AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE EFFORTS TO AID JAPANESE AMERICAN CITIZENS DURING WORLD WAR II

This is a thesis that examines the role that Quakers (American Friends) played in relation to helping the people who were interned in America during World War II. My impression is that they did the best they could, given all the circumstances. They did not succeed totally, but they did help and that's the most important part.

The material below are some of what I consider to be the most important parts of the thesis.

While Americans sacrificed so much at home and abroad to help liberate the world from fascism and tyranny, the United States government with the support of the majority of Americans chose to suspend the rights of many of its own citizens, and went so far as to imprison over a hundred thousand loyal Americans based solely on economic and racial discrimination. These loyal Japanese Americans lost their homes, their belongings, and between two to four years of their lives as they were isolated in inhospitable concentration camps located throughout the Western deserts and Arkansas.

Groups like the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) chose to help the Japanese Americans from the start of 1942 in every way they could. This aid originally focused on getting students out of the camps and into colleges in the East but eventually ballooned into countless other tasks as the war dragged on. The Society of Friends didn’t lend their support in the hopes of making converts out of the Japanese or because Quakers were not patriotic Americans. Nor did they limit their aid to other Christians but gave of their time and energy to people of all religions because their own faith admonished them to help any person in need and stressed that equality was a core value central to their salvation.

Furthermore, the AFSC had to walk a fine line in working with both the government and the interned Japanese. That tightrope walk forced them to make certain concessions to the government and forced the Friends to turn their backs on one of their core tenets, namely the call to fight injustice and always “speak truth to power.”

In the end their results were spotty at best; in some ways the undertaking was a huge success while in other regards it could be looked at as an abject failure.

Chapter 1- background and philosophy of American Friends (Quakers)

It would make sense then that the concept most commonly associated with Quaker philosophy, namely the taking of human life, is outlawed because it would be tantamount to executing the part of God which resides within each human being, whether they be homeless and living on the streets or incredibly wealthy and living in a palace.

They believe that no book including the Bible is taken as a final or unchallengeable work.

This concept of human unity with God defines the Society of Friends as mystical at its very core because mystics believe that all human beings can connect with God directly either through some form of meditation or physical endeavor.

There are no intermediaries between Quakers and their God. The only two sacraments they seek to obtain are the mystical union of themselves with God and the elevation of all members of society.

“The Quakers believed that Christ had died for all men—including the Indians and the Negroes—and that each had an eternal soul in spite of his different skin color.”

From early on the Quakers pushed the British government to take care of the sick who couldn’t support themselves, asking that hospitals be built for the poor, specialized institutions be funded to aid ostracized groups like the blind and the deaf, and that special asylums be set aside so that people with mental illnesses could be treated and helped instead of mocked and abused in the streets. Poverty has always been a major focus of the Friends who hold that social equality demands not only the abolishment of a class system, but that everyone is fed, clothed, and given a decent standard of living.

Their philosophy could be compared to the motto adopted by Habitat for Humanity over the past thirty years urging people to offer the poor a hand-up, not a hand out.

In 1924 the AFSC founded a new “interracial section” to deal with what it saw as blatant racism in the United States, a section that would eventually lead it toward constructing a strong relationship with both the Japanese and Japanese Americans.

Many people in the United States today are under the impression that the internment camps were the one and only event perpetrated against the Japanese in the United States. They believe that this was a military response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that there was a rational belief by the military authorities that the Japanese living in the continental United States posed a threat to national security. In fact it was the last in a long line of offenses committed by white Americans against Asian immigrants starting around the turn of the century.

Individual states added to these federal measures by passing their own laws aimed at slowing down the “Yellow Peril” as they saw fit. In San Francisco the Japanese were asked to leave the public schools and join the Korean and Chinese students at separate schools set aside for Asian students. Antimiscegenation laws were also introduced so that Japanese men and women couldn’t marry outside of their race. California passed the Alien Land Law in 1913 that prohibited anyone born in Japan from owning property in the state of California.

The first and foremost reason given for placing the Japanese in concentration camps was that it was a military necessity and that the Japanese could very well represent a “fifth column” along the West Coast. That meant that the government believed they could rise up to help their native Japanese brethren overrun the United States in the eventuality that the continental U.S. was attacked and they were allowed to remain along the coast. This of course holds very little water today as it has been revealed that both the FBI and the military felt that there was no threat coming from the Japanese American community after the attack on Pearl Harbor. On the Hawaiian Islands where the Japanese were more closely tied to their homeland and where they constituted over a third of the population, only 1% of them were interned as enemies of the state. On the other hand, on the continental United States where the Japanese were a small percentage of the overall population and had cut most of their ties with Japan, over 90% of the population was sent to camps.

Some argued at the time that this was for their own good—that there would have been no way to protect them from vigilante justice so it was best to keep them out of sight. In reality only twentyfive major crimes were reported as having been carried out against the Japanese before they were interned. Even so, vigilante justice is a civil affair that could have been handled by the police simply doing their job without the military getting involved.

