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CHAPTER 2

Japanese Americans on Parole: The Perils and Promises of a Postwar State

For Japanese Americans, the answer to the question of what the wartime state could ask of its citizens was painfully obvious: everything. Theirs was a forced sacrifice, perpetrated by their own government, so the war liberalism that sprang from that war crime was tinged with a deep ambivalence about the state. Their recovery from compulsory sacrifice, to the surprise of their government captors, introduced the problem of war-related but state-induced dependency: what was the state’s responsibility to care for their jailed charges when the war was over? Government planners had never before faced this kind of welfare dilemma. Indeed, the story of Japanese American demobilization is like no other of the postwar generation. Millions had left home during World War II to find a job, follow family, or serve in the military, but only Japanese Americans were tagged, marched, and warehoused after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. Their recovery, not their internment, is the focus of this chapter.¹

This “exit moment” from camp has received less attention, but it is a fascinating story about how an internal “enemy” in wartime tried to reconstitute itself in the postwar. Internment made Japanese Americans conditional citizens. Once freed, they were still on racial probation, under pressure to prove their loyalty and worth as they tried to rebuild from scratch. Approximately twenty thousand to thirty thousand of these “resettlers,” as the government called them, arrived in Chicago from 1942 through 1950, making the city “the primary center of relocation in the United States,” according to the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the agency in charge of internment.² Refugees from the West, now even farther from their agricultural and coastal homes, newly freed Japanese Americans had to fast become midwestern Asian urbanites. Boarding a bus, finding a flat, locating a friendly grocer, these were all essentially racial experiments, for Chicago’s new Asian migrants had to test their reception with every interaction. For them, demobilization was both a bread-and-butter struggle and a fight for racial redemption and justice.

It was also a welfare problem. Demobilization’s history offers a new opportunity to examine Japanese Americans’ attitudes about the state in the aftermath of an extreme and punitive statism. The government’s power to separate, remove, and imprison represented state authority at its peak, but that overreach created a novel predicament for postwar policymakers. Locking people up as national security risks meant they had to provide for them. When Dillon S. Myer assumed leadership of the WRA in June 1942, he thought of himself not as a prison warden but as the new mayor of “ten abnormal cities” whose needs he thought would mimic “most or all of the problems of the small city.” This was internment as city management, the chore of arranging the basic needs of shelter, food, education, recreation, and health care for over 120,000 people. As Myer put it, the essential challenge of wartime detention was “the problem of caring.”³ His odd but suggestive phrase nudges us to think anew about internment as a welfare dilemma for the wartime and postwar liberal state: how to transition a population from carceral dependence to, as Myer put it, “a normal useful American life with all possible speed”?⁴ The fear that wartime federal custody could foster postwar federal dependency nagged WRA planners more than any national security issue. Essentially, internment had turned a once productive population into wards of the state, and Myer and his staff worried that wartime “caring” would have to continue well after the war as former prisoners tried to regain their livelihoods. Even more worrisome, internment may have fostered in its detainees a sense of entitlement to that caring.

These national politics played out as local realities in Chicago’s north side neighborhoods. Here, contact with two federal agencies—the WRA and OPA/OHE—shaped resettlers’ understanding of the state in peacetime. They leaned on both, especially the OPA/OHE, but their postwar state was never just the federal government. They built their own welfare organizations, local and national, and when those could not meet their needs, they wandered a little farther from their base into Chicago’s network of settlement houses and aid agencies. Indeed, their war liberalism alternated between an older ethic of racial self-help and a new and evolving sensibility that the federal government bore some liability for their long-term well-being. Older Issei immigrants wanted restored financial security and family reunion; younger Nisei, the Issei’s American-born children, wanted new financial security and family formation. They all wanted to exhale the war and inhale a new normal—to tend to the mundane, to be bothered by the small irritants of a regular day. From certain angles, their demobilization history looks much like everyone else’s—a grand scavenger hunt for the good life. The evidence from Chicago suggests that Japanese Americans emerged from this long process with some of what they wanted, but also with a sharpened sense of the trade-offs and fragilities of citizenship—especially for nonwhites—and a deeper wariness of their government’s power.⁵

Involuntary Moves

The regional history of Japanese American internment is more varied than we think. The original exclusion area reached from Washington State in the Northwest all the way to the Arizona-Mexico border. The government imprisoned Japanese Americans in western states (California, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado), but also in the Southwest (Arizona) and South (Arkansas). If we include the Department of Justice prisons, which held those identified as “leaders,” internment’s territorial reach expanded to New Mexico, Texas, Montana, and North Dakota. And if we consider when Japanese Americans migrated eastward after their release, then the captivity geography extends even farther—to Missouri, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio, all the way to New York. In fact, the postwar history of internment anchors us in Chicago because thousands resettled there. Thus we tend to think about internment as a western story, but it is really a national one if we include demobilization in World War II’s time line.

