All American evacuees, including high ranking officials, newspapermen and merchants, who have just returned to the United States on the first exchange of civilian nationals, are now pouring out in unison tales of cruelty and horror alleged to have been suffered by them in Japan. It must be stated frankly and honestly that the Americans were accorded the most considerate treatment as could be expected under wartime conditions and that the tales told by the American repatriates are either utterly unfounded or so exaggerated that they cannot be considered the thoughts of an honest conscience.
The American Government should have been informed by the International Red Cross representative in Tokyo that our treatment of internees and war prisoners in Japan and Japanese occupied zones is of a high order. No plainer proof exists than in the fact that several thousand American and British nationals still remaining in Shanghai are at this very moment living normal lives with hardly any restraint, still enjoying movies and dancing.
Whatever may be the fantastic stories of these Americans, they do not comapre in the least with the unfair, unjustifiable and inhuman treatment meted out to the Japanese evacuees and internees at the hands of the American authorities. Let me point out a few examples on the basis of objective accounts by actual witnesses.
Many Japanese evacuees on the point of leaving America were subjected to the least necessary and the most humiliating investigations by the American officials—a detailed description of which makes me breathless with shame. In the investigation before boarding the exchange vessel, they were obliged, regardless of age or sex, to strip off their clothes—a flagrant violation of the mutual agreement on the treatment of their nation also.
Not satisfied with strip-teasing, the American officials cut open coat lapels and removed the heels of shoes. And on top of all this the Japanese were divested of most of their personal effects; even such trifles as watches, shoes, towels, tooth brushes and shaving creams were not overlooked by the petty American officials to satisfy their own greed. So extreme have been the American methods of investigation and search that quite a number of Japanese even committed suicide to evade the indignities and tortures.
These are only a few of many examples of American maltreatment of the Japanese. Serious though they were, however, they do not compare in scope and intensity with the treatment accorded every one of Japanese blood who used to reside on the west coast, numbering nearly one hundred and thirty thousands.
Honest and simple Japanese farmers, businessmen and shopkeepers, they migrated to America first at the invitation of American industry and later to seek a new life in the land of liberty and equality. They worked diligently, reclaimed the waste lands and transformed them into fertile valleys, reared wholesome families, gave the best of American education to their children and annually contributed more than a hundred million dollars to American wealth. Furthermore, to advance their common welfare, they created various Japanese associations which were dedicated only to civic duties and good citizenship. They also established many cultural centres with the genuine desire to introduce the culture of the old Orient to their American neighbours and friends.
They thought 'America is grand!' Not for a moment did they ever dream of the tragic future which awaited them, the most peaceful, the most industrious and the most law-abiding people in the land of liberty and justice.
The first blow was delivered in 1913 in the form of the Alien Land Law of California, a measure followed by other states, which deprived them not only of the right to own land in the future but even the right to keep the land which they had acquired by sheer toil and perseverance.
Then came the second blow—the Immigration Act of 1924 as a legislation which forever separated parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. It is easy to imagine how these successive measures stunned and stupefied the Japanese who had always believed 'it can't happen here' in America. However, gallantly and silently they tolerated these discriminaions and hardships, because they were still permitted to have their humble homes to live in and more because they hoped that some day rightminded Americans in free America would rise and rectify their mistakes.
This last and lingering hope was shattered to pieces by the third and fatal blow which came with the present war. From their productive lands and profitable businesses and from their homes on the Pacific coast of America built up over the years by honest and patient human toil, they were uprooted almost overnight by a presidential decree.
It took but a moment for the American authorities to dash to pieces not only the result of over fifty years of blood, sweat and tears which contributed to the increasing prosperity of the Pacific coast but also the very soul of the people who devoted their lives to the attainment of a better life and to the welfare of the communities in which they lived. Their civic organizations and cultural centres were sensationally raided by the American authorities, and thousands of Japanese were arrested or interned only because they spoke on community welfare and Japanese culture. All the rest of the Japanese regardless of age, sex or nationality, thousands upon thousands of them, were driven out of their established homes without a moment of grace and rounded up like cattle into the stables of various race tracks such as Santa Anita and Tanforan which the American authorities ingeniously called reception centres.
From these stables, they were again herded in a mass involuntary migration into the interior, into heretofore uncultivated desert regions. There
they were told 'folks, help yourselves,' and left to their own resources, their investments of over $100,000,000 in farms alone abandoned, their hard earned savings of many years frozen, their husbands and brothers interned in concentration camps, with no hope for the future and in constant fear of arrest and further compulsory removal.
Even more cruel, unjust and inhuman is the fact that no exception whatever was made of the nisei, American-born citizens who know no country but America, whose loyalty was devoted to America and who under the Constitution were guaranteed certain inalienable rights among which are the freedom to live and work as they chose,—all because their parents were racially Japanese.
This is what the American authorities have done and are doing this very moment. Has the American Government some convincing evidence to justify its actions in the court of humantiy? Is moral decency bankrupt in the United States? Is this what the American Government means by 'free from fear and free from want?' Is it this they are now fighting to protect and maintain? What has become of the war aims of America—the repeated assurance of 'the sovereign equality of people' or the 'abolition of discrimination between people because of race, creed or colour?'
Let the American Government answer these questions themselves. Only let me tell the American people, as well as the world, that whether they know it or not, the American Government is today writing the darkest and the ugliest page of American history, thus adding the most infamous chapter to the annals of human history: "Persecution in the Land of Liberty."