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75 years ago today: The other day of infamy that Mexican illegal aliens tend to forget, right Japanese citizens?

Cross-posted to 5 groups.

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It began hours after news of Pearl Harbor reached the West Coast.

A rap at the door, a shoe on the doorjamb, then FBI agents, 
welcome or otherwise, entered to take away roughly 1 in 10 heads 
of a few hundred specific households – all men, all Japanese.

Warnings were not given and explanations were not offered. But 
when that first wave of arrests came, word spread quickly. 
Everybody knew.

So two months later, on Feb. 19, 1942, the Japanese American 
community in Southern California – the nation’s largest at about 
35,000 – was less shocked than it was horrified by what 
occurred: Executive Order 9066.

Signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 546-word document 
declared the government’s intent to treat the West Coast as a 
war zone, complete with powers that suspended some 
constitutional guarantees.

Soon, Japanese Americans in the region were told to pack their 
things, sell or give away what they could, and prepare to be 
taken.

Today, on its 75th anniversary, we know that 9066 led to the 
confinement of more than 110,000 Japanese American men, women 
and children. It’s widely viewed as a racially motivated, 
historical stain, a self-inflicted mistake.

Related: Not all the internees were Japanese

We also know, today, that most of those people touched by 9066 
survived it physically, if not emotionally or economically.

But on the day the order became public, nobody knew any of that.

It was only known that what had once happened to Native 
Americans, and what was happening again to Jews in much of 
Europe, was about to happen to Japanese Americans – forced 
relocation.

“That was such a final kind of experience,” says Thomas Fujita-
Rony, a Cal State Fullerton professor who teaches about the 
experiences of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“It was like, ‘OK. It’s over.’ What we were before the war, it’s 
over.”

‘ANY OR ALL’

Executive Order 9066 didn’t mention Japanese Americans.

Roosevelt simply authorized military commanders to establish a 
zone “from which any or all persons may be excluded.”

The language meant any descendants of America’s new enemies – 
including Americans of Italian and German descent – could be 
targeted for expulsion. It also restricted movement for certain 
people. Giuseppe DiMaggio, father of Yankees star Joe DiMaggio, 
was barred from the San Francisco wharves where he’d made his 
living for three decades.

But while some Italian and German nationals were arrested and 
detained for a time, only Japanese Americans were forcibly 
removed, en masse, and sent to War Relocation Authority 
incarceration sites, considered by many America’s version of 
concentration camps.

The first to be banished was a fishing community of about 3,000 
people who lived on Terminal Island, near San Pedro. Their order 
to pack came on Feb. 25, 1942, less than a week after Roosevelt 
signed 9066.

“We were flabbergasted,” recalls John Marumoto, who grew up on 
Terminal Island.

Marumoto’s father, a fisherman, was among those Issei (first-
generation) men arrested hours after Pearl Harbor. They were 
civic leaders and business owners, teachers, Buddhist priests, 
martial arts instructors. Eventually, the list grew to include 
poets, artists and even those who were expert in pruning Bonsai 
trees.

When the family’s order to pack came, the Marumotos were already 
devastated. They had no income, no friends, no contacts off the 
island.

They also had already watched their father and others disappear.

The men caught up in those first arrests had been kept briefly 
at the prison on Terminal Island and, a few weeks later, they’d 
been sent to another detention facility farther inland.

That day, the whole town came out to wave goodbye to buses 
carrying their husbands and fathers.

Marumoto remembers his sister, then 4, running to the bus and 
calling out to their father: “Don’t go with them. They’re going 
to take you away.”

“Then,” Marumoto says, “everybody started crying.”

John Marumoto, now 89, was just 14 that day. And like so many 
children who spoke more English than their parents, he was the 
new head of a household.

“Who was going to make any decisions?” he remembers thinking. 
“I’m too young.”

So, when their order to pack came, a week after 9066, Marumoto 
said they had one more question:

“Where were we going to go?”

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SITES

This map shows where Japanese Americans were detained in 
Southern California during WWII.

AMERICAN STORIES

Bacon Sakatani and his family reported to the Pomona Fairgrounds.

The land used for livestock shows and county fairs was one of 
several “assembly centers” that were hastily set up in Southern 
California in the weeks after 9066. Another operated at Santa 
Anita Park in Arcadia. They housed thousands of Japanese 
Americans, against their will, until more permanent camps could 
be built in more distant, isolated locations.

Nobody knew how long they’d be kept, or how they might be set 
free.