We also have to rethink time, not just territory. The war began for Japanese Americans in government prisons. Midway through, the War Department granted them permission to leave if they swore their loyalty and found paid work east of the Mississippi. Here, they were in a strange moment of postinternment but not postwar, with many family and friends still in camp. In December 1944, the government revoked the exclusion orders, enabling them to return home, but the war was still on and most were afraid to go west. Their full release came after two atomic bombs ended the war in a place far away but deeply connected to them. Yet it was not until March 1946 that the last of those held as “security risks” were freed. It would take years for Japanese Americans to rebuild, and decades until the government admitted the injustice and apologized. In 1990, survivors or their descendants saw their first redress payments for what they had lost during incarceration. How, then, do we date World War II’s end for them?

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was an explosive start of the war, but for Japanese Americans on the mainland, their war began as a series of involuntary moving days. First, in the spring of 1942, families hastily packed their bags (only two per person allowed) and went to what the government called “assembly centers,” temporary holding areas where the bureaucracy of detention stalled until full-fledged concentration camps could be built. Here, families stayed an average of three months, a strange limbo lived in converted racetracks and stockyards that previewed the misery of the more permanent “relocation centers.” In these prison camps, conditions were only marginally better than some of the animal habitats they had just left. Japanese Americans moved into “blocks,” rows of long, rectangular buildings, each divided into small rooms, one room per family—no matter the size. These “apartments,” as they were called, were essentially army barracks lacking even the most basic amenities, some of them not even finished when the prisoners arrived. Bathing and going to the bathroom were now painfully awkward communal acts. Internee complaints about their apartments sound much like those in the rent control files, and like those tenants, camp residents had an official process through which to grieve wretched conditions. But they were prisoners, not renters, and barbed wire and men with guns made Chicago landlords’ power seem trifling by comparison.⁶

Each of these moves required trains, the workhorses of modern warfare and the equipment that ferried Japanese Americans into and out of federal custody. On the trains into camp, Japanese Americans rode as prisoners, sitting upright, tightly packed, windows closed and shades down by order of the military.⁷ On the way out, they rode like tourists, shades up, eyes wide open, surveying landscapes they were seeing for the first time. Before the war, few had any reason to go east for either work or family; that was in ready supply on the West Coast, where Japanese immigrants had first settled early in the century. Only a plucky few had crossed the Mississippi, with less than four hundred recorded in Chicago on the eve of World War II.⁸ As we will see, that number would rise dramatically when, in mid-1942, the WRA adopted a policy that allowed internees to apply for work leaves. This meant they could leave camp, perhaps indefinitely, as long as they had a job.

Their third and final move then was their postinternment resettlement, a longed-for liberation, but an exit wound, of sorts, for prison life had done some damage but how much was still unclear. Fanning out from western and southern camps, Japanese American migrants began their midwestern urbanization. Chicago emerged as the destination city for two reasons. First, it had an unusually diverse wartime economy, and this promised the most potential matches for a population unsure of how its West Coast skills might translate in a different labor market. According to People in Motion, the WRA’s landmark study of resettlement, Chicago “was booming, the demand for workers was great, and wages were as high as could be found anywhere.”⁹ For parolee-migrants who had lost everything, Chicago promised the chance to refill family coffers. As early as 1943, the talk in many camps was of Chicago as the “City of Opportunity”; at the Jerome, Arkansas, camp, for example, a survey of those exiting showed Chicago as their “first preference.”¹⁰

