Deja Vu

This is how serendipitous and odd and mysterious life can be.

A Seattle woman is searching for a carpenter to do some work in her home, which is being remodeled. She considers one man who, like her, is Japanese American. She’s the chatty type and, as they talk, it turns out he has an interesting hobby--a private passion, actually--researching Japanese immigrants who were detained during World War II. Not the well-documented stories of families sent to internment camps, but the largely untold tales of people who were essentially convicted, in closed hearings without legal representation, of being a threat to national security.

The woman mentions that her grandfather had suffered such a fate, and the carpenter grows excited, promising to do some research. But she decides not to hire him--his quote is too high--and she never expects to hear from him again. He’s a carpenter, after all--an amateur historian whose zeal surely can’t reflect any real sleuthing ability. The woman forgets their conversation.

Three months later, late in 2002, the carpenter calls. “I found it!” he says. “I found the records of your grandfather!” Soon, he delivers 132 pages of documents. It is her grandfather’s Department of Justice file, which the carpenter has obtained through the Freedom of Information and Privacy acts.

And this is how the woman, my sister, learns what happened to our grandfather, our jichan, Yoshitaka Watanabe.

Jichan. I haven’t much thought of him for years, decades even. He had been a fruit and vegetable dealer at Pike Place Market along Seattle’s waterfront when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. While growing up, I had heard he was arrested by the FBI, separated from his invalid wife and five children and detained for nearly two years.

My family never knew why. We never knew what his experience was like. We never asked him about it, and he never volunteered any information. He died with his secrets, nearly 40 years ago, when I was 6, too young to know enough to ask questions.

Now a thick file detailing his case has unexpectedly landed in our laps, 60 years later, at another time of tension and fear in America. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center--a strike that was often compared to Pearl Harbor--President Bush declared a war on terrorism. It spawned a Department of Homeland Security and laws such as the Patriot Act, which vastly expanded the surveillance powers of federal law-enforcement agencies.

After Pearl Harbor, nearly 8,000 Japanese immigrants were arrested and interned as potentially dangerous enemy aliens, says University of Cincinnati professor emeritus Roger Daniels; not one was found guilty of espionage or sabotage. Since Sept. 11, about 4,000 men, mostly Arabs and Muslims, have been arrested and detained, according to Georgetown University law professor David Cole; among them, he says, only a minuscule number have been charged with crimes related to terrorism.

These developments have provoked unease among many Japanese Americans, 120,000 of whom--including my grandmother and her children--were removed from their West Coast homes and locked up in desolate camps after Pearl Harbor. Many speak of a sense of deja vu. Japanese Americans are making documentaries, staging performances and holding forums and vigils--from Seattle to Los Angeles--to underline their concerns that innocent people are again being trampled upon in the name of national security.

There are “disturbing parallels with post 9/11 experiences in Arab, Muslim and South Asian communities all over the U.S.,” says John Christgau, who wrote a 1985 book, “Enemies,” on the alien internment program and who helped compile a current exhibition at UCLA’s Powell Library on the 31,000 Japanese, Italian and German immigrants and their families who were interned during World War II.

The unexpected appearance of my grandfather’s file, an invitation to reopen the past and compare it to the present, seems discomfortingly coincidental. In these pages we would at last learn the reasons for Jichan’s arrest and detention. Here are the records of the Alien Enemy Hearing Board that interrogated my grandfather and concluded that he was potentially dangerous, and the deliberations of another hearing board 19 months later that decided he was not.

As my grandfather’s file prompted my extended family to gather and reminisce, I would hear stories of stoic and heroic responses to the bewildering turn of events following Pearl Harbor. While Jichan was locked up as a national security threat, one of his three sons--my Uncle Mas--volunteered for the celebrated 442nd Regimental Combat Team of the United States Army. Except for some of its officers, the 442nd was composed entirely of the American-born sons of Japanese immigrants who chose as their motto “Go for Broke.” In the dank and forbidding forests of the Vosges mountains of France, they fought in the famed “Battle of the Lost Battalion,” rescuing a group of Texas soldiers at a cost of four lives sacrificed for every one saved. The 442nd became one of the most highly decorated U.S. military units in history.

Uncle Mas was awarded a Bronze Star for valor, a Purple Heart for combat injuries and eight other military decorations. His brother-in-law, Uncle Ned, never made it back. A 442nd Army sergeant and squad leader, he was killed by Germans while on patrol during the hellish battle for the Lost Battalion. He left an infant daughter and a wife of two years.

