prejudices against ethnic Japanese) signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Under authority of this order, the army forcibly expelled all residents of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast during the months that followed. In the process, the vast majority of families lost their property or were forced to sell it at fire sale prices. Once removed from their homes, the Japanese Americans were placed in a network of “Assembly Centers,” stockades in disused fairgrounds and racetracks where the Japanese Americans were housed in converted horse stalls and animal pens and treated by army administrators as prisoners. After several weeks or months, they were then transported under guard to a network of ten government-run “relocation centers” in remote desert areas or swamplands in the interior, where they sweltered in summer and often froze in winter. The inmates lived in hastily constructed tar-paper barracks, one room to a family. Health and sanitary facilities in the camps, particularly at the outset, were primitive. The War Relocation Authority, the government agency created to supervise the camps, deliberately kept food and salaries for all inmate workers at levels below that of the lowest-paid American soldier.3
Although War Department chiefs privately conceded as early as 1943 that there was no military necessity for continued confinement of the mass of the inmates, West Coast military commanders, under pressure from anti-Japanese American politicians and media barons, long refused to reopen the excluded areas to people of Japanese ancestry. Furthermore, the government's mass removal policy convinced important elements of public opinion nationwide that the inmates represented a danger. There was therefore significant opposition to resettlement, and no strong wave of sentiment in their favor.
The WRA gradually developed a parole system of sorts, to permit inmates to leave camp without mobilizing hostile public opinion against them. After filling out a compulsory “loyalty questionnaire” and being adjudged “loyal” by a joint military board, individuals were eligible to obtain “leave permits” to resettle outside the West Coast excluded area. The process remained slow and cumbersome—not only did candidates have to have offers of jobs and housing, but the WRA had to ensure that local public opinion was favorable to entry of Japanese Americans. The majority of Japanese Americans, unable to return home and unwilling or unable to resettle elsewhere, remained confined in the camps for the balance of the war. Nevertheless, approximately one-fourth of the confined Issei and Nisei did gain official permission to leave camp during these years and settle outside the West Coast. This first wave of resettlers was composed mostly of Nisei in their late teens or twenties who left camp to join the military or take up outside employment. In addition, a group of Nisei college students were authorized to take up scholarships at colleges east of the Rocky Mountains under the auspices of a newly created private welfare agency, the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council.4 As these pioneers put down roots in their new communities, they were joined by siblings and friends, and in some cases parents and other relatives. The largest populations remained in the Mountain West or moved to the industrial cities of the East and Midwest. Chicago, in particular, became a population center: from a prewar community of some 400, the Windy City's ethnic Japanese population reached 20,000 by 194546, while an estimated 25,000 took up at least temporary residence during those years. The WRA was responsible for finding jobs and advocating for the newcomers, a task that was taken over by private church and local welfare groups after the dissolution of the agency in mid-1946.5
The West Coast remained closed to Japanese Americans (apart from soldiers and some other minor exceptions) until the end of 1944, when the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Endo that the government had no authority to hold a concededly loyal citizen without charge. In response, the army lifted its blanket exclusion orders in January 1945, although it substituted thousands of individual exclusion orders for inmates it suspected. Almost immediately, most of the remaining camp inmates began to return to the West Coast despite the efforts of the WRA, which feared violent backlash from white racists, to use various administrative devices to slow the flow of such return. Though resettlement east of the Rockies did continue at a slower pace, by mid-1947 the majority of the mainland ethnic Japanese population was once again settled on the Pacific coast. As those who had first moved east out of camp returned to their former homes the Japanese populations of the Midwest and East Coast began to decline, although significant pockets remained east of the Rockies, especially in the large cities.
Whatever their destination, the former camp inmates attempted to rebuild their lives under difficult and trying circumstances.6 Despoiled of most of their property during removal and psychologically scarred by their unjust confinement, they entered their new communities with little in the way of resources. Despite the wartime economic boom, they experienced widespread poverty and economic discrimination. In the prewar era, Issei and Nisei were largely self-employed in agriculture or as small shopkeepers, or worked for family businesses. Forced during removal to give up their shops and the land they owned or leased, most were unable to resume their former positions. Even those with significant educational or professional experience were forced to work for white families as gardeners or domestic servants, or to take low-status and menial-1abor jobs.7Unlike the prewar era, though, numerous Nisei, notably veterans, ultimately managed to secure jobs outside the community as teachers, corporate employees, and civil servants. By 1960, the median income of Japanese Americans exceeded the national average.
Housing was an equally difficult problem. Japanese Americans were confronted by shortages made worse by poverty and widespread racial discrimination, especially on the West Coast. Most Issei and Nisei, unable to resume their former leases or to borrow money to buy land, were forced to resettle in urban areas. There officials charged with aiding resettlers attempted to steer the newcomers, especially single Nisei, into taking domestic service positions, since they would thereby be provided board. Those with the means to buy homes and hotels opened space for lodgers. For others, community groups formed hostels to ease the housing problem. However, none of these efforts could begin to absorb all the newcomers. Instead, thousands of resettlers in cities such as San Diego, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and San Jose were forced into substandard housing, generally in or alongside black and Latino neighborhoods. Ultimately, greater prosperity plus the decline of restrictive covenants led masses of Nisei to migrate to suburbs and more affluent districts.
Although the resettlers were warned by the WRA and the FBI to fit in as much as possible and to promise to stay away from other Japanese Americans on leaving camp, they were brought together into Japanese enclaves both by internal factors such as religious observance or the desire for community and by external factors such as ethnic-based hostility and exclusion by whites. During the resettlement period, Japanese Americans took up some of their old community institutions and also developed new ones.8While the Japanese consulates that had anchored the prewar Little Tokyos remained shuttered, Japanese Buddhist temples and Christian churches reopened their doors in large numbers, and business groups mushroomed. Outside the West Coast, community hostels and interracial organizations such as the YMCA served as main recreational centers, providing libraries and game rooms for social events. The Japanese American Citizens League, although resented by many former inmates for its wartime policy of collaboration, was left as the sole ethnic organization of any size in the postwar years, and large numbers of Nisei joined newly constituted or reformed JACL chapters (Issei were not accepted as members until several years later). In addition to pol itical advocacy, JACL chapters organized social events, dinners, and sports leagues—especially basketball and bowling, the two unofficial Nisei national pastimes.
A main focus of community attention was journalism. Within months after the opening of the camps a series of newspapers, predominantly Japanese-language but with greater or lesser amounts of English content, started up operations. Los Angeles's bilingual prewar dailies Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi resumed publication, and soon afterward San Francisco's prewar Nichi Bei Shimbun and Shin Sekai morphed into a pair of new weekly journals, Nichi Bei Times and Hokubei Mainichi. Resettlers in the Mountain West were served by a trio of small-scale newspapers that had continued to publish during the war, Salt Lake City's Utah Nippo and the Denver-based Colorado Times and Rockii Shimpo. In New York a new journal, Hokubei Shimpo, took pride of place. The ethnic newspaper that attained the
