The story of the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans in the United States during World War II, once little noted even by historians, has become familiar.1 Most Americans are now also aware that Americans of Japanese descent have become quite successful, have achieved levels of education and income above those of the population at large. Japanese Americans have been called a "model minority," and some have gloried in the term. A range of writers, including most prominently William Petersen and Thomas Sowell, have written as if the transformation from "pariah to paragon" were merely a mechanical adjustment of market forces.2 For example, the urban historian Mark Gelfand recently observed that "although Japanese-Americans were sent packing to desolate internment camps, they . . . came out of the war experience more closely identified with the mainstream of American society."3

The process by which Japanese Americans reestablished themselves in the cities they had left has been little studied.4 This essay examines the case of Seattle-both the dismantling of the ethnic community in 1941-42 and its restoration after the West Coast was reopened to "loyal" Japanese Americans in January 1945.5

Prewar Seattle was the second city of Japanese America.6 In 1940 it was home to 6,975 Japanese, and with the surrounding county to 9,863, 68 percent of the 14,565 residing in Washington State.7 The city boasted a thriving Nihonmachi (Japantown), centered on Jackson, Main, and Washington streets just east of Union Station. A considerable proportion of the Japanese engaged in small business. As was true in other Nikkei (Japanese) urban communities, many of the businesses marketed the produce of Japanese farmers and fishermen; Japanese leased 64 stalls in the public Pike Place Market. Idiosyncratically, the Japanese in Seattle operated 183 hotels and had all of the redcap jobs at the railroad terminal.8 And they were by far the largest prewar racial minority.9 Although the early population had been heavily male-nearly 30 to 1 in 1900-by 1940 it was predominantly composed of family units; there were, however, still 123 males for every 100 females.10 Approximately two out of three Seattle Japanese were Nisei (second generation or American born) and thus citizens; their immigrant parents, the Issei, were ineligible for naturalization and thus aliens.11 It was the alien one-third of the population that first felt the brunt of wartime repression.

Japanese nationals, along with all other aliens, had been required to register and be fingerprinted under terms of the Alien Registration Act of 1940.12 Then, immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a presidential proclamation made all Japanese nationals resident in the U.S. "alien enemies," and proclamations covering Germans and Italians followed. These proclamations restricted the movements of these noncitizens and forbade possession of firearms, explosives, shortwave radios, and even cameras.13 From the first, the government was more concerned about Japanese aliens than about German and least concerned about Italian. After all, as Franklin Roosevelt remarked to the attorney general Francis Biddle, the Italians were "a lot of opera singers."14 These first edicts did not affect American citizens directly, with one exception: the attorney general closed U.S. borders to enemy aliens and "all persons of Japanese ancestry, whether citizen or alien." No other citizens were so restricted. In addition, all "alien enemies deemed dangerous to the public peace or safety by the
Attorney General or the Secretary of War" were made subject to "summary apprehension."

Beginning on December 7, using lists prepared by the Office of Naval Intel-ligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, law enforcement officials began to round up selected alien enemies. Almost all were adult males.15 Eventually, almost 5,000 Japanese nationals were thus rounded up and interned. They, together with 2,264 Latin American Japanese, some 2,300 German nationals, and more than 1,000 Italian nationals, constituted the nearly 11,000 persons interned in the continental U.S. by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), an agency of the Department of Justice, during World War II. Several thou-sand more were arrested but never interned.16

Many of the Japanese men interned were leaders in their communities. Because the government knew little about the Nikkei-not one official of the Department of Justice could speak or read Japanese-and acted on the theory of guilt by association, it seized officials, members of ethnic organizations, and persons who had observable contacts with the Japanese embassy and consulates. As soon as the banks opened on Monday, December 8, the Treasury Department began freezing the bank accounts of all Issei and all of the accounts in American branches of Japanese banks. These federal actions not only caused hardship for individual Japanese Americans but also crippled their community by depriving it of both its established leaders and most of its liquid assets.17

Some 300 Japanese residents of Seattle were interned, most in the early days of December 1941. Perhaps not unrepresentative of these was 49-year-old Iwao Matsushita, a native of Hiroshima Prefecture who had lived in the city since 1919. He had been employed by the local branch of the large trading firm Mitsui and Company until 1940. He then worked for the Seattle Japanese Chamber of Commerce compiling statistics. His ambition was to teach at the University of Washington, where he had taught Japanese for one year as an unpaid adjunct, but despite a recommendation from the Department of Oriental Studies he was not hired. Picked up in the first sweep of enemy aliens shortly after Pearl Harbor, Matsushita was sent to an INS facility at Fort Missoula, Montana. His less acculturated wife, Hanaye, remained at liberty, trying to cope with family finances. Eventually, she was sent with other Seattle Japanese to an assembly center at Puyallup and later from there to Minidoka, a camp at Hunt, Idaho, where her mental and physical health deteriorated.18

Although living conditions at Fort Missoula were in every way superior to those in the camps to which his wife and most other Japanese Americans were sent, and despite being on occasion allowed limited freedom for recreation in the neighboring mountains, Matsushita desperately sought not release but a transfer to Minidoka to be with his wife. He pleaded his case in two letters to American officials.