As I gently probe family memories, I would find that time does not heal all wounds. I would see glimpses of pain and shadows of sadness. I would find surprising tensions among my aunts and uncles stemming from the day they took our Jichan away.

It is Thanksgiving 2002. I am in Seattle to visit my family. My sister Andy picks me up at the airport, the file in the front seat of her van. I open the manila envelope with trepidation, instinctively sensing the troubling nature of its contents. The very first page stops me. It features Jichan’s fingerprints and mug shots, front and side. He is dressed in a white shirt and tie, his salt-and-pepper hair neatly parted and combed to the side. His face looks shiny and tense; his eyes seem vacant.

He’s a criminal, I think with a start.

Then comes the FBI report, dated March 30, 1942.

“Synopsis of Facts: Subject apprehended at his residence 1005 East Jefferson Street, Seattle, Washington on March 7, 1942 and detained as an enemy alien, basis of detention being membership in Sokoku-Kai . . . records disclosed that YOSHITAKA WATANABE, subject of this case, was a paying subscriber to the ‘Sokoku’ magazine and consequently a member of the organization during 1940 and 1941. . . . It will be noted that this organization has been declared subversive by the Attorney General of the U.S. Department of Justice, and it has been ruled that mere membership in this organization constitutes sufficient ground for internment.”

I’m floored. My grandfather a member of a subversive organization? None of my family have ever heard of the organization, or its magazine. I can not square my memories of Jichan with the image of a dangerous subversive.

Like so many immigrants of his time, my grandfather came to America at the turn of the century hoping to strike it rich. He was 18 when he took up his duty as the family’s eldest son and sailed to Seattle in 1908 with a mission: to make enough money to pay off the taxes on the family’s substantial land holdings in Nambu, a picturesque village of rolling hills and vineyards near the foot of Mt. Fuji. Or so I heard from my Japanese relatives many years later. The FBI file, however, says my grandfather left Japan to avoid the military draft, the first we have heard of this. In any case, he never made his mint--earning $8 a week in lime quarries and restaurants before starting his produce stand--and refused to return to Japan except for one brief visit to find a bride. My grandmother, who passed away many years ago, used to say he probably felt haji--shame--that he had failed in his mission and let his family down.

I remember only a short, stout man with a white mane of hair and bushy eyebrows who doted on his 21 grandchildren. He kept a ceramic candy jar in the kitchen for us, filled with bubble gum and Tootsie Rolls, and played the accommodating monster who chased us on all fours and growled. My older sister, Mary Jo, remembers how Jichan helped her with homework, illustrating her school reports, and once stunned her by turning over his Social Security check as a high school graduation present. Cousin Ed recalls how Jichan never missed one of his Little League baseball games, paid a penny for every cigarette he rolled for him and affectionately called him bakatare--blockhead.

All of us remember his passion and pride in all things Japanese. He was a man of art and culture who painted watercolors of old Japan: samurai battles, travelers along the old Tokaido Road, the hills of Nambu. He would spend hours practicing Japanese calligraphy, his back ramrod straight and his brow furrowed in deep concentration as he fluidly inked graceful ideographs on old newspapers and the backs of torn-off calendar pages. Under the pen name Ryuu--Willow Rain--he wrote Japanese poetry.

After the war, listening to the Emperor’s voice

I look up at the moon over Nebraska’s desert skies

And wonder about the shattered nation

But, truth be told, Jichan was also a stubborn, old-fashioned Issei immigrant with the volatile temper and hard-headedness that mark many a Watanabe man. Strange things set him off, and then he would get spittin’ mad, literally. He fumed over TV shows he found idiotic, such as “The Three Stooges,” and would march to my cousin Ed’s house at show time to turn off the TV--setting grandfather and grandson nose-to-nose in yelling matches. When he caught my Uncle Joke helping his wife wash the dishes, he bellowed that a man should never be in the kitchen and ordered him out. He raged over Japanese girls who wore short skirts or makeup, and strictly forbade his own two daughters from painting their faces or their nails.

“He used to say if God intended a girl’s nails to be red, he would have made them that way,” Auntie Joy tells me.

My grandfather would spend long nights drinking with his buddies at the old Tenkatsu restaurant in what used to be Seattle’s Japantown, and then he could get mean. Sometimes he directed his outbursts at my grandmother, Shizue, even though she was, by then, bedridden, mute and half-paralyzed by two strokes.

In his household, there were no questions asked, no challenges to his authority. His children all went to Japanese language school after their regular classes, whether they liked it or not. His sons joined the judo club. He followed centuries of Japanese patriarchal practices by showering family privileges on his eldest son--my father, Shigeo--who got all of the new sports equipment and the shot at college.

