circulation was the Chicago Shimpo, whose progressive political outlook, in both its Japanese and English sections, attracted large-scale community attention (both positive and negative). During these same years, a set of all-English weekly newspapers started up, including Crossroads in Los Angeles, Northwest Times in Seattle, Progressive News in San Francisco, and Nisei Weekender in New York City, though most soon folded. In addition, Nisei Vue, a short-lived glossy quarterly magazine, started life in 1947. It was succeeded by Scene, which had a longer run (1950-57). The premier Nisei publication was the Pacific Citizen, organ of the JACL, which was published under the dynamic editorship of Larry Tajiri. Although the Pacific Citizen lost the near-monopoly of the Japanese American press that it had enjoyed during the war, it remained a forum for news and opinion on a nationwide scale.
One clear area of division between the West Coast and the rest of the country was the level of race-based harassment and bias. To be sure, Nisei in many areas faced insults or were refused service in stores, and job discrimination was widespread throughout the country. However, both anecdotal evidence and records testify to more widespread patterns of ethnic-based hostility and exclusion by West Coast whites, which remained unchanged into the postwar period. There were thirty-eight documented instances of terrorism against resettlers in California over the months that followed the opening of the West Coast, including sabotage of equipment, torching of barns, and shots fired into houses. Local WRA officials were forced into action in support of returnees. They lobbied newspapers to offer positive coverage of Issei and Nisei, protested harassment and violence, and looked into allegations of racial discrimination.
Furthermore, unlike in the rest of the country, the ugly climate on the West Coast was reflected in official policy. State public assistance bodies generally refused to fund or direct the absorption and adjustment of the resettlers. Instead, local WRA offices, which lacked staff and funding for such tasks, were forced to take up the burden of organizing private charity. Washington State governor Mon Wallgren maintained that Japanese Americans were not welcome in his state.9 In contrast, California governor Earl Warren called for full and positive public compliance with the return of Japanese Americans to their old homes once the army lifted exclusion. Yet, as will be noted more fully later in this volume, Warren also signed various discriminatory legislative measures designed to discourage Issei and Nisei from returning. In 1943 the California legislature allocated funds for escheat suits to enforce the long-dormant Alien Land Act against Japanese immigrants “ineligible to citizenship” and take away the property they had acquired. The legislature meanwhile enacted a new law forbidding all Japanese immigrants to hold fishing licenses.
Despite these overall national and regional patterns, there were significant variations in the experience of resettlers in individual cities throughout the country. A close review of the progress of resettlement reveals both surprising similarities and differences, all of which complicate easy distinctions between resettlement on the West Coast and that outside. By way of illustration, let us compare Japanese American resettlement in three key urban areas, Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles. While very divergent pol itically and economically, each of these three areas served as a regional economic center, and each underwent important demographic shifts during World War II, including massive inmigration by southern white and African American war workers. All three, notably, were scarred by large-scale rioting and interracial conflict during summer 1943.
The initial resettlement of Japanese Americans from the camps to the Detroit area followed in its outlines the larger patterns of migration. Just over 3,000 Issei and Nisei moved to Michigan directly from camp during the war years, of whom a large majority settled in the greater Detroit area. (In addition, 534 Japanese Americans moved to Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, where a military language school was created.) More specifically, WRA records list 1,007 Japanese Americans who took up residence within Detroit's city limits during 1943-44, making it the fifth-largest center of resettlement nationwide after Chicago, Denver, New York, and Cleveland. Of this total, almost 90 percent (899) were Nisei.Once West Coast exclusion was lifted, migration slowed drastically. Individual Issei and family groups predominated among postwar migrants—Issei accounted for 186 of the 456 newcomers to the city between January 1, 1945, and spring 1946.10
In addition to those arrivals listed by the WRA, the city's midcentury ethnic Japanese population was swelled by the arrival of various former camp inmates who had initially resettled elsewhere (and thus did not appear on resettlement registers). For example, Fred Korematsu, who unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of mass removal in the U.S. Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States, originally resettled out of camp in Salt Lake City, but then moved to Detroit in 1944 to join his older brother Hi Korematsu. Furthermore, some Nisei who had not been confined in camp decided to make Detroit their home. The architect Minoru Yamasaki, future designer of the World Trade Center, who had spent the war years in New York, was hired in 1945 as chief of design for the architectural firm of Smith Hinchman & Grylls, and took up residence in Detroit. Another transplanted New Yorker, sociologist T. Scott Miyakawa, entered the area in 1944 after he was hired as a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan. At the same time, a small colony of Japanese Canadians who had suffered official removal from Canada's west coast resettled in Windsor, Ontario, where they interacted with the nearby Detroit community.
In the vast majority of cases, the Japanese American newcomers had never previously lived in or even visited Detroit (whose prewar Japanese population was limited to a few dozen individuals—103 as of the 1930 census). Those who settled in outlying rural areas were almost exclusively employed in farm labor. Inside the city the newcomers took up all sorts of jobs. A large percentage of Issei of both sexes worked as domestics or gardeners; Nisei women also found work as stenographers and secretaries, and Nisei men were also employed as dishwashers in city restaurants and as blue-collar workers in the city's dominant automobile industry and allied trades. The Ford Motor Company, which had hired Issei engineers since the 1910s and was traditionally known for friendliness to African American labor, became a major employer of Nisei resettlers, as did the Chrysler Corporation. Kustu Ishimaru and Gilbert Kurihara worked as auto mechanics in garages, while Bill Kitamura was employed by the Detroit Street Railway. Other big employers of Nisei labor included the Briggs Manufacturing Company, the Essex Wire Company, Gar Wood Industries, and the Ex-cell-o Company. Groups of younger Nisei attended college or studied in trade schools. Wayne University welcomed a number of Nisei students—including a class of fifteen cadet nurses preparing for military duty. Grace Hospital engaged a pair of Nisei physicians as residents. A half-dozen Nisei beauticians graduated from the Dermaway University of Hair and Beauty Culture in mid-1945.11
As time passed, a wider spectrum of skilled and salesclerk jobs opened up. By 1945, Frank Doi was hired as a dental lab technician, Grace Fujii was employed as a hospital social worker, George Kawamoto ran a photography studio, and Roy Setsuda was hired as an interior decorator. Others found public sector positions: Marie Doi was employed as a relocation officer by the WRA's Detroit office, while Roku Yasui worked for the city's Postwar Planning Division, and Jane Togasaki worked for the Michigan State Health Department. A few Japanese Americans went into business for themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Masujiro Ishioka, an Issei couple, operated an apartment house on Cass Avenue. Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Yasutake started a dry goods store in the suburb of Royal Oak. The most popul ar Nisei small business (capitalizing on popular stereotypes of Asian labor) was the laundry. George Akamine, Mas Hashimoto, and Tom and Jimmie Tagami and their families each opened cleaning establishments in Detroit. Few re-settlers were able to establish themselves in management or white-collar positions, although the community was served by a group of medical professionals such as dentists Kiyoshi Sonoda and Mark Kanda and optometrist John Koyama.
As in other cities, the task of aiding the absorption and adjustment of the resettlers was taken up by a coalition of the local WRA office with private church and welfare groups. As early as mid-1942, WRA resettlement director Thomas Holland and George Rundquist of the Protestant Council of Churches organized a Detroit Resettlement Committee under the lead of the Reverend Father James McCormick to help locate housing and jobs for the resettlers. In September 1943 (following the lead of Rev. T.
