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3. Japantown Born and Reborn

Comparing the Resettlement Experience of Issei and Nisei in Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the unleashing of World War II in the Pacific wiped out the thriving Japanese communities on the Pacific coast of the United States. In the weeks that followed the onset of war, military officials on the West Coast became increasingly terrified of a Japanese invasion. They proceeded to single out the region's Japanese American population as potential spies and saboteurs on the basis of their ancestry, and called for the mass “evacuation” of both Issei and Nisei from the West Coast.¹ The movement was further fomented and abetted by white nativist organizations and agricultural and commercial groups, who saw an opportunity to rid themselves of their long-despised economic competitors, and by opportunistic politicians. The fact that there was no documented case of any disloyal activity by any person of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, and that two-thirds of the community's members, the Nisei, were American citizens did not ease the fears of their panicked neighbors. Rather, as West Coast defense commander General John DeWitt stated, the very absence of evidence only proved that a concentrated campaign of subversion had been prepared for the future. Anyway, DeWitt insisted, it was impossible to tell a loyal Japanese American from a disloyal one. “A Jap is a Jap,” he told his War Department superiors, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. McCloy and Stimson soon overcame their initial doubts about the necessity and constitutionality of mass removal of Japanese Americans, and brought the matter into the White House.²

In response to the pressure from the military and West Coast political leaders, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (who had his own prejudices against ethnic Japanese) signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Under authority of this order, the army forcibly expelled all residents of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast during the months that followed. In the process, the vast majority of families lost their property or were forced to sell it at fire sale prices. Once removed from their homes, the Japanese Americans were placed in a network of “Assembly Centers,” stockades in disused fairgrounds and racetracks where the Japanese Americans were housed in converted horse stalls and animal pens and treated by army administrators as prisoners. After several weeks or months, they were then transported under guard to a network of ten government-run “relocation centers” in remote desert areas or swamplands in the interior, where they sweltered in summer and often froze in winter. The inmates lived in hastily constructed tar-paper barracks, one room to a family. Health and sanitary facilities in the camps, particularly at the outset, were primitive. The War Relocation Authority, the government agency created to supervise the camps, deliberately kept food and salaries for all inmate workers at levels below that of the lowest-paid American soldier.³

Although War Department chiefs privately conceded as early as 1943 that there was no military necessity for continued confinement of the mass of the inmates, West Coast military commanders, under pressure from anti-Japanese American politicians and media barons, long refused to reopen the excluded areas to people of Japanese ancestry. Furthermore, the government's mass removal policy convinced important elements of public opinion nationwide that the inmates represented a danger. There was therefore significant opposition to resettlement, and no strong wave of sentiment in their favor.

The WRA gradually developed a parole system of sorts, to permit inmates to leave camp without mobilizing hostile public opinion against them. After filling out a compulsory “loyalty questionnaire” and being adjudged “loyal” by a joint military board, individuals were eligible to obtain “leave permits” to resettle outside the West Coast excluded area. The process remained slow and cumbersome—not only did candidates have to have offers of jobs and housing, but the WRA had to ensure that local public opinion was favorable to entry of Japanese Americans. The majority of Japanese Americans, unable to return home and unwilling or unable to resettle elsewhere, remained confined in the camps for the balance of the war. Nevertheless, approximately one-fourth of the confined Issei and Nisei did gain official permission to leave camp during these years and settle outside the West Coast. This first wave of resettlers was composed mostly of Nisei in their late teens or twenties who left camp to join the military or take up outside employment. In addition, a group of Nisei college students were authorized to take up scholarships at colleges east of the Rocky Mountains under the auspices of a newly created private welfare agency, the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council.⁴ As these pioneers put down roots in their new communities, they were joined by siblings and friends, and in some cases parents and other relatives. The largest populations remained in the Mountain West or moved to the industrial cities of the East and Midwest. Chicago, in particular, became a population center: from a prewar community of some 400, the Windy City's ethnic Japanese population reached 20,000 by 194546, while an estimated 25,000 took up at least temporary residence during those years. The WRA was responsible for finding jobs and advocating for the newcomers, a task that was taken over by private church and local welfare groups after the dissolution of the agency in mid-1946.⁵

The West Coast remained closed to Japanese Americans (apart from soldiers and some other minor exceptions) until the end of 1944, when the Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Endo that the government had no authority to hold a concededly loyal citizen without charge. In response, the army lifted its blanket exclusion orders in January 1945, although it substituted thousands of individual exclusion orders for inmates it suspected. Almost immediately, most of the remaining camp inmates began to return to the West Coast despite the efforts of the WRA, which feared violent backlash from white racists, to use various administrative devices to slow the flow of such return. Though resettlement east of the Rockies did continue at a slower pace, by mid-1947 the majority of the mainland ethnic Japanese population was once again settled on the Pacific coast. As those who had first moved east out of camp returned to their former homes the Japanese populations of the Midwest and East Coast began to decline, although significant pockets remained east of the Rockies, especially in the large cities.

Whatever their destination, the former camp inmates attempted to rebuild their lives under difficult and trying circumstances.⁶ Despoiled of most of their property during removal and psychologically scarred by their unjust confinement, they entered their new communities with little in the way of resources. Despite the wartime economic boom, they experienced widespread poverty and economic discrimination. In the prewar era, Issei and Nisei were largely self-employed in agriculture or as small shopkeepers, or worked for family businesses. Forced during removal to give up their shops and the land they owned or leased, most were unable to resume their former positions. Even those with significant educational or professional experience were forced to work for white families as gardeners or domestic servants, or to take low-status and menial-1abor jobs.⁷Unlike the prewar era, though, numerous Nisei, notably veterans, ultimately managed to secure jobs outside the community as teachers, corporate employees, and civil servants. By 1960, the median income of Japanese Americans exceeded the national average.

Housing was an equally difficult problem. Japanese Americans were confronted by shortages made worse by poverty and widespread racial discrimination, especially on the West Coast. Most Issei and Nisei, unable to resume their former leases or to borrow money to buy land, were forced to resettle in urban areas. There officials charged with aiding resettlers attempted to steer the newcomers, especially single Nisei, into taking domestic service positions, since they would thereby be provided board. Those with the means to buy homes and hotels opened space for lodgers. For others, community groups formed hostels to ease the housing problem. However, none of these efforts could begin to absorb all the newcomers. Instead, thousands of resettlers in cities such as San Diego, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and San Jose were forced into substandard housing, generally in or alongside black and Latino neighborhoods. Ultimately, greater prosperity plus the decline of restrictive covenants led masses of Nisei to migrate to suburbs and more affluent districts.

