From Resettler to Renter
The foremost task for these migrants was to draw their own city maps and find home in a strange place. Of course, any urban greenhorn had to figure out the contours of his or her new village. Chicago was large, but people lived small—in ethnic enclaves, in the flats, bars, churches, and shops of their neighborhoods. For evacuees, though, this was no ordinary urban adjustment. Their move was voluntary in a narrow sense, for they had chosen Chicago as their resettlement destination. But it was essentially coerced, because they went there only because they could not go home. Evacuation orders were not lifted until December 1944, and when the camps finally closed in 1946, those remaining could go west, but the fear of returning to the scene of the racial crime was its own kind of intimidation. And even in their chosen city, now “free,” the government tried to track their movements. Evacuees were expected to go directly from camp to the WRA’s Chicago office, register their arrival, and then notify WRA staff whenever they found a new job or apartment. What is more, the WRA had the right to call an internee back to camp at any point for what Myer called “sufficient reason,” a security phrase just as nebulous and arbitrary as the rationale for internment. There is some intriguing evidence that internees ignored the local registration rule: in a week when ninety-one were to leave camp and report to Chicago, only fifty showed up at the WRA office. Even so, the registry, the status updates, and the power to recall—all of this meant that a resettler was, technically, still in custody of the army and the WRA.34 In this context, then, drawing that map and finding home was an incredible act of hope and persistence. Millions of World War II migrants had done it, too, but not with an ankle bracelet.
A resettler’s first visit to the WRA’s Chicago office was a necessity, but it did not feel like safety. That office was a branch of the military state, the carceral state, and now, the welfare state. Yet the WRA offered new arrivals welfare in only a limited sense; staff counselors gave anxious war migrants their first leads on housing and jobs and referrals to local groups that could offer them essential services. These groups were the private, voluntary, and religious organizations that had served the welfare needs of urban Americans for decades, funded through charity and state and local governments. Some had longer histories, reaching all the way back to the nineteenth century, while others sprang up to address the kind of social welfare emergencies World War II had created. The postcamp fate of Japanese Americans was one of those war-related emergencies. The Advisory Committee for Evacuees, for example, was created mainly by white, faith-based groups, whose sympathies for internees sprang variously from their firm belief in Christian uplift, their earlier missionary work in Japan, or from their membership in the historic peace churches, who felt it was their moral obligation—especially in wartime—to promote “the ultimate triumph of love over hate.”35 For those behind barbed wire, the committee’s existence was tangible evidence that Chicago was, indeed, a safe bet, but the realities of making room for thousands of war refugees were an entirely different matter. A select few of the committee’s member organizations tackled the everyday problems of resettlement—finding beds, food, jobs, and permanent housing. Chicago’s American Friends Service Committee provided office space, hired paid staff, and opened a bricks-and-mortar operation—a hostel for incoming Japanese Americans that offered a cot and a meal for one dollar a day. The Chicago Church of the Brethren ran a hostel, too, an offshoot of the work its codirectors had done as teachers at Manzanar.
Figure 5. After a Japanese American prisoner left camp, the WRA’s Chicago branch office was the required first stop, where resettlers would meet with a WRA relocation field officer to register their arrival in Chicago and then seek referrals for local job and housing opportunities. Still, much of the support for this difficult transition to Chicago came from Japanese Americans’ own mutual aid organizations. Courtesy of War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement, WRA no. I-860, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Working in a parallel and often overlapping universe were Japanese American mutual aid organizations. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), already a national association, set up a Midwest regional office in January 1943—only after its leaders were given a security clearance to do so. Its first director, Thomas Yatabe, had been imprisoned himself, so he had a deep understanding of evacuee sensitivities. But he was building a civil rights organization for the long haul, so his vision of what his branch should do was much broader than resettlement services. Further, the JACL offered membership only to Nisei—that is, American citizens—and this made it difficult to win the trust of Issei resettlers, already resentful of their declining community status during internment. The smallness of the Chicago JACL’s budget and staff necessitated cooperation with white allies, such as the Friends, with whom the JACL had adjoining office space, and with their former captor, the WRA, whose Chicago office opened the very same month as the JACL’s. An essentially one-man operation, director Yatabe found himself pulled in many directions, and as more complex family configurations migrated to the city, his local JACL simply did not have the resources to help.36
Luckily, there were other Japanese American groups who could react more nimbly to conditions on the ground. Together, they constituted a kind of homegrown, resettler-controlled social service operation for a population in the midst of yet another war-related relocation. Chief among them was the Chicago Resettlers Committee (CRC), created in 1944, which, unlike the JACL, defined its membership very broadly, putting both Nisei and Issei on its executive board. According to an internal report, this marked “the first time both generations sat down together to plan for the welfare of their own people.”37 Even white allies, such as the director of Chicago’s famed Hull House, could join, partly to garner “sympathetic support” from the white reform community and city leaders, generally. The CRC’s mission and practical services were little different from that of the Friends or the Brethren, but its largely Japanese American leadership made it a trusted “go to” for the newly freed. An organization run by Issei and Nisei could inspire “the confidence of the resettlers as they would feel that it is their own,” said the CRC’s 1946 membership report.38 Although the CRC was more homegrown, more attuned to the local and urgent than the overtly political, its members shared the civil rights goals of their JACL colleagues: “to eliminate discrimination” and to “maintain a sound peace.”39 These were the embryonic, idealistic views of an urban Japanese American war liberalism that would be tested immediately by the challenges of city resettlement.
A “sound peace” started with good housing, but Chicago was a deeply racially segregated city. The apartment hunt made Japanese Americans doubt whether their adopted city could offer a more tolerant—even liberal—climate for their recovery. According to People in Motion, finding a place to live was resettlers’ “first and increasingly desperate concern.”40 In fact, their migration to Chicago coincided exactly with the war-induced housing crisis, so just as resettlers were being liberated from their prison “apartments,” the odds were narrowing for them to find a real apartment. The WRA and evacuee aid groups sweated this problem every day. They saw housing as one of the prerequisites for a successful long-term racial integration, and they worried that the shortage would foster what they called “social maladjustment.” According to a CRC analysis, “undesirable housing” magnified or created anew a roster of social problems in Japanese American neighborhoods, ranging from marital strain to juvenile delinquency. “From the standpoint of healthy social adjustment to their communities,” the CRC found, “resettlers occupy housing that is both good and bad. For the most part it is bad.”41
Why it was bad had much to do with America’s long history of racial conflict, now compounded by World War II’s own perversions of racial thinking. Yet it was also true that lousy housing was the lot for almost everyone as the country demobilized. When researcher Togo Tanaka tried to sort this out, he posited supply and demand and the “added possibility of race prejudice,” but there was no way to know for sure, he said, no “measuring determinant” to actually prove it. “No doubt, both are important factors,” he surmised.42
