Japanese Americans 1942 - 21 February 1992

I have a beloved friend in New York who is going to say a week or two from now: "So you've been in California, see any of the old crowd?" She doesn't mean California, she doesn't even mean Los Angeles, she means that tiny, manicured bit of hill country called Beverley Hills.

I know I shall reply, "No, all the ones I used to know are dead or went off to avoid British taxes in France or Switzerland or Spain and it did them little good, they are dead too." That is, I guess, something of a final answer. We never go on, nobody present is ever likely to say, "What part of California were you in and what was going on there?" And I imagine that the immediate response, the picture in the mind of most people around the world, would be not much different.

Fifty years ago, just before the Second World War say, California, to most people, meant oranges and movie stars. Then came Pearl Harbor and suddenly to Americans from all over who went there, it meant still movie stars but now something new. Industries that had never been wildly possible because California had no steel, wherewith to get their ores, two thousand miles away in Pittsburgh.

Well, a bulldog of a pioneer, California pioneer certainly, one Henry Kaiser, needed ores badly – he'd promised the government he would build freighters in numbers never seen before. And he found his ores in Utah, to the north, there, in Mormon country and soon there were steel plants near the coast and within months the Kaiser shipyards here in San Francisco, a great joke to an old traditional ship builder here, who'd done business with Scotland for maybe two, three generations.

This Henry Kaiser, he didn't even recognise the bow and the stern, he talked about the front end of a ship. Never mind, he built and welded these big-bottomed galumphing Liberty ships, so called, and within the year was delivering two a day. It was these hundreds of Liberty ships, carrying arms, material, food back and forth across the Pacific that sustained the war against the Japanese and made possible the release of enough ships' bottoms to Britain to mount the invasion of Normandy when, at last, the Allies could guarantee the provision of a continuous line of supply across the English Channel.

So after the war, California now meant movies and shipyards and then very soon, airplane factories and then microchips and Silicon Valley. Oranges are very much a second or third thought by the end of the '50s, a thousand people a day were coming into the state. They needed homes and the big orange growers discovered that real estate is more profitable than citrus and, anyway, by a process invented during the war by the government, and later smartly seized by Bing Crosby for one, you could concentrate the juice of one orange, add five parts of water and still have, technically speaking, whole orange juice. Today, even to an Easterner or a nerd, California means a vast variety of fruits and vegetables, aerospace, electronics, commercial fishing, timber up in the grey coastal north of the state – at last count 4.1 billion board feet a year, wine, tourism, skiing up in the Sierra and sure, Hollywood, movies and television.

The Los Angeles Times, at least the second best newspaper in America, is likely any day to have more about Lebanon and Ireland and Ukraine and Chile and Haiti and Russia than all the movie news and reviews in a month. And, need I say, I've noticed that English language tabloids, anywhere in the English-speaking world, publish more movie gossip than California newspapers outside the small city of Hollywood.

Well, we're outside Hollywood now, back in San Francisco and, as always here, you don't have to go peering for a story. Two in particular have dominated the news in the past week. One is the rains and the other is the Presidential Order, 50 years old last Wednesday that was celebrated or rather recalled here, with proper shame. In a minute – first the rains. I arrived here a week ago on what was gravely recorded as the beginning of the sixth year of the California drought. No sooner had the historical date been noted than storms rushed in from the Pacific, from the south, from the north, collided and slammed the south Los Angles county with massive rains. So, it happens other places surely and is no cause for panic. You must have seen the usual flood pictures.

What was more rarely seen were pictures of the swollen drains depositing not only the rainwater down and out into the sea but also all the rubbish, the sewage, the moveable objects people had on their lawns and porches, so that there was one eerie picture of several miles of the curling Pacific tide on the beach, churning with every sort of garbage. But what makes the California coast, down south especially, so risky to build on, and I do mean the actual hills on the shoreline, is their geological composition. They are loosely bound clay and sand, shale that can take only so much drenching without dribbling and then shooing loose from the pilings and the foundations of the buildings above it. The special California coastal peril after heavy rains, is the mudslide, which is a great democrat, carrying away in one huge tumbling motion, the cottage and the mansion alike and depositing them in broken pieces either on the highway below or below that, in the ocean.

Now you may have gathered from my gingerly mention of the other story that it's something which, on a cheerful day, I'd rather not talk about. The Presidential Order which was 50 years old, last Wednesday. Anyone who followed the papers last December and read about the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, will have learned the phrase made famous by President Roosevelt, when he appeared before the Congress on 8 December 1941 to ask for a Declaration of War. Yesterday, he began, on 7 December, a date that will live in infamy. He never, at any later time, mentioned another date that will live in infamy, which was 19 February 1942. That was the date when he, as President, signed a Presidential Order, which in time of war has the force of law, no need for Congressional debate and a vote. It was known officially as Executive Order 9066 and it authorised the mass removal from their homes by the US military, of all the Japanese living in the state of California.

To be taken first to clearing centres and then to detention camps in remote and desolate parts of the country, the Cascade or the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada or in the surrounding desert valleys. A hundred and twenty thousand men, women and children, defined, by way of immigrant status in three ways: the Issei, the Kibei, the Nisei. That's to say old folks born in Japan, who had emigrated but never become citizens, younger ones generally who had become citizens and the last generation, born in this country and Americans at birth. They were taken, not brutally, quietly and swiftly and both their houses, their places of business and their farms were left untenanted and unleased. Many, if not most, were bought or taken over by white neighbours, so that when they were all released from the detention camps at the very end of 1944, only four months or so before the end of the war in Europe, when they came back most of them were penniless and had the cruel job of starting again in communities which, in the three years that America had been in the war, had whipped up a steady paranoia about Japanese people, not least of the old neighbours, the American Japanese. There were 75,000 of them.

How could this be? How could the just, the liberal Roosevelt perform an act which four later presidents condemned and which the courts came to decode had violated seven of the 10 Articles of the Bill of Rights? It's painful but not otherwise difficult for me to recall the time and the popular chauvinist mood that spawned this awful Presidential Order which was, by the way, never applied to Americans of German or Italian background and their parent countries were enemies too.

Well, there had been for almost half a century a particular California mania, the yellow peril. Japanese had come in in such numbers that, in 1924, Japanese immigration was banned and new laws barred all Asian immigrants from owning land or becoming citizens. And yet by December 1941, the general feeling about the established Japanese was that they were an ideal minority: hard-working, thrifty, peaceable and it was thought, essential for stoop labour on the farms. But the days after Pearl Harbor were heady with alarms and rumours.

I was here and I got the impression that the Japanese were going to invade from submarines overnight and a month or two later I followed some of these people beyond the Tehachapi Mountains, into a desert valley where on windy days they bent into sandstorms with handkerchiefs over their nostrils. On the horizon they saw only barbed wire and at four corners, small towers with armed sentries. I went back the next year, 1943, and by then they'd planted grass seed and built little gardens round all their shacks. There was, throughout all these western camps, no case of desertion, violence, let alone of the treachery which had been the original pretext for rounding them up.

A year or two ago, a Congressional commission reviewed this bitter exodus. President Reagan and the Congress made a formal, certainly an unprecedented apology and $1.25 billion were voted in reparation payments to the now ageing and almost all American-born survivors. About time.

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