I was born a Christian in a Methodist minister's family, educated in an American Mission School. . . . I have [lived], almost half and best part of my life, in Seattle . . . [I] never went [back] to Japan . . . because I liked this country, and the principles on which it stands.

I have never broken any Federal, State, Municipal, or even traffic laws, and paid taxes regularly. . . . I have never been, am not, and will never be potentially dangerous to the safety of the United States. . . . My wife, with whom I have never been separated even for a short time . . . is living helplessly and sorrowfully in Idaho Relocation Center.19 [She] is ill and under a doctor's care . . . [and] has patiently been waiting for my return for over two long years. . . . This was the third Christmas she had to observe so miserably. . . . I like to help her, nurse her, and cheer her up. When I heard a certain wife who died alone without her husband at her side, I simply could'nt but shudder at the thought [that] the same fate might be falling upon us.20

Matsushita did get a hearing and like many other family heads was eventually released, joining his wife in mid-January 1944 after more than two years' separation. Several hundred other internees, including a few from Seattle, who had formed no strong attachment to the U.S., were allowed to return to Japan aboard the Swedish vessel Gripsholm in 1943, and others repatriated after the war.21

Clearly the internment program caused much hardship, and most of those locked up were in no way "dangerous to the public peace or safety." But the internment program did follow due process of law and internationally accepted procedure. Although it has become commonplace to refer to the later mass incarceration of Japanese Americans as internment, that usage is not really appropriate. Internment was individual and presumably based on something each person had done; the mass incarceration was based simply on ethnic origin and geography. Most of the few thousand Nikkei who lived east of California or the Cascades were left in nervous liberty. Those in Spokane, for example, did not have to leave their homes. Every person interned had the right to an individual hearing, which, in some instances, eventually resulted in release. There were no hearings for the incarcerated Japanese Americans: their "guilt" was their ancestry. They were, in the inaccurate but graphic words of a 1972 NBC television documentary, Guilty by Reason of Race.

After Matsushita and other Issei had been rounded up and shipped off, most Japanese Seattleites became increasingly anxious about their fate. They were, as Bill Hosokawa remembers, "leaderless, frightened and confused."22 Although government security agencies would have left the remaining Nikkei at liberty, however restricted, politicians, the press, and special interest groups demanded some kind of mass incarceration of all ethnic Japanese. By the end of December, contrary to law, the army began to discharge some Nisei soldiers on ethnic grounds, and draft boards stopped sending Nisei induction notices. In Seattle, more and more people began to express distrust and fear of their Japanese neighbors-even though there were no overt acts of sabotage in their city or anywhere else in the nation. Mayor Earl Milliken surely spoke for many when he told a congressional committee: "There is no doubt about those 8,000 Japanese, that 7,900 probably are above question but the other 100 would burn this town down and let the Japanese planes come in and bring on something that would dwarf Pearl Harbor."23

Radical Seattle politicians tended to agree. The statement of the executive secretary of the left-wing Washington Commonwealth Federation, Terry Pettus, was pure double-talk. It was necessary, Pettus said, to remove "the Japanese, United States as well as foreign born," but he "respectfully suggest[ed] that the Japanese people be evacuated as quickly as possible in a humane and orderly manner" because "we must show by our actions that American democracy, while it takes all necessary precautionary steps, treasures the lives and liberties of all its people."24

By the time that Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, the Seattle Nikkei community was prepared for some kind of drastic action, but even then neither it nor the government knew what was to happen or how many people would be affected. FDR's order was deliberately vague: his accompanying verbal admonition to the secretary of war Henry L. Stimson was to "be as reasonable as you can."25 EO 9066 mentioned no ethnic group or other class of individuals. Its provisions could have applied to anyone in the United States. Citing sabotage as a danger, it empowered the secretary of war or "the Military Commanders . . . he may . . . designate . . . to prescribe military areas" and to bar or remove from them "any or all persons" and "to provide for residents of any such area . . . transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary . . . until other arrangements are made."26 But, as the briefed media immediately reported, Japanese were the prime targets, and in fact, the only American citizens incarcerated were
of Japanese descent, although some children whose parents were German or Italian enemy aliens shared their imprisonment.27

Some Seattle Nikkei hoped that it might be only California Japanese who would be most affected. On February 4 the attorney general, Biddle, had designated a restricted area covering a large part of California-but not Washington or Oregon-and applied a dusk-to-dawn curfew to all enemy aliens living within it. Nevertheless, by mid-February a few hundred Seattle Japanese had headed east across the Cascades to resettle away from the Pacific coast.28 The publicity and rumors attending the announcement of EO 9066 further demoralized the Japanese community, as can be seen from the testimony that one of its citizen leaders gave before the Tolan committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in a Seattle hearing held on February 28.

