We have been down this road before
Kusuda wonders and is concerned because he's been there before. Kusuda is one of 120,000 Japanese Americans who were detained during World War II in relocation camps on the desert fringe in California without due process or having been accused of a crime. Kusuda knows how it feels.
In essence, Kusuda's destiny was set the day his father left Japan for the United States in 1906 at the age of 17. He didn't want to be forced into the military. "My father did not care for the militarism," Kusuda said during an interview with The Madison Times. "So, he decided he would leave as soon as he graduated from high school."
Kusuda's father eventually migrated to Los Angeles (LA) where he met the woman who would be his future wife - and Kusuda's mother. She had left Japan when she was 13 years old. "It was an arranged marriage after my father was ready to get married," Kusuda said. "They had three children. I had an older brother and a younger sister. The arrangements were made and they were married in 1916. My mother was 17 years old. We lived in downtown LA until I was seven years old."
Even back in the 1920s, downtown LA was not a great place to raise children. So, the Kusudas packed up and moved to west LA in the area now known as Koreatown. He bought a small grocery store on the eve of the Great Depression. Kusuda's father wasn't a hardened businessman. He had a lot of empathy for the people who had been his customers, so he gave a lot of credit. "He gave credit to a lot of people during the Depression," Kusuda said. "He knew that being unemployed meant they were unable to pay for their groceries. He kept book after book on the customers with their names, addresses, and amounts and how much they borrowed and how much they paid. It was a running account. A couple of times he asked me to go out and try to make collections. I tried to do it. I was in my early teens then."
Since he had extended a lot of credit, the store itself was cash strapped. "I also knew we had trouble making our checks," Kusuda recalled."He would date the checks in advance. This was acceptable. I would have to rush to the bank before noon on Saturday in order to cover the checks. It was so bad that if a customer happened to come in with a $20 bill, my father could never cash it. So, either my brother or I would run to a gas station and get the change and come back to the store with it. The cashier's till was very empty."
While the living was hard, Kusuda's parents shielded them from the negative effect of being poor. "We were on the edge of being poor, but we never thought we were poor because we always had food and we always gave away food," he said. "We were able to make due. We never thought we were poor, so we never knew what poverty was. But we must have been in the throes of it."
The length of the Depression eventually forced Kusuda's father to close the store. "It was just too difficult to make ends meet," Kusuda said. "Instead of going bankrupt, he kept all of his creditors' names and paid them off as soon as he could. It took a long time. He held down two jobs then to make ends meet and to meet his financial obligations."
The closing of the store also forced the Kusudas to move back to downtown LA. It was pretty rough, even back then. "We found an apartment where most of the people were on government projects like WPA and PWA and all of the alphabet type agencies that were established by President Roosevelt," Kusuda said. "The atmosphere around where I lived was rife with prostitutes and people who were unemployed and people who were just looking for things to do. It was ethnically mixed. In the apartment house where we lived, it was a mixed group. We had African Americans as well as Hispanics, Filipinos, White, and other Japanese families. It was a fairly large, three-story apartment house."
As they entered high school, none of the Kusuda children attended school in downtown LA. The two boys falsified their addresses to attend LA High School, even though it was 10 miles from where they lived. Their sister took another route. "My sister went to Hollywood High because she was working in a home as a domestic student," Kusuda said. "They were called 'Schoolgirls.' A Schoolgirl could live in, help with children and other domestic duties, and get room and board and some spending money. She left our home to do that."
The area where Kusuda lived and was going to school was pretty rough. A friend of his from the college was killed by the gangs there. "He was knifed and thrown over a viaduct, " Kusuda recalled. "His body was cut up by trains. He was an athlete too. He was going to LACC. His plan was to get out of the barrios, but he never did make it. He wasn't a gang member, but the gangs got to him because he was going to junior college and he was going to go on to college after that as I was planning to do. He was going to be an engineer like I was."
It was late fall of 1941. It appeared that Kusuda was going to make it out of downtown LA through hard work and determination. Engineering jobs were beginning to open up for him. "On the basis that I was practically through with my two years of pre-engineering, I got a form from the federal government," Kusuda recalled. " I was accepted as a naval ordinance inspector for the San Francisco shipyards on the basis of the classes I had taken and the fact I would get my AA degree in June 1942. That notice came around Tuesday. Pearl Harbor came on Sunday. The following Wednesday, I got another notice. It said the previous notice should be ignored because it was canceled. I was no longer certified to be a naval ordinance inspector. There was no reason given, but it was pretty obvious they wouldn't want a suspicious character doing the ordinance inspecting. The process had begun.