Although the resettlers were warned by the WRA and the FBI to fit in as much as possible and to promise to stay away from other Japanese Americans on leaving camp, they were brought together into Japanese enclaves both by internal factors such as religious observance or the desire for community and by external factors such as ethnic-based hostility and exclusion by whites. During the resettlement period, Japanese Americans took up some of their old community institutions and also developed new ones.⁸While the Japanese consulates that had anchored the prewar Little Tokyos remained shuttered, Japanese Buddhist temples and Christian churches reopened their doors in large numbers, and business groups mushroomed. Outside the West Coast, community hostels and interracial organizations such as the YMCA served as main recreational centers, providing libraries and game rooms for social events. The Japanese American Citizens League, although resented by many former inmates for its wartime policy of collaboration, was left as the sole ethnic organization of any size in the postwar years, and large numbers of Nisei joined newly constituted or reformed JACL chapters (Issei were not accepted as members until several years later). In addition to pol itical advocacy, JACL chapters organized social events, dinners, and sports leagues—especially basketball and bowling, the two unofficial Nisei national pastimes.

A main focus of community attention was journalism. Within months after the opening of the camps a series of newspapers, predominantly Japanese-language but with greater or lesser amounts of English content, started up operations. Los Angeles's bilingual prewar dailies Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi resumed publication, and soon afterward San Francisco's prewar Nichi Bei Shimbun and Shin Sekai morphed into a pair of new weekly journals, Nichi Bei Times and Hokubei Mainichi. Resettlers in the Mountain West were served by a trio of small-scale newspapers that had continued to publish during the war, Salt Lake City's Utah Nippo and the Denver-based Colorado Times and Rockii Shimpo. In New York a new journal, Hokubei Shimpo, took pride of place. The ethnic newspaper that attained the highest local circulation was the Chicago Shimpo, whose progressive political outlook, in both its Japanese and English sections, attracted large-scale community attention (both positive and negative). During these same years, a set of all-English weekly newspapers started up, including Crossroads in Los Angeles, Northwest Times in Seattle, Progressive News in San Francisco, and Nisei Weekender in New York City, though most soon folded. In addition, Nisei Vue, a short-lived glossy quarterly magazine, started life in 1947. It was succeeded by Scene, which had a longer run (1950-57). The premier Nisei publication was the Pacific Citizen, organ of the JACL, which was published under the dynamic editorship of Larry Tajiri. Although the Pacific Citizen lost the near-monopoly of the Japanese American press that it had enjoyed during the war, it remained a forum for news and opinion on a nationwide scale.

One clear area of division between the West Coast and the rest of the country was the level of race-based harassment and bias. To be sure, Nisei in many areas faced insults or were refused service in stores, and job discrimination was widespread throughout the country. However, both anecdotal evidence and records testify to more widespread patterns of ethnic-based hostility and exclusion by West Coast whites, which remained unchanged into the postwar period. There were thirty-eight documented instances of terrorism against resettlers in California over the months that followed the opening of the West Coast, including sabotage of equipment, torching of barns, and shots fired into houses. Local WRA officials were forced into action in support of returnees. They lobbied newspapers to offer positive coverage of Issei and Nisei, protested harassment and violence, and looked into allegations of racial discrimination.

Furthermore, unlike in the rest of the country, the ugly climate on the West Coast was reflected in official policy. State public assistance bodies generally refused to fund or direct the absorption and adjustment of the resettlers. Instead, local WRA offices, which lacked staff and funding for such tasks, were forced to take up the burden of organizing private charity. Washington State governor Mon Wallgren maintained that Japanese Americans were not welcome in his state.⁹ In contrast, California governor Earl Warren called for full and positive public compliance with the return of Japanese Americans to their old homes once the army lifted exclusion. Yet, as will be noted more fully later in this volume, Warren also signed various discriminatory legislative measures designed to discourage Issei and Nisei from returning. In 1943 the California legislature allocated funds for escheat suits to enforce the long-dormant Alien Land Act against Japanese immigrants “ineligible to citizenship” and take away the property they had acquired. The legislature meanwhile enacted a new law forbidding all Japanese immigrants to hold fishing licenses.

Despite these overall national and regional patterns, there were significant variations in the experience of resettlers in individual cities throughout the country. A close review of the progress of resettlement reveals both surprising similarities and differences, all of which complicate easy distinctions between resettlement on the West Coast and that outside. By way of illustration, let us compare Japanese American resettlement in three key urban areas, Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles. While very divergent pol itically and economically, each of these three areas served as a regional economic center, and each underwent important demographic shifts during World War II, including massive inmigration by southern white and African American war workers. All three, notably, were scarred by large-scale rioting and interracial conflict during summer 1943.

The initial resettlement of Japanese Americans from the camps to the Detroit area followed in its outlines the larger patterns of migration. Just over 3,000 Issei and Nisei moved to Michigan directly from camp during the war years, of whom a large majority settled in the greater Detroit area. (In addition, 534 Japanese Americans moved to Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, where a military language school was created.) More specifically, WRA records list 1,007 Japanese Americans who took up residence within Detroit's city limits during 1943-44, making it the fifth-largest center of resettlement nationwide after Chicago, Denver, New York, and Cleveland. Of this total, almost 90 percent (899) were Nisei.Once West Coast exclusion was lifted, migration slowed drastically. Individual Issei and family groups predominated among postwar migrants—Issei accounted for 186 of the 456 newcomers to the city between January 1, 1945, and spring 1946.¹⁰

In addition to those arrivals listed by the WRA, the city's midcentury ethnic Japanese population was swelled by the arrival of various former camp inmates who had initially resettled elsewhere (and thus did not appear on resettlement registers). For example, Fred Korematsu, who unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of mass removal in the U.S. Supreme Court case Korematsu v. United States, originally resettled out of camp in Salt Lake City, but then moved to Detroit in 1944 to join his older brother Hi Korematsu. Furthermore, some Nisei who had not been confined in camp decided to make Detroit their home. The architect Minoru Yamasaki, future designer of the World Trade Center, who had spent the war years in New York, was hired in 1945 as chief of design for the architectural firm of Smith Hinchman & Grylls, and took up residence in Detroit. Another transplanted New Yorker, sociologist T. Scott Miyakawa, entered the area in 1944 after he was hired as a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan. At the same time, a small colony of Japanese Canadians who had suffered official removal from Canada's west coast resettled in Windsor, Ontario, where they interacted with the nearby Detroit community.

