Nikkei Voices
Rev. Daisuke Kitagawa spoke out against wartime injustices, asserting that his fellow Episcopal churchmen “opposed evacuation as a matter of principle, but nothing was done beyond that. . . . The church [remained] curiously silent, issuing no resolutions, letters to the President or newspapers, or signed petitions.”[1]
There had been no organized effort made by the Christian churches to prevent such a measure’s being adopted by the government. . . . Undesirable though it was, once the evacuation order was issued, the church leaders began to say that under the circumstances it probably was the wisest thing for the government to do; it was for the safety of the loyal and innocent Japanese people. We were to be put under protective custody, lest we be attacked or molested under the pressure of wartime hysteria. The evacuation order was unquestionably a defeat for the forces of justice. All the Christian virtues—humility, longsuffering, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, magnanimity and tolerance—were to be practiced by the victims (most of whom were not even Christians), while the oppressors, the majority of whom were at least nominally Christians, were not to be blamed for their organized robbery.[2]
Kitagawa pleaded for action: “It is your duty, fellow-Christians of America, to keep the whole nation awake to this very cause in time of peace or in time of war. . . . In view of the coming evacuation of Japanese, I cannot help weeping, not so much for the misery of the Japanese, but for the future generations of America.”[3] His exhortation, however, fell upon deaf ears. Most Japanese Americans were disappointed, but did not condemn their fellow believers for lack of courage:
As the internment policy inexorably unfolded, Japanese Americans yearned silently for official religious condemnation of it as a violation of Nisei citizenship. Still, ordained and institutionally-rooted Japanese Episcopalians . . . were somehow able to differentiate their denomination’s official silence about an oppressive policy, from that policy itself.[4]
Some Nikkei, however, grew exceedingly critical of white churches and denominations. For instance,
Lay member Noboku Lillian Omi, a resident at Santa Anita and Jerome, felt that white American Christians had let their fellow believers down. “I felt that God went with us and didn’t desert us,” Omi recalled. “As for our church, we could always build another one. I felt that there was a wall between American (White) churches and the ethnic churches, that we were deserted at a crucial time.”[5]
Non-Japanese Voices
The atmosphere of silence made the voices of protestors seem that much louder as a handful of Christians expressed their convictions that the evacuation was morally wrong. These voices included Galen Fisher, a faculty member at the Pacific School of Religion and former missionary to Japan for twenty-one years with the YMCA. Fisher had announced the establishment of the Fair Play Committee in September 1941, three months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.[6] Although public opinion remained heavily against the Nikkei, Fisher argued that all citizens should receive fair treatment under the law and only be evacuated if they were deemed disloyal or potentially dangerous.[7] He also highlighted the impracticality and lack of necessity for such massive action. Then even as evacuation became a reality, he continued his call to action: “For white Americans, it [the internment] is a testing by fire of devotion to the letter and spirit of the federal Constitution, and of their ability to hold justice and national unity above antipathy toward persons of Japanese race. For white Christians, it is a challenge to demonstrate that Christian brotherhood transcends blood and skin color.”[8]
Independent groups also voiced their own censure of the evacuation. Some ministers in Santa Maria, California released a statement in February 1942, rejecting the internment for its totalitarian methods.[9] “On April 27, the San Francisco Chronicle printed a letter signed by twenty-eight Protestant and Jewish clergy pledging assistance to the Japanese [American evacuees].”[10] In May-June 1942 the American Baptist Foreign Missions Society (ABFMS) adopted a resolution that called the “indiscriminate and enforced evacuation” a “violation of Christian principles of racial non-discrimination and respect, of justice and fair play, as contrary to the best interests of our nation, and injurious to the worldwide mission of the Christian Church.”[11] The Fremont Baptist Church in Seattle expressed “deep concern” for the un-Christian and unconstitutional precedent set by this case, where “democratic rights have been infringed upon and racial discrimination placed above law.”[12] Then in June 1942, the Protestant publication Christian Century heralded: “It is time that all the churches stir themselves to make plain to the nation the tragic mistake it is making. . . . The method is not democratic, is not in accord with American traditions, and is not right.”[13]
