Postwar. Laura McEnaney
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emerged as the destination city for two reasons. First, it had an unusually diverse wartime economy, and this promised the most potential matches for a population unsure of how its West Coast skills might translate in a different labor market. According to People in Motion, the WRA’s landmark study of resettlement, Chicago “was booming, the demand for workers was great, and wages were as high as could be found anywhere.”9 For parolee-migrants who had lost everything, Chicago promised the chance to refill family coffers. As early as 1943, the talk in many camps was of Chicago as the “City of Opportunity”; at the Jerome, Arkansas, camp, for example, a survey of those exiting showed Chicago as their “first preference.”10
But the city lured resettlers for another reason. Quite simply, it was not the west (a place they could not return to anyway), yet by wartime standards, Chicago was allegedly approachable, even friendly. That friendliness (a regionalism midwesterners still love to claim) was more myth than fact, but enough Japanese Americans experienced it to turn them into believers. In many accounts, train-riding pioneers reported that Chicagoans welcomed them without hostility. In March 1943, with the WRA’s permission, Shotaro Hikida and a friend left the Gila River, Arizona, prison camp to do some reconnaissance of racial attitudes. Their plan was to make a field trip to Chicago and enjoy the city the way any white person would, and then report their findings to WRA staff. The WRA’s investment in the trip was more than curiosity. Unnerved by prisoner demonstrations at two camps, Myer and his staff pondered whether and how they could detain so many for so long. Their solution was the “work release,” a program that would allow internees to leave for short- and long-term paid work assignments. It was at least a partial answer to the unrest, Myer thought. But first, both Issei and Nisei would have “to be assured about the kind of reception they might expect.”11 To that end, WRA authorities let camp leaders such as Hikida make fact-finding trips, hoping to use his stories to advertise, especially to the older and more fearful Issei, that there was, indeed, life after camp.
Once in Chicago, though, the reception was decidedly mixed: Hikida and his friend could not find a hotel anywhere, partly a function of arriving so late on a Saturday, but in one case, because they were “Oriental.” Still, their white cab driver tried to help, driving them from place to place, even negotiating for them at one stop. After a ten-day stay, Hikida concluded that freed internees could resettle in Chicago “without worrying so much.” This is exactly what WRA officials wanted to hear, but we should not see Hikida as just a mouthpiece, as some of his fellow prisoners did. He wanted out and he wanted to convince others they could leave, too. His phrase “without worrying so much” did not mean safety. Chicago was not free of racism, Hikida said, but there was “less racial feeling” than in other places.12
Stories like Hikida’s helped prepare internees for a strange middle passage: a move from the relative safety of racially segregated imprisonment (most were at least with family) to the uncertainties of a racially integrated parole (now often alone, at first, and among more whites). In fact, many internees cited the trip to Chicago as an eye-opening first exposure to the racial geography of wartime. When twenty-two-year-old Ben Chikaraishi gained his work release from the Rohwer, Arkansas, camp in 1943 (on the Fourth of July), he boarded a bus to take him to the train station. As he described it, the “first decision I had to make outside of camp was ‘Where do I sit?’” Staring from the front of the bus at waiting faces, blacks in the back, whites in front, he wondered where a Japanese American might sit—literally—in the southern racial hierarchy. In that moment, he reasoned that both his people’s long history of racial discrimination and their current detention put him solidly in the back of the bus. But the driver, the de facto arbiter and enforcer of Jim Crow, ruled that his new passenger was white, and he brought the bus to a full stop to insist that Chikaraishi move forward. Chikaraishi was only somewhat compliant, deciding that he was neither black nor white but somewhere in between.13
The bus took him to a train headed north, but the train car did not feel like neutral space either. Japanese Americans traveling together could cluster, but that might attract attention and suspicion. Traveling alone brought its own vulnerabilities, and it certainly meant sitting right next to hakujin (white people), an uncomfortable proximity, maybe, for both. This palpable tension on buses and trains recalls Robin Kelley’s notion of public transportation as a kind of “moving theater” in which racial freedoms and restraints were being enacted on a daily basis during wartime.14 Passengers like Chikaraishi were both actors and spectators in the play, and each train trip offered another chance to watch World War II’s racial dynamics. Exiled in camps, Japanese Americans now had to rejoin and relearn the rules of public space in new regions altogether. They were anxious to avoid the spotlight, but they were an attentive audience, studying closely their shifting environs, but feeling mostly on edge about the potential for things to end badly. On her train ride from Manzanar, California, to Chicago, Kaye Kimura described a “marked feeling of self-consciousness…. I thought everybody was looking at me,” and she braced herself for “some sort of unpleasantness” as she rode.15 Leaving Topaz, Utah, for Chicago, Sam Konishi similarly reported feeling uneasy when he boarded the train, “because I had never been that far east before and I didn’t know how we would be accepted.”16
The surprise ending turned out to be the genuinely warm reaction from fellow travelers—even, notably, from men in uniform. Many internees described a sense of relief once they began to do what they feared most: talk to strangers. Kimura admitted that the train “was [her] first touch with the outside world and the passengers … didn’t seem to be any different from before.” She recalled how scared she was when she first saw so many soldiers in her car, but they treated her small group of Manzanar migrants “very nicely.” In fact, “the soldiers even went out of their way to talk with us. They guessed that we were just coming out of camp … [and] they condemned the California people for treating us so unjustly.”17 Konishi, too, noted the presence of GIs, but “nobody bothered us.”18 When Mae Kaneko fell ill on her trip, she was amazed when a sailor brought her some dinner. “I had to laugh then at my fears,” she recalled, “because … I had built up my imagination to the point where I thought I would be the victim of some kind of incident.”19
To lessen what Hikida had called the “racial feeling” for those going east, the WRA opened a network of branch offices to facilitate a smooth camp-to-city migration. The first in the nation opened in Chicago in the January cold of 1943, and by June of that year, forty-two more offices opened in cities around the country. For arriving resettlers, the WRA was not so much a friendly face as a familiar one, and the irony of asking for help from their captors was not lost on them. But they needed the lifeline, and the WRA thought these urban outposts could foster the kind of “favorable community acceptance” that resettlers desperately wanted in their adopted cities.20 At least initially, resettlers did not mind the wartime overcrowding lamented by so many in Chicago. As the WRA’s People in Motion phrased it, the city’s “metropolitan atmosphere” could offer “a cloak of indifference” for Japanese Americans whose detention had heightened their racial self-consciousness.21 Stories of anti-Japanese violence “were given wide belief” in camp, according to the study, so “to go ‘outside’ was considered extremely hazardous.”22 Thus Chicago—or any other big city—would make it possible to hide, to create an urban anonymity that might shield evacuees from simmering resentment or even rage.
It helped, too, that Chicago’s local newspapers and politicians decided not to indulge in the Hearst-style media hysteria of the West Coast. For the most part, Chicago’s press coverage was “relatively mild and objective,” reported Shotaro Miyamoto, a social scientist studying resettlement conditions in Chicago.23 Some outlets used the racist language of the era, “Japs,” but most avoided racial sensationalism. The media mainly adopted a reportorial tone. The Chicago Daily Tribune’s earliest articles, for example, cited an “infiltration of Japanese evacuees” but also highlighted their education and skills. Reports of scattered local opposition to arriving Japanese Americans were always balanced with an opposing view, most often from WRA staff, who used an early variant of the model minority theory. Elmer R. Shirrell, director of the WRA’s midwestern office, described Japanese American newcomers as “industrious and intelligent workers