In the vast majority of cases, the Japanese American newcomers had never previously lived in or even visited Detroit (whose prewar Japanese population was limited to a few dozen individuals—103 as of the 1930 census). Those who settled in outlying rural areas were almost exclusively employed in farm labor. Inside the city the newcomers took up all sorts of jobs. A large percentage of Issei of both sexes worked as domestics or gardeners; Nisei women also found work as stenographers and secretaries, and Nisei men were also employed as dishwashers in city restaurants and as blue-collar workers in the city's dominant automobile industry and allied trades. The Ford Motor Company, which had hired Issei engineers since the 1910s and was traditionally known for friendliness to African American labor, became a major employer of Nisei resettlers, as did the Chrysler Corporation. Kustu Ishimaru and Gilbert Kurihara worked as auto mechanics in garages, while Bill Kitamura was employed by the Detroit Street Railway. Other big employers of Nisei labor included the Briggs Manufacturing Company, the Essex Wire Company, Gar Wood Industries, and the Ex-cell-o Company. Groups of younger Nisei attended college or studied in trade schools. Wayne University welcomed a number of Nisei students—including a class of fifteen cadet nurses preparing for military duty. Grace Hospital engaged a pair of Nisei physicians as residents. A half-dozen Nisei beauticians graduated from the Dermaway University of Hair and Beauty Culture in mid-1945.¹¹

As time passed, a wider spectrum of skilled and salesclerk jobs opened up. By 1945, Frank Doi was hired as a dental lab technician, Grace Fujii was employed as a hospital social worker, George Kawamoto ran a photography studio, and Roy Setsuda was hired as an interior decorator. Others found public sector positions: Marie Doi was employed as a relocation officer by the WRA's Detroit office, while Roku Yasui worked for the city's Postwar Planning Division, and Jane Togasaki worked for the Michigan State Health Department. A few Japanese Americans went into business for themselves. Mr. and Mrs. Masujiro Ishioka, an Issei couple, operated an apartment house on Cass Avenue. Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Yasutake started a dry goods store in the suburb of Royal Oak. The most popul ar Nisei small business (capitalizing on popular stereotypes of Asian labor) was the laundry. George Akamine, Mas Hashimoto, and Tom and Jimmie Tagami and their families each opened cleaning establishments in Detroit. Few re-settlers were able to establish themselves in management or white-collar positions, although the community was served by a group of medical professionals such as dentists Kiyoshi Sonoda and Mark Kanda and optometrist John Koyama.

As in other cities, the task of aiding the absorption and adjustment of the resettlers was taken up by a coalition of the local WRA office with private church and welfare groups. As early as mid-1942, WRA resettlement director Thomas Holland and George Rundquist of the Protestant Council of Churches organized a Detroit Resettlement Committee under the lead of the Reverend Father James McCormick to help locate housing and jobs for the resettlers. In September 1943 (following the lead of Rev. T. T. Brumbaugh, a former missionary in Japan) the Detroit Council of Churches established its own United Ministry to Resettlers. The Council invited Rev. Shigeo Tanabe, a Nisei pastor from Washington State, to operate the ministry. In 1945, after the WRA announced plans to wind up its operations, local civil leaders formed the Detroit Committee to Aid Resettlers of Japanese Ancestry, which operated approximately through the end of 1947. Under the auspices of the United Ministry to Resettlers, Tanabe established Fellowship House, a Nisei hostel, at 130 East Grand Boulevard. The WRA subsequently opened a family hostel at 3915 Trumbull in July 1945 under the auspices of the Buddhist Church of Detroit. Rev. and Mrs. Shawshew Sakow were the hostel's managers. In addition to serving as temporary housing for the resettlers, the hostels served as recreational centers, providing libraries and game rooms where the newcomers joined together for social events. In addition, a Nisei committee formed at the International Institute in 1944. It arranged biweekly dances and ping-pong nights to encourage sociability. Young Nisei joined baseball teams, and a Nisei basketball club participated in an interstate tournament. As in other places, the most popular Nisei sport was bowling—in 1945 an entire Detroit-area Nisei bowling league was formed. In mid-1946 a Detroit chapter of the JACL formed, under the leadership of Peter Fujioka.¹²

Permanent housing remained the most troublesome item on the resettlement aid agenda—as a report of the Detroit Relocation Committee put it, “Housing was the ‘nightmare' of all newcomers to the city.”¹³ The wartime economic boom had brought such a huge influx of war workers, primarily African Americans and white southerners, that local housing stock was completely inadequate to contain them. (So explosive was the housing shortage that the opening of a public housing project for African Americans, the Sojourner Truth Homes, in spring 1942 had touched off mass demonstrations and threats of violence by mobs of local whites who insisted that they should be assigned the homes.) Community activists directed their attention to solving the housing problem. Jack Shimoda, a Japanese American businessman who had lived in Detroit during the prewar era, purchased a boardinghouse on Forest Avenue, which was filled with new arrivals. A number of resettlers obtained long-term housing at the city's YMCA, which also hired a cadre of Nisei workers. Nevertheless, in the end, many Japanese Americans were obliged to settle in decrepit housing in or adjacent to the city's African American neighborhoods, as white areas were all but inaccessible.

The question of discrimination was a complex one. Detroit was notorious in prewar years as a center of Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist activity, with right-wing leader Gerald L. K. Smith and the anti-Semitic “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin as the movement's most visible figures. During the war, existing racial tensions between blacks and whites had been exacerbated by rapid population shifts, which led to overcrowding and shortages of transportation, schools, and housing. These tensions exploded into violent confrontation in June 1943, when fights at the city's Belle Isle resort area ignited a large-scale racial riot. The riot lasted three days, claiming thirty lives (twenty-five of them African Americans), and gave rise to lasting tensions. That said, according to various accounts, Nisei in Detroit felt welcomed. For example, Pacific Citizen columnist Dale Oka, who resettled in Detroit in June 1943, stated that he was initially wary of how he would be accepted, but was soon put at ease:

The reception accorded me since my advent to this area has surpassed my most optimistic hopes. Perhaps I belong to that fortunate few who found their relocation paths strewn with flowers of welcome instead of thorns. But I prefer to believe that the great majority of us have discovered their new lives to be similarly pleasant and encouraging.¹⁴

