but feeling mostly on edge about the potential for things to end badly. On her train ride from Manzanar, California, to Chicago, Kaye Kimura described a “marked feeling of self-consciousness…. I thought everybody was looking at me,” and she braced herself for “some sort of unpleasantness” as she rode.15 Leaving Topaz, Utah, for Chicago, Sam Konishi similarly reported feeling uneasy when he boarded the train, “because I had never been that far east before and I didn’t know how we would be accepted.”16
The surprise ending turned out to be the genuinely warm reaction from fellow travelers—even, notably, from men in uniform. Many internees described a sense of relief once they began to do what they feared most: talk to strangers. Kimura admitted that the train “was [her] first touch with the outside world and the passengers … didn’t seem to be any different from before.” She recalled how scared she was when she first saw so many soldiers in her car, but they treated her small group of Manzanar migrants “very nicely.” In fact, “the soldiers even went out of their way to talk with us. They guessed that we were just coming out of camp … [and] they condemned the California people for treating us so unjustly.”17 Konishi, too, noted the presence of GIs, but “nobody bothered us.”18 When Mae Kaneko fell ill on her trip, she was amazed when a sailor brought her some dinner. “I had to laugh then at my fears,” she recalled, “because … I had built up my imagination to the point where I thought I would be the victim of some kind of incident.”19
To lessen what Hikida had called the “racial feeling” for those going east, the WRA opened a network of branch offices to facilitate a smooth camp-to-city migration. The first in the nation opened in Chicago in the January cold of 1943, and by June of that year, forty-two more offices opened in cities around the country. For arriving resettlers, the WRA was not so much a friendly face as a familiar one, and the irony of asking for help from their captors was not lost on them. But they needed the lifeline, and the WRA thought these urban outposts could foster the kind of “favorable community acceptance” that resettlers desperately wanted in their adopted cities.20 At least initially, resettlers did not mind the wartime overcrowding lamented by so many in Chicago. As the WRA’s People in Motion phrased it, the city’s “metropolitan atmosphere” could offer “a cloak of indifference” for Japanese Americans whose detention had heightened their racial self-consciousness.21 Stories of anti-Japanese violence “were given wide belief” in camp, according to the study, so “to go ‘outside’ was considered extremely hazardous.”22 Thus Chicago—or any other big city—would make it possible to hide, to create an urban anonymity that might shield evacuees from simmering resentment or even rage.
It helped, too, that Chicago’s local newspapers and politicians decided not to indulge in the Hearst-style media hysteria of the West Coast. For the most part, Chicago’s press coverage was “relatively mild and objective,” reported Shotaro Miyamoto, a social scientist studying resettlement conditions in Chicago.23 Some outlets used the racist language of the era, “Japs,” but most avoided racial sensationalism. The media mainly adopted a reportorial tone. The Chicago Daily Tribune’s earliest articles, for example, cited an “infiltration of Japanese evacuees” but also highlighted their education and skills. Reports of scattered local opposition to arriving Japanese Americans were always balanced with an opposing view, most often from WRA staff, who used an early variant of the model minority theory. Elmer R. Shirrell, director of the WRA’s midwestern office, described Japanese American newcomers as “industrious and intelligent workers who take their places quietly in the community and ask nothing but tolerance of their new neighbors.” The Tribune also engaged in some hometown boosterism when it recited the growing sense among camp refugees of Chicago as “the nation’s warmest host.” These reports came from both Japanese Americans’ own prison newspapers and WRA staffers, but the Tribune was happy to publish them to burnish the city’s reputation as a place of “congenial resettlement.”24
(Re)Settling In
The train car, however, was merely the first of many public spaces a former internee had to inhabit. Japanese Americans still had a whole city to navigate. Their initial disenchantment was visual. Their first impressions of Chicago suggest that the train shades should have been pulled down after all. Lily Umeki described feeling “really disappointed to see all those dark and dirty buildings” when she pulled in.25 Mae Kaneko admitted that from her window, “I thought that I would never like Chicago because it was so old and dirty.”26 And Kaye Kimura’s poetic fantasies of Chicago did not match the reality when she arrived. “I had read in books what an exciting place Chicago was,” she said. “There was supposed to be a sort of electrical energy in the atmosphere there…. I had read [Carl] Sandburg’s poems about Chicago while in camp and this impressed me so much that I decided that I would like to live in a city which possessed such vitality.” But when her train pulled in, she was disheartened: “The dirtiness of this city sounded exciting in poems but it was a big disillusionment in real life. Everything seemed so grim and cheerless. It made my morale go way down and I felt low, strange, and alone.”27 Considering internees left prison camps that even Dillon Myer called “largely desert wastelands,” these first encounters were discouraging.28
Chicago was a big, noisy, industrial city—made even bigger by the bustle of war. Shotaro Miyamoto found that newly freed internees formed lasting impressions of the city just two weeks into their stay. The “sweat and stink” of the meatpacking industry, the Democratic political machine that ruled the city, and the “goddamned Els” (referring to the city’s elevated trains) defined the character of the city, and “these snapshot impressions,” he wrote, were the “signposts that guide[ed] people’s emotions and thinking as they adjust[ed] to their conditions of life.”29 The signpost every new migrant looked for was another Japanese American. The more newcomers saw their own kind walking city streets, renting apartments, working in stores and industry, even riding the “goddamned Els,” the more they were convinced that Chicago was, as Miyamoto said, a “‘safer bet’ for evacuees than most cities east of the Mississippi.”30
The first Japanese Americans arrived in Chicago in June 1942, with a larger wave arriving in 1943, and the influx into the city would last until 1950. This makes for a weird war time line and points to the blurriness of the category “postwar.” Thousands of Japanese Americans walked out of camp well before World War II ended, but they entered a city still deeply at war. The first to leave were the young: college students whose education had been interrupted and Nisei youth willing to do hard labor on farms just to escape, even if temporarily. These were “the advance guard,” as the WRA called them, migrants “who probed the war inflamed attitudes of American communities” outside the West Coast. The second wave was also a young, mainly single, Nisei cohort, and it included more women. These “girls” could find work in the service sector, as either domestics or secretaries, or even in light industry, while Nisei men found employment in factories or in some sort of mechanical service work. By the end of 1943, almost eighteen thousand of these “relocation pioneers” had left the camps permanently.31
The next migration waves, though, were more cumbersome, because now whole families were moving, carrying with them the duties of marriage, children, and elder care. But the trains kept coming, bringing young and old, single and married, Nisei and Issei, and by 1947, enough resettlers had arrived to form an entirely new Japanese American population in Chicago. Indeed, the chances of encountering another Japanese American who had not been imprisoned were almost nil; by the WRA’s count, 97 percent of the Japanese Americans walking around Chicago had come from the camps.32 Ultimately, between twenty-thousand and thirty thousand internees landed in Chicago, giving the city almost as many Japanese American residents as there were in all the rest of the states east of the Mississippi River combined. At this point, only Los Angeles County had more Japanese American residents. The accumulated success stories of chain migrations out of camp were “a magnet,” said the WRA, and its final report on resettlement announced that, by 1947, Chicago had become “the recognized economic and
