After Camp. Greg Robinson

boycotts stalled Japanese commerce and war clouds loomed, many of the businessmen and consular officials who were the mainstay of the community returned to Japan. Once war was declared, the FBI rounded up several hundred remaining Japanese diplomatic officials, merchants, and community leaders, who were interned at Ellis Island. The New York branches of Japanese firms shut their doors, even as masses of ethnic Japanese were fired from their jobs by non-Japanese employers, throwing the community into difficult economic straits. Meanwhile, a curfew, travel restrictions, and limits on bank withdrawals were imposed on the Issei as enemy aliens. The community's two newspapers, the Nichi-Bei jiho and its English-language offshoot, The Japanese American Review, were closed. While some of those interned were later released, their community leadership had by then passed away to a left-l eaning antifascist group, the Japanese American Committee for Democracy. The JACD produced a monthly newsletter and community surveys, found jobs for dismissed Japanese workers, and sponsored forums and demonstrations in favor of victory over Japan. (On the JACD, see Chapter 10 in this volume.)

      Still, New York was formally unaffected by Executive Order 9066, and with the emptying out of the West Coast, the city became the largest “free” Nikkei community on the United States mainland. As the war went on, former West Coast residents released from the camps began to arrive, and the city's ethnic Japanese population swelled. At least 1,000 migrants resettled in New York during 1943-44, and they continued to arrive in even greater numbers during 1945 and 1946. As a result, the city's Japanese population grew from barely 2,000 in mid-1942 to about three times that number in 1946-47. The Japanese Americans who resettled in New York during 1943-1944 were almost entirely Nisei (at least 70 percent), while anecdotal evidence from the WRA's New York office indicates that a large number of the perhaps 1,500 migrants who moved to New York in 1945-46 were families and individual Issei.²⁷

      As with Detroit, in the vast majority of cases the resettlers had never previously lived in New York, and most had never even visited. Moreover, because New York was so distant from the camps, the new arrivals had usually spent an initial resettlement period elsewhere, and therefore were comparatively more affluent and adjusted to life “outside.” Although the newcomers held all sorts of jobs, a large percentage of Issei worked as domestics or gardeners. Nisei men also took jobs as dishwashers in city restaurants, as hotel bellhops, as laundry workers, or as hospital staffers. Women worked as nurses, stenographers, and secretaries. As time passed and more jobs opened up, Nisei took jobs as salesclerks, service workers, and skilled laborers. Groups of younger Nisei attended college at Columbia, New York University, and the city's four public colleges (the future CUNY system), as well as denominational colleges, business schools, and trade schools—ihere were even seventeen Nisei girls studying at the Traphagan fashion school. Nevertheless, in contrast to other resettlement areas, numerous newcomers—Nisei and even some Issei—were able to open their own businesses, including grocery stores, restaurants, and machine repair shops.²⁸

      The newcomers also tended to congregate together residentially. The WRA opened a hostel in Brooklyn Heights in mid-1944, and a few hundred resettlers lived there during its two-year existence. Others settled in the Manhattan Hostel, opened by the Community Church and the New York Unitarian Service Committee in fall 1945. Even after they left their temporary quarters, many resettlers found permanent housing in two small Japanese American enclaves. One was located on the West Side around 106th-110th Streets, near the Japanese American Methodist Church, an area that one wit soon dubbed the “umeboshi [pickled plum] district.” A second group moved into Inwood, near Manhattan's northern tip, where another Japanese American church set up operations.²⁹ Unlike Detroit and the West Coast, however, the newcomers did not generally face restrictive covenants barring them from all-white districts. Though the skyrocketing price of housing made more affluent neighborhoods generally unaffordable, relatively few Issei and Nisei took up residence in African American areas such as Harlem or the South Bronx.

      Again, as with Detroit, the question of discrimination is complex. According to various accounts, New York was the first place the West Coast refugees were not made to feel different because of their Japanese ancestry. One woman later stated that the city breathed liberation: “I became a free person for the first time.”³⁰ At the same time, an eloquent letter from an army major to the WRA scored the unjust treatment of the newcomers:

      It is unbelievable that people of Japanese ancestry are finding a happy haven in New York City. Japanese businessmen and workers interviewed must be making statements which they THINK they should, if they say that everything is sweet and serene—that they are entirely comfortable and happy here. That is definitely not the word that passes between them.…This is brought to my attention almost daily by a fifty-nine year old Japanese cook in my employ in New York City. He has been in this country thirty-nine years.…Whenever he goes along the street he is pointed at by adults and children who indicate that he is probably a spy. When he goes into public places, nearby people engage in loud and disturbing conversation which is not directed at him but which he is supposed to hear. HE is not writing to other Japanese friends suggesting that they come here.³¹

      There was some official as well as unofficial discrimination. New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia was openly hostile to Japanese Americans (although he made a generous public endorsement after Pearl Harbor of the loyalty of a local Issei, New York Philharmonic xylophonist Yoichi Hiraoka). La Guardia refused to protect Japanese Americans faced with being fired from city jobs or to permit others to be hired, although he was willing to experiment with hiring fifty Japanese Americans for “hospital helper” positions to reduce a desperate hospital worker shortage. In April 1944, when the WRA announced its plans to open its Brooklyn hostel, La Guardia publicly denounced the project and asserted that resettled internees were not welcome to enter New York. Not only did they threaten the city's security, he insisted dubiously, but their presence would spark riots among the city's Chinese population.³²

      The records of the WRA's New York office, which was responsible for finding jobs and housing for the newcomers, also testify to a widespread pattern of job discrimination. For example, a letter asking the A&P grocery store chain to consider hiring Nisei was met with a cold rebuff: “The question of placement of American Japanese citizens with our company has been discussed and it was decided we could hardly consider employing them at this time because of public reaction to such a move.”³³ In late September 1943, two Nisei, Kenji Ota and Hideo Tanaka, were sent by the WRA to interview for welding jobs with a New York company that maintained a shipyard in Camden, New Jersey. Although the company assured the WRA their need for welders was desperate, Ota and Tanaka were forced to wait until several weeks after their initial interview to hear from the company. They then were summoned for a second interview. This time they were interviewed by a uniformed army officer, who proceeded to ask them a set of extraordinarily irrelevant and insulting questions, such as whether they were fluent in Japanese and whether they hoped Japan would win the war. WRA officers were so outraged by these harassing tactics that they made an official complaint and had the two Nisei provide affidavits testifying to their experience.³⁴ After 1945, when New York State passed the Ives-Quinn bill, the first state fair employment practices legislation, job discrimination became more subtle and somewhat less widespread.

      Still, even if resettlement in New York in many ways resembled that in other cities, the city was remarkable for the unusually rapid adjustment of the migrants. The reasons for this are twofold. First, whereas ethnic Japanese communities in other cities were too small or too insecure and wary of newcomers to offer them substantial aid, New York had a long-existing, self-confident Japanese community, with restaurants, churches, and grocery stores to serve the newcomers. In addition, the Japanese population in this most rootless of cities had always been heavily young, educated, and transient, so there was less suspicion of outsiders and sojourners than elsewhere. The second reason is that New York, a historic center of settlement houses and charity work, was much better equipped than most cities with non-Japanese agencies to serve the immediate needs of the resettlers and get them on their feet. Beginning in mid-1942, the Protestant Welfare Council assigned one of its specialists to locate jobs and housing for Japanese Americans so that they could leave the camps, while the American Baptist Home Mission Society dispatched workers to greet and look after the newcomers. The Federal Council