Liberal and religious groups in the city mobilized to aid Japanese Americans. As noted, the Detroit Council of Churches (which as early as spring 1942 had passed an official resolution deploring mass evacuation and calling for rapid loyalty hearings for Japanese Americans) took a leading role in aiding resettlers and in advocating for their rights. Public opinion, as reflected in media accounts, was overwhelmingly positive. The Detroit News editorialized in 1944, “There are now numbers of Japanese here, migrants from the Pacific coast, whose records have been sifted and who should be regarded and treated as loyal friends in the war against Japan.”¹⁵The following year, the Detroit Free Press ran a positive article on the approximately 2,000 Japanese Americans, whom it termed “all American citizens who speak our own language,” living in Detroit. The article featured an interview with Mrs. Terry Koyama, who praised the treatment she had received in Detroit and expressed optimism about her future: “The dispersal was good because we used to live too close together on the West Coast, anyway. Now we're more spread out and we have a better chance—without the old prejudices.”¹⁶

Still, both anecdotal evidence and the records of the WRA's Detroit office, which was responsible for finding jobs and advocating for the newcomers, testify to widespread patterns of discrimination. When the Yoshiki family left camp for Detroit in 1944, one family member who traveled ahead to find housing called a local hotel to reserve a room. When he appeared at the hotel, however, the hotel's owners—shocked to discover that Mr. Yoshiki was Japanese and not Polish, as they had assumed from his name—refused him lodging.¹⁷ Educational discrimination was also palpable in the Detroit area. At the outset of war, administrators at the University of Michigan made a confidential decision to limit admission of Nisei students to a quota of twenty-seven per year, spread among the university's different faculties. When challenged on its discriminatory policy, the university denied that it had established any quota, and defended its policy on the pretext that the FBI and army refused to grant clearances (a transparent falsehood in view of the fact that the Military Intelligence Service language school was on campus, housing Nisei students and instructors, and that the university simultaneously hired more than 200 Nisei employees to take up menial-labor jobs on its grounds). Even after all government controls over Nisei students were abandoned in fall 1944, the university maintained its discriminatory policy.¹⁸

Employers and labor unionists also were mixed in their reactions to Japanese Americans. The local chapter of the AFL-affiliated Teamsters Union (following national policy) was extremely hostile to Nisei and refused to allow them to join the union or to support their employment in the trucking industry. The leadership of the CIO was supportive—United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther even joined a delegation to ask the Detroit Housing Commission to open public housing to Japanese Americans—but local activists were often recalcitrant. In Ann Arbor, the CIO refused to accept Japanese Americans in a factory producing defense material. Similarly, in April 1944, Tom Nakamura, a resettler from Jerome, was hired by the Palmer Company, a Detroit war plant. When he appeared for work, employees staged a walkout to protest the hiring of a Nisei. Although swift action by the local Fair Employment Practices Committee and local CIO officials limited the action to a single day and ensured Nakamura's continued employment, the incident revealed the existence of widespread, if subtle, currents of anti-Nisei sentiment.¹⁹

The experience of Issei and Nisei in New York forms an interesting contrast with that of their Michigan counterparts. The community in Detroit, created as a result of the wartime migration, was close-knit and composed mainly of industrial and other blue-collar laborers. In contrast, the experience of resettlers in New York City during the 1940s reflects the larger narrative of the city's distinctive Nikkei (ethnic Japanese) community. Like the larger city itself, the Big Apple's Nikkei population was notable as early as the nineteenth century for its demographic and occupational diversity, a culture of cosmopolitanism, and pol itical and artistic effervescence. In stark contrast to its Pacific coast counterparts, the New York community was also marked by lack of group cohesion and a readiness to absorb transients and new arrivals. Both these salient characteristics—cosmopolitanism and political/artistic self-assertion—were accentuated with the coming of World War II.

It is impossible to properly understand the wartime development of New York's ethnic Japanese population without a sense of the community's history. To summarize very briefly, the first Japanese immigrants arrived in the New York area during the late 1800s, and by 1920 the local Japanese community had swelled to 5,000-6000 people. While this represented only a tiny fraction of the city's population, it was enough to make New York's Nikkei community the fifth-largest in the nation. However, this community, unlike its counterparts on the West Coast and Hawaii, was not composed of farm workers or fishermen, but included merchants, domestics, office workers (many of whom worked for Japanese firms), and industrial laborers—notably shipyard workers.²⁰ Even after the 1924 Nationalities Act cut off immigration from Japan and the city's Nikkei population contracted, Japanese citizens—consular officials, businessmen, ministers, students, and artists—continued to arrive as temporary residents, and sometimes for extended stays.

In addition, throughout the prewar decades New York gained renown as a center for ethnic Japanese intellectuals, artists, and performers. The city was home at various times to such internationally known figures as scientists Hideyo Noguchi and Jokichi Takamine; writers Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann; dancer Michio Ito; soprano Hizi Koyke; and painters Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Eitaro Ishigaki, Chuzo Tamotsu, and Hideo Noda.²¹ Columbia University attracted a range of Japanese students, even as authors Roy Akagi (director of the nationally based Japanese Student Christian Association), Etsu Sugimoto, and Bunji Omura taught there. During the 1930s the community was also graced by the presence of dissidents from Japan such as Toru Matsumoto, Jack Shirai, Taro and Mitsu Yashima (Jun and Mimosa Iwamatsu), and Haru Matsui (Ayako Ishigaki), who found refuge in the city and built networks of friends and political supporters.²²

Nikkei communities in New York reflected the city's cosmopolitan flavor. Unlike on the West Coast, Issei faced no alien land laws or restrictive covenants. Affluent Japanese migrated away from the city center. (The 1921 New York Japanese Address Book lists a dozen suburbs on Long Island and Westchester County with Japanese residents.) Furthermore, New York society lacked the laws against intermarriage and many of the sexual stigmas that marked the West Coast. According to one community survey in the mid-1930s, at least one-third and possibly as many as half of community members married non-Japanese spouses.²³ In turn, relatively few of New York's Issei residents brought their Japanese families to live with them. Thus, in addition to being the only Nikkei community of any size east of the Pacific coast, New York's was the only one in the nation where most residents were Japanese aliens and not their Nisei offspring.

