Kristen Hayashi
speaker
189 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Kristen Hayashi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The same time, you know, I think, again, they're living in this very hostile social climate. And so I think for Nisei, born here in the This is kind of a generalization, but I think a lot of them feel this pressure to be, you know, 200% American. And they are. They were born here in the United States to immigrant parents, but culturally they are really American.
And so, you know, while like my grandparents, for example, were Nisei, and I'm sure Japanese may have been their first language. But I never heard them speak Japanese. And, you know, I think that our family and so many other Japanese American families have lost, like, the language over the generations.
And I think it's really rooted in this time period when, you know, my grandparents growing up felt like that they couldn't, you know, speak Japanese and they needed to be American.
1930, Japanese American Citizens League is formed by Nisei, you know, swearing them an oath to the pledge and all the rest of it, but at the same time still claiming their Japanese heritage. That's the transition that's happening in the 1930s, really. And then along comes Pearl Harbor. And the attack on Pearl Harbor, which really changes everything.
How quickly, we all know, you know, the upshot of this, the detention camps that are built and so forth. But I'm curious how the shift happened so quickly. That's always interested me. Here you have a whole community of people who have, I assume, made friends and relationships in communities. And yet somehow this country does a U-turn on them so fast based on fear and paranoia.
Yeah. I mean, that's true.
I'm so glad that we set this up by starting with, you know, early immigration and just what the social climate was like, because I think it's important to talk about all the legislation that was passed between, you know, from like the turn of the 20th century all the way to 1924, because that sets up that there was this long trajectory of discriminatory legislation that was put in place that really affected the daily lives of Japanese Americans.
So while Pearl Harbor had a profound impact on the community, It was part of this long history of discrimination and prejudice. It didn't just happen because of that. And we know this because on the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, leaders of the Japanese American community were picked up by the FBI.
So how were they able to mobilize that quickly when we know that they were surveilling Japanese immigrants long before Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor? In our collection, we have these records that L.A. County kept. They're called farm survey records, where prior to Pearl Harbor, County officials were going and they're visiting Japanese American operated farms throughout Southern California.
And they're just asking a lot of questions about who they employ, what they're growing. And, you know, just and there's there's an economic argument to that, too. But so there is this planning that happens long before Pearl Harbor. But you're right. Pearl Harbor does have a profound impact. So Pearl Harbor is attacked by the Japanese Imperial Army on December 7th, 1941.
And by February of 1942, you already have leaders of the community that have been picked up and they're held by the Department of Justice in detention centers across the U.S. But February 19, 1942, that's when President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066. So what this essentially does is it lays the foundation for the mass removal that's to come in a few months.
But it creates an exclusionary zone on the West Coast, which is where the concentration of the Japanese population was at the time. And essentially says that the U.S. military has the right to exclude anyone it deems necessary. So at that point, there's no mention of Japanese. But things start to happen soon after that. So soon after that, there's a curfew that's put in place.
Japanese Americans couldn't leave their homes after a certain time each evening. There's also a travel restriction, and then they had to register their families.
And then by the spring, that's when you start to see public notices going up that now say to all persons of Japanese ancestry and outline what they need to do, that they need to report to a civil control station by a certain date to tell them what they need to bring with them. and when they need to report, but it never states where they're going or for how long.
So this all happens really quickly, and then Japanese Americans are first sent to temporary detention centers, which the government called assembly centers. The government called this whole operation an evacuation, which made it seem like it was for their own protection, but we're very clear now to call it a forced removal. mass removal.
And then when more permanent detention centers were created, Japanese Americans were, you know, moved into those. And those were very clear to call America's concentration camps. And there were 10 of those camps that were operated by the War Relocation Authority. But, you know, in total, there were something like 75 confinement sites across the United States that detained Japanese Americans.
And they were operated by the War Relocation Authority or the Department of Justice, Immigration Naturalization Services or the U.S. Army. So places like Ellis Island was a detention center, Angel Island operated by the Immigration Naturalization Services. But, yeah, so, I mean, this mobilization happens very quickly after Pearl Harbor.
I'll say it's amazing. By March, really, this is all underway. March 2nd, 1942, General John L. DeWitt issues instructions to all people of Japanese ancestry. What was the criteria? I mean, how do they determine that your family is going? It's pretty simple, isn't it?
It's just based on geography. So you had to be in this exclusionary zone, which ran down from Washington, Oregon, California, and then a part of Arizona. And again, that's where the concentration of the Japanese population was. One of my grandparents, my grandfather's family was in Eastern Oregon at the time. So they were outside of the exclusionary zone.
So even though they were Japanese American, they were not forced to, or they weren't part of the forced removal. I mean, people living like in New York, Or the Midwest or, you know, they were not forced to to move either. So it's really arbitrary. It's based on.
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