ARTICLES
July/August 1997 ARTICLESLETTERS
Contents © 1997
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
If They Hadn't Been There,
It Would've Been Hell
MARYKNOLL IN THE CAMPS
By Charles A. Coulombe
One of the darkest episodes of our nation's history was the forcible relocation of thousands of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast in 1942 from their homes and businesses (which were lost without compensation) to ten camps in the barren interior of the nation. Ironically, while many of their sons and brothers were fighting in Europe in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (the single most decorated unit in World War II), non-combat eligible Japanese sat out the war in these camps. The contributions of Japanese-Americans in Military Intelligence to cracking the Japanese codes is one of the least known dramas of the war. But even while these efforts were continuing, California Attorney General Earl Warren (later governor and then a famed liberal Supreme Court Chief Justice) was asking Washington to deport the Japanese.
What makes President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's acceptance of the request the more strange is that he knew it was baseless. Before Pearl Harbor, the president had secretly commissioned Chicago businessman Curtis Munson to investigate the Japanese Americans and evaluate them as a security threat. In the report, which Roosevelt received on November 7, 1941, Munson declared that: "There will be no armed uprising of Japanese [in this country]....Japan will commit some sabotage largely depending on imported Japanese as they are afraid of and do not trust the Nisei [second-generation Japanese Americans]. There will be no wholehearted response from Japanese in the United States....For the most part the local Japanese are loyal to the United States or, at worst, hope that by remaining quiet they can avoid concentration camps or irresponsible mobs. We do not believe that they would be at least any more disloyal than any other racial group in the United States with whom we went to war." Munson's conclusions, amply evidenced in his report, were proved by later events.
Despite the president's private knowledge, however, he acquiesced to the request of Warren and others. This was in the face of J. Edgar Hoover's report in February 1942 that the proposed evacuation was unjustifiable on security grounds. Such well-known characters as national columnist Walter Lippman (who had justified Stalin's mass starvation of the Ukrainians) joined the chorus. In the May, 1942 Saturday Evening Post, the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association stated that "We've been charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over....If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows." These sentiments were publicly echoed by powerful lobbies throughout the state; it is perhaps no surprise that major governmental figures agreed with them.
In any case, on April 30, 1942 the Western Defense Command ordered that all Japanese or Japanese-descended persons on the West Coast were to be evacuated by May 7. Allowed to bring only what they could carry, the 110,000 internees were sent to Topaz in Utah, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Amache in Colorado, Jerome and Rohwer in Arkansas, Minidoka in Idaho, Manzanar and Tule Lake in California, and Heart Mountain in Wyoming. Most would remain until the end of the war in 1945.
In Los Angeles, the Catholic Japanese community was based (as it still is) around the Maryknoll Japanese Catholic Center--St. Francis Xavier chapel, founded locally in 1912. Before the War, the elementary school there provided both a Catholic education and fluency in Japanese and English for 300 to 400 students. One eighth-grade graduate in 1932 was Harry Honda, today a member of the parish council. "In those days," Mr. Honda remembers, "the Maryknoll brothers drove a bus all around town to pick up the students. I was drafted before Pearl Harbor, and spent the War in the Quartermaster Corps, all over the country. But the school was shut down when the deportation went into effect, and the archdiocese took over the chapel. The school became St. Vibiana's Junior High, and then reopened as the Maryknoll elementary in 1948. It closed finally in 1994."
Father Hugh Lavery, M.M., then the pastor of St. Francis Xavier, was aware that something was about to happen. Recalls Henry Umeda, a 1934 graduate of the school, "I was working in Alhambra, in the produce department of a market--lots of Japanese men were. Father Lavery told us that the evacuation was coming, so when the order finally came, we were not too surprised. We registered at Maryknoll. Father said that it was inevitable and that we should cooperate. I didn't have much, I was just starting out. But the people who had property and businesses lost it all."
Of the ten camps, Maryknoll priests and nuns attended nine, and the Divine Word Missionaries (S.V.D.), one. Maryknoll missionaries expelled by Japan returned to the United States and went directly to the camps. Umeda was sent to Manzanar: "there were two Japanese Maryknoll sisters who were interned with us. Father Leo Steinbeck and Brother Theophane came to be with us, but, because they were whites, they were not allowed to live in the camp. They had to stay at Lone Pine, the nearest town. From there they came in every day. If they could do anything, they did it. There was daily Mass, parish and youth activities, even convert instruction. There were a lot of conversions at the camp."