Although a few Nisei who subsequently achieved fame were raised in the New York region, such as activists Bill Kochiyama and Toshi Ohta Seeger and photographer Yoichi Okamoto, the city's Nisei population grew largely through internal migration. During the 1920s and 1930s educated Nisei from other parts of the country settled in New York, where they could more easily express their talents. Prominent among these were sculptor Isamu Noguchi, sociologist T. Scott Miyakawa, lawyer George Yamaoka, photographer Toge Fujihira, architect Minoru Yamasaki, activist Tokie Slocum, and journalists Larry Tajiri and Tooru Kanazawa. In addition, the city was home during the 1930s to a set of early Nisei book authors: memoirist Kathleen Tamagawa, novelist Kay Karl Endow (Karl Nakagawa), and poets Kimi Gengo and Kikuko Miyakawa.²⁴

The city's Japanese population was enriched by a number of social and financial institutions founded early in the century, including the Nippon Club (1905), the Japanese American Association (1907), and a series of newspapers, climaxing with the Nyokyu Shimpo newspaper (1911; a separate English-language journal, the Japanese American Review, was spun off in 1939). The community was likewise served by Christian churches and missions, starting with the Japanese Christian Institute (1899), plus the New York Buddhist Church, founded by Rev. Hozen Seki in 1938.²⁵These organizations were operated in large part by employees of Japanese firms doing business in New York, with assistance from the Manhattan-based Japanese consulate, and tended to be conservative and pro-Japan in their viewpoint. They were counterbalanced by organizations founded by left-leaning Issei artists and intellectuals. Under the leadership of the pioneering Marxist Sen Katayama, leftist New Yorkers founded the Japanese Socialist (later Japanese Communist) Group in America in 1919, and the Nihonjin Rodosha Kurabu (Japanese Workers Club) a decade later.²⁶

In the months before Pearl Harbor, as American boycotts stalled Japanese commerce and war clouds loomed, many of the businessmen and consular officials who were the mainstay of the community returned to Japan. Once war was declared, the FBI rounded up several hundred remaining Japanese diplomatic officials, merchants, and community leaders, who were interned at Ellis Island. The New York branches of Japanese firms shut their doors, even as masses of ethnic Japanese were fired from their jobs by non-Japanese employers, throwing the community into difficult economic straits. Meanwhile, a curfew, travel restrictions, and limits on bank withdrawals were imposed on the Issei as enemy aliens. The community's two newspapers, the Nichi-Bei jiho and its English-language offshoot, The Japanese American Review, were closed. While some of those interned were later released, their community leadership had by then passed away to a left-l eaning antifascist group, the Japanese American Committee for Democracy. The JACD produced a monthly newsletter and community surveys, found jobs for dismissed Japanese workers, and sponsored forums and demonstrations in favor of victory over Japan. (On the JACD, see Chapter 10 in this volume.)

Still, New York was formally unaffected by Executive Order 9066, and with the emptying out of the West Coast, the city became the largest “free” Nikkei community on the United States mainland. As the war went on, former West Coast residents released from the camps began to arrive, and the city's ethnic Japanese population swelled. At least 1,000 migrants resettled in New York during 1943-44, and they continued to arrive in even greater numbers during 1945 and 1946. As a result, the city's Japanese population grew from barely 2,000 in mid-1942 to about three times that number in 1946-47. The Japanese Americans who resettled in New York during 1943-1944 were almost entirely Nisei (at least 70 percent), while anecdotal evidence from the WRA's New York office indicates that a large number of the perhaps 1,500 migrants who moved to New York in 1945-46 were families and individual Issei.²⁷

As with Detroit, in the vast majority of cases the resettlers had never previously lived in New York, and most had never even visited. Moreover, because New York was so distant from the camps, the new arrivals had usually spent an initial resettlement period elsewhere, and therefore were comparatively more affluent and adjusted to life “outside.” Although the newcomers held all sorts of jobs, a large percentage of Issei worked as domestics or gardeners. Nisei men also took jobs as dishwashers in city restaurants, as hotel bellhops, as laundry workers, or as hospital staffers. Women worked as nurses, stenographers, and secretaries. As time passed and more jobs opened up, Nisei took jobs as salesclerks, service workers, and skilled laborers. Groups of younger Nisei attended college at Columbia, New York University, and the city's four public colleges (the future CUNY system), as well as denominational colleges, business schools, and trade schools—ihere were even seventeen Nisei girls studying at the Traphagan fashion school. Nevertheless, in contrast to other resettlement areas, numerous newcomers—Nisei and even some Issei—were able to open their own businesses, including grocery stores, restaurants, and machine repair shops.²⁸

The newcomers also tended to congregate together residentially. The WRA opened a hostel in Brooklyn Heights in mid-1944, and a few hundred resettlers lived there during its two-year existence. Others settled in the Manhattan Hostel, opened by the Community Church and the New York Unitarian Service Committee in fall 1945. Even after they left their temporary quarters, many resettlers found permanent housing in two small Japanese American enclaves. One was located on the West Side around 106th-110th Streets, near the Japanese American Methodist Church, an area that one wit soon dubbed the “umeboshi [pickled plum] district.” A second group moved into Inwood, near Manhattan's northern tip, where another Japanese American church set up operations.²⁹ Unlike Detroit and the West Coast, however, the newcomers did not generally face restrictive covenants barring them from all-white districts. Though the skyrocketing price of housing made more affluent neighborhoods generally unaffordable, relatively few Issei and Nisei took up residence in African American areas such as Harlem or the South Bronx.

Again, as with Detroit, the question of discrimination is complex. According to various accounts, New York was the first place the West Coast refugees were not made to feel different because of their Japanese ancestry. One woman later stated that the city breathed liberation: “I became a free person for the first time.”³⁰ At the same time, an eloquent letter from an army major to the WRA scored the unjust treatment of the newcomers:

It is unbelievable that people of Japanese ancestry are finding a happy haven in New York City. Japanese businessmen and workers interviewed must be making statements which they THINK they should, if they say that everything is sweet and serene—that they are entirely comfortable and happy here. That is definitely not the word that passes between them.…This is brought to my attention almost daily by a fifty-nine year old Japanese cook in my employ in New York City. He has been in this country thirty-nine years.…Whenever he goes along the street he is pointed at by adults and children who indicate that he is probably a spy. When he goes into public places, nearby people engage in loud and disturbing conversation which is not directed at him but which he is supposed to hear. HE is not writing to other Japanese friends suggesting that they come here.³¹

There was some official as well as unofficial discrimination. New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia was openly hostile to Japanese Americans (although he made a generous public endorsement after Pearl Harbor of the loyalty of a local Issei, New York Philharmonic xylophonist Yoichi Hiraoka). La Guardia refused to protect Japanese Americans faced with being fired from city jobs or to permit others to be hired, although he was willing to experiment with hiring fifty Japanese Americans for “hospital helper” positions to reduce a desperate hospital worker shortage. In April 1944, when the WRA announced its plans to open its Brooklyn hostel, La Guardia publicly denounced the project and asserted that resettled internees were not welcome to enter New York. Not only did they threaten the city's security, he insisted dubiously, but their presence would spark riots among the city's Chinese population.³²

