was not composed of farm workers or fishermen, but included merchants, domestics, office workers (many of whom worked for Japanese firms), and industrial laborers—notably shipyard workers.20 Even after the 1924 Nationalities Act cut off immigration from Japan and the city's Nikkei population contracted, Japanese citizens—consular officials, businessmen, ministers, students, and artists—continued to arrive as temporary residents, and sometimes for extended stays.
In addition, throughout the prewar decades New York gained renown as a center for ethnic Japanese intellectuals, artists, and performers. The city was home at various times to such internationally known figures as scientists Hideyo Noguchi and Jokichi Takamine; writers Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann; dancer Michio Ito; soprano Hizi Koyke; and painters Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Eitaro Ishigaki, Chuzo Tamotsu, and Hideo Noda.21 Columbia University attracted a range of Japanese students, even as authors Roy Akagi (director of the nationally based Japanese Student Christian Association), Etsu Sugimoto, and Bunji Omura taught there. During the 1930s the community was also graced by the presence of dissidents from Japan such as Toru Matsumoto, Jack Shirai, Taro and Mitsu Yashima (Jun and Mimosa Iwamatsu), and Haru Matsui (Ayako Ishigaki), who found refuge in the city and built networks of friends and political supporters.22
Nikkei communities in New York reflected the city's cosmopolitan flavor. Unlike on the West Coast, Issei faced no alien land laws or restrictive covenants. Affluent Japanese migrated away from the city center. (The 1921 New York Japanese Address Book lists a dozen suburbs on Long Island and Westchester County with Japanese residents.) Furthermore, New York society lacked the laws against intermarriage and many of the sexual stigmas that marked the West Coast. According to one community survey in the mid-1930s, at least one-third and possibly as many as half of community members married non-Japanese spouses.23 In turn, relatively few of New York's Issei residents brought their Japanese families to live with them. Thus, in addition to being the only Nikkei community of any size east of the Pacific coast, New York's was the only one in the nation where most residents were Japanese aliens and not their Nisei offspring.
Although a few Nisei who subsequently achieved fame were raised in the New York region, such as activists Bill Kochiyama and Toshi Ohta Seeger and photographer Yoichi Okamoto, the city's Nisei population grew largely through internal migration. During the 1920s and 1930s educated Nisei from other parts of the country settled in New York, where they could more easily express their talents. Prominent among these were sculptor Isamu Noguchi, sociologist T. Scott Miyakawa, lawyer George Yamaoka, photographer Toge Fujihira, architect Minoru Yamasaki, activist Tokie Slocum, and journalists Larry Tajiri and Tooru Kanazawa. In addition, the city was home during the 1930s to a set of early Nisei book authors: memoirist Kathleen Tamagawa, novelist Kay Karl Endow (Karl Nakagawa), and poets Kimi Gengo and Kikuko Miyakawa.24
The city's Japanese population was enriched by a number of social and financial institutions founded early in the century, including the Nippon Club (1905), the Japanese American Association (1907), and a series of newspapers, climaxing with the Nyokyu Shimpo newspaper (1911; a separate English-language journal, the Japanese American Review, was spun off in 1939). The community was likewise served by Christian churches and missions, starting with the Japanese Christian Institute (1899), plus the New York Buddhist Church, founded by Rev. Hozen Seki in 1938.25These organizations were operated in large part by employees of Japanese firms doing business in New York, with assistance from the Manhattan-based Japanese consulate, and tended to be conservative and pro-Japan in their viewpoint. They were counterbalanced by organizations founded by left-leaning Issei artists and intellectuals. Under the leadership of the pioneering Marxist Sen Katayama, leftist New Yorkers founded the Japanese Socialist (later Japanese Communist) Group in America in 1919, and the Nihonjin Rodosha Kurabu (Japanese Workers Club) a decade later.26
In the months before Pearl Harbor, as American boycotts stalled Japanese commerce and war clouds loomed, many of the businessmen and consular officials who were the mainstay of the community returned to Japan. Once war was declared, the FBI rounded up several hundred remaining Japanese diplomatic officials, merchants, and community leaders, who were interned at Ellis Island. The New York branches of Japanese firms shut their doors, even as masses of ethnic Japanese were fired from their jobs by non-Japanese employers, throwing the community into difficult economic straits. Meanwhile, a curfew, travel restrictions, and limits on bank withdrawals were imposed on the Issei as enemy aliens. The community's two newspapers, the Nichi-Bei jiho and its English-language offshoot, The Japanese American Review, were closed. While some of those interned were later released, their community leadership had by then passed away to a left-l eaning antifascist group, the Japanese American Committee for Democracy. The JACD produced a monthly newsletter and community surveys, found jobs for dismissed Japanese workers, and sponsored forums and demonstrations in favor of victory over Japan. (On the JACD, see Chapter 10 in this volume.)
