Ambassadors in Arms (1954)

This is one of the oldest books that I have found on the subject of the Japanese Americans and their involvement in the US war effort, and it also happens to be one of the best written books. It's centered on the Hawaiian Nisei.

The author talks a lot about the Japanese immigrants and how they felt about the Hawaii:

”...most of the Japanese immigrants came to be fairly content in-some even to love-the beautiful land in which their children were being born.”

There were those known as the kibei who were children of Japanese immigrants who went back to Japan for their schooling, and then returned to their parents in the US. This is the group that was under the most suspicion by the government as to where their loyalties lay once the war started.

The author talks about how some of the immigrants visited Japan and found themselves uneasy. Japan had a markedly different culture than Hawaii, and they were not really welcomed. They were considered “altered” by their time in Hawaii. (This is not uncommon even today; people born in Japan who go abroad for a few years and then return, especially if they are children, are considered not to be “true Japanese” and they may very well have major social problems caused by the reluctance of the others to accept them.)

What all of this did was to make the immigrants even happier that they had come to Hawaii and the mainland where life was, at least physically, much better.

This is not to say that Hawaii was a paradise. There was still some racial prejudice, and “Executive positions on plantations and in other haole-controlled establishments were practically closed to nisei as well as to other Orientals.”

Still, there was some progress made for the AJAs, as they held 15% of the “professional, proprietary,and managerial positions” in business on the islands.

The children of the immigrants, the Nisei, or second-generation persons of Japanese ancestry, made up about half the school population of Hawaii. The AJA (Americans of Japanese Ancestry) made up about a third of the population of Hawaii, and this all plays into the way they were treated in relation to internment and relocation.

There was a Congressional hearing in 1937 dealing with the attitude of the AJAs in Hawaii and it concluded that their attitudes were pretty much normal and the same as attitudes of first generation Americans from Europe.

”Their record as an orderly, law-abiding group was unexcelled, and thrift, industry, and willingness to co-operati0n with other groups were well-marked traits.”

This is also the only book that I found that brought up a quite interesting point as far as citizenship goes. For a long time the Japanese government position was that any child born to persons of Japanese ancestry was a citizen of Japan. In December of 1924, though, the government altered its position and said that if the parents wanted their child to be a citizen of Japan they would have to register the infant's name with the Japanese consulate within two weeks of its birth.

So children born in Hawaii or the US to Issei, first-generation, parents, were not really both Japanese and American, officially, but were totally American citizens unless their parents wanted to go through the paperwork to make them citizens of both countries.

G-2, the Military Intelligence Section, was trying to figure out how the AJAs in Hawaii would act if war happened. They were suspicious of the Issei since they were not really fully “Americanized”, still maintaining much of their Japanese culture. Their children, the Nisei, though, grew up in Hawaiian schools and were much more deeply involved in American culture.

G-2 was also suspicious of the kibei. They weren't sure of the Nisei, though.

The FBI became involved in August of 1939 when they opened a Honolulu office and began to evaluate the security of the islands. Robert C. Shivers was the agent-in-charge of the office.

”As Shiver's survey progressed, and the Army and FBI agents checked individual nisei, it appeared that there was no real reason to doubt the loyalty of the majority of Japanese-Americans. But it also became apparent that it would take the authorities quite some time to investigate these persons, both alien and citizen, whose attitudes were in doubt.”

Shivers ended up believing that the only group whose loyalty could be questioned were the kibei, and they made up .345 percent of the entire AJA population. In plan words, there were only a few of them.

Another report was made in October of 1941 about the “Japanese problem” on the islands, and given to the State Department. It said that the Issei were closer to Japan's culture than their children, the Nisei, but curiously almost everyone in Hawaii had their loyalty not to Japan or the US first, but to Hawaii first, and the US second. (At this time Hawaii was not a state.) At least 98% of the Nisei were considered to be loyal, meaning only 2% at a maximum might be questionable.

In the October 19, 1940 issue of Collier's, Lieutenant General Charles D. Herron said the following:

”The Army is not worried about the Japanese in Hawaii. Among them there may be a small hostile alien group, but we can handle the situation. It seems people who know least about Hawaii and live farthest away are most disturbed over this matter. People who know the Islands are not worried about possible sabotage. I say this sincerely after my years of service here. I am sold on the patriotism and Americanization of the Hawaiian people as a whole.”

There had been around 600 men inducted into the military just before Pearl Harbor, training at Camp Schofield. 350 of them were AJAs. After the attack, they were put to work digging trenches. On December 10 they were ordered to turn in their rifles and stay in their tents. They weren't even allowed out to use the restroom.