The records of the WRA's New York office, which was responsible for finding jobs and housing for the newcomers, also testify to a widespread pattern of job discrimination. For example, a letter asking the A&P grocery store chain to consider hiring Nisei was met with a cold rebuff: “The question of placement of American Japanese citizens with our company has been discussed and it was decided we could hardly consider employing them at this time because of public reaction to such a move.”³³ In late September 1943, two Nisei, Kenji Ota and Hideo Tanaka, were sent by the WRA to interview for welding jobs with a New York company that maintained a shipyard in Camden, New Jersey. Although the company assured the WRA their need for welders was desperate, Ota and Tanaka were forced to wait until several weeks after their initial interview to hear from the company. They then were summoned for a second interview. This time they were interviewed by a uniformed army officer, who proceeded to ask them a set of extraordinarily irrelevant and insulting questions, such as whether they were fluent in Japanese and whether they hoped Japan would win the war. WRA officers were so outraged by these harassing tactics that they made an official complaint and had the two Nisei provide affidavits testifying to their experience.³⁴ After 1945, when New York State passed the Ives-Quinn bill, the first state fair employment practices legislation, job discrimination became more subtle and somewhat less widespread.

Still, even if resettlement in New York in many ways resembled that in other cities, the city was remarkable for the unusually rapid adjustment of the migrants. The reasons for this are twofold. First, whereas ethnic Japanese communities in other cities were too small or too insecure and wary of newcomers to offer them substantial aid, New York had a long-existing, self-confident Japanese community, with restaurants, churches, and grocery stores to serve the newcomers. In addition, the Japanese population in this most rootless of cities had always been heavily young, educated, and transient, so there was less suspicion of outsiders and sojourners than elsewhere. The second reason is that New York, a historic center of settlement houses and charity work, was much better equipped than most cities with non-Japanese agencies to serve the immediate needs of the resettlers and get them on their feet. Beginning in mid-1942, the Protestant Welfare Council assigned one of its specialists to locate jobs and housing for Japanese Americans so that they could leave the camps, while the American Baptist Home Mission Society dispatched workers to greet and look after the newcomers. The Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America hired Rev. Toru Matsumoto to head their Committee on Resettlement of Japanese Americans in order to coordinate efforts. With aid from the WRA, a coalition of religious groups formed the New York City Advisory Committee on Japanese Americans in May 1943, and organized a conference on resettlement. In 1945 the WRA and the fledgling New York chapter of the JACL came together to organize the Japanese American Coordinating Committee of New York City. After the WRA announced plans to cease operations, the Greater New York Citizens Committee for Japanese-Americans formed in November 1945, under the leadership of George Yamaoka (who shortly thereafter left for Tokyo to join the war crimes team) and Robert Benjamin.

At the same time, New York's Japanese resettlers passed more easily into the city's intellectual and artistic mainstream. New York was certainly not without racism—the 1943 Harlem riot had baldly demonstrated racial tensions and the impact of discrimination—and the newcomers did face various forms of exclusion, as noted. Still, the cosmopolitan tradition of the city gave them a major assist. Almost immediately, art galleries and museums featured shows with Japanese American artists, while a select group of Issei and Nisei found employment in the creative arts: Robert Kuwahara created a daily syndicated comic strip, Miki; Yuriko Amemiya danced with Martha Graham and on Broadway; Ruby Yoshino toured as a concert singer; and Michi Nishiura became a costume designer. (Miné Okubo, as will be detailed in Chapter 4, made a career as an author/illustrator.) A constellation of visual artists, including such figures as Henry Sugimoto, Hideo Date, Hisako Hibi, Lewis Suzuki, and Hideo Kobashigawa, took up long-term residence in the city. Conversely, even if they faced difficulties with housing and employment, the character of the newcomers made their social adjustment easier. Unlike in other regions, the migrants were not primarily farmers with little experience of urban life. Rather, like their predecessors during the 1930s, the Nisei who chose to resettle in New York were educated, articulate, and wide-ranging in their interests and associations. A number of them, including Ernest Iiyama, Chiye Mori, Tak and Kazu Iijima, Dyke Miyagawa, Kenny Murase, Joe Oyama, Eddie Shimano, Ina Sugihara, and Nori Ikeda Lafferty, had been active during the prewar Popular Front years in political and activist groups along the West Coast (notably the Los Angeles and Bay Area Nisei Democrats clubs). Others, such as James Nakamura, Shuji Fujii, Carl Kondo, Bob Kuwahara, and Miné Okubo, were writers and artists who had staffed prewar and/or camp newspapers. They were able to parlay their experience into leadership roles in community institutions, most notably the Japanese American Committee for Democracy, in the process acting as liaisons between the WRA, social welfare organizations, and pro-immigrant groups such as the Common Council for American Unity and the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born.

It is impossible to do justice in a brief sketch to the wide diversity of experiences of the thousands of Japanese Americans who migrated to Los Angeles after camp, but a summary view reveals that their circumstances were in some ways quite distinct from their counterparts in either Detroit or New York. First, the scale and timing of their entry and adjustment were very different. Because the West Coast did not even begin to open its doors until late 1944 and the WRA discouraged mass return, resettlement in Southern California was primarily a postwar process. However, the movement, once started, became a flood: by mid-1947 there were 28,000 people of Japanese ancestry in Los Angeles County (as compared with 37,000 before removal), making it the largest ethnic Japanese population on the continent.³⁵ Unlike in the other cities, the returnees were by no means the first Japanese Americans ever seen in the Los Angeles area: many were returning to areas where they had lived before the war, and in various cases resuming their prewar occupations or business ventures. By the same token, in returning home, they lacked the sense of exile or temporary residence that was felt by a large fraction of those who resettled in the East and Midwest.

That said, as in Detroit and New York, many resettlers in Los Angeles were newcomers. Large numbers of migrants who had lived in rural areas before the war now crowded into the city limits: Issei who had long resided in ethnic enclaves but had been unable to reclaim their property now settled in mixed areas where they were surrounded by non-Japanese neighbors. Nisei who had grown up largely among Japanese Americans, and then had been confined in all-Japanese camps during the war, now faced head-on the difficulties of living as a minority group. Even native Angelenos were often unable to return to their previous residences. In particular, the large prewar Japanese colony that had grown up around the canneries on Terminal Island in San Pedro had been, as one newspaper article described it, “the very pulse of prewar Japanese concentration around Los Angeles.”³⁶ It had been wiped out in February 1942, when the navy had taken over the island and expelled its Japanese residents on forty-eight hours' notice. The island remained a naval installation after the war's end, and its population was forced to disperse, though a significant hub of fishermen and naval workers relocated to nearby Long Beach.