Other arguments for incarceration that were discussed before the internment stated that having them in camps would benefit the military in terms of prisoner exchanges because they could be exchanged for POW’s or could be used as tools of reprisal.

Roger Daniels summed it up best when he wrote, “The reasons for the establishment of these concentration camps are clear. A deteriorating military situation created the opportunity for American racists to get their views accepted by the national leadership.

The American Legion was one of the first organizations that called for the removal of all Japanese Americans from the West Coast. The California Joint Immigration Committee, an organization that was formerly known as the Japanese Exclusion League, reasserted its earlier claims that the Japanese could not assimilate into American society.

In 1940 the average value for farmland in America was approximately $37.94 an acre, while the average value for an acre of Japanese owned farmland was approximately $279.96.

History had taught the Japanese living in America that injustice was to be expected, and Nagata explains that people accustomed to constant discrimination are much more likely to put up with more and more discrimination whenever it is meted out. There was also a push from within the Japanese community to not fight back against the oppressor because the leaders feared that they would appear disloyal or traitorous to the general public, and of course the Japanese culture values interdependence over independence, loyalty and obedience over rocking the boat or challenging authority.

The government did not help by aiding the divisions being created in the Japanese American community once they were in camps. They chose to bar the Issei from holding any elected offices in the camps and gave all official authority to the second and third generations. This system helped disenfranchise the Japanese elders and created “a structure which directly opposed Japanese cultural values of filial piety and deference to one’s elders.”

Much of what the Quakers attempted to do could be regarded as an unmitigated failure because they did not have the time or the finances to accomplish many of their more lofty goals. The reality was that they were constantly working to come from behind as new challenges arose, and the government threw new hurdles in their path and changed the rules of the game as the war progressed.

Surprisingly enough, one of the main setbacks to resettling the students outside of the camps was the United States government, specifically the War Department.

In fact it took the government until September 2nd to approve 100 colleges that the Japanese could “safely” attend, and by November 1942, 284 colleges were deemed open to the Japanese based on the fact that there were no defense installations or war laboratories set up on those campuses or anywhere nearby.33 The doors were opening at many universities but the Army and the AFSC itself set up countless hoops that the students had to jump through in order to leave the camps and enter schools.

FRIENDS HOSTELS

Education was of course very important and the AFSC contacted school superintendents, teachers, and local principals so that children could start attending schools as soon as they arrived in their new communities.

(They used a holistic approach to helping students find a school, a place to stay, financial aid, informal counseling, etc.)

The main problem could probably be tied to the fact that the Friends just didn’t know how to say no, and they were willing to help out on so many different levels that they found themselves spread incredibly thin.

A list put together in November of 1942 is a good example of all that the AFSC programs included: camp visitation, continuing student location, individual and industrial placement of evacuees, encouraging adult educational programs, placement of volunteer workers within the camps, sending toys, Christmas presents and layettes to evacuees in camps, and interpretation of the Japanese-American problem to the public.

One of the main problems was that the US government really didn’t think this process through before they set the wheels in motion. They didn’t have what could be referred to as a legitimate exit strategy for successfully emptying out the camps, and while they did create a civilian agency to handle this miscarriage of justice the fact that the Army made up the rules regarding who was free to leave the camps served to make the situation much worse than it needed to be.

Quakers were slow and methodical and wanted things to perfection.

It discusses the problem that some of the people in the camps did not want to leave. Also, something needed to be done about the Issei who would have to eventually leave but had no family to move in with.

The first roadblock to leaving the camps was the fact that discrimination and racism made most of them feel unwelcome in almost every community across the United States. Several examples of outright discrimination and hatred made it obvious that white Americans didn’t want to have the Japanese move into their neighborhoods. The government had labeled them as a fifth column so communities who had never been introduced to Japanese Americans before Pearl Harbor didn’t warm to the idea of bringing traitors into their presence, and this news made it back to those still living in the camps.

In Seattle the situation affected not only housing or employment, but also the very ability of the Japanese Americans to compete in the market. When Japanese Americans were allowed to return to the Northwest and take back their farms and businesses, Seattle’s labor unions stepped in to create a situation where Japanese farmers could not get their produce to market.

Securing adequate housing was a huge stumbling block for people leaving the camps and the risk of being homeless in a new city, during a war, when they might not speak English very well, made for a greater sense of insecurity. How could you honestly ask someone to leave their free shelter in the camps no matter how inadequate the tarpaper shacks may have been?

Even in 1945 after the government allowed the Japanese Americans to return to the West Coast most continued to stay in the camps because once again there was a real shortage of housing in the West Coast cities and even the hostels set up by various religious groups to aid in resettlement were overflowing with Japanese American refugees.

The Friends got involved in this program because their religion dictated that they should help their fellow human beings as a matter of course and because of their belief on righting the wrongs done by an oppressive regime and American society as a whole.



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