Chicago. Obituaries in the Japanese American Citizens League newspaper not infrequently list a deceased person's Midwest hometown with the added note: "prewar home, Seattle."

But new blood was brought to Seattle, too: Those who did return frequently brought new spouses from elsewhere, and often the spouses' families.

For a time, though, Seattle suffered a net loss of Japanese Americans: from 7,000 in 1940 to 5,800 in 1950. Today the population is about 9,800; 21,000 in King County.

The war also hastened what had been a slow spread of Seattle's Japanese Americans out of their central-city ghetto.

After the war, the community still was centered along Yesler Way and Jackson Street from Fourth to 23rd avenues. But much of the housing had been filled by a growing number of blacks who had migrated here to work in the war industries.

The Yesler housing project, built in 1941 and 1942, eliminated an old residential area the Japanese had occupied. The first units were built as low-income housing; more were added to house war workers.

Even before the war, some more affluent "pioneers," including the Unos, had begun moving into north Beacon Hill, as well as farther east toward Lake Washington and Mount Baker. Housing covenants still largely kept non-whites from most other areas, although Japanese were thinly represented in outlying areas - to farm or run greenhouses and small service businesses such as cleaners to serve surrounding white communities.

Because many of the small businesses were hastily sold before evacuation, the visible presence of a strong Japanese community in the International District was greatly diminished after the war. The void allowed other Asian groups, primarily the Chinese, to gain a greater presence in the district.

Accounts tell of a few brave souls venturing in the 1950s to the wilds of Ravenna and Laurelhurst - with only a smattering of virulent attacks by neighbors.

But until the Open Housing Act in 1968, the majority were not so daring. Immediately after the war, Leonetti says, the International District was the starting point once again - having the cheapest housing and least discrimination - and from there, the community began gradually extending south, onto Beacon Hill and into the Rainier Valley.

Today, by far the largest numbers of Japanese Americans in Seattle live on Beacon Hill.

UPWARD MOBILITY

The near-disappearance of the Japanese-American small-business district, whose shops were run by the first-generation Issei, had far-reaching implications for the Nisei, their American children.

If not for the evacuation, Miyamoto says that the Nisei would have likely continued in the small-business footsteps of their parents. Instead, a combination of circumstances - loss of businesses, the GI Bill and a postwar opening of opportunities - accelerated their climb into the professions.

By 1970, more than half the Japanese-American population was in white-collar jobs, a higher percentage than white males, according to David Takami, author of "Executive Order 9066," a history of Seattle-area Japanese Americans prepared for the Wing Luke Asian Museum.

Furthering the demise of the old Nihonmachi, or Japan Town, that had been centered at Sixth Avenue and Main Street, was Interstate 5, which in the early '60s sliced through the heart of the community. But even with the freeway, Miyamoto says, "the community would be noticeably still there, it would have persisted, if evacuation hadn't taken place."

Even before the war, the Nisei were going to college, pushed by their Issei parents who saw it as a key to success. Their high-school graduation rates in 1940 were almost twice that of whites (85 percent vs. 45 percent, said to Leonetti, the UW anthropologist).

But prewar opportunities for college graduates, given a combination of the Depression and prejudice, were limited. The best job avenues for Japanese Americans, says Leonetti, were in government, and for those without education, the post office.

Private industry was largely closed to them. "Before the war, the Nisei didn't have any hope of getting a job at Boeing, Frederick and Nelson, any of those places, except as a janitor or other service people," says Miyamoto, the UW sociology professor emeritus.

Again, the war changed the climate, as war industry needs forced companies such as Boeing to hire African Americans and Chinese Americans, he says.

"Boeing hired its first Japanese-American engineer in about 1952; Boeing was one of the first private areas to open up," says Leonetti.

The first Japanese-American teacher in the Seattle School District began work in 1952.

As with the majority population, the GI Bill had an enormous impact on the number of Japanese Americans who went to college. The impact was even larger on them, says Leonetti, because proportionally so many of them were youths.

While barred from serving in the military until 1943, many left the camps to join after that and earned GI benefits.

Those benefits even more profoundly affected the rural community, where children had had fewer opportunities to go to college.

In 1942, Japanese-American farmers farmed about 56 percent of all agricultural land in King County; only a fraction went back to the Puyallup and White River valleys after the war.

White farmers in Auburn and Kent formed the "Pearl Harbor League" to prevent such a return. The Japanese farmers who tried to continue were hurt by boycotts and bans. With so many of their children gone to school and the cities, the loss of the rural way of life for Japanese Americans was almost complete.

THE DECLINE OF PREDJUDICE

While the GI Bill was important, Miyamoto believes that gradually diminishing discrimination and more interaction with Seattle whites led the Nisei into middle-class prosperity.

Much of the impetus was not the war experience of Japanese Americans per se, but the larger civil-rights movement. Affecting Japanese specifically was the end in 1952 to the restriction against Issei becoming naturalized U.S. citizens.

Nisei veterans have argued that their heroic exploits in the war, especially in the highly decorated all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, were essential to bettering their status in mainstream eyes.

And despite the initial hostility that much of Seattle showed toward the returning evacuees, Miyamoto says the defeat of Japan eliminated some of the fear of Japanese and, by extension, Japanese Americans. Meanwhile, U.S. occupation forces were learning an appreciation for Japanese culture - something most Americans were abysmally ignorant of before the war. Still, the war's negative legacy has not disappeared.

A "glass ceiling" that allows only so much upward mobility persists for Japanese Americans, says Leonetti.