James Yoshino Sakamoto (1903-55) was a native-born Seattleite, the son of Issei pioneers who had arrived in 1894. A prizefighter blinded as a result of injuries received in the ring, he had long edited the Japanese American Courier and was general chairman of the Emergency Defense Council of the local Japanese American Citizens League (jacl). During the period between Pearl Harbor and August 1942, he was the city's most important Japanese leader even though at the time of the hearings the jacl chapter had fewer than 320 paid-up members. He and his colleagues assumed, as did many Nisei, that there actually were dangerous subversives within their community. In a letter to President Roosevelt, he wrote,

We know there have been dissident elements among us. . . . We, like our fellow citizens, have complete confidence in the all-seeing eye of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We have seconded their efforts when told what it was they were searching for and we shall continue to do so.29

As Sakamoto told the Tolan committee, "Our organization, both locally and nationally, has, let us say, 'turned in' people whom we thought should be checked into."30 jacl leaders thought that an evacuation was unnecessary and preferred an arrangement that would somehow have made the Nisei -citizens-the guardians of their parents' generation. However, by the end of February they realized that some kind of a mass movement involving both citizens and aliens was going to take place. And although Sakamoto and the others were painfully aware of the possibility of what they called "concentration camps," they hoped for a more benign solution if move they must. The jacl council's prepared statement to the congressmen ended with this summary:

Covering the problem of mass evacuation generally these are the important points:
1. The Japanese do not know where to go in case of general evacuation.
2. They wish to be directed by the Government as to where to go.
3. They wish to be sent together, with families intact and in sufficient numbers to be able to help each other over the difficult period of adjustment.
4. They wish to be settled near large urban settlements.31

On March 2 it became clear that the military was in control. On that day, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, designated by the secretary of war Stimson, issued Public Proclamation 1, establishing two zones, Military Areas 1 and 2. Not just much of California, but all of Washington and Oregon west of the Cascades fell within Military Area 1. This enlargement of the restricted zone sent a message to the Seattle Japanese that they were not to be spared. Two announcements on March 24-107 days after Pearl Harbor-confirmed that the jaws of the trap were tightening.

One announcement, Public Proclamation 3, expanded the scope of travel and curfew regulations, which had previously affected only enemy aliens, to include all Japanese persons in Military Area 1. Even more ominous was the second announcement, titled Civilian Exclusion Order 1: it notified
all Japanese on Bainbridge Island-located in Puget Sound a short ferry ride from the Seattle waterfront-that they would be taken from their homes six days later. The island's 54 Japanese families were not told where they were going. Instructed to bring only what they could carry, which should include bedding, toilet articles, clothing, and eating utensils, the stunned adults and their children were herded onto trains by soldiers with fixed bayonets. Their departure got full coverage and pictures in the local press. The exiles traveled all the way to Manzanar in southern California, the only facility then ready to take the refugees.32 Once the army had tested its system on the Bainbridge Islanders, it divided the rest of the coast into 107 districts stretching from the Canadian to the Mexican border, each calculated to contain about a thousand Japanese.33 Evacuation of Military Area 1 took until June 5; Military Area 2, until August 7.34

The Seattle Japanese, after watching the Bainbridge Islanders leave, had a month or more to wait. Evacuation from the city proper did not begin until April 28 and was completed in mid-May. The army sent 7,400 men, women, and children to the assembly center at the state fairgrounds in Puyallup. Despite the euphemistic names the government gave to the places in which it incarcerated most mainland Japanese Americans-assembly centers for short-term camps run by the U.S. Army, relocation centers for the longer-term ones run by the civilian War Relocation Authority-both types of facility can properly be called concentration camps. The term disturbs many Americans who equate concentration camps with the death camps of Nazi Germany or with the Soviet gulag, but though the phenomenon preceded the American institutions and has, alas, survived them, in fact, no other term is appropriate.35 The inmates were charged with no offense, and the camps were surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

Most Seattle residents were either relieved to see the Japanese go or unaffected by their departure, but a few were deeply concerned.36 Thomas Bodine, a Quaker who spent much time ministering to the stricken Nikkei community, described some of the leave-taking from Seattle in a series of letters that were widely distributed among Quakers and others who cared.

