Postwar. Laura McEnaney
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in a parallel and often overlapping universe were Japanese American mutual aid organizations. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), already a national association, set up a Midwest regional office in January 1943—only after its leaders were given a security clearance to do so. Its first director, Thomas Yatabe, had been imprisoned himself, so he had a deep understanding of evacuee sensitivities. But he was building a civil rights organization for the long haul, so his vision of what his branch should do was much broader than resettlement services. Further, the JACL offered membership only to Nisei—that is, American citizens—and this made it difficult to win the trust of Issei resettlers, already resentful of their declining community status during internment. The smallness of the Chicago JACL’s budget and staff necessitated cooperation with white allies, such as the Friends, with whom the JACL had adjoining office space, and with their former captor, the WRA, whose Chicago office opened the very same month as the JACL’s. An essentially one-man operation, director Yatabe found himself pulled in many directions, and as more complex family configurations migrated to the city, his local JACL simply did not have the resources to help.36
Luckily, there were other Japanese American groups who could react more nimbly to conditions on the ground. Together, they constituted a kind of homegrown, resettler-controlled social service operation for a population in the midst of yet another war-related relocation. Chief among them was the Chicago Resettlers Committee (CRC), created in 1944, which, unlike the JACL, defined its membership very broadly, putting both Nisei and Issei on its executive board. According to an internal report, this marked “the first time both generations sat down together to plan for the welfare of their own people.”37 Even white allies, such as the director of Chicago’s famed Hull House, could join, partly to garner “sympathetic support” from the white reform community and city leaders, generally. The CRC’s mission and practical services were little different from that of the Friends or the Brethren, but its largely Japanese American leadership made it a trusted “go to” for the newly freed. An organization run by Issei and Nisei could inspire “the confidence of the resettlers as they would feel that it is their own,” said the CRC’s 1946 membership report.38 Although the CRC was more homegrown, more attuned to the local and urgent than the overtly political, its members shared the civil rights goals of their JACL colleagues: “to eliminate discrimination” and to “maintain a sound peace.”39 These were the embryonic, idealistic views of an urban Japanese American war liberalism that would be tested immediately by the challenges of city resettlement.
A “sound peace” started with good housing, but Chicago was a deeply racially segregated city. The apartment hunt made Japanese Americans doubt whether their adopted city could offer a more tolerant—even liberal—climate for their recovery. According to People in Motion, finding a place to live was resettlers’ “first and increasingly desperate concern.”40 In fact, their migration to Chicago coincided exactly with the war-induced housing crisis, so just as resettlers were being liberated from their prison “apartments,” the odds were narrowing for them to find a real apartment. The WRA and evacuee aid groups sweated this problem every day. They saw housing as one of the prerequisites for a successful long-term racial integration, and they worried that the shortage would foster what they called “social maladjustment.” According to a CRC analysis, “undesirable housing” magnified or created anew a roster of social problems in Japanese American neighborhoods, ranging from marital strain to juvenile delinquency. “From the standpoint of healthy social adjustment to their communities,” the CRC found, “resettlers occupy housing that is both good and bad. For the most part it is bad.”41
Why it was bad had much to do with America’s long history of racial conflict, now compounded by World War II’s own perversions of racial thinking. Yet it was also true that lousy housing was the lot for almost everyone as the country demobilized. When researcher Togo Tanaka tried to sort this out, he posited supply and demand and the “added possibility of race prejudice,” but there was no way to know for sure, he said, no “measuring determinant” to actually prove it. “No doubt, both are important factors,” he surmised.42 Tanaka was right, but it was hard for those who had just suffered a race-based internment to see their own housing struggle as anything but racial. So, like riding a train, finding housing would have to be part of resettlers’ race work. They would have to probe Chicago’s racial attitudes house by house, bracing for resentment, hoping for acceptance.
As we know from the rent control stories, finding housing in Chicago was not for the timid. The very congestion that offered resettlers a “cloak of indifference” made finding a place to sleep almost unattainable. Hoofing it around the city, placing a desperately worded ad in a newspaper (should they divulge their race?), tapping into existing networks, and, of course, bunking with family until something came through, these were all a start. In a way, resettlers actually had a slight advantage at this stage because of the religious and mutual aid groups arrayed to help them. Fresh off the train, they could lean immediately on a member of the Friends Service Committee (who was often at the station to meet them) or on the downtown YMCA (where staff were attuned to their special needs). In fact, internees awaiting their work release while in camp could even reserve a bed at the Friends’ hostel, and if there was no space when they arrived, they could at least sleep on a couch or the floor, something a random newcomer who spent a night in the train station would have jumped at.
Finding permanent accommodations proved much harder, though. Aid groups sometimes did advanced reconnaissance to see what was available or what might soon turn over. As described in Shotaro Miyamoto’s report, Friends staff, for example, “would canvass whole residential areas of the city, jotting down addresses of vacancies, making inquiries, talking to apartment managers,” and taking scrupulous notes so they could later describe a “desirable and undesirable area.” Even the director of the Friends’ hostel devoted over half of each workday to sniffing out new leads and verifying tips from other referral lists.43 What these staffers learned from walking the beat was that no one could count on stability in the housing market; war migrations fluctuated in response to local and national economic factors, the situation in camps, even the weather. Turnover was the only sure thing, and even the hostels set up to ease this volatility experienced this. The Church of the Brethren lost its lease in the fall of 1943, and it was lucky to find another building after a determined hunt. The Friends had no such luck when their landlord terminated the lease, so they had to shutter their hostel in November 1943, just as evacuee numbers were swelling.44
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