fact, the postwar history of internment anchors us in Chicago because thousands resettled there. Thus we tend to think about internment as a western story, but it is really a national one if we include demobilization in World War II’s time line.
We also have to rethink time, not just territory. The war began for Japanese Americans in government prisons. Midway through, the War Department granted them permission to leave if they swore their loyalty and found paid work east of the Mississippi. Here, they were in a strange moment of postinternment but not postwar, with many family and friends still in camp. In December 1944, the government revoked the exclusion orders, enabling them to return home, but the war was still on and most were afraid to go west. Their full release came after two atomic bombs ended the war in a place far away but deeply connected to them. Yet it was not until March 1946 that the last of those held as “security risks” were freed. It would take years for Japanese Americans to rebuild, and decades until the government admitted the injustice and apologized. In 1990, survivors or their descendants saw their first redress payments for what they had lost during incarceration. How, then, do we date World War II’s end for them?
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was an explosive start of the war, but for Japanese Americans on the mainland, their war began as a series of involuntary moving days. First, in the spring of 1942, families hastily packed their bags (only two per person allowed) and went to what the government called “assembly centers,” temporary holding areas where the bureaucracy of detention stalled until full-fledged concentration camps could be built. Here, families stayed an average of three months, a strange limbo lived in converted racetracks and stockyards that previewed the misery of the more permanent “relocation centers.” In these prison camps, conditions were only marginally better than some of the animal habitats they had just left. Japanese Americans moved into “blocks,” rows of long, rectangular buildings, each divided into small rooms, one room per family—no matter the size. These “apartments,” as they were called, were essentially army barracks lacking even the most basic amenities, some of them not even finished when the prisoners arrived. Bathing and going to the bathroom were now painfully awkward communal acts. Internee complaints about their apartments sound much like those in the rent control files, and like those tenants, camp residents had an official process through which to grieve wretched conditions. But they were prisoners, not renters, and barbed wire and men with guns made Chicago landlords’ power seem trifling by comparison.6
Each of these moves required trains, the workhorses of modern warfare and the equipment that ferried Japanese Americans into and out of federal custody. On the trains into camp, Japanese Americans rode as prisoners, sitting upright, tightly packed, windows closed and shades down by order of the military.7 On the way out, they rode like tourists, shades up, eyes wide open, surveying landscapes they were seeing for the first time. Before the war, few had any reason to go east for either work or family; that was in ready supply on the West Coast, where Japanese immigrants had first settled early in the century. Only a plucky few had crossed the Mississippi, with less than four hundred recorded in Chicago on the eve of World War II.8 As we will see, that number would rise dramatically when, in mid-1942, the WRA adopted a policy that allowed internees to apply for work leaves. This meant they could leave camp, perhaps indefinitely, as long as they had a job.
Their third and final move then was their postinternment resettlement, a longed-for liberation, but an exit wound, of sorts, for prison life had done some damage but how much was still unclear. Fanning out from western and southern camps, Japanese American migrants began their midwestern urbanization. Chicago emerged as the destination city for two reasons. First, it had an unusually diverse wartime economy, and this promised the most potential matches for a population unsure of how its West Coast skills might translate in a different labor market. According to People in Motion, the WRA’s landmark study of resettlement, Chicago “was booming, the demand for workers was great, and wages were as high as could be found anywhere.”9 For parolee-migrants who had lost everything, Chicago promised the chance to refill family coffers. As early as 1943, the talk in many camps was of Chicago as the “City of Opportunity”; at the Jerome, Arkansas, camp, for example, a survey of those exiting showed Chicago as their “first preference.”10
But the city lured resettlers for another reason. Quite simply, it was not the west (a place they could not return to anyway), yet by wartime standards, Chicago was allegedly approachable, even friendly. That friendliness (a regionalism midwesterners still love to claim) was more myth than fact, but enough Japanese Americans experienced it to turn them into believers. In many accounts, train-riding pioneers reported that Chicagoans welcomed them without hostility. In March 1943, with the WRA’s permission, Shotaro Hikida and a friend left the Gila River, Arizona, prison camp to do some reconnaissance of racial attitudes. Their plan was to make a field trip to Chicago and enjoy the city the way any white person would, and then report their findings to WRA staff. The WRA’s investment in the trip was more than curiosity. Unnerved by prisoner demonstrations at two camps, Myer and his staff pondered whether and how they could detain so many for so long. Their solution was the “work release,” a program that would allow internees to leave for short- and long-term paid work assignments. It was at least a partial answer to the unrest, Myer thought. But first, both Issei and Nisei would have “to be assured about the kind of reception they might expect.”11 To that end, WRA authorities let camp leaders such as Hikida make fact-finding trips, hoping to use his stories to advertise, especially to the older and more fearful Issei, that there was, indeed, life after camp.
Once in Chicago, though, the reception was decidedly mixed: Hikida and his friend could not find a hotel anywhere, partly a function of arriving so late on a Saturday, but in one case, because they were “Oriental.” Still, their white cab driver tried to help, driving them from place to place, even negotiating for them at one stop. After a ten-day stay, Hikida concluded that freed internees could resettle in Chicago “without worrying so much.” This is exactly what WRA officials wanted to hear, but we should not see Hikida as just a mouthpiece, as some of his fellow prisoners did. He wanted out and he wanted to convince others they could leave, too. His phrase “without worrying so much” did not mean safety. Chicago was not free of racism, Hikida said, but there was “less racial feeling” than in other places.12
Stories like Hikida’s helped prepare internees for a strange middle passage: a move from the relative safety of racially segregated imprisonment (most were at least with family) to the uncertainties of a racially integrated parole (now often alone, at first, and among more whites). In fact, many internees cited the trip to Chicago as an eye-opening first exposure to the racial geography of wartime. When twenty-two-year-old Ben Chikaraishi gained his work release from the Rohwer, Arkansas, camp in 1943 (on the Fourth of July), he boarded a bus to take him to the train station. As he described it, the “first decision I had to make outside of camp was ‘Where do I sit?’” Staring from the front of the bus at waiting faces, blacks in the back, whites in front, he wondered where a Japanese American might sit—literally—in the southern racial hierarchy. In that moment, he reasoned that both his people’s long history of racial discrimination and their current detention put him solidly in the back of the bus. But the driver, the de facto arbiter and enforcer of Jim Crow, ruled that his new passenger was white, and he brought the bus to a full stop to insist that Chikaraishi move forward. Chikaraishi was only somewhat compliant, deciding that he was neither black nor white but somewhere in between.13
The bus took him to a train headed north, but the train car did not feel like neutral space either. Japanese Americans traveling together could cluster, but that might attract attention and suspicion. Traveling alone brought its own vulnerabilities, and it certainly meant sitting right next to hakujin (white people), an uncomfortable proximity, maybe, for both. This palpable tension on buses and trains recalls Robin Kelley’s notion of public transportation as a kind of “moving theater” in which racial freedoms and restraints were being enacted on a daily basis during wartime.14 Passengers like Chikaraishi were both actors and spectators in the play, and each train trip offered another chance to watch World War II’s racial dynamics. Exiled in camps, Japanese