[May 11] Only 1000 Seattle Japanese remain to be evacuated. For the last four or five days they have been leaving by the hundreds at 9 in the morning (assembling at 7 and 7:30 and at 2 in the afternoon). . . . This afternoon the first trainload of Japanese from the White River Valley left for [the assembly center] at Pinedale California. I was down to see them off and my heart split wider [than] it has for any of the others at the time of departure. No Pullmans this time. . . . Just old ratty coaches for a 2 day 2 night trip to California. . . . The roofs of the coaches were covered with bird dung . . . the windows were like car windows on a misty day. . . . The Japanese were their cheerful selves: stoicism is a wonderful thing for circumstances like these.37

Most members of Seattle's Nikkei community remained in the temporary camps until their transfer in mid-August to Minidoka. Minidoka, like all the long-term concentration camps, was isolated and desolate. It was not a death camp: 489 American citizens were born behind its barbed wire, and only 193 died there. At Minidoka, happily, the guards killed no one: all of the government-inflicted homicides occurred at the Manzanar, Topaz, and Tule Lake camps. Minidoka, which reached a peak inmate population of 9,397 on March 1, 1943, kept some Seattleites for as long as 1,176 days.38

How long Japanese remained incarcerated was variable. As early as the summer of 1942, some were furloughed from assembly and relocation centers to help harvest crops east of the forbidden zone; for example, some were transferred to the Farm Security Administration's camp at Nyssa, Oregon. Others were recruited by Army Intelligence, which was desperately seeking linguists. Still others were allowed to continue their education in colleges and universities in the interior of the United States. After that, through a procedure that the WRA called "leave clearance," many inmates were granted "indefinite leave" for resettlement away from the coast. Others enlisted or, by 1944, were drafted as the military and the selective service, which had discriminated against Nisei men after Pearl Harbor, changed policy again. Even those still in concentration camps were drafted. Thus after reaching peaks in late 1942 or early 1943, camp populations declined.39

Because there is a large memoir literature that describes life in the concentration camps, this essay will skip over the camp experience and focus on the Nikkei's release from camp and their return to Seattle. It must be noted, however, that thousands did not return to the places from which they had come but settled elsewhere.40

From 1942 through 1944, releases of Japanese Americans from the camps fell into five major classifications: relocation, armed forces, institutionalization, Department of Justice internment, and repatriation. Relocation, which according to the government referred to "the movement of evacuees out of the centers and back into private life," was granted on grounds of education, employment, family unity, and mixed marriage. Between the opening of Minidoka and the end of 1942, 106 inmates took one of those resettlement options; 2,404 did so in 1943; and 2,165 did so in 1944.41

The rules governing evacuees' movement back into private life changed drastically at the beginning of 1945 because of the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1943 a unanimous court had rejected the suit of a Seattle man, Gordon K. Hirabayashi, who protested DeWitt's curfew regulations, and in December 1944 the court had rejected the suit of Fred Korematsu, who challenged the government's right to send a U.S. citizen to a concentration camp, although in this case three justices did dissent. But on the same day that it turned down Korematsu, the court approved the suit of Mitsuye Endo for a writ of habeas corpus. The crux of the Endo case was that she, a native-born American citizen with no charges against her, was confined in a WRA camp.42 The authorities were willing for her to be resettled in the interior, but she insisted on her right to return to her home in Sacramento. The court ruled unanimously in her favor, but its decision said nothing about the role of the army, Congress, or the president and found fault only with the civilian WRA, which had violated Endo's rights in simply doing the army's bidding. The decision, written by the Washingtonian William O. Douglas, pretended that only the WRA had been at fault. Justice Owen J. Roberts, in a concurring opinion, rejected his colleague's quaint theory of history and argued that his brethren were avoiding the real issue. He felt that the court had been

faced with a serious constitutional question-whether [Endo's] detention violated the guarantees of the Bill of Rights . . . and especially the guarantee of due process of law. There can be but one answer to that question. An admittedly loyal citizen has been deprived of her liberty for a period of years. Under the Constitution she should be free to come and go as she pleases.43

The day before the court handed down its verdict, the army, alerted by Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone and perhaps by Justice Felix Frankfurter, announced that effective January 2, 1945, there would no longer be any restrictions on "loyal" American citizens of Japanese ancestry returning to the West Coast. The WRA dropped its unconstitutional leave clearance procedures and began granting "terminal departures" instead of indefinite leaves. At the same time it announced that all relocation centers would be closed within six months to a year, that is, by January 2, 1946, and in fact, all the camps except Tule Lake (see n. 39) were closed by the end of November 1945. Minidoka shut up shop on October 28: some of its residents had been there more than three years and in captivity longer. Not surprisingly, some inmates had been so scarred by their experiences that they had to be evicted from camps, but most went gladly, although not without trepidation. Reports of sporadic terrorism against returnees in central California and of general hostility elsewhere fed the anxieties of almost everyone who was still in camp or who had been temporarily resettled in the interior.