Sakatani was 12 when his family arrived at the fairgrounds. One 
of the few items he brought was a baseball glove.

As he walked the land recently, the West Covina man, now 87, 
recalled playing softball surrounded by an 8-foot-high chain-
link fence. “If someone hit a home run,” he wondered, “what 
happened to the ball?”

That they were playing ball in such a place – and living there – 
was still a shock.

Before the Pearl Harbor attack, most Japanese Americans who 
lived in Southern California believed that when the seemingly 
inevitable war came they would be allowed to stay and help 
defeat the Axis Powers – Germany, Italy and Japan. Just like 
everyone else.

Two out of three were American citizens – born, raised and 
schooled here. They were as likely to be Christians as 
Buddhists. Many ran farms or businesses. They drank Coca-Cola 
and joined the Scouts, the YMCA.

How could they be the enemy?

For some neighbors, however, Executive Order 9066 provided a 
means to move aside a people they wished to see gone, for 
reasons that ran from bigotry to business.

“It was a chance to get rid of them,” says Art Hansen, a retired 
history professor who has edited a six-volume project on the 
evacuation kept at Cal State Fullerton’s Center for Oral and 
Public History.

Many prewar Japanese were thriving in the bustling downtown Los 
Angeles community of Little Tokyo, then the nation’s largest 
Japanese American enclave.

They formed smaller communities in Long Beach and in the 
burgeoning suburban towns of Santa Monica, Culver City, Pasadena 
and Gardena, among others.

They worked on fishing boats and in canneries in places like 
Terminal Island, Huntington Beach and San Diego. They grew 
vegetables and raised chickens in the rural parts of Los 
Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

But no matter where they lived, or how much they’d succeeded, 
all Japanese Americans on the West Coast would be touched by 
9066.

During the limbo that came after Pearl Harbor, their lives 
became increasingly restricted.

A dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed. New rules limited travel to 
within 5 miles of their homes. Their bank accounts initially 
were frozen, then later limited for use to pay for only basic 
needs. Their radios, cameras and guns were confiscated.

What started with the arrest of the elder men ended with every 
man, woman and child of Japanese descent – from widows to 
orphans, down to those with one-sixteenth Japanese blood – 
expelled from Washington, Oregon, California and southern 
Arizona. The banishments came in a series of 108 “exclusion 
orders” that followed 9066.

And it happened over the course of a few months.

UNDER SUSPICION

George Fujimoto Jr., the eldest son among George Toranosuke and 
Suni Fujimoto’s six children, began keeping a diary the day his 
father was arrested at their farm in north Riverside.

The elder Fujimoto was one of the men taken in the weeks between 
Pearl Harbor and 9066.

“Twenty-eight Riverside Japanese aliens were rounded up in 
today’s raid; Mr Sanematsu & Pop included ... Fortunately Pop 
was partially prepared.”

Deborah Wong, an ethnomusicologist at UC Riverside, has 
transcribed the diary Fujimoto Jr. kept in a pocket-sized 
notebook from 1942 to 1948. Fujimoto Jr., a college student in 
1942, wrote a page a day. Wong notes that he stuck to events, 
not feelings.

Fujimoto Sr. also kept a diary, and he chronicled the day of his 
arrest later from his jail cell in town. He was more effusive 
than his son.

“This is the first time I’ve been in jail. This is a very 
difficult experience for me. God sent me this experience as a 
lesson, so I shouldn't complain that this is happening to me. I 
shouldn’t be sad ...”

Fujimoto Jr.’s diary picks up the next day.

“Stayed out of school today to assume Pop’s duties & 
responsibilities. Went to Bank first thing after feeding hens 
wet mash to change Pop’s, Cha’s, and my check acct. to mine and 
Cha’s. Successful. Mr. & Mrs. Hiroto paid visit. Offered 
assistance.”

Riverside’s Japanese American population was tiny then, about 
200 people, but they were close-knit. The farmers picnicked 
together, worshiped at the town’s Japanese church and talked 
regularly on their phones.

After Executive Order 9066, their communications grew more 
intense.

“They knew what was coming,” Wong says. “They were tracking what 
was going on. They were in touch with other folks up and down 
the coast.”

AMERICAN REFUGEES

On an afternoon in spring 1942, June Aochi Berk walked home with 
her sister, Kay, to their Hollywood home. They’d just watched a 
movie.

That’s when they saw the message – a poster hung on a telephone 
poll.

“INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY ...”

Thousands of exclusion orders just like it were displayed in 
Japanese American communities on the West Coast, hammered to the 
walls of churches, temples and community centers.