University of Washington education Prof. James Morishima, founding director of the U.S. Asian American Studies Department, points out that a recent Field Institute California Poll found that one-third of respondents thought the decision to send Japanese Americans to internment camps was a correct one.

The war weakened or destroyed many of the vibrant community institutions that the first-generation immigrants had built and led - such as language schools and fraternal clubs.

The postwar community took another direction: as a bicultural rather than immigrant society, which increasingly was assimilated into mainstream Seattle life.

After the war, the Nisei became the leaders because so many of their parents were too old, broke and often dispirited, to rebuild what it had taken them a lifetime to create.

This unnaturally speeded up the transition of power that had been enforced in the internment camps, where the young, American-born Nisei were given leadership positions, while the non-citizen Issei's authority was undermined; families were further weakened by the communal-style living.

Before their evacuation, many Japanese had burned cultural items out of fear, and some of that fear continued post-war in a quest for assimilation.

Aki Kurose, an internee who now teaches science, believes if there had been no war, "there would be more cultural things like Japanese drama, dancing, get-togethers, judo tournaments, community things that have dissipated."

Among the young Nisei, the loosening of cultural bonds was not entirely negative.

Says Tsuguo "Ike" Ikeda, a retired social worker who was in the Minidoka, Idaho, camp:

"There was no longer the social and psychological pressure of the community; before the war, we toed the line in how we behaved. . . . Without the camps, we would have been much more ingrown, much more culturally Japanese," Ikeda says. "As a result, we would have limited ourselves and our potential. Not that Japanese culture is bad, but having both was much richer."

If cultural bonds were weakened, an enduring ethnic and generational bonding among the Nisei was forged by the camp experience. For many, if not most, camp was the defining experience of their generation.

Even today, Nisei say, one of the first questions one Nisei will ask another on making acquaintance is: "What camp were you in?"

A glance through Japanese-American newspapers shows that not an issue goes by without some mention of a topic related to wartime and camp experiences.

BURDEN OF PAIN

Though the Issei suffered most, the trauma of the camps took a toll that endures to this day in the Nisei who were interned.

"The impact on teens, young adults - you have constant need to cope with that hurt as long as you live," says Leonetti, who has published a study on "the coping process of the Nisei."

"The war left a burden of psychological pain that has influenced people's social lives, made the Nisei less comfortable with the majority population in social situations. Emotionally they feel comfortable and secure where they are with people who have the same shared experience. That powerfully reinforces social ties in the Nisei community, which may not have happened without the camps."

Still, the Nisei are as mentally healthy as the white population, she says. They found ways to bolster their psychological well-being as a group, through such devices as pride-building organizations including the Nisei Veterans Committee and Japanese American Citizens League, she says.

But, she adds, "The Nisei had to put a great deal of energy into that coping process," and some couldn't do it.

It is among the "no-no boys" that the psychological wounds have most defied healing.

The name is taken from a loyalty questionnaire given to camp internees after the government changed its policy barring Japanese Americans from military service. In it, internees were asked to forswear allegiance to Japan and be willing to serve in the military.

Those who answered no to the questions (hence, no-no boys) were widely ostracized from the community, though many had refused to sign out of principle because their constitutional rights had been violated, first by being denied the chance to enlist, then by being incarcerated in camps.

Even today, a community rift over the issue remains. Fifty years later, a sudden confession of having been a no-no brings tears to the confessor's eyes.

A father whose no-no boy was publicly, if belatedly, praised for courage, felt the need to make hundreds of copies of the speech and distribute them to community members.

BLENDING IN

Many believe another psychological outcome of the camps was an acceleration of assimilation.

Some say the war-caused passion for assimilation led to the high incidence of intermarriage among Japanese Americans.

Larry Shinagawa, professor of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University in California, says the intermarriage rate today is 40 percent among women, 30 percent among men (nearly all the women who marry non-Japanese white men, while two-thirds of the men choose other Asians). Marriages to other racial minorities are few.

Leonetti points out that it wasn't the Nisei, but the third-generation Sansei and fourth-generation Yonsei - who often live in predominantly white suburbs - that really began to intermarry in numbers. The Nisei were still strongly influenced by their parents, who were usually adamant that their offspring marry other Japanese.

The intermarriage rate among Nisei was below 10 percent until the 1960s.

While it has been noted that Japanese Americans have the highest intermarriage rate among Asians, Shinagawa says the comparison isn't really fair.

Japanese Americans, he says, are more likely to be third generation than other Asian groups, and the third generation always intermarries at a higher rate, he says.

THE NEXT GENERATION

Older Japanese Americans sometimes lament the passing of the kind of community they knew, and worry whether the assimilated young people will carry anything on of their heritage. Ethnic newspapers, churches, restaurants, the JACL, remain; but Morishima notes that, with the restriction of Asian immigration now, cultural ties will weaken. New immigrants always keep culture alive.

But because they remain racially identifiable, as opposed to white immigrants who can "blend in," Miyamoto says, ethnic identification remains in spite of Americanization. Racism seemingly is a powerful enforcer of ethnic identity.

The message has been delivered most recently in a spate of Japan bashing - sparked by the trade imbalance, Japanese politicians' disparaging comments about Americans and the potential sale of the Mariners to a majority Japanese owner.

The bashing, with its racist overtones and sometimes violent targeting of Japanese Americans, draws on the ugly memories of wartime. And it painfully brings home to the younger Japanese Americans that in the eyes of some of the majority population, they can never be "just American."

Will the legacy of the war ever go away?