Wholesale violation of the Constitution
After he lost his job, Kusuda continued to attend Los Angeles City College. Within four days of Pearl Harbor, the government began to pick up some Japanese Americans; Kusuda refers to them as "potentials." "The FBI had a dossier on practically everyone who would be suspicious," Kusuda said "They were practically all aliens who were picked up within that four-day period and went to local lock-ups and held without charge and without notification to the families as to where the person was kept. In many cases, the families didn't know for a long time where their husbands and other relatives were kept. All they knew was that the so-called government came by and picked them up. These were people who contributed quite a bit of money to Japan, had a fair amount of money in Japanese banks, taught the Japanese language, and taught Japanese dancing, judo, and kendo, a ceremonial fighting with bamboo sticks. These were the people who were targeted, the teachers and those who had been well educated in Japan. They also targeted Buddhist priests, anyone who espoused being Shinto if they were leaders in the community. Those were the people who were hit. Most or all of them were aliens. It was a wide net."
Kusuda assumed that this would be the extent to which Japanese Americans would be rounded up. After all, they had picked up people of German and Italian ancestry who had the same type of profile. The U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the California state Constitution guaranteed his right to due process and equal protection. And Kusuda was a law-abiding citizen of the U.S. "I was absolutely certain we would not be evacuated," Kusuda said. "I bet my friends at City College. They said 'No, this is wartime. You're going to be evacuated whether you like it or not." I said 'Put your money where your mouth is.' We had bets.
In the months following Pearl Harbor, the environment grew increasingly hostile for Japanese Americans in California."There was negative newspaper publicity, and many organizations including churches were driven by panic and felt they had a suspect group in the local communities," Kusuda said. "After all, the west coast is so close to Japan. The whole of the west coast was afraid that Japan would come over and bomb the west coast, especially all of the oil and the shipbuilding and the manufacturing elements we had up and down the west coast. So, California girded itself in this national emergency by forcing blackouts of everyone. The idea was if there is no light seen from above by an airplane, then targets would be very difficult to point out. So, we were under a complete blackout system with block captains running around making sure that people did not have their lights on. Cars were traveling slowly with no lights. The atmosphere of the fear of attack was very heavy."
Things began to get worse. Kusuda's father lost one of his jobs as a clerk at a hotel because of his ancestry. And then President Franklin Roosevelt signed Proclamation 9066 that allowed the military to evacuate and intern Japanese Americans without due process. The first group targeted in LA were the fishermen of Terminal Island south of metropolitan LA, which is now part of the U.S. naval station in Long Beach.
The Terminal Island fishermen were the most prosperous group of Japanese Americans in the area and had accumulated the most material wealth according to Kusuda. They were given 5-7 days to evacuate. Kusuda and some friends drove a pick-up truck one of them had and went out to Terminal Island to help out.
It was obvious they would not be able to take everything with them. "They had boats that were worth thousands of dollars at the time," Kusuda said. "That was a lot of money. Their whole life was put into that occupation. It was hard to go into a home to help them move. Some of the people had fine things that they had brought over from Japan. They had all kinds of souvenir things as well as clothing such as ceremonial dress, and their furniture was good because when the fishing season was good, they didn't mind spending their money to buy good things. They were much better off than the rest of us in the city."
The "vultures," as Kusuda referred to them, also descended on Terminal Island. The "vultures" were trying to get a bargain because many things would obviously have to be left behind. "They offered to buy at ridiculously low rates," Kusuda said. "In one family that I saw, fine dishes were just smashed on the floor rather than be sold because the people were offering such small amounts. They said 'This is worth so much more, you can have the pieces.' Whole sets were all smashed on the floor and just left there. In the house I went into to help out, they broke up some of the furniture as well. They said 'You don't offer enough so it must be scrap.' It was pitiful."
The families had to move in with relatives or friends in LA. Many lost their boats. By the time they were able to return to Terminal Island after World War II, their means of making a living and way of life was destroyed. They would have to start over.
While the hysteria at the time created a public mandate to relocate the Japanese Americans, actually doing so would be a formidable, if not impossible task. The military needed cooperation. "No one could actually tell the difference between a person of Japanese ancestry and a person of Chinese, Filipino or any other Asian ancestry because, as the saying goes, 'they all look alike,'" Kusuda said. "There's no way there could be a round-up of the 120,000 to be sent to the assembly and relocation centers. National security was such that we were urged by the Japanese-American Citizens League to cooperate and not raise a ruckus even though we knew, as the Japanese-American Citizens League knew, this was unconstitutional. We were aware of the Bill of Rights and the legal end of due process. But the organization said because of national security, we should do our best to keep a low profile and not create any disturbances. We would help the government out with their task of differentiation. Everyone did a self-selection, self-identification. People would say 'I am a person of Japanese ancestry.'"
Some of Kusuda's friends came up with an idea to aid him in not going to the relocation center. "My friends who happened to be Chinese and Filipino gave me big buttons to wear," Kusuda recalled. "One side was the American flag. The other side was the Filipino flag or Chinese flag. China, then, was our big ally. Chiang Kai-shek was FDR's good friend. They said if I would wear the badges, I could probably wander around and everyone would figure I wasn't Japanese. I never wore them, but I thanked them for them."
Kusuda would be uprooted with his family and sent to the Manzanar relocation camp.
Next issue: The relocation process and life in Manzanar.