Jichan’s world was insular, hemmed in by racism--U.S. laws barred Japanese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens--and the common immigrant tendency to cluster around familiar customs and language. He was active only in Japanese organizations: the chamber of commerce, the farmers organization, the poetry club, his hometown association.

He would not allow his children to have Chinese friends, because Japan was at war with China. He wanted Japan to win that war, and contributed a few times to the homeland war fund. Did he want Japan to defeat America, too?

At his hearing before the government’s alien enemy hearing board in April 1942, Jichan told his interrogators that he wanted America to win the war, after initially saying he hated to see either side lose. He was asked if he believed the emperor of Japan became “kami”--god--after he died, and Jichan replied no. He was asked if he were bound to obey the emperor, and Jichan said no, because America was now his family’s permanent home. He was asked if he still worshiped kami, a term for the divine used at the time in the Shinto faith of the emperor, and Jichan replied that he was a baptized Christian.

His interrogators asked Jichan about his memberships in various Japanese associations, and about the contents of the Sokoku magazine. Jichan told them that he barely read the magazine, having subscribed to help out the salesman, a friend in financial need.

Finally, the review board asked my grandfather if he had anything to say. Jichan replied: “I only wish peace comes in Japan and in this country.”

Six weeks later, the three-member hearing board concluded that my grandfather “would offer no definite or convincing assurance of loyalty to the United States.” The board said the attorney general had ordered internment for all Sokokukai members because of the organization’s “high degree of dangerousness” unless there were countervailing factors, and that it found none in my grandfather’s case.

On July 21, 1942, the attorney general of the United States issued an official internment order, calling Jichan “potentially dangerous to the public peace and safety of the United States.” Shortly thereafter, he was transferred from an INS facility in Montana to a U.S. Army center for enemy alien internees in Louisiana.

The documents leave unanswered a critical question: Why did the attorney general find Sokokukai to be so highly dangerous? What exactly was this organization? An Internet search produced nothing. I call leading Japanologists, but even MIT professor John Dower, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of Japan’s World War II era, never had heard of Sokokukai. I file a Freedom of Information request with the Seattle office of the FBI, asking for any records on the organization or its magazine.

“I don’t know what i can tell you,” says my Auntie Kim, 83, her voice tinged with hesitation. It is February and I am back in Seattle with my family. I want to plumb their memories about Jichan and understand how his two-year detention had affected those he left behind. The reticence in Auntie Kim’s voice signals that this might not be easy.

At the time of my grandfather’s arrest, panic and fear gripped the country. Japan’s mighty war machine was racking up one victory after another--through Hong Kong, Guam, Wake Island, Singapore, most of the Philippines and what is today Malaysia and Indonesia. The Seattle Daily Times reported the arrest of several unnamed Northwest “Japs,” presumably my grandfather among them, in a front-page story. Another prominent article and map--headlined “West Coast Invasion Pattern?”--detailed spots between the Mexican and Canadian borders that could be vulnerable to a Japanese attack.

Auntie Tosh, then 14, remembers her fear when three FBI agents came to the wooden shingled duplex the family rented not far from Seattle’s old Japantown. They ransacked the basement, she recalls, but the FBI report says the agents found no contraband. They seized three membership cards to the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and two magazines that “appeared to contain pro-Japanese propaganda” before arresting my grandfather and taking him away.

Uncle Mas, a high school senior at the time, remembered his anger in an interview taped before he died in February. “I don’t want to say I scuffled with the FBI, but we had words,” he told Densho, a Seattle organization that documents the oral histories of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II. “It was a traumatic moment.”

Worse was soon to come. Under executive order 9066, which authorized the mass internment of all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, my entire extended family was hauled away and temporarily placed at a Washington state fairground in stalls normally used by pigs and cows. Eventually, they were relocated to the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho.

Before he died a decade ago, my father would tell me how he could never forget his shock upon reaching the internment grounds and having American soldiers train their guns on him--a fellow U.S. citizen.

“I know it hurt me tremendously,” Uncle Mas said. “You try to be a good citizen, [then] they’re treating us like dogs, and you just have to live with it. The rejection is very difficult.”

In an odd way, however, the internment lessened the burden on my family, who had suddenly been deprived of its main breadwinner. At least, my Auntie Kim says, they did not have to worry about where to sleep and what to eat.