The pace of resettlement did quicken after the West Coast was reopened to Japanese Americans, but not immediately. Departures from Minidoka averaged 200 per month during 1943, a little less than that during 1944, and just over that for January and February 1945 but jumped to more than 500 in March.44 Most of those leaving Minidoka in 1945 returned to Seattle, where they found both hostility and support; public controversy had begun the previous fall with a flurry of local newspaper stories about returning Japanese. At least 13 Japanese Americans had been allowed back permanently by special permit before the general ban on return to the West Coast was lifted.45 The first, according to the Reverend U. G. Murphy in a September 1944 press conference called by the Seattle Council of Churches, were "six or seven wives of mixed marriages" who had come back without much publicity starting in March 1943.46 Murphy also introduced 29-year-old Kaoru Ichihara, who had resumed her former position as a clerk in the council of churches office. Ichihara had been released from Minidoka to Spokane, in unrestricted eastern Washington, in March 1943. From there she had made her way to Seattle. As she told the press, her brother Albert was currently fighting with the 442d Regimental Combat Team in Italy, and she would do her "utmost to be worthy of the privilege given me to be one of the first to return to my home and work."47

Murphy also announced that Mine Hasegawa, a nurse, accompanied by her Issei mother, was returning to her job at Firland Sanatorium. The superintendent there, Dr. Kenneth B. Olson, faced with the inevitable wartime shortage of nurses, had arranged to hire 15 other Nisei nurses, but the city health commissioner Dr. Ragnar T. Westman and Mayor William F. Devin vetoed the plan. Westman claimed that he and the mayor had "nothing against the Japanese-Americans" but were concerned about community reaction.48 Although Japanese Americans could provide much-needed health services, as the mayor reportedly put it, "'The city government can't be the first to accept them.'"49 At the same time, two brothers, Takashi and Fukashi Hori, received passes to come to Seattle from Minidoka to look over their Panama Hotel at 6051/2 Main Street. They were apparently the first to be allowed to travel from Minidoka without Caucasian escorts. Murphy's press conference produced predictable reactions from veterans groups, such as the John R. Blackburn Post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which had "never favored Jap immigration" and now "oppose the return of these people. . . . for they are either soldiers of the son of heaven or decoys." One VFW member wrote that "if this results in sub-standard jobs for returning veterans . . . while disloyal Japs are sheltered in jobs on the West coast . . . it will result in some rough handling
of the Japs."50

If Seattle was uneasy, some neighboring farming communities were in an uproar over Murphy's announcement that a Nisei family-Chitake Yamagiwa, his wife, Yoshiko, and their son, Takeji-was coming from Michigan to bid on farm property in Kent that Yamagiwa had previously held under lease. White farmers in Kent and neighboring Renton, Auburn, Sumner, Puyallup, Orting, and Fife formed the Remember Pearl Harbor League, aimed at "map[ping] out an orderly program of procedure to keep the Japs from resettling in the valleys."51

Returnees got little support and some opposition from the established political leadership of the state. In late January 1945, the newly elected governor, Mon C. Wallgren, issued a public statement opposing return as long as the war was on, and as late as April Senator Warren G. Magnuson was calling for mass deportation of any "American-born Japanese who have indicated by act or implication their loyalty to Hirohito."52 Trade union opposition, long a bulwark of the anti-Japanese movement, continued, most notably by Dave Beck's Teamsters, who refused either to handle or to allow others to handle produce from Nikkei farms. In the summer of 1945 the only way that some of the returned farmers could get their produce to market was to have it delivered in trucks driven by white sympathizers. Similarly, the Northwest Produce Dealers Association had to be restrained from an effective boycott of fruits and vegetables grown by Japanese Americans; the U.S. secretary of agriculture Clinton P. Anderson issued a cease and desist order.53