Individual Christian leaders also spoke out against the evacuation as an unchristian response to wartime fears. Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, who founded the publication Christianity and Crisis, insisted in his article, “A Blot on Our Record” that the incarceration was not an “unfortunate necessity.”[14] In Seattle, Rev. Everett W. Thompson “stressed the loyalty of the Issei and the need for [the church’s] continued labor. He too touched on the effect the action would have on the enemy: ‘It would be defeating democracy doing what Hitler did to the Jews.’”[15] In Oregon, “Reverend U. G. Murphy, a Methodist from the Northwest Oriental Evangelization Society, submitted letters to the Tolan Committee on behalf of Nikkei.”[16] Other pro-Nikkei religious leaders along the West Coast, including the YM/WCA, George Gleason of the Los Angeles Committee for Church and Community Cooperation, and the Seattle and Portland Council of Churches, gave a similar range of testimonies.[17] Rev. Allan Hunter, pastor of the Mount Hollywood Congregational Church, also
opposed the internment and did what he could to help the Japanese Americans. Rev. Ray Kinney, the assistant minister, arranged for Mount Hollywood to take legal responsibility for the nearby Hollywood Independent Church when its Japanese American congregation was interned. Mount Hollywood’s members served sandwiches and coffee to the evictees the day they left, and kept watch over the Independent Church and the internees’ goods stored there. Hunter spent so much time at Manzanar ministering to restless and rebellious youth that pastor emeritus Dr. E. P. Ryland often had to substitute at Mount Hollywood on Sundays. The congregation also supported the internees. They sent $100 to Heart Mountain to help establish a church, collected craft materials for a kindergarten teacher at Manzanar, and shipped Christmas and Easter presents to Manzanar children. . . . When former internees returned to Los Angeles, Mount Hollywood helped find them jobs and housing.[18]
The Quakers, however, were among the most vocal of protestors. Floyd Schmoe had organized FOR conferences in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Honolulu “to bring attention to the challenges facing Nikkei in the spring of 1941.”[19] Another Quaker, Rev. Herbert Nicholson, helped form the Friends of the American Way, declaring, “We hold the view that it is high time that all churches, synagogues, educational institutions, and many other organizations make their position emphatically clear and demand fair play toward Japanese Americans and all other racial minorities.”[20] This organization wrote thousands of letters in support of the Nikkei to individuals and officials all over the Unites States. The Quakers spoke up for the Japanese Americans not out of charity, but because they took full responsibility for their part in allowing the internment: “Let us never forget that we threw these people behind barbed wire. We wiped out their savings, and their means of livelihood. We destroyed their financial security. . . . For the sake of our own integrity, we still have a debt to pay.”[21] The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) even sent apologies to community leaders and printed them in publications read by the Japanese to “humbly ask forgiveness.”[22] “AFSC workers organized food deliveries, arranged legal assistance, and met with state attorneys general to activate bank accounts. . . . As rumors of Executive Order 9066 spread, the Seattle AFSC office protested the policy in telegrams to the secretary of war, the attorney general, Eleanor Roosevelt, and three congressmen.”[23] The AFSC also supported legal action for Japanese Americans such as Gordon K. Hirabayashi and George K. Yamada, who protested the evacuation and relocation based on Christian principles.[24] For their courage amidst adversity, the AFSC would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947.[25] As one Friend wrote, “The fault rests squarely upon us as a people who have permitted prejudice, fear, and hatred to flower into intolerance and violence, and now in a war situation have allowed the government to arrange this evacuation in direct violation of our heritage of social and racial justice.”[26]
[1] Daisuke Kitagawa, Memoirs (unpublished manuscript, 16), UP18, AEC. The 1942 convention of the Episcopal diocese of Los Angeles expressed concern for the evacuees, but did not take a courageous stand against internment: “Christians are saddened by the state of the world. Specifically, the Christian Japanese in [America] should not be treated as enemy aliens but as brothers in the Body of Christ.”
[2] Kitagawa, Issei and Nisei, 57.
[3] Daisuke Kitagawa, “An Open Letter to Fellow-Christians in the United States of America,” in The Living Church 104, no. 16 (19 April 1942), 15.
[4] Interview with John H. M. Yamazaki cited in Gillespie, “Japanese-American Episcopalians,” 139.
[5] Yoo, Nisei, 120, citing Heihachiro Takarabe, ed. Nisei Christian Journey: Its Promise and Fulfillment, vol. 3 (Sacramento, CA: Nisei Christian Oral History Project, 2006), 100.
[6] Atlee E. Shidler, “The Fair Play Committee: A Study in the Protection of the Rights of Minority Groups” (Master’s Thesis, Claremont Graduate School, 1952); Ruth W. Kingman, “A Brief Historical Report of the Pacific Coast Committee on American Principles and Fair Play” (Berkeley, CA: Fair Play Committee, 1946), 1-2. Fisher, a Congregationalist, had served with the YMCA in Japan prior to the war and would write many pro-Japanese articles on behalf of the Fair Play Committee. See Galen Fisher, A Balance Sheet on Japanese Evacuation: Untruths About Japanese Americans (Berkeley, CA: Committee on American Principles and Fair Play, 1943), previously published in Christian Century, August 18 and 26, September 1 and 8, 1943.