Still, New York was formally unaffected by Executive Order 9066, and with the emptying out of the West Coast, the city became the largest “free” Nikkei community on the United States mainland. As the war went on, former West Coast residents released from the camps began to arrive, and the city's ethnic Japanese population swelled. At least 1,000 migrants resettled in New York during 1943-44, and they continued to arrive in even greater numbers during 1945 and 1946. As a result, the city's Japanese population grew from barely 2,000 in mid-1942 to about three times that number in 1946-47. The Japanese Americans who resettled in New York during 1943-1944 were almost entirely Nisei (at least 70 percent), while anecdotal evidence from the WRA's New York office indicates that a large number of the perhaps 1,500 migrants who moved to New York in 1945-46 were families and individual Issei.27
As with Detroit, in the vast majority of cases the resettlers had never previously lived in New York, and most had never even visited. Moreover, because New York was so distant from the camps, the new arrivals had usually spent an initial resettlement period elsewhere, and therefore were comparatively more affluent and adjusted to life “outside.” Although the newcomers held all sorts of jobs, a large percentage of Issei worked as domestics or gardeners. Nisei men also took jobs as dishwashers in city restaurants, as hotel bellhops, as laundry workers, or as hospital staffers. Women worked as nurses, stenographers, and secretaries. As time passed and more jobs opened up, Nisei took jobs as salesclerks, service workers, and skilled laborers. Groups of younger Nisei attended college at Columbia, New York University, and the city's four public colleges (the future CUNY system), as well as denominational colleges, business schools, and trade schools—ihere were even seventeen Nisei girls studying at the Traphagan fashion school. Nevertheless, in contrast to other resettlement areas, numerous newcomers—Nisei and even some Issei—were able to open their own businesses, including grocery stores, restaurants, and machine repair shops.28
The newcomers also tended to congregate together residentially. The WRA opened a hostel in Brooklyn Heights in mid-1944, and a few hundred resettlers lived there during its two-year existence. Others settled in the Manhattan Hostel, opened by the Community Church and the New York Unitarian Service Committee in fall 1945. Even after they left their temporary quarters, many resettlers found permanent housing in two small Japanese American enclaves. One was located on the West Side around 106th-110th Streets, near the Japanese American Methodist Church, an area that one wit soon dubbed the “umeboshi [pickled plum] district.” A second group moved into Inwood, near Manhattan's northern tip, where another Japanese American church set up operations.29 Unlike Detroit and the West Coast, however, the newcomers did not generally face restrictive covenants barring them from all-white districts. Though the skyrocketing price of housing made more affluent neighborhoods generally unaffordable, relatively few Issei and Nisei took up residence in African American areas such as Harlem or the South Bronx.
Again, as with Detroit, the question of discrimination is complex. According to various accounts, New York was the first place the West Coast refugees were not made to feel different because of their Japanese ancestry. One woman later stated that the city breathed liberation: “I became a free person for the first