But there were other burdens. It was Auntie Kim’s husband, Ned, who was killed in battle. He was listed as missing in action until his comrades found a shallow grave marked by his helmet and dog tags dangling from his rifle stuck upright into the ground.

Auntie Kim was now a war widow, but among some of her fellow Americans she was still seen as a Jap. By the spring of 1945, the family had been allowed to leave the Idaho camp to work at an ordnance depot in Nebraska. One day, the family tried to eat at a local restaurant and were refused service because they were Japanese. They complained to the depot commander, telling him that Auntie Kim’s husband had just given his life for his country. The commander shut down the restaurant for the duration of the war.

I hear these stories for the first time at a family dinner at my sister Mary Jo’s house overlooking Lake Washington. She has laid out family photo albums on the coffee table. There are grainy images of my grandfather in a formal black suit at poetry conventions, and others showing him relaxed, holding his grandchildren. There are pictures of the stark camp barracks at Minidoka, and shots of the memorial service for Uncle Ned. My aunts and uncles pore over the pictures and reminisce.

Auntie Kim, a trim, bright-eyed woman with skin as delicate as tissue paper, speaks haltingly. Her words only hint at what seem to be deep pools of a pain she’d prefer to forget. “I went through a lot of hardship. It was a very humiliating experience. I have real bad memories of camp.”

She offered deeper reflections in her 1981 testimony to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, a congressional body that found the internment unjustified and recommended redress payments of $20,000 to each person incarcerated.

“For the forced incarceration during the war, which did so much to thwart my relationships with others, I am bitter,” she testified. “For the fear instilled in me at the hands of my own government, I am bitter. For the unnecessary feelings of shame inflicted on my father and my family for unfounded and never explained reasons, I am bitter.”

Her younger sister, my irrepressible Auntie Tosh, is outspoken about the harm she says Jichan’s absence caused the family, its tight bonds suddenly broken. She tells her younger brother Tabo, who was 10 when their father was arrested, that the paternal void in his life caused him to run wild. Her disapproval startles us, for we had always adored him as our dashing uncle, a high school football star who rode motorcycles dressed in black leathers, and gave us dimes for candy.

“There was no family connection,” Auntie Tosh tells my uncle. “When we were in camp, you did not eat one meal with us. You had nobody to hold you down. No one was there to discipline you, which you needed at that age.”

Uncle Tabo, now 71, does not see it that way. “It just happened that was my personality, Tosh. It didn’t matter. You think so but I don’t think so.”

“Well,” Auntie Tosh retorts, “I just think that’s when you went downhill.”

Auntie Joy rises to her husband’s defense. The rest of us shift uncomfortably in our chairs. The room falls quiet except for the sound of forks scraping up scalloped potatoes and ham. I change the subject.

In the summer of ‘43, the quest for my grandfather’s release escalated. Uncle Mas had volunteered for the Army. Uncle Joke, then engaged to Jichan’s second daughter, Tosh, signed up, too. My father also volunteered, ending up at the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Service, where his Japanese proficiency was used to translate documents.

The Rev. Emery E. Andrews of Seattle’s Japanese Baptist Church, who had ministered to my family for 13 years as a member of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, was among the white missionaries who relentlessly fought for my grandfather’s release. At great personal risk and sacrifice, they uprooted themselves from Seattle and moved to the desolate plains of Idaho so they could tend to their interned Japanese American flocks.

The missionaries helped launch a letter campaign and petition drive signed by 200 Minidoka internees. In a letter to the United States attorney in Seattle, Andrews vouched for my grandfather’s character and loyalty and said the only thing that had prevented him from becoming a citizen was the U.S. government’s “race prejudiced exclusion act” barring Japanese aliens from naturalization. He said the family patriarch was desperately needed to care for his young children and invalid wife.

“The greatest danger to America is the breaking up of homes, especially where citizenship rights and American ideals have been violated,” Andrews wrote.

For these activities, Andrews was investigated by the FBI and denied services and housing by some of his Idaho neighbors. But thanks to his efforts and those of others, my grandfather was granted a rehearing in November 1943. A Department of Justice special review board cited favorable evaluations from his detention facility supervisors and noted that two of his sons had volunteered for the U.S. armed forces. This time, board members seemed to believe Jichan’s statements that he wanted America to win the war and had subscribed to Sokoku only to help out a friend. They lauded his “sincerity” and recommended his release.

A month later, the attorney general ordered him paroled to join his family at the Minidoka camp. He was set free Sept. 18, 1945, a month after the emperor of Japan urged his people to “bear the unbearable” in surrendering to Allied Forces.