But the city lured resettlers for another reason. Quite simply, it was not the west (a place they could not return to anyway), yet by wartime standards, Chicago was allegedly approachable, even friendly. That friendliness (a regionalism midwesterners still love to claim) was more myth than fact, but enough Japanese Americans experienced it to turn them into believers. In many accounts, train-riding pioneers reported that Chicagoans welcomed them without hostility. In March 1943, with the WRA’s permission, Shotaro Hikida and a friend left the Gila River, Arizona, prison camp to do some reconnaissance of racial attitudes. Their plan was to make a field trip to Chicago and enjoy the city the way any white person would, and then report their findings to WRA staff. The WRA’s investment in the trip was more than curiosity. Unnerved by prisoner demonstrations at two camps, Myer and his staff pondered whether and how they could detain so many for so long. Their solution was the “work release,” a program that would allow internees to leave for short- and long-term paid work assignments. It was at least a partial answer to the unrest, Myer thought. But first, both Issei and Nisei would have “to be assured about the kind of reception they might expect.”¹¹ To that end, WRA authorities let camp leaders such as Hikida make fact-finding trips, hoping to use his stories to advertise, especially to the older and more fearful Issei, that there was, indeed, life after camp.

Once in Chicago, though, the reception was decidedly mixed: Hikida and his friend could not find a hotel anywhere, partly a function of arriving so late on a Saturday, but in one case, because they were “Oriental.” Still, their white cab driver tried to help, driving them from place to place, even negotiating for them at one stop. After a ten-day stay, Hikida concluded that freed internees could resettle in Chicago “without worrying so much.” This is exactly what WRA officials wanted to hear, but we should not see Hikida as just a mouthpiece, as some of his fellow prisoners did. He wanted out and he wanted to convince others they could leave, too. His phrase “without worrying so much” did not mean safety. Chicago was not free of racism, Hikida said, but there was “less racial feeling” than in other places.¹²

Stories like Hikida’s helped prepare internees for a strange middle passage: a move from the relative safety of racially segregated imprisonment (most were at least with family) to the uncertainties of a racially integrated parole (now often alone, at first, and among more whites). In fact, many internees cited the trip to Chicago as an eye-opening first exposure to the racial geography of wartime. When twenty-two-year-old Ben Chikaraishi gained his work release from the Rohwer, Arkansas, camp in 1943 (on the Fourth of July), he boarded a bus to take him to the train station. As he described it, the “first decision I had to make outside of camp was ‘Where do I sit?’” Staring from the front of the bus at waiting faces, blacks in the back, whites in front, he wondered where a Japanese American might sit—literally—in the southern racial hierarchy. In that moment, he reasoned that both his people’s long history of racial discrimination and their current detention put him solidly in the back of the bus. But the driver, the de facto arbiter and enforcer of Jim Crow, ruled that his new passenger was white, and he brought the bus to a full stop to insist that Chikaraishi move forward. Chikaraishi was only somewhat compliant, deciding that he was neither black nor white but somewhere in between.¹³

The bus took him to a train headed north, but the train car did not feel like neutral space either. Japanese Americans traveling together could cluster, but that might attract attention and suspicion. Traveling alone brought its own vulnerabilities, and it certainly meant sitting right next to hakujin (white people), an uncomfortable proximity, maybe, for both. This palpable tension on buses and trains recalls Robin Kelley’s notion of public transportation as a kind of “moving theater” in which racial freedoms and restraints were being enacted on a daily basis during wartime.¹⁴ Passengers like Chikaraishi were both actors and spectators in the play, and each train trip offered another chance to watch World War II’s racial dynamics. Exiled in camps, Japanese Americans now had to rejoin and relearn the rules of public space in new regions altogether. They were anxious to avoid the spotlight, but they were an attentive audience, studying closely their shifting environs, but feeling mostly on edge about the potential for things to end badly. On her train ride from Manzanar, California, to Chicago, Kaye Kimura described a “marked feeling of self-consciousness…. I thought everybody was looking at me,” and she braced herself for “some sort of unpleasantness” as she rode.¹⁵ Leaving Topaz, Utah, for Chicago, Sam Konishi similarly reported feeling uneasy when he boarded the train, “because I had never been that far east before and I didn’t know how we would be accepted.”¹⁶

The surprise ending turned out to be the genuinely warm reaction from fellow travelers—even, notably, from men in uniform. Many internees described a sense of relief once they began to do what they feared most: talk to strangers. Kimura admitted that the train “was [her] first touch with the outside world and the passengers … didn’t seem to be any different from before.” She recalled how scared she was when she first saw so many soldiers in her car, but they treated her small group of Manzanar migrants “very nicely.” In fact, “the soldiers even went out of their way to talk with us. They guessed that we were just coming out of camp … [and] they condemned the California people for treating us so unjustly.”¹⁷ Konishi, too, noted the presence of GIs, but “nobody bothered us.”¹⁸ When Mae Kaneko fell ill on her trip, she was amazed when a sailor brought her some dinner. “I had to laugh then at my fears,” she recalled, “because … I had built up my imagination to the point where I thought I would be the victim of some kind of incident.”¹⁹

