War led to acts based on ancestry

By Scott Ishikawa
Advertiser Staff Writer

As a Japanese American teenager during World War II, Jane Komeiji knew it what it felt like to be discriminated against.

But the biggest shock came after the war, when she found the U.S. government had suspected her family of assisting the Japanese during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

"My mother, who managed a dry-goods store in 'A'ala, had ran a newspaper ad before the attack," said Komeiji during a discussion at the Japanese Cultural Center yesterday called "Beyond Pearl Harbor," which focused on the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

"The military actually thought our ads sent secret messages to the Japanese on how to attack Pearl Harbor."

Military officials thought the figure $1.15 in the ad — in which the digits add up to 7 — meant Dec. 7, the day of the attack. The word "fashions," if turned upside down and held up to a mirror, supposedly read "Jap Raid."

"It sounded crazy, but I think when there's a blackout on news as during the war, some people's imagination just ran wild."

The event held yesterday by the Japanese American Citizens League was in reaction to the movie "Pearl Harbor." Although the film reflects on the Dec. 7, 1941, attack, it overlooks the war-era hysteria that targeted Americans of Japanese ancestry living in Hawai'i and on the West Coast.

About 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — many of them U.S. citizens — were interned in camps during World War II because they were considered a security threat, although there were no documented cases of espionage or sabotage. In addition to the loss of their freedom and their civil rights, many also lost their homes and businesses in the process.

To prove their loyalty, many joined the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and made it the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in U.S. history.

Komeiji's family was not interned during the war, but she lived with the fear that her mother would be taken away. Komeiji, 15 years old at the time of the 1941 attack, said she and her mother were forced to turn over any binoculars, telescopes or short-wave radios.

Military officials came one night and took away two of her neighbors.

"I heard they were still in their pajamas when they left," she said. "A lot of us had our bags packed just in case we had to go."

The Rev. Yoshiaki Fujitani remembered when his father, Kodo, a Buddhist priest, was shipped to a Mainland internment camp after the Pearl Harbor attack.

"I certainly believe there was a blacklist from the start," said Fujitani, a retired bishop of the Honpa Hongwanji of Hawai'i who today serves as an officer of several civil-rights organizations. "They were going after ministers, Sunday School teachers, judo instructors: those they felt could influence others."

The U.S. government at one point asked the interned Kodo Fujitani, a legal alien, if he wanted to be shipped back to Japan. He asked his family if they wanted to go, but they said no.

Yoshiaki Fujitani said: "The vote was 9 to 1, so we won out." Fujitani's father was later told he could leave the internment camp in Santa Fe, N.M., if he didn't move back to Hawai'i, but toward the East Coast.

"He refused, and opted to stay there until the end of the war," Fujitani said. "While enlisted in the military, I visited him in 1944 on emergency leave after he suffered a heart attack. He recovered, but it was a shocking situation, with the barbed wire and armed guard towers."

Sandra Hoshida's family in Hilo was also split up. Her father was sent to a California internment camp when she was only a year old. Hoshida said her mother, pregnant at the time, suffered a nervous breakdown trying to hold the family together. The family moved to a Mainland internment camp to join their father.

"My family lost their home, and after the war he couldn't get his old job back," Hoshida said. "We had to live in public housing and with relatives until they finally got another home."

Hoshida said, "My mom and dad never lived long enough to receive reparations from Congress," which was $20,000 to each surviving person interned during the war.

She and her family didn't discuss the internment camps. "You didn't want to talk about it because you felt you did something wrong," she said. Only later, while attending law school, did Hoshida learn that the internment violated her family's constitutional rights.

Hoshida warns that groups could face discrimination again during wartime because of ancestry. "It all depends on who's running the military at the time," she said. "I know when I was writing my thesis on it, Iranian students were threatened on being sent home during (tensions between the U.S. and Iran)."