The notices ordered people of Japanese descent – citizens and 
noncitizens – to pack their bags and report to local parks, 
churches and transit stations.

Berk, who is now 85 and lives in Studio City, remembers feeling 
confused, rooted on the sidewalk with her sister, ice cream 
melting in her hand. She was 10, but the poster made her think 
of a question no adult could properly answer.

“Why do they hate us? Why do they want to get rid of us?”

The exclusion orders made Japanese Americans refugees in their 
own country.

Phil Shigekuni, 82, remembers looking up and down his family’s 
block on 36th Place in South Los Angeles and seeing neighbors’ 
furniture in their front yards. He was 8.

“That’s the one part I remember,” he says. “The trauma of having 
to let everything go.”

Berk’s family sold off what they could, found their dog Tippy a 
new home, and took what they could carry to a bus stop at 5th 
and San Pedro streets on May 7, 1942.

When they arrived at the Santa Anita Park racetrack, the five 
family members learned their identification number and were 
ordered to fill canvas bags with hay. These would become 
mattresses.

Another detainee escorted them to their living quarters: Horse 
stall No. 54.

“It was a complete shock,” says Berk.

They slept with the stench of horse feces and urine. Horse flies 
buzzed around them as they ate. They stayed nearly five months.

A TAG AND A FLAG

Mary Adams Urashima writes a blog about Historic Wintersburg, 
located in what is now Huntington Beach, detailing life in the 
most prominent prewar Japanese community in Orange County. About 
2,000 Japanese Americans lived in the county at the time.

She’s studied photographs of men and women who, in May 1942, 
were sent directly from Wintersburg to the Poston War Relocation 
Center in Arizona.

Like all the others ripped from their homes and communities, the 
people taken that day wore the fluttering tags that denoted 
their destiny. The tags are tied with string to shirt lapels, 
belt loops, coat buttons.

“The photos are heartbreaking,” Urashima says. “You can see the 
anguish on the faces.”

Some people might not want to look at those photos or consider 
the consequences of Executive Order 9066, she adds, but they 
need to.

Yes, there was a real fear that the Japanese would strike at the 
West Coast after Pearl Harbor; but no evidence has ever been 
uncovered of spying or sabotage from Japanese Americans.

“This is factual,” Urashima says. “The fact that this happened 
to people who were by a majority American citizens is something 
we need to pay attention to.”

Not everyone looked at their Japanese American neighbors as 
enemies.

Friends and supporters did what they could: storing possessions, 
taking over leases, safeguarding farm property and businesses. 
They brought coffee and doughnuts the morning of departure.

Ike Hatchimonji lived in El Monte and was 14 when he was taken.

He remembers his school principal calling him and his twin 
brother to the office the day he learned the Hatchimonjis were 
leaving. “He said how sorry he was. And he didn’t think it was 
right for us to be taken away from our home like that.”

The principal gave the boys a gift from one of the classrooms – 
an American flag.

“It was a great gesture. He considered us to be Americans.”

Contact the writer: thwalker@scng.com or sbaer@scng.com

THE DIFFERENCE IS THE JAPANESE WHO WERE HERE KNOCKED FIRST!!!

MEXICANS ARE THIEVING CRIMINALS WHO DO NOT OBEY LAWS!!!

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/japanese-744478-americans-
american.html
 

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75 years ago today: The other day of infamy that Mexican illegal aliens tend to forget, right Japanese citizens? "No Japanese Sanctuary Cities In California?" <bigoted-idiots@latimes.com> - 2017-02-21 10:57 +0100
  Re: 75 years ago today: The other day of infamy that Mexican illegal aliens tend to forget, right Japanese citizens? "raykeller" <whiney_will_have_his_nose_in_my_ass_in_3_2_1@leftards_are_loosers.com> - 2017-02-21 11:50 -0700
    Re: 75 years ago today: The other day of infamy that Mexican illegal aliens tend to forget, right Japanese citizens? Sam Spade <sam@coldmail.com> - 2017-03-01 17:55 -0800
      Re: 75 years ago today: The other day of infamy that Mexican illegal aliens tend to forget, right Japanese citizens? rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2017-03-01 19:59 -0700
        Re: 75 years ago today: The other day of infamy that Mexican illegal aliens tend to forget, right Japanese citizens? cbIxS⚛← Ｍｉｇｈｔｙ ╬ Ｗａｎｎａｂｅ →⚛iZNOd <mnbXV@zjurd.com> - 2017-03-02 07:07 -0500

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