To lessen what Hikida had called the “racial feeling” for those going east, the WRA opened a network of branch offices to facilitate a smooth camp-to-city migration. The first in the nation opened in Chicago in the January cold of 1943, and by June of that year, forty-two more offices opened in cities around the country. For arriving resettlers, the WRA was not so much a friendly face as a familiar one, and the irony of asking for help from their captors was not lost on them. But they needed the lifeline, and the WRA thought these urban outposts could foster the kind of “favorable community acceptance” that resettlers desperately wanted in their adopted cities.²⁰ At least initially, resettlers did not mind the wartime overcrowding lamented by so many in Chicago. As the WRA’s People in Motion phrased it, the city’s “metropolitan atmosphere” could offer “a cloak of indifference” for Japanese Americans whose detention had heightened their racial self-consciousness.²¹ Stories of anti-Japanese violence “were given wide belief” in camp, according to the study, so “to go ‘outside’ was considered extremely hazardous.”²² Thus Chicago—or any other big city—would make it possible to hide, to create an urban anonymity that might shield evacuees from simmering resentment or even rage.

It helped, too, that Chicago’s local newspapers and politicians decided not to indulge in the Hearst-style media hysteria of the West Coast. For the most part, Chicago’s press coverage was “relatively mild and objective,” reported Shotaro Miyamoto, a social scientist studying resettlement conditions in Chicago.²³ Some outlets used the racist language of the era, “Japs,” but most avoided racial sensationalism. The media mainly adopted a reportorial tone. The Chicago Daily Tribune’s earliest articles, for example, cited an “infiltration of Japanese evacuees” but also highlighted their education and skills. Reports of scattered local opposition to arriving Japanese Americans were always balanced with an opposing view, most often from WRA staff, who used an early variant of the model minority theory. Elmer R. Shirrell, director of the WRA’s midwestern office, described Japanese American newcomers as “industrious and intelligent workers who take their places quietly in the community and ask nothing but tolerance of their new neighbors.” The Tribune also engaged in some hometown boosterism when it recited the growing sense among camp refugees of Chicago as “the nation’s warmest host.” These reports came from both Japanese Americans’ own prison newspapers and WRA staffers, but the Tribune was happy to publish them to burnish the city’s reputation as a place of “congenial resettlement.”²⁴

(Re)Settling In

The train car, however, was merely the first of many public spaces a former internee had to inhabit. Japanese Americans still had a whole city to navigate. Their initial disenchantment was visual. Their first impressions of Chicago suggest that the train shades should have been pulled down after all. Lily Umeki described feeling “really disappointed to see all those dark and dirty buildings” when she pulled in.²⁵ Mae Kaneko admitted that from her window, “I thought that I would never like Chicago because it was so old and dirty.”²⁶ And Kaye Kimura’s poetic fantasies of Chicago did not match the reality when she arrived. “I had read in books what an exciting place Chicago was,” she said. “There was supposed to be a sort of electrical energy in the atmosphere there…. I had read [Carl] Sandburg’s poems about Chicago while in camp and this impressed me so much that I decided that I would like to live in a city which possessed such vitality.” But when her train pulled in, she was disheartened: “The dirtiness of this city sounded exciting in poems but it was a big disillusionment in real life. Everything seemed so grim and cheerless. It made my morale go way down and I felt low, strange, and alone.”²⁷ Considering internees left prison camps that even Dillon Myer called “largely desert wastelands,” these first encounters were discouraging.²⁸

Chicago was a big, noisy, industrial city—made even bigger by the bustle of war. Shotaro Miyamoto found that newly freed internees formed lasting impressions of the city just two weeks into their stay. The “sweat and stink” of the meatpacking industry, the Democratic political machine that ruled the city, and the “goddamned Els” (referring to the city’s elevated trains) defined the character of the city, and “these snapshot impressions,” he wrote, were the “signposts that guide[ed] people’s emotions and thinking as they adjust[ed] to their conditions of life.”²⁹ The signpost every new migrant looked for was another Japanese American. The more newcomers saw their own kind walking city streets, renting apartments, working in stores and industry, even riding the “goddamned Els,” the more they were convinced that Chicago was, as Miyamoto said, a “‘safer bet’ for evacuees than most cities east of the Mississippi.”³⁰