If the returnees held the advantage of familiarity with their surroundings, they also had a long-entrenched pattern of prejudice, newly inflamed by wartime passions, to combat. Public attitudes in Los Angeles were decidedly mixed, and the level of overall anti-Japanese prejudice is hard to quantify.³⁷ Still, various controversies reveal the extent of tension and bias. In late summer 1944, through the efforts of the Pasadena-based fair play group Friends of the American Way, Esther Takei enrolled at Pasadena Junior College (today's Pasadena Community College), thus becoming the first Nisei since Pearl Harbor to be admitted to a Pacific coast college. A group of twenty local whites, supported by the California American Legion, campaigned publicly to exclude her. However, the college's faculty and student councils voted unanimously to accept Takei, and the Pasadena Board of Education announced that it had no power to refuse her, with the result that she was registered.³⁸ Soon after, when the celebrated chemist Dr. Linus Pauling of the California Institute of Technology hired a Nisei gardener, the exterior of his Pasadena home was vandalized with signs calling him “Jap lover,” while a Japanese flag was painted on the house.³⁹

The city's public stance on the resettlers was ambivalent at best. Mayor Fletcher Bowron, who had been a primary instigator of mass confinement and who had called in 1943 for all Nisei to be stripped of their American citizenship, made a public about-face. In January 1945, he announced that all returnees would be welcomed back to the city with their rights ensured, and he made a symbolic journey to Union Station to greet an initial group of returnees personally.⁴⁰ After a meeting with Bowron in September 1946, Mike Masaoka warmly praised the city under his administration as “the white spot of the country as far as unpleasant incidents connected with our return to our former homes is concerned.”⁴¹ Nonetheless, in January 1946, L.A. county manager Wayne Allen caused a widespread anti-Japanese backlash when he made a fraudulent public statement that 4,000 Japanese Americans were on the county relief rolls. In fact, this figure included not only the fewer than 1,000 individuals actually receiving relief funds (almost all of whom were elderly Issei barred by discriminatory state laws from receiving old-age assistance) but more than 3,000 Issei and Nisei families in emergency public housing whom the county manager imputed would all ultimately become a public charge. The Los Angeles Times quickly chimed in with a complaint that Japanese Americans were refusing employment offers, and pressed unemployed workers to take jobs as citrus pickers. The Hearst-owned Los Angeles Herald-Express proclaimed editorially that idle Japanese American men should be put to work on road labor or public projects and “shipped back to Japan” if they refused to take such jobs.⁴²

At the same time, securing housing was a contested and fraught process for the returnees. As in Detroit, the war had brought about a huge migration of war workers, who had taken up all available stock. In particular, there was an influx of African Americans from the South, whose arrival rapidly doubled the size of the region's black community. As a result of discrimination by white landlords as well as the overall housing shortage, many of the black migrants had no choice but to settle in the emptied Little Tokyo district (redubbed “Bronzeville”), which took on many characteristics of a slum area: overcrowding, crime, and poor public services. Meanwhile, as in Detroit, tensions over housing and recreation led to racial rioting in summer 1943, when invading white servicemen targeted blacks and Mexican Americans for assault in the so-called zoot suit riots.

As Japanese Americans began to return from the camps, the West Coast press voiced real fear of conflict between the returnees and the African Americans and others who would resist being displaced—fears that were further fanned by unscrupulous whites as a pretext for further exclusion.⁴³ Then in February 1945, Rev. Julius Goldwater, a Buddhist priest who was the guardian of the Honjuwani Temple, prepared to restore the temple building to its Nikkei worshipers. He obtained an eviction order to remove a black Baptist congregation that had taken over space in the building previously leased by other parties.⁴⁴ The dispute threatened to explode intergroup relations. As a result, leaders of the WRA, the NAACP, and other groups met to try to resolve further disputes over property. Gradually, Issei and Nisei landlords resumed their residence and reopened their businesses. Prewar hotels were transformed into rooming houses for returnee families. Meanwhile, other previous area residents doubled up or sought temporary housing while they waited for the leases on their properties to expire.

Again, as in Detroit, finding housing was largely impossible due to restrictive covenants in all-white areas, plus alien land legislation. In 1947, the Los Angeles Citizens' Housing Council organized a conference of more than a hundred organizations, which unanimously passed a resolution against restrictive covenants, and called for suspension of the Alien Land Act against the families of Nisei veterans.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, a majority of the city's landscape remained closed to Japanese owners and tenants. The largest fraction of returnees moved into housing, much of it substandard, in East Los Angeles's Hollenbeck Heights and Boyle Heights areas. This area, formerly a racially mixed area with a large Jewish population, was in the process of losing its non-Latino population. Some returnees found housing on North Broadway near Chinatown, or in Jefferson Park, while a new enclave formed in Sawtelle.⁴⁶ A large fraction of returnees took up residence alongside black neighbors in Watts. In the years after restrictive covenants were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, the largest fraction of the city's ethnic Japanese population moved into suburban Gardena.

Meanwhile, an estimated 4,000 Japanese Americans were forced into temporary housing. A network of hotels was set up by private groups. For example, the American Friends Service Committee and the Presbyterian Church in the United States established the Evergreen Hostel in a former school for Mexican American girls on Evergreen Avenue. The WRA petitioned the city to open thirty housing centers but was authorized to create only five. In the end, the WRA and the Federal Public Housing Authority (FPHA) hastily set up temporary housing centers in former army barracks, mixed with trailers, in sites in Hawthorne, El Segundo, and Lomita.⁴⁷ In fall 1945, the Winona emergency housing project, made up of a group of converted trailers, was established by the FPHA in Burbank, and 1,300 Japanese Americans resettled there. After several months, a portion of the Winona residents found private housing, while others were moved to the camps with barracks. However, more than 500 of the residents were unable to find other housing. In March 1946, they were informed that the project was to be cleared, and some residents were expelled to other facilities. After protests by residents, they were permitted to stay on, and the majority ultimately purchased their trailers and moved off in them. The final group of 350 were relocated to a trailer camp leased by local Nisei in November 1947.⁴⁸

