level were filled.50 When Amy Nomi applied for a job at L.A. County Hospital in September she was turned away on the excuse of the board's decision. After Dorothy Okura placed first on her civil service exam as social worker with the County Board of Charities, the board claimed the privilege to hire the second-place finisher.51 Other public sector agencies were also touched by bias. A Los Angeles post office gained widespread attention when it refused to rehire a former Nisei employee who was a decorated war veteran, though other post offices, and the Board of Education, hired Nisei clerical work-ers.52 Still, as outrageous as such legal bias was, it served merely as a continuation of the notorious employment bars that had existed in prewar years, when only a few dozen Nisei had held civil service positions.53
The situation was scarcely better in the private sector. Throughout the postwar years, there were various reports of private discrimination. Although one industrialist with a cannery on Terminal Island had promised in early 1945 to employ 100 returnees, few office and factory employers rushed to open places for the returnees. An aluminum company that had hired a Nisei employee was forced to discharge him following a hate strike by other employees.54 Once again, this did not represent a large-scale shift from prewar patterns of exclusion. The difference is that before the war, employment was available inside the community. Over the first half of the twentieth century, masses of Issei were able to use savings and community mutual aid funds to establish independent small businesses. Their Nisei descendants, despite a high average level of educational achievement, were all but unemployable in mainstream firms. Thus, apart from a small minority who secured executive positions working for Japanese firms, the Nisei were able to support themselves and their families by working for family or community-based enterprises (for which they were generally overqualified) or opening their own businesses. After the war, in contrast, Issei and Nisei found financing of new businesses unavailable, and there were no Japanese firms to take up the slack. Occupational downward mobility, at least in the short term, was the rule for Nisei as well as Issei. Former store owners were reduced to working as domestic servants, while truck farmers and market directors found work as gardeners and handy-men. Astoundingly, while less than 20 percent of Japanese American workers in Los Angeles region were employed by whites before the war, the total rose to approximately 70 percent afterward.55
To an even greater extent than in other cites, Issei and Nisei were thrown back on themselves and forced to join into ethnic-specific groups to respond to the difficulties facing them. A network of JACL chapters formed in the different Nisei enclaves, and Nisei veterans' groups attracted numerous community members. Postwar Los Angeles boasted two daily Japanese newspapers, as the prewar journals Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi resumed daily publication, while the progressive English-language weekly Crossroads debuted in 1948. By the same token, even more than in New York—and in marked contrast to Detroit—the resettlers in Los Angeles engaged with African Americans in daily life and community action, especially in Little Tokyo/Bronzeville. The center of interracial unity was Pilgrim House, a settlement house opened for African Americans in the vacated Japanese Union Church in 1943 and headed by Rev. Charles Kingsley. Kingsley took the lead in welcoming Issei and Nisei resettlers. Pilgrim House provided returnees with day care, athletic facilities, and crafts classes. Its Common Ground committee, headed by volunteer worker Samuel Ishikawa, helped resolve conflicts between Japanese Americans, blacks, and Chícanos.56 Nisei activists responded in kind. Mary Oyama Mittwer crusaded for interracialism and denounced Nisei bigotry against other groups in her Rafu Shimpo column, “New World A-Coming.” Hisaye Yamamoto, hired as a columnist by the African American Los Angeles Tribune newspaper to serve as a bridge between the two communities, joined Wakako Yamuchi and other activists in founding a Los Angeles chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, and in 1947-48 the two organized a series of intergroup sit-ins and picket lines to desegregate the Bullock's department store lunchroom and the Bimini Baths, a swimming resort.
Still, Hisaye Yamamoto and other writers complained that relations between the two groups in Little Tokyo/Bronzeville continued to “stink.” Discrimination by Issei shop owners and pressure from Nisei who sought to displace black residents led to resentment.57 The ethnic Japanese press complained of a “Negro crime wave” in Little Tokyo/Bronzeville during 1946-47, and a merchants' group hired a pair of Nisei ex-GIs as security guards.58 In March 1947 a community meeting was organized by G. Raymond Booth, executive director of the Council for Civic Unity, and Rev. Kingsley in an effort to resolve the strained relations between the two communities. Various speakers, including W. E. B. Du Bois, called for conflict resolution and tolerance.59 Improvement was slow, though, and barely six months later the Union Church ordered Pilgrim House to vacate the premises. Stripped of a permanent residence, it folded not long after.
In sum, the process of resettlement and readaptation of Japanese Americans took shape in rather distinct forms and at varying speeds in different areas. A comparative view suggests that while conditions on the West Coast were more unfriendly to the migrants, generally speaking, the ability of the newcomers to find acceptable employment and housing was also influenced by other factors, such as the size of the resettler population and the existence of social welfare agencies to advocate for the migrants. In addition, various similarities between Detroit and Los Angeles in the first period of resettlement suggest that the presence of large wartime migrant populations in any city, and rising ethnic tensions that accompanied the strain on municipal facilities, may have had as much to do with the treatment of Issei and Nisei as did historic bias toward Japanese Americans.
Japanese American resettlers in New York, like those elsewhere, faced many difficulties. Yet Issei as well as Nisei there, inspired by the city's cosmopolitan spirit, were used to living and working unrestricted by discrimination, and to dealing with other citizens on an equal basis. This attitude of openness may have sowed the seeds for a more rapid and successful adjustment by the small but disproportionately intellectual-minded and artistic group of Nisei who resettled there than either their counterparts in Detroit or Southern California were able to achieve. However, the relatively small size of the New York community, and the lack of ostentatious discrimination, also meant that there was little force holding the community together, especially after 1948.
PART II
The Varieties of Assimilation
4. Birth of a Citizen
Miné Okubo and the Politics of Symbolism
Citizen 13660, Miné Okubo's illustrated memoir of her personal experience during the wartime removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans, is a masterpiece of ambiguity. Like many works of art and literature by African Americans, Citizen 13660 has often been assimilated by latter day critics into the protest tradition.1 These critics make much of Okubo's trickster nature and her use of double-sided combinations of words and images as weapons of resistance. Pointing to the disjunction between the narrative and Okubo's accompanying drawings, they contend that beneath the text's apparently clear (and supposedly inoffensive) surface narrative lurk various subversive and radical messages awaiting decryption by the attentive reader. For example, Pamela Stennes Wright finds that Okubo employs two narrative strategies throughout her book—an overt narrative that documents the story of a loyal American citizen who “must come to an understanding of her evacuation and internment” plus a covert narrative that suggests the injustices of official policy by depicting the massive disruption it wreaked on Japanese Americans.2 “The genius of Okubo's book,” Elena Tajima Creef adds, “is the unusual combination of visual and literary narrative that allows her to tell both stories…[pairing] its provocative, and subversive, use of the autobiographical ‘I’…with the observational power of the artist's ‘eye.’” 3
Even though I find the various critical explorations of subversive currents in Okubo's work engaging, they tend to privilege a rather recondite subtextual reading as the essential version. Worse, they focus so single-mindedly on locating resistance and