[7] Hearings Before the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, House of Representatives, Seventy-Seventh Congress, Part 29, San Francisco Hearings, February 21 and 23, 1942 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Printing Office, 1942), 11197-11203.
[8] Galen M. Fisher, “Our Japanese Refugees,” Christian Century 59, no. 13 (1 April 1942), 424.
[9] “Santa Maria Ministers on Enemy Alien Control” (4 February 1942), Box 3/Fld 24, Gillett Papers, UCLA.
[10] Girdner and Loftis, The Great Betrayal, 126.
[11] A Resolution Regarding the Evacuation of Japanese from West Coast Areas, adopted May-June, 1942 by ABFMS and WABFMS (ABHMS Archives, 116-2).
[12] Fremont Baptist Church, “Resolution to Be Presented to the Resolutions Committee of the Northern Baptist Convention,” Presented to the Resolutions Committee of the Northern Baptist Convention” (26-31 May 1942), Box 15/Fld 8, CCGS. Sympathy in Seattle was often with the Nikkei. In 1939, for example, the Rev. Harold V. Jensen had spoken on behalf of the Seattle Council of Churches: “We must see in the Japanese . . . neighbors, who need our understanding and co-operation, rather than our scrap iron and our most un-neighborly exclusion act” (D. M. Dye, “For the Sake of Seattle’s Soul: The Seattle Council of Churches, the Nikkei Community, and World War II,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 93, no. 3 [2002], 127-28).
[13] “Justice for the Evacuees,” Christian Century, 750-52, clipping in the Conrad-Duveneck collection, Hoover Institution Collections of War, Revolution, and Peace (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University). The Christian Century avoided direct condemnation of the federal government prior to evacuation.
[14] Henry Smith Leiper, A Blot on Our Record,” Christianity and Crisis (20 April 1942), 1-2; See Niebuhr, “The Evacuation of Japanese Citizens,” Christianity and Crisis (18 May 1942), 2-5.
[15] Taylor, “Fellow-Feelers,” 124.
[16] Blankenship, Social Justice, 29.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Seigel, In Good Conscience, 117. “In 1946, the Hollywood Independent Church gave Mount Hollywood $100 in appreciation for its help during the internment. To turn the gift into a lasting symbol of peace and Christian dedication, a cross was made from the charred remains of an atomic bomb-blasted tree. The tree had stood in the churchyard of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, where Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Independent Church’s prewar pastor, was serving at the time of the nuclear attack. The simple wooden cross, inscribed ‘He is our peace,’ remains installed on Mount Hollywood’s altar to represent the church’s longstanding commitment to justice, and to commemorate its support for Japanese Americans during the internment period.”
[19] Blankenship, Social Justice, 18. See letter from Floyd Schmoe to James Sakamato (8 April 1941), Box 2/Fld 35, James Y. Sakamoto Papers, UW.
[20] Friends of the American Way, Undated information letter, in the Brethren Service Committee Japanese Relocation Collection (Elgin, IL: Brethren Historical Library and Archives), Boxes 1-6.
[21] “A Message to the Society of Friends and Our Fellow Christians”; Thomas Bodine to Student Relocation Council Executive Committee (4 October 1944), Box 1/Fld 1, RG 37, Presbyterian Historical Society.
[22] Letter to Americans of Japanese ancestry; “American Friends Service Committee Sends Greetings,” Minidoka Irrigator (25 December 1942), 3.
[23] Blankenship, Social Justice, 20-21.
[24] As Hirabayashi, a Quaker, stated, “I must maintain my Christian principles. I consider it my duty to maintain the democratic standards for which this nation lives. Therefore, I must refuse this order for evacuation” (Hirabayashi, “Why I Refused to Register for Evacuation” (13 May 1942), Box 1/Fld 6, Ring Papers [4241-2], UW). Along with Hirabayashi, Minoru Yasui, a Methodist lawyer, unsuccessfully challenged the curfew law before the Supreme Court on May 11, 1943.
[25] The Quakers received this award primarily for their work in Germany during and after World War II, however, their work in Japan and among Japanese Americans was inestimable. Gunnar Jahn, chair of the Nobel Committee, said in his speech, “The Quakers have shown us that it is possible to carry into action something which is deeply rooted in the minds of many: sympathy with others; the desire to help others; that significant expression of sympathy between men, without regard to nationality or race; feeling which, when carried into deeds, must provide the foundation of a lasting peace. For this reason they are today worthy of receiving Nobel’s Peace Prize” (American Friends Service Committee Bulletin [1997]).
[26] American Friends Service Committee, “A Message for Today,” The American Friend (16 July 1942), 305.