Nor were the religious' ministrations limited to Catholics. "If anybody came to them for help, Catholic or not, the Maryknollers did what they could, intereceding with camp authorities or whatever." Asked how the government justified its actions to them, Umeda says, "well, they didn't much. Just said it was for our own good, our own protection. But somebody asked, 'if it's for us, why are the guns in the guard towers pointed inward?' But there was no answer. But we took it all in stride. Basically the Issei (first generation immigrants) just went along, and so did the rest of us."
Umeda did not stay at Manzanar until the end of the war. "After about a year, Father Steinbeck married my wife and me. My brother-in-law lived near Chicago, and he was able to find us a place to stay. You were allowed to leave for the Midwest and East if you had someplace, and the government paid the transportation."
Vincent Uyeda is a 1929 graduate of the school. In 1942, he was married with two children, and owned five markets in the L.A. area and a wharf in San Pedro. All was lost at the evacuation. "My parents were taken before we went to Poston. My mother was sent to the Federal Pen on Terminal Island, and they took Dad first to Glendale or Burbank, and then to New Mexico. It was half a year before we saw them at Poston. But the Maryknollers did everything they could. They went to court to stop the evacuation, but they lost. Father Clement and one brother were there at Poston with us, but they wouldn't let them stay with us. They had to live in Parker. But they came in every day and Father celebrated Mass on Sundays. We built a chapel and had parish activities. The Maryknollers did everything they could for us from the very beginning."
Like Umeda, Uyeda did not spend the whole war in the camp. "We all figured we would be interned for the duration. I left my family at Poston, and went to find work in New York in 1944. But they closed the camps just after the war ended, so I came back and took the family to L.A. My business was gone, but a friend of mine had been living in the apartment over my garage, and he held onto the house for us. So we still live in the same place."
Uyeda's daughter, Eileen Sato, is chairman of the parish council. Uyeda himself is still active at St. Francis Xavier, and helps keep the memory of what the Japanese endured alive. "In 1990, they asked me to make the Nativity scene for Christmas. So I built a regular one with the stable and the Christ child in the center. But when they asked me to build another one the following year, I thought I'd be a little different. I made it in a Japanese house. Then in 1992, I built a half-barracks, like the ones we lived in, and put the Christ child in the center on a hay mattress, like the ones we used to have."
Father Henry Felsecker, now living at Maryknoll, New York, is the last survivor of the priests assigned to the camps. At 91, the Milwaukee native has recently been confined to a wheel-chair. Last year, however, he was a guest of the government of Japan in token of his services to the Japanese and Japanese-Americans before, during, and after the war. He was one of the Maryknoll priests sent back to the United States after Pearl Harbor. Teaching for a time at Maryknoll, his order assigned Flesecker to the camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming in November, 1942. There were no brothers at the camp, and like his confreres he was not permitted to stay with his flock. "I stayed in Powell, about ten miles away, and came in every day to talk and instruct them. Every Sunday I celebrated Mass. The people were very kind, and gave me a meal every day--they took care of me. But the soldiers never invited me."
Father Felsecker is quite passionate on the topic of the injustice of the camps. "The government made a big mistake. There was no trouble with the Japanese anywhere in the States. It was very unfair. They had to leave their businesses and everything behind. After 40 years, the government finally compensated the survivors with $20,000 apiece. But many had died by then. I don't know why they thought they had to do it. I guess none of the government people had ever been in Japan or knew the Japanese."
But certainly the Japanese people knew and know what the Maryknollers did for them. As Henry Umeda put it, "if they hadn't have been there, it would've been hell." Although both the United States and the State of California governments may have a lot to be forgiven for in this area, the Church and the Maryknoll order can be proud of how they fulfilled Christ's commandment to "visit the prisoner."
A small museum chronicling the fascinating history of the Japanese Catholic Center--including war-time experiences--is open. Information about it and other activities may be obtained from: St. Francis Xavier Chapel (Maryknoll Japanese Catholic Center) 222 Hewitt St. (2nd and Hewitt), Los Angeles, CA 90012-4389; (213) 626-2279.