Yet, all things considered, the return did not work out too badly, according to two early postwar surveys, one done at the end of 1945 for the local yw-ymcas and one conducted in 1947 for the WRA by two University of Washington faculty members, S. Frank Miyamoto and Robert W. O'Brien. Each survey found some measure of economic progress for the Nikkei community, coupled with more than residual discrimination and significant social isolation. The first report, for example, noted that "there are still twelve no jap signs that are obvious in the 'Produce Row' area on Western Avenue,"54 and the more sophisticated survey concluded:

While the statistics seem to indicate that the people of the community look upon the present situation as an improvement over previous conditions, emphasis in interpretation of the data should be placed upon the large percentage . . . who regard the prewar and the present situation as essentially the same. What this means is that the economic discrimination in Seattle against Japanese Americans is not so serious as to prevent them from making a decent livelihood, as they did before the war. But just as there were ceilings on job opportunities for Issei and Nisei in Caucasian companies before the war, it is recognized that similar ceilings exist today. True, a few more jobs in Caucasian companies now exist that were not available previously, and this reflects itself in the fifth to a quarter of the population who see less discrimination in the present economic conditions.55

Thus, to trained observers and to the returned Seattle Nikkei themselves, the immediate postwar situation was quite similar to what had existed before Pearl Harbor. Two decades later it was possible for a social scientist not only to claim that socioeconomic conditions for West Coast Japanese Americans were nearly ideal but also to find little contradiction from the ethnic community, from other scholars, or from the media, which soon adopted the term "model minority" for Japanese Americans and then expanded it to cover Asian Americans. The achievement of model minority status, real or imagined, clearly did not take place right after the war but sometime later. One of the present tasks for historians of both the modern Far West and of the Asian experience in America is to explicate, in detail, when, if ever, the transformation occurred.

Roger Daniels is Charles Phelps Taft Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. He has written widely on immigration in general and on Asian Americans in particular, most recently Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (1993).

1. For some notion of the literature, see the bibliographies in Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano, eds., Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress, rev. ed. (Seattle, 1991).

2. William Petersen, "Success Story, Japanese American Style," New York Times Magazine, Jan. 6, 1966, pp. 20 ff., and idem, Japanese Americans: Oppression and Success (New York, 1971); Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York, 1981);
Peter I. Rose, "Asian Americans: From Pariahs to Paragons," in Clamor at the Gates: The New American Immigration, ed. Nathan Glazer (San Francisco, 1985), 181-212.

3. Mark Gelfand, rev. of The American West Transformed: The Impact of World War II, by G. Nash, AHR, Vol. 91 (1986), 760.

4. U.S. Dept. of the Interior, War Relocation Authority, The Relocation Program (Washington, D.C., 1946), 47-105, hereafter cited as WRA, Relocation Program. This government account says little about Washington State and nothing about Seattle, although there is statistical information. The only substantial account of a return to a West Coast metropolis, in this case, Utah to San Francisco, is
Sandra C. Taylor, Jewel of the Desert: Japanese American Internment at Topaz (Berkeley, 1993), chap. 9.

5. See S. Frank Miyamoto and Robert W. O'Brien, "A Survey of Some Changes in the Seattle Japanese Community since Evacuation," Research Studies of the State College of Washington, Vol. 15 (1947), 147-54; there is some material in Howard A. Droker, "Seattle Race Relations during the Second World War," PNQ, Vol. 67 (1976), 163-74.

6. The best portrait is still S. Frank Miyamoto, Social Solidarity among the Japanese in Seattle (1939; rpt. Seattle, 1984). See also idem, "An Immigrant Community in America," in East across the Pacific, ed. Hilary Conroy and T. Scott Miyakawa (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1972), 217-43, and Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle, 1988), 159-61 and passim. Quintard Taylor, "Blacks and Asians in a White City: Japanese Americans and African Americans in Seattle, 1890-1940," Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 22 (1991), 401-29, is a brilliant example of multiethnic urban history. For prewar Seattle generally, see Richard C. Berner, Seattle, 1921-1940: From Boom to Bust (Seattle, 1992). Dana Frank, "Race Relations and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1915-1929," PNQ, Vol. 86 (1994/95), 35-44, looks at the Nikkei community from a special and, I believe, distorting angle. Also see David Takami, Executive Order 9066: 50 Years before and 50 Years After: A History of Japanese Americans in Seattle (Seattle, 1992).

7. Calvin F. Schmid, Charles E. Nobbe, and Arlene E. Mitchell, Nonwhite Races, State of Washington (Olympia, 1968), 55 and table 3:II, p. 35. Los Angeles County had the highest Japanese population, 23,231, and San Francisco County third highest, just over 5,000. If one includes adjacent counties-Pierce in the Northwest and Alameda and San Mateo in the Bay Area-these three urban areas account for nearly half of the 126,947 Japanese in the continental U.S. in 1940.

