Americans, and then had been confined in all-Japanese camps during the war, now faced head-on the difficulties of living as a minority group. Even native Angelenos were often unable to return to their previous residences. In particular, the large prewar Japanese colony that had grown up around the canneries on Terminal Island in San Pedro had been, as one newspaper article described it, “the very pulse of prewar Japanese concentration around Los Angeles.”36 It had been wiped out in February 1942, when the navy had taken over the island and expelled its Japanese residents on forty-eight hours' notice. The island remained a naval installation after the war's end, and its population was forced to disperse, though a significant hub of fishermen and naval workers relocated to nearby Long Beach.
If the returnees held the advantage of familiarity with their surroundings, they also had a long-entrenched pattern of prejudice, newly inflamed by wartime passions, to combat. Public attitudes in Los Angeles were decidedly mixed, and the level of overall anti-Japanese prejudice is hard to quantify.37 Still, various controversies reveal the extent of tension and bias. In late summer 1944, through the efforts of the Pasadena-based fair play group Friends of the American Way, Esther Takei enrolled at Pasadena Junior College (today's Pasadena Community College), thus becoming the first Nisei since Pearl Harbor to be admitted to a Pacific coast college. A group of twenty local whites, supported by the California American Legion, campaigned publicly to exclude her. However, the college's faculty and student councils voted unanimously to accept Takei, and the Pasadena Board of Education announced that it had no power to refuse her, with the result that she was registered.38 Soon after, when the celebrated chemist Dr. Linus Pauling of the California Institute of Technology hired a Nisei gardener, the exterior of his Pasadena home was vandalized with signs calling him “Jap lover,” while a Japanese flag was painted on the house.39
The city's public stance on the resettlers was ambivalent at best. Mayor Fletcher Bowron, who had been a primary instigator of mass confinement and who had called in 1943 for all Nisei to be stripped of their American citizenship, made a public about-face. In January 1945, he announced that all returnees would be welcomed back to the city with their rights ensured, and he made a symbolic journey to Union Station to greet an initial group of returnees personally.40 After a meeting with Bowron in September 1946, Mike Masaoka warmly praised the city under his administration as “the white spot of the country as far as unpleasant incidents connected with our return to our former homes is concerned.”41 Nonetheless, in January 1946, L.A. county manager Wayne Allen caused a widespread anti-Japanese backlash when he made a fraudulent public statement that 4,000 Japanese Americans were on the county relief rolls. In fact, this figure included not only the fewer than 1,000 individuals actually receiving relief funds (almost all of whom were elderly Issei barred by discriminatory state laws from receiving old-age assistance) but more than 3,000 Issei and Nisei families in emergency public housing whom the county manager imputed would all ultimately become a public charge. The Los Angeles Times quickly chimed in with a complaint that Japanese Americans were refusing employment offers, and pressed unemployed workers to take jobs as citrus pickers. The Hearst-owned Los Angeles Herald-Express proclaimed editorially that idle Japanese American men should be put to work on road labor or public projects and “shipped back to Japan” if they refused to take such jobs.42
At the same time, securing housing was a contested and fraught process for the returnees. As in Detroit, the war had brought about a huge migration of war workers, who had taken up all available stock. In particular, there was an influx of African Americans from the South, whose arrival rapidly doubled the size of the region's black community. As a result of discrimination by white landlords as well as the overall housing shortage, many of the black migrants had no choice but to settle in the emptied Little Tokyo district (redubbed “Bronzeville”), which took on many characteristics of a slum area: overcrowding, crime, and poor public services. Meanwhile, as in Detroit, tensions over housing and recreation led to racial rioting in summer 1943, when invading white servicemen targeted blacks and Mexican Americans for assault in the so-called zoot suit riots.
As Japanese Americans began to return from the camps, the West Coast press voiced real fear of conflict between the returnees and the African Americans and others who would resist being displaced—fears that were further fanned by unscrupulous whites as a pretext for further exclusion.43 Then in February 1945, Rev. Julius Goldwater, a Buddhist priest who was the guardian of the Honjuwani Temple, prepared to restore the temple building to its Nikkei worshipers. He obtained an eviction order to remove a black Baptist congregation that had taken over space in the building previously leased by other parties.44 The dispute threatened to explode intergroup relations. As a result, leaders of the WRA, the NAACP, and other groups met to try to resolve further disputes over property. Gradually, Issei and Nisei landlords resumed their residence and reopened their businesses. Prewar hotels were transformed into rooming houses for returnee families. Meanwhile, other previous area residents doubled up or sought temporary housing while they waited for the leases on their properties to expire.
Again, as in Detroit, finding housing was largely impossible due to restrictive covenants in all-white areas, plus alien land legislation. In 1947, the Los Angeles Citizens' Housing Council organized a conference of more than a hundred organizations, which unanimously passed a resolution against restrictive covenants, and called for suspension of the Alien Land Act against the families of Nisei veterans.45 Nevertheless, a majority of the city's landscape remained closed to Japanese owners and tenants. The largest fraction of returnees moved into housing, much of it substandard, in East Los Angeles's Hollenbeck Heights and Boyle Heights areas. This area, formerly a racially mixed area with a large Jewish population, was in the process of losing its non-Latino population. Some returnees found housing on North Broadway near Chinatown, or in Jefferson Park, while a new enclave formed in Sawtelle.46 A large fraction of returnees took up residence alongside black neighbors in Watts. In the years after restrictive covenants were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, the largest fraction of the city's ethnic Japanese population moved into suburban Gardena.
Meanwhile, an estimated 4,000 Japanese Americans were forced into temporary housing. A network of hotels was set up by private groups. For example, the American Friends Service Committee and the Presbyterian Church in the United States established the Evergreen Hostel in a former school for Mexican American girls on Evergreen Avenue. The WRA petitioned the city to open thirty housing centers but was authorized to create only five. In the end, the WRA and the Federal Public Housing Authority (FPHA) hastily set up temporary housing centers in former army barracks, mixed with trailers, in sites in Hawthorne, El Segundo, and Lomita.47 In fall 1945, the Winona emergency housing project, made up of a group of converted trailers, was established by the FPHA in Burbank, and 1,300 Japanese Americans resettled there. After several months, a portion of the Winona residents found private housing, while others were moved to the camps with barracks. However, more than 500 of the residents were unable to find other housing. In March 1946, they were informed that the project was to be cleared, and some residents were expelled to other facilities. After protests by residents, they were permitted to stay on, and the majority ultimately purchased their trailers and moved off in them. The final group of 350 were relocated to a trailer camp leased by local Nisei in November 1947.48
Employment was another area in which Japanese American returnees had a particularly difficult experience. As in New York, part of the difficulty was due to official discrimination in city hiring. In January 1945 the County Board of Supervisors voted to bar Japanese Americans from civil service positions until at least ninety days after the end of the war, although its members admitted they had no legal basis for discrimination against those seeking the return of their jobs.49 The Church Federation of Los Angeles protested the refusal of the county to employ Nisei, but the policy stood. In April 1945, the Board of Supervisors turned down Dr. Masako Kusayanagi's request to return immediately from leave to her job at General Hospital. Though there was a vital physician shortage, the County Board of Charities insisted that Dr. Kusayanagi (despite her three years of service as an accredited physician at two different WRA camps) was still to be deemed a student in residency, the level she had attained at the time of removal,