The first Japanese Americans arrived in Chicago in June 1942, with a larger wave arriving in 1943, and the influx into the city would last until 1950. This makes for a weird war time line and points to the blurriness of the category “postwar.” Thousands of Japanese Americans walked out of camp well before World War II ended, but they entered a city still deeply at war. The first to leave were the young: college students whose education had been interrupted and Nisei youth willing to do hard labor on farms just to escape, even if temporarily. These were “the advance guard,” as the WRA called them, migrants “who probed the war inflamed attitudes of American communities” outside the West Coast. The second wave was also a young, mainly single, Nisei cohort, and it included more women. These “girls” could find work in the service sector, as either domestics or secretaries, or even in light industry, while Nisei men found employment in factories or in some sort of mechanical service work. By the end of 1943, almost eighteen thousand of these “relocation pioneers” had left the camps permanently.³¹

The next migration waves, though, were more cumbersome, because now whole families were moving, carrying with them the duties of marriage, children, and elder care. But the trains kept coming, bringing young and old, single and married, Nisei and Issei, and by 1947, enough resettlers had arrived to form an entirely new Japanese American population in Chicago. Indeed, the chances of encountering another Japanese American who had not been imprisoned were almost nil; by the WRA’s count, 97 percent of the Japanese Americans walking around Chicago had come from the camps.³² Ultimately, between twenty-thousand and thirty thousand internees landed in Chicago, giving the city almost as many Japanese American residents as there were in all the rest of the states east of the Mississippi River combined. At this point, only Los Angeles County had more Japanese American residents. The accumulated success stories of chain migrations out of camp were “a magnet,” said the WRA, and its final report on resettlement announced that, by 1947, Chicago had become “the recognized economic and social center of the Japanese Americans located in the Midwest.”³³

From Resettler to Renter

The foremost task for these migrants was to draw their own city maps and find home in a strange place. Of course, any urban greenhorn had to figure out the contours of his or her new village. Chicago was large, but people lived small—in ethnic enclaves, in the flats, bars, churches, and shops of their neighborhoods. For evacuees, though, this was no ordinary urban adjustment. Their move was voluntary in a narrow sense, for they had chosen Chicago as their resettlement destination. But it was essentially coerced, because they went there only because they could not go home. Evacuation orders were not lifted until December 1944, and when the camps finally closed in 1946, those remaining could go west, but the fear of returning to the scene of the racial crime was its own kind of intimidation. And even in their chosen city, now “free,” the government tried to track their movements. Evacuees were expected to go directly from camp to the WRA’s Chicago office, register their arrival, and then notify WRA staff whenever they found a new job or apartment. What is more, the WRA had the right to call an internee back to camp at any point for what Myer called “sufficient reason,” a security phrase just as nebulous and arbitrary as the rationale for internment. There is some intriguing evidence that internees ignored the local registration rule: in a week when ninety-one were to leave camp and report to Chicago, only fifty showed up at the WRA office. Even so, the registry, the status updates, and the power to recall—all of this meant that a resettler was, technically, still in custody of the army and the WRA.³⁴ In this context, then, drawing that map and finding home was an incredible act of hope and persistence. Millions of World War II migrants had done it, too, but not with an ankle bracelet.

A resettler’s first visit to the WRA’s Chicago office was a necessity, but it did not feel like safety. That office was a branch of the military state, the carceral state, and now, the welfare state. Yet the WRA offered new arrivals welfare in only a limited sense; staff counselors gave anxious war migrants their first leads on housing and jobs and referrals to local groups that could offer them essential services. These groups were the private, voluntary, and religious organizations that had served the welfare needs of urban Americans for decades, funded through charity and state and local governments. Some had longer histories, reaching all the way back to the nineteenth century, while others sprang up to address the kind of social welfare emergencies World War II had created. The postcamp fate of Japanese Americans was one of those war-related emergencies. The Advisory Committee for Evacuees, for example, was created mainly by white, faith-based groups, whose sympathies for internees sprang variously from their firm belief in Christian uplift, their earlier missionary work in Japan, or from their membership in the historic peace churches, who felt it was their moral obligation—especially in wartime—to promote “the ultimate triumph of love over hate.”³⁵ For those behind barbed wire, the committee’s existence was tangible evidence that Chicago was, indeed, a safe bet, but the realities of making room for thousands of war refugees were an entirely different matter. A select few of the committee’s member organizations tackled the everyday problems of resettlement—finding beds, food, jobs, and permanent housing. Chicago’s American Friends Service Committee provided office space, hired paid staff, and opened a bricks-and-mortar operation—a hostel for incoming Japanese Americans that offered a cot and a meal for one dollar a day. The Chicago Church of the Brethren ran a hostel, too, an offshoot of the work its codirectors had done as teachers at Manzanar.