Jichan’s return to freedom went unheralded. My aunties and uncles offer no clear memories. The Seattle Daily News never reported my grandfather’s release, the failure to find genuine evidence of his disloyalty, or the pain caused by the detention of so many Issei men. Whatever burdens Jichan brought back with him, he carried silently.

In April, the Seattle office of the FBI replied to my Freedom of Information request about Sokokukai. Records pertinent to my request had been destroyed in accordance with the law, the letter said. By then, colleagues in The Times’ Tokyo bureau had sent me several copies of the magazine from the Japanese Parliament’s library. My husband deciphered the archaic script of prewar Japan and I learned that the magazine had warned against a war with the United States.

The magazine was critical of American elites, publishing pieces on racism against blacks and Jews and the greed of U.S. business conglomerates pushing to profit from war. It harshly condemned the Western colonization of Asia, proudly proclaiming that “Japan is the only country that completely refuses to bow to the pressures of the Caucasian race.”

The magazine’s publisher, Reikichi Kita, was a complex thinker and cosmopolitan intellectual who had been active in citizen rights movements before the war. He started the magazine in part to protect his motherland from growing Communist influence, according to Kenichi Matsumoto, a prominent commentator on modern Japanese political history.

Having studied at Harvard, Kita knew enough about the United States to believe that war would be disastrous for Japan. Once the conflict started, he supported it as a matter of Japan’s survival. But, as an elected official in Japan’s House of Representatives, Kita publicly expressed fears that Japan was heading toward a totalitarian state ruled by militarists.

Matsumoto, who has extensively studied Kita and his organization, speculates that Sokokukai landed on the FBI’s radar because of a suspected link with a notorious ultra-right organization in Japan called the Kokuryukai, or Black Dragon Assn. But there was no substantive link, he says, nor any record that Kita advocated hatred or violence against the United States

“I think the FBI, maybe without much reading the magazine, took the alarmist view that it was a nationalistic organization because of its name, ‘Motherland,’ ” Matsumoto says.

So it was all one big mistake, I think, incredulously.

According to Pedro Loureiro, curator of the Pacific Basin Institute in Claremont and an expert on U.S. wartime intelligence about Japan, not one FBI special agent at the time could read or speak Japanese. I wonder who translated the magazines. I wonder how our government deprived my grandfather of his freedom for so long based on such faulty intelligence.

I wonder if the Department of Justice’s intelligence is any more reliable today in justifying the arrest and detention of 4,000 people. FBI spokesman Ernie Porter assures me that the agency has detained people since Sept. 11 with “a lot better cause than what happened 60 years ago.”

“Some of the people rounded up from foreign countries who were Muslim were linked with suspected hijackers,” Porter says. “The terrorists were in this country for a long time with the exact intent to do harm . . . they roamed the country trying to get recruits and get money by going to mosques. You can’t say that about Japanese Americans.”

Georgetown University’s David Cole, a leading constitutional lawyer, agrees that the government is more careful today--it has not ordered a mass internment of U.S. citizens, for instance. At the same time, he also sees striking parallels. The central analogy, he says, is that both groups were mainly locked up not because of what they had done, but what others feared they might do.

“The problem in both instances is that no one has figured out how to predict the future,” Cole says. “So the government finds itself relying on all kinds of overbroad criteria about who they think is suspicious: associations, religion and ethnicity.”

Cole, in his forthcoming book, “Enemy Aliens,” details how similar sweeps in the past began with non-citizens and eventually crossed the line. Most of those rounded up since Sept. 11 have been cleared by the FBI of any links to terrorism and deported or released, Cole says. “Like World War II, in a time of fear we have targeted a vulnerable group, swept broadly within that group and harmed countless people who have no connection to terrorism,” he says.

After those traumatic war years, my aunts and uncles moved forward and lived fruitful lives. Ironically, Auntie Kim ended up working as a secretary for the FBI in counterintelligence. The octogenarian still swims, golfs and takes daily walks, bakes homemade cinnamon rolls and blueberry muffins, attends weekly Bible study, constantly visits ailing friends and does volunteer reading to schoolchildren.

“Life goes on and you just have to make the best of it,” she says.

The family dinner is winding down. I want to know what they’ve learned from their hardships and whether they believe the government is repeating past mistakes. Their answers surprise me.

“I support the government’s policies right now,” says Auntie Kim, expressing loyalty as she sees it and none of the unease that has unsettled other Japanese Americans.

“I don’t feel it’s right to do this exactly,” says Auntie Joy, “but it almost has to be done to protect the country.”

We remember. I wonder what we learn.