8. Miyamoto, Social Solidarity, 72. For a charming memoir by a woman whose parents ran a workingmen's hotel in prewar Seattle, see Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (1953; rpt. Seattle, 1979).

9. In Seattle in 1940 there were 3,798 blacks, 1,781 Chinese, 1,392 Filipinos, and 222 American Indians. Schmid, Nobbe, and Mitchell, 49, 56.

10. Ibid., table 5:I, p. 81.

11. U.S. law did not permit Japanese to become citizens until 1952. An exception was a law that allowed a handful of Issei who had served in the U.S. military during World War I to become naturalized. The U.S. Employment Service reported that in the state of Washington 66.6 percent of the Japanese were citizens. The Seattle Nisei leader James Y. Sakamoto estimated the population in February 1942 to be 3,500 citizens and 2,500 aliens. U.S. House, Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, Hearings, 77th Cong., 2d Sess., 1942, pt. 30, pp. 11480, 11452, hereafter cited as Tolan committee hearings.

12. 54 Stat. 670 (1940), title 3. Despite its bland name, the act dealt with "interference with the military or naval forces of the United States," other "subversive activities," and "deportation."

13. Presidential Proclamation 2525, Dec. 7, 1941. German and Italian nationals were covered by similar proclamations-2526 and 2527-dated Dec. 8, 1941. Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority (New York, 1962), 207. Because there were very large numbers of Italian-American voters, on Columbus Day 1942, just before the off-year elections, Italian Americans as a class were removed from the "alien enemy" category, although individuals could still be detained.

14. FDR quoted in Biddle, 207.

15. For the Office of Naval Intelligence and its role, see Jeffery M. Dorwart, Conflict of Duty: The U.S. Navy's Intelligence Dilemma, 1919-1945 (Annapolis, Md., 1983).

16. For the Japanese from Latin America, see C. Harvey Gardiner, "The Latin American Japanese and World War II," in Daniels, Taylor, and Kitano, 142-45. For the best work on an INS internment camp, see John J. Culley, "The Santa Fe Internment Camp and the Justice Department Program for Enemy Aliens," ibid., 57-71. The topic of internment is largely uninvestigated.

17. In response to a request from Eleanor Roosevelt, who in her capacity as an official of the Office of Civilian Defense was on the Pacific Coast, the secretary of the treasury Henry Morgenthau soon modified the freeze order on Issei bank accounts so that families could draw a maximum of $100 monthly.

18. For a full treatment of the Matsushitas, see Louis Fiset, Imprisoned Apart: The World War II Correspondence of an Issei Couple, in press. Matsushita was one of 194 internees to enter Minidoka; 1,735 internees were eventually transferred to WRA custody. War Relocation Authority, The Evacuated People: A Quantitative Description (Washington, D.C., 1946), table 1, p. 9.

19. Iwao Matsushita to Francis Biddle, Jan. 2, 1943, box 9, Iwao Matsushita Papers, Acc. 2718, University of Washington (UW) Libraries.

20. Matsushita to J. Charles Dennis, Dec. 27, 1943, ibid.

21. See P. Scott Corbett, Quiet Passages: The Exchange of Civilians between the United States and Japan during the Second World War (Kent, Ohio, 1987); WRA, Evacuated People, table 97, p. 196.

22. Bill Hosokawa, "The Uprooting of Seattle," in Daniels, Taylor, and Kitano, 19. See also his essay "When Seattle's Japanese Vanished," Annals of the Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest (1984), 90-94.

23. Milliken quoted in Tolan committeehearings, 11408. The notion that a small core of subversive Japanese could wreak havoc was widespread. The Seattle jacl told the committee that "most persons who express themselves on the subject seem to believe that only one out of 10 or perhaps one out of 100 Japanese may be disloyal. Many contend that because of the presence of this questionable element, the whole group must suffer" (ibid., 11463). The businessman Curtis B. Munson, whose infamous "Munson Report" went to FDR's desk in November 1941, acknowledged the loyalty of the vast majority of Japanese of both generations but claimed that there were "Japanese in the United States who will tie dynamite around their waist and make a human bomb out of themselves." For details, see Daniels, Asian America, 211-12.

24. Pettus quoted in Tolan committee hearings, 11613-14.

25. FDR quoted in Stetson Conn, "Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast," in Conn, Rose C. Engleman, and Byron Fairchild, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts, The United States Army in World War II: The Western Hemisphere(Washington, D.C., 1964), 131-32, and telephone conversation transcripts, Stetson Conn, "Notes," Center for Military History, Washington, D.C.

26. Executive Order 9066. This and other pertinent documents are conveniently compiled in 77th Cong., 2d Sess., 1942, HR 2124 (Serial 10668).