On Dec. 11 they awoke to find their bivouac area surrounded by machine guns. The machine guns were removed on the 12th.

There is discussion in the book about the various rumors about things that the AJAs supposedly did to help the Japanese during their attack on Pearl Harbor. The Secretary of the Navy said that there was “the most effective fifth-column work that has come out of this war except in Norway” going on in Hawaii. There were loads of rumors like farmers having a big arrow in their fields to direct the planes.

All the rumors were, of course, totally without merit. There was only one incident which was shown to be true. A Japanese pilot had been shot down and got to Nihau island. A resident Nisei had decided to help the pilot, but he killed himself after someone else had attacked the Japanese pilot and, despite being shot three times, killed him with his bare hands.

A rescue party had been sent to the area, but they arrived after the pilot and his helper were dead. The leader of the rescue party was himself a Nisei.

There apparently was a plan in Hawaii to confine Issie and Nisei to their homes if the islands were actually invaded.

The governor of Hawaii had ordered a “territorial milita” to be formed and turned into a Hawaii Territorial Guard. ROTC students were called up, but a lot of the young men were Nisei. The group grew and by the end of December there were 89 officers and 1,254 enlisted men in the group. On January 21 of 1942, though, the 317 members who were Nisei were discharged from the guard without explanation.

There were several schools of thought on what to do with Hawaii's population of AJAs. Some people wanted them all shipped to the US mainland. Some wanted them all taken to the small island of Lanai. Another group wanted internment camps to be built on Oahu. All of the ideas had problems.

1. The West Coast had made it clear they did not want anymore AJAs.

2. Shipping all the AJAs in Hawaii to another island would tie up boats needed for the war effort.

3. Establishing camps, whether on another island or on Oahu itself, would require a lot of materials that could be better used for the war, and it would also require soldiers as guards, leaving that many fewer soldiers to fight the actual enemy.

4. If the AJAs were put into the camps, it might cause any “fence-sitters” to become hostile to the US.

5. The AJAs made up more than a third of the work force. To ship them all to another island or intern them on Oahu would take a third of the workers away from the labor force just when the war was getting started, and that would be a loss that would be incredibly hard to overcome. Mainland workers would have to be imported, and that would again involve the use of shipping that was more needed for the actual war effort.

Some AJAs were taken into captivity, and less than 500 were sent to the Mainland, but they were sent right back to Hawaii since Mainland authorities thought it would be unconstitutional to detain them on the mainland where marital law had not been declared as it had been in Hawaii.

This meant that only a very small group of AJAs were actually taken into custody, and this left the vast majority of AJAs free to continue their lives, unlike the AJAs on the West Coast. There is no doubt that this helped the AJAs in Hawaii to feel even better about American then they already did.

The book goes into the history of the Nisei that ended up in the US military. They were first organized into the 298th and 299th battalions and then transferred to the mainland where they suddenly became the 100th battalion. (I have no idea where the military comes up with these numbers.)

One of the reasons that they were shipped to the mainland was the concern that, in case of an actual Japanese invasion of the islands, the regular US troops that were there might accidentally shoot the Nisei soldiers, thinking they were the enemy, or some Japanese soldiers might dress up in US uniforms and attack that way.

As to the 100th, 95% were the sons of immigrants. Only a small number were kibei. Many had attended Japanese language schools.

The formation of an AJA battalion was kept a secret for a while.

The unit, when it arrived at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin, was declared a “separate” unit. The Hawaiians at times referred to it as one-puka-puka, since puka was the world for hole or zero.

The unit was composed of one infantry battalion, two rifle companies, one battalion medical section, one battalion service section, one transportation platoon and one service company.

They were met quite well by the citizens of nearby Sparta, and they got along well with them. Newstand vendors said the men bought a lot of books and magazines. The librarian noted that they men got books from the library. Reporters would ask they if they would fight the “Japs,” and the men said they would for sure, that many of those injured in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the area around it were AJAs, and they had friends to avenge.

The group was then moved to Camp Shelby in Mississippi. The culture there was different, and nearby townspeople were not as friendly at all as the people in Sparta had been. There was also the problem of the South's attitude about blacks, and the AJAs from Hawaii were surprised to find all the signs about separate facilities for blacks and for whites.

There was a pamphlet published in 1943 called Shall the Japanese be Allowed to Dominate Hawaii?? that called for the evacuation of the entire Japanese population of the islands. The author was the chairman of the board of directors of a public utility company there and he was afraid that “...if the Japanese were allowed to continue in their present numbers as the largest racial group in Hawaii the position of all other racial groups would be jeopardized.”



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