(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 social center of the Japanese Americans located in the Midwest.”33
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