At the same time, an eloquent letter from an army major to the WRA scored the unjust treatment of the newcomers:
It is unbelievable that people of Japanese ancestry are finding a happy haven in New York City. Japanese businessmen and workers interviewed must be making statements which they THINK they should, if they say that everything is sweet and serene—that they are entirely comfortable and happy here. That is definitely not the word that passes between them.…This is brought to my attention almost daily by a fifty-nine year old Japanese cook in my employ in New York City. He has been in this country thirty-nine years.…Whenever he goes along the street he is pointed at by adults and children who indicate that he is probably a spy. When he goes into public places, nearby people engage in loud and disturbing conversation which is not directed at him but which he is supposed to hear. HE is not writing to other Japanese friends suggesting that they come here.31
There was some official as well as unofficial discrimination. New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia was openly hostile to Japanese Americans (although he made a generous public endorsement after Pearl Harbor of the loyalty of a local Issei, New York Philharmonic xylophonist Yoichi Hiraoka). La Guardia refused to protect Japanese Americans faced with being fired from city jobs or to permit others to be hired, although he was willing to experiment with hiring fifty Japanese Americans for “hospital helper” positions to reduce a desperate hospital worker shortage. In April 1944, when the WRA announced its plans to open its Brooklyn hostel, La Guardia publicly denounced the project and asserted that resettled internees were not welcome to enter New York. Not only did they threaten the city's security, he insisted dubiously, but their presence would spark riots among the city's Chinese population.32
The records of the WRA's New York office, which was responsible for finding jobs and housing for the newcomers, also testify to a widespread pattern of job discrimination. For example, a letter asking the A&P grocery store chain to consider hiring Nisei was met with a cold rebuff: “The question of placement of American Japanese citizens with our company has been discussed and it was decided we could hardly consider employing them at this time because of public reaction to such a move.”33 In late September 1943, two Nisei, Kenji Ota and Hideo Tanaka, were sent by the WRA to interview for welding jobs with a New York company that maintained a shipyard in Camden, New Jersey. Although the company assured the WRA their need for welders was desperate, Ota and Tanaka were forced to wait until several weeks after their initial interview to hear from the company. They then were summoned for a second interview. This time they were interviewed by a uniformed army officer, who proceeded to ask them a set of extraordinarily irrelevant and insulting questions, such as whether they were fluent in Japanese and whether they hoped Japan would win the war. WRA officers were so outraged by these harassing tactics that they made an official complaint and had the two Nisei provide affidavits testifying to their experience.34 After 1945, when New York State passed the Ives-Quinn bill, the first state fair employment practices legislation, job discrimination became more subtle and somewhat less widespread.
Still, even if resettlement in New York in many ways resembled that in other cities, the city was remarkable for the unusually rapid adjustment of the migrants. The reasons for this are twofold. First, whereas ethnic Japanese communities in other cities were too small or too insecure and wary of newcomers to offer them substantial aid, New York had a long-existing, self-confident Japanese community, with restaurants, churches, and grocery stores to serve the newcomers. In addition, the Japanese population in this most rootless of cities had always been heavily young, educated, and transient, so there was less suspicion of outsiders and sojourners than elsewhere. The second reason is that New York, a historic center of settlement houses and charity work, was much better equipped than most cities with non-Japanese agencies to serve the immediate needs of the resettlers and get them on their feet. Beginning in mid-1942, the Protestant Welfare Council assigned one of its specialists to locate jobs and housing for Japanese Americans so that they could leave the camps, while the American Baptist Home Mission Society dispatched workers to greet and look after the newcomers. The Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America hired Rev. Toru Matsumoto to head their Committee on Resettlement of Japanese Americans in order to coordinate efforts. With aid from the WRA, a coalition of religious groups formed the New York City Advisory Committee on Japanese Americans in May 1943, and organized a conference on resettlement. In 1945 the WRA and the fledgling New York chapter of the JACL came together to organize the Japanese American Coordinating Committee of New York City. After the WRA announced plans to cease operations, the Greater New York Citizens Committee for Japanese-Americans formed in November 1945, under the leadership of George Yamaoka (who shortly thereafter left for Tokyo to join the war crimes team) and Robert Benjamin.
At the same time, New York's Japanese resettlers passed more easily into the city's intellectual and artistic mainstream. New York was certainly not without racism—the 1943 Harlem riot had baldly demonstrated racial tensions and the impact of discrimination—and the newcomers did face various forms of exclusion, as noted. Still, the cosmopolitan tradition of the city gave them a major assist. Almost immediately, art galleries and museums featured shows with Japanese American artists, while a select group of Issei and Nisei found employment in the creative arts: Robert Kuwahara created a daily syndicated comic strip, Miki; Yuriko Amemiya danced with Martha Graham and on Broadway; Ruby Yoshino toured as a concert singer; and Michi Nishiura became a costume designer. (Miné Okubo, as will be detailed in Chapter 4, made a career as an author/illustrator.) A constellation of visual artists, including such figures as Henry Sugimoto, Hideo Date, Hisako Hibi, Lewis Suzuki, and Hideo Kobashigawa, took up long-term residence in the city. Conversely, even if they faced difficulties with housing and employment, the character of the newcomers made their social adjustment easier. Unlike in other regions, the migrants were not primarily farmers with little experience of urban life. Rather, like their predecessors during the 1930s, the Nisei who chose to resettle in New York were educated, articulate, and wide-ranging in their interests and associations. A number of them, including Ernest Iiyama, Chiye Mori, Tak and Kazu Iijima, Dyke Miyagawa, Kenny Murase, Joe Oyama, Eddie Shimano, Ina Sugihara, and Nori Ikeda Lafferty, had been active during the prewar Popular Front years in political and activist groups along the West Coast (notably the Los Angeles and Bay Area Nisei Democrats clubs). Others, such as James Nakamura, Shuji Fujii, Carl Kondo, Bob Kuwahara, and Miné Okubo, were writers and artists who had staffed prewar and/or camp newspapers. They were able to parlay their experience into leadership roles in community institutions, most notably the Japanese American Committee for Democracy, in the process acting as liaisons between the WRA, social welfare organizations, and pro-immigrant groups such as the Common Council for American Unity and the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born.
It is impossible to do justice in a brief sketch to the wide diversity of experiences of the thousands of Japanese Americans who migrated to Los Angeles after camp, but a summary view reveals that their circumstances were in some ways quite distinct from their counterparts in either Detroit or New York. First, the scale and timing of their entry and adjustment were very different. Because the West Coast did not even begin to open its doors until late 1944 and the WRA discouraged mass return, resettlement in Southern California was primarily a postwar process. However, the movement, once started, became a flood: by mid-1947 there were 28,000 people of Japanese ancestry in Los Angeles County (as compared with 37,000 before removal), making it the largest ethnic Japanese population on the continent.35 Unlike in the other cities, the returnees were by no means the first Japanese Americans ever seen in the Los Angeles area: many were returning to areas where they had lived before the war, and in various cases resuming their prewar occupations or business ventures. By the same token, in returning home, they lacked the sense of exile or temporary residence that was felt by a large fraction of those who resettled in the East and Midwest.
That said, as in Detroit and New York, many resettlers in Los Angeles were newcomers. Large numbers of migrants who had lived in rural areas before the war now crowded into the city limits: Issei who had long resided in ethnic enclaves but had been unable to reclaim their property now settled in mixed areas where they were surrounded by non-Japanese neighbors. Nisei who had grown