27. Stephen Fox, The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans during World War II (Boston, 1990), treats only northern California, not always accurately.

28. A small but unknown number of persons moved before March 2, when the army began keeping records; there were 499 departures from Washington west of the Cascades, 403 of them from King County. Many Japanese Americans went to eastern Washington. After March 29, travel permits were required, and Seattle's Japanese, in Military Area 1, were frozen there. U.S. Western Defense Command, Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942 (Washington, D.C., 1943), 106-13.

29. James Y. Sakamoto to FDR, March 23, 1942, James Y. Sakamoto Papers, Acc. 1609, UW Libraries. The letter was not answered.

30. Sakamoto quoted in Tolan committee hearings, 11475.

31. Ibid., 11449-78 (qtns., 11465 and 11470).

32. Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York, 1971), chap. 4. But at page 86 I erroneously stated that the Bainbridge Islanders were sent to Puyallup.

33. King County contained six such districts covered by Civilian Exclusion Orders 36, 37, 39, 40, 79, and 80. Western Defense Command, Final Report, table 47, pp. 363-66.

34. Actually some Japanese remained in Area 1-142 in western Washington. There were 77 in the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island and 14 in Seattle-11 at the King County sanatorium, 2 in the county hospital, and 1 in the county jail. WRA, Evacuated People, table 87, p. 189.

35. The Library of Congress subject heading for these camps is "Concentration Camps-United States of America."

36. See Floyd Schmoe, "Seattle's Peace Churches and Relocation," in Daniels, Taylor, and Kitano, 117-22.

37. Thomas Bodine, open letter, May 11, 1942, Conrad-Duveneck Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Calif.

38. See Daniels, Asian America, 234-40; and Robert C. Sims, "Japanese Americans in Idaho," in Daniels, Taylor, and Kitano,
103-11.

39. The WRA camp at Tule Lake, California, to which a few hundred persons from Puyallup were sent initially, became the facility for those Japanese Americans considered actively disloyal; Seattleites composed less than 3 percent of these. WRA, Evacuated People, table 75, p. 168. Tule Lake reached peak population on Christmas Day 1944. Ibid., table 5, p. 17.

40. For memoirs, see John Tateishi, ed., And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps (New York, 1984), and Daniels, Taylor, and Kitano. For resettlement in a new city, see Thomas Linehan, "Japanese American Resettlement in Cleveland during and after World War II," Journal of Urban History, Vol. 20 (1993), 54-80.

41. WRA, Evacuated People, table 10h, p. 38.

42. Hirabayashi v. United States, 321 U.S. 81 (1943); Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), and Ex parte Endo, 323 U.S. 283 (1944). The literature on these cases is vast. Two works by Peter Irons-Justice at War (New York, 1983), and Justice Delayed: The Record of the Japanese American Internment Cases (Middletown, Conn., 1989)-both summarize the literature and break new ground.

43. Ex parte Endo, 310.

44. WRA, Evacuated People, table 10h, p. 38. Departures numbered 463 in April, 774 in May, 678 in June, 606 in July, 1,119 in August, 1,737 in September, and 1,495 in October.

45.Ibid., table 12, p. 45, shows that, of 852 returnees for Washington in 1944, 13 went to Seattle. It was possible, however, for persons released from WRA custody for settlement in one place to move to another. In addition, the WRA's own data show 2,355 persons leaving camps, "destination unknown" (p. 42).

46. Seattle Times, Sept. 20, 1944. Accounts of the Murphy press conference appeared in the Seattle Times, Post-Intelligencer, and Star, the Longview News, and Tacoma Tribune, Sept. 20, 1944.

47. Star, Sept. 20, 1944.

48. Times, Sept. 20, 1944.

49. Post-Intelligencer, Sept. 20, 1944.

50. Star, Oct. 19, 1944.

51. Post-Intelligencer, Oct. 5, 1944.

52. Ibid., April 29, 1945.

53. For these and other "antireturn" activities, see Daniels, Concentration Camps USA, 158-65, and idem, Asian America, 292-94. There is no detailed treatment of this activity.

54. Helen E. Amerman and Elmer R. Smith, "Survey of Nisei in Seattle" (typescript, Dec. 31, 1945), p. 64, box 15, Greater Seattle Council of Churches Records, Acc. 1358-7, UW Libraries.

55. S. Frank Miyamoto and Robert W. O'Brien, "Adjustment in Seattle," in [War Relocation Authority], People in Motion: The Postwar Adjustment of the Evacuated Japanese Americans (Washington, D.C., 1947), 113-33 (qtn. 133).