the Detroit Council of Churches established its own United Ministry to Resettlers. The Council invited Rev. Shigeo Tanabe, a Nisei pastor from Washington State, to operate the ministry. In 1945, after the WRA announced plans to wind up its operations, local civil leaders formed the Detroit Committee to Aid Resettlers of Japanese Ancestry, which operated approximately through the end of 1947. Under the auspices of the United Ministry to Resettlers, Tanabe established Fellowship House, a Nisei hostel, at 130 East Grand Boulevard. The WRA subsequently opened a family hostel at 3915 Trumbull in July 1945 under the auspices of the Buddhist Church of Detroit. Rev. and Mrs. Shawshew Sakow were the hostel's managers. In addition to serving as temporary housing for the resettlers, the hostels served as recreational centers, providing libraries and game rooms where the newcomers joined together for social events. In addition, a Nisei committee formed at the International Institute in 1944. It arranged biweekly dances and ping-pong nights to encourage sociability. Young Nisei joined baseball teams, and a Nisei basketball club participated in an interstate tournament. As in other places, the most popular Nisei sport was bowling—in 1945 an entire Detroit-area Nisei bowling league was formed. In mid-1946 a Detroit chapter of the JACL formed, under the leadership of Peter Fujioka.12
Permanent housing remained the most troublesome item on the resettlement aid agenda—as a report of the Detroit Relocation Committee put it, “Housing was the ‘nightmare' of all newcomers to the city.”13 The wartime economic boom had brought such a huge influx of war workers, primarily African Americans and white southerners, that local housing stock was completely inadequate to contain them. (So explosive was the housing shortage that the opening of a public housing project for African Americans, the Sojourner Truth Homes, in spring 1942 had touched off mass demonstrations and threats of violence by mobs of local whites who insisted that they should be assigned the homes.) Community activists directed their attention to solving the housing problem. Jack Shimoda, a Japanese American businessman who had lived in Detroit during the prewar era, purchased a boardinghouse on Forest Avenue, which was filled with new arrivals. A number of resettlers obtained long-term housing at the city's YMCA, which also hired a cadre of Nisei workers. Nevertheless, in the end, many Japanese Americans were obliged to settle in decrepit housing in or adjacent to the city's African American neighborhoods, as white areas were all but inaccessible.
The question of discrimination was a complex one. Detroit was notorious in prewar years as a center of Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist activity, with right-wing leader Gerald L. K. Smith and the anti-Semitic “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin as the movement's most visible figures. During the war, existing racial tensions between blacks and whites had been exacerbated by rapid population shifts, which led to overcrowding and shortages of transportation, schools, and housing. These tensions exploded into violent confrontation in June 1943, when fights at the city's Belle Isle resort area ignited a large-scale racial riot. The riot lasted three days, claiming thirty lives (twenty-five of them African Americans), and gave rise to lasting tensions. That said, according to various accounts, Nisei in Detroit felt welcomed. For example, Pacific Citizen columnist Dale Oka, who resettled in Detroit in June 1943, stated that he was initially wary of how he would be accepted, but was soon put at ease:
The reception accorded me since my advent to this area has surpassed my most optimistic hopes. Perhaps I belong to that fortunate few who found their relocation paths strewn with flowers of welcome instead of thorns. But I prefer to believe that the great majority of us have discovered their new lives to be similarly pleasant and encouraging.14
Liberal and religious groups in the city mobilized to aid Japanese Americans. As noted, the Detroit Council of Churches (which as early as spring 1942 had passed an official resolution deploring mass evacuation and calling for rapid loyalty hearings for Japanese Americans) took a leading role in aiding resettlers and in advocating for their rights. Public opinion, as reflected in media accounts, was overwhelmingly positive. The Detroit News editorialized in 1944, “There are now numbers of Japanese here, migrants from the Pacific coast, whose records have been sifted and who should be regarded and treated as loyal friends in the war against Japan.”15The following year, the Detroit Free Press ran a positive article on the approximately 2,000 Japanese Americans, whom it termed “all American citizens who speak our own language,” living in Detroit. The article featured an interview with Mrs. Terry Koyama, who praised the treatment she had received in Detroit and expressed optimism about her future: “The dispersal was good because we used to live too close together on the West Coast, anyway. Now we're more spread out and we have a better chance—without the old prejudices.”16
Still, both anecdotal evidence and the records of the WRA's Detroit office, which was responsible for finding jobs and advocating for the newcomers, testify to widespread patterns of discrimination. When the Yoshiki family left camp for Detroit in 1944, one family member who traveled ahead to find housing called a local hotel to reserve a room. When he appeared at the hotel, however, the hotel's owners—shocked to discover that Mr. Yoshiki was Japanese and not Polish, as they had assumed from his name—refused him lodging.17 Educational discrimination was also palpable in the Detroit area. At the outset of war, administrators at the University of Michigan made a confidential decision to limit admission of Nisei students to a quota of twenty-seven per year, spread among the university's different faculties. When challenged on its discriminatory policy, the university denied that it had established any quota, and defended its policy on the pretext that the FBI and army refused to grant clearances (a transparent falsehood in view of the fact that the Military Intelligence Service language school was on campus, housing Nisei students and instructors, and that the university simultaneously hired more than 200 Nisei employees to take up menial-labor jobs on its grounds). Even after all government controls over Nisei students were abandoned in fall 1944, the university maintained its discriminatory policy.18
Employers and labor unionists also were mixed in their reactions to Japanese Americans. The local chapter of the AFL-affiliated Teamsters Union (following national policy) was extremely hostile to Nisei and refused to allow them to join the union or to support their employment in the trucking industry. The leadership of the CIO was supportive—United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther even joined a delegation to ask the Detroit Housing Commission to open public housing to Japanese Americans—but local activists were often recalcitrant. In Ann Arbor, the CIO refused to accept Japanese Americans in a factory producing defense material. Similarly, in April 1944, Tom Nakamura, a resettler from Jerome, was hired by the Palmer Company, a Detroit war plant. When he appeared for work, employees staged a walkout to protest the hiring of a Nisei. Although swift action by the local Fair Employment Practices Committee and local CIO officials limited the action to a single day and ensured Nakamura's continued employment, the incident revealed the existence of widespread, if subtle, currents of anti-Nisei sentiment.19
The experience of Issei and Nisei in New York forms an interesting contrast with that of their Michigan counterparts. The community in Detroit, created as a result of the wartime migration, was close-knit and composed mainly of industrial and other blue-collar laborers. In contrast, the experience of resettlers in New York City during the 1940s reflects the larger narrative of the city's distinctive Nikkei (ethnic Japanese) community. Like the larger city itself, the Big Apple's Nikkei population was notable as early as the nineteenth century for its demographic and occupational diversity, a culture of cosmopolitanism, and pol itical and artistic effervescence. In stark contrast to its Pacific coast counterparts, the New York community was also marked by lack of group cohesion and a readiness to absorb transients and new arrivals. Both these salient characteristics—cosmopolitanism and political/artistic self-assertion—were accentuated with the coming of World War II.
It is impossible to properly understand the wartime development of New York's ethnic Japanese population without a sense of the community's history. To summarize very briefly, the first Japanese immigrants arrived in the New York area during the late 1800s, and by 1920 the local Japanese community had swelled to 5,000-6000 people. While this represented only a tiny fraction of the city's population, it was enough to make New York's Nikkei community the fifth-largest in the nation. However, this community, unlike its counterparts