Employment was another area in which Japanese American returnees had a particularly difficult experience. As in New York, part of the difficulty was due to official discrimination in city hiring. In January 1945 the County Board of Supervisors voted to bar Japanese Americans from civil service positions until at least ninety days after the end of the war, although its members admitted they had no legal basis for discrimination against those seeking the return of their jobs.⁴⁹ The Church Federation of Los Angeles protested the refusal of the county to employ Nisei, but the policy stood. In April 1945, the Board of Supervisors turned down Dr. Masako Kusayanagi's request to return immediately from leave to her job at General Hospital. Though there was a vital physician shortage, the County Board of Charities insisted that Dr. Kusayanagi (despite her three years of service as an accredited physician at two different WRA camps) was still to be deemed a student in residency, the level she had attained at the time of removal, and reported that all positions at that level were filled.⁵⁰ When Amy Nomi applied for a job at L.A. County Hospital in September she was turned away on the excuse of the board's decision. After Dorothy Okura placed first on her civil service exam as social worker with the County Board of Charities, the board claimed the privilege to hire the second-place finisher.⁵¹ Other public sector agencies were also touched by bias. A Los Angeles post office gained widespread attention when it refused to rehire a former Nisei employee who was a decorated war veteran, though other post offices, and the Board of Education, hired Nisei clerical work-ers.⁵² Still, as outrageous as such legal bias was, it served merely as a continuation of the notorious employment bars that had existed in prewar years, when only a few dozen Nisei had held civil service positions.⁵³

The situation was scarcely better in the private sector. Throughout the postwar years, there were various reports of private discrimination. Although one industrialist with a cannery on Terminal Island had promised in early 1945 to employ 100 returnees, few office and factory employers rushed to open places for the returnees. An aluminum company that had hired a Nisei employee was forced to discharge him following a hate strike by other employees.⁵⁴ Once again, this did not represent a large-scale shift from prewar patterns of exclusion. The difference is that before the war, employment was available inside the community. Over the first half of the twentieth century, masses of Issei were able to use savings and community mutual aid funds to establish independent small businesses. Their Nisei descendants, despite a high average level of educational achievement, were all but unemployable in mainstream firms. Thus, apart from a small minority who secured executive positions working for Japanese firms, the Nisei were able to support themselves and their families by working for family or community-based enterprises (for which they were generally overqualified) or opening their own businesses. After the war, in contrast, Issei and Nisei found financing of new businesses unavailable, and there were no Japanese firms to take up the slack. Occupational downward mobility, at least in the short term, was the rule for Nisei as well as Issei. Former store owners were reduced to working as domestic servants, while truck farmers and market directors found work as gardeners and handy-men. Astoundingly, while less than 20 percent of Japanese American workers in Los Angeles region were employed by whites before the war, the total rose to approximately 70 percent afterward.⁵⁵

To an even greater extent than in other cites, Issei and Nisei were thrown back on themselves and forced to join into ethnic-specific groups to respond to the difficulties facing them. A network of JACL chapters formed in the different Nisei enclaves, and Nisei veterans' groups attracted numerous community members. Postwar Los Angeles boasted two daily Japanese newspapers, as the prewar journals Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi resumed daily publication, while the progressive English-language weekly Crossroads debuted in 1948. By the same token, even more than in New York—and in marked contrast to Detroit—the resettlers in Los Angeles engaged with African Americans in daily life and community action, especially in Little Tokyo/Bronzeville. The center of interracial unity was Pilgrim House, a settlement house opened for African Americans in the vacated Japanese Union Church in 1943 and headed by Rev. Charles Kingsley. Kingsley took the lead in welcoming Issei and Nisei resettlers. Pilgrim House provided returnees with day care, athletic facilities, and crafts classes. Its Common Ground committee, headed by volunteer worker Samuel Ishikawa, helped resolve conflicts between Japanese Americans, blacks, and Chícanos.⁵⁶ Nisei activists responded in kind. Mary Oyama Mittwer crusaded for interracialism and denounced Nisei bigotry against other groups in her Rafu Shimpo column, “New World A-Coming.” Hisaye Yamamoto, hired as a columnist by the African American Los Angeles Tribune newspaper to serve as a bridge between the two communities, joined Wakako Yamuchi and other activists in founding a Los Angeles chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, and in 1947-48 the two organized a series of intergroup sit-ins and picket lines to desegregate the Bullock's department store lunchroom and the Bimini Baths, a swimming resort.

Still, Hisaye Yamamoto and other writers complained that relations between the two groups in Little Tokyo/Bronzeville continued to “stink.” Discrimination by Issei shop owners and pressure from Nisei who sought to displace black residents led to resentment.⁵⁷ The ethnic Japanese press complained of a “Negro crime wave” in Little Tokyo/Bronzeville during 1946-47, and a merchants' group hired a pair of Nisei ex-GIs as security guards.⁵⁸ In March 1947 a community meeting was organized by G. Raymond Booth, executive director of the Council for Civic Unity, and Rev. Kingsley in an effort to resolve the strained relations between the two communities. Various speakers, including W. E. B. Du Bois, called for conflict resolution and tolerance.⁵⁹ Improvement was slow, though, and barely six months later the Union Church ordered Pilgrim House to vacate the premises. Stripped of a permanent residence, it folded not long after.

In sum, the process of resettlement and readaptation of Japanese Americans took shape in rather distinct forms and at varying speeds in different areas. A comparative view suggests that while conditions on the West Coast were more unfriendly to the migrants, generally speaking, the ability of the newcomers to find acceptable employment and housing was also influenced by other factors, such as the size of the resettler population and the existence of social welfare agencies to advocate for the migrants. In addition, various similarities between Detroit and Los Angeles in the first period of resettlement suggest that the presence of large wartime migrant populations in any city, and rising ethnic tensions that accompanied the strain on municipal facilities, may have had as much to do with the treatment of Issei and Nisei as did historic bias toward Japanese Americans.

Japanese American resettlers in New York, like those elsewhere, faced many difficulties. Yet Issei as well as Nisei there, inspired by the city's cosmopolitan spirit, were used to living and working unrestricted by discrimination, and to dealing with other citizens on an equal basis. This attitude of openness may have sowed the seeds for a more rapid and successful adjustment by the small but disproportionately intellectual-minded and artistic group of Nisei who resettled there than either their counterparts in Detroit or Southern California were able to achieve. However, the relatively small size of the New York community, and the lack of ostentatious discrimination, also meant that there was little force holding the community together, especially after 1948.