Figure 5. After a Japanese American prisoner left camp, the WRA’s Chicago branch office was the required first stop, where resettlers would meet with a WRA relocation field officer to register their arrival in Chicago and then seek referrals for local job and housing opportunities. Still, much of the support for this difficult transition to Chicago came from Japanese Americans’ own mutual aid organizations. Courtesy of War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement, WRA no. I-860, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Working in a parallel and often overlapping universe were Japanese American mutual aid organizations. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), already a national association, set up a Midwest regional office in January 1943—only after its leaders were given a security clearance to do so. Its first director, Thomas Yatabe, had been imprisoned himself, so he had a deep understanding of evacuee sensitivities. But he was building a civil rights organization for the long haul, so his vision of what his branch should do was much broader than resettlement services. Further, the JACL offered membership only to Nisei—that is, American citizens—and this made it difficult to win the trust of Issei resettlers, already resentful of their declining community status during internment. The smallness of the Chicago JACL’s budget and staff necessitated cooperation with white allies, such as the Friends, with whom the JACL had adjoining office space, and with their former captor, the WRA, whose Chicago office opened the very same month as the JACL’s. An essentially one-man operation, director Yatabe found himself pulled in many directions, and as more complex family configurations migrated to the city, his local JACL simply did not have the resources to help.³⁶

Luckily, there were other Japanese American groups who could react more nimbly to conditions on the ground. Together, they constituted a kind of homegrown, resettler-controlled social service operation for a population in the midst of yet another war-related relocation. Chief among them was the Chicago Resettlers Committee (CRC), created in 1944, which, unlike the JACL, defined its membership very broadly, putting both Nisei and Issei on its executive board. According to an internal report, this marked “the first time both generations sat down together to plan for the welfare of their own people.”³⁷ Even white allies, such as the director of Chicago’s famed Hull House, could join, partly to garner “sympathetic support” from the white reform community and city leaders, generally. The CRC’s mission and practical services were little different from that of the Friends or the Brethren, but its largely Japanese American leadership made it a trusted “go to” for the newly freed. An organization run by Issei and Nisei could inspire “the confidence of the resettlers as they would feel that it is their own,” said the CRC’s 1946 membership report.³⁸ Although the CRC was more homegrown, more attuned to the local and urgent than the overtly political, its members shared the civil rights goals of their JACL colleagues: “to eliminate discrimination” and to “maintain a sound peace.”³⁹ These were the embryonic, idealistic views of an urban Japanese American war liberalism that would be tested immediately by the challenges of city resettlement.

A “sound peace” started with good housing, but Chicago was a deeply racially segregated city. The apartment hunt made Japanese Americans doubt whether their adopted city could offer a more tolerant—even liberal—climate for their recovery. According to People in Motion, finding a place to live was resettlers’ “first and increasingly desperate concern.”⁴⁰ In fact, their migration to Chicago coincided exactly with the war-induced housing crisis, so just as resettlers were being liberated from their prison “apartments,” the odds were narrowing for them to find a real apartment. The WRA and evacuee aid groups sweated this problem every day. They saw housing as one of the prerequisites for a successful long-term racial integration, and they worried that the shortage would foster what they called “social maladjustment.” According to a CRC analysis, “undesirable housing” magnified or created anew a roster of social problems in Japanese American neighborhoods, ranging from marital strain to juvenile delinquency. “From the standpoint of healthy social adjustment to their communities,” the CRC found, “resettlers occupy housing that is both good and bad. For the most part it is bad.”⁴¹

Why it was bad had much to do with America’s long history of racial conflict, now compounded by World War II’s own perversions of racial thinking. Yet it was also true that lousy housing was the lot for almost everyone as the country demobilized. When researcher Togo Tanaka tried to sort this out, he posited supply and demand and the “added possibility of race prejudice,” but there was no way to know for sure, he said, no “measuring determinant” to actually prove it. “No doubt, both are important factors,” he surmised.⁴² Tanaka was right, but it was hard for those who had just suffered a race-based internment to see their own housing struggle as anything but racial. So, like riding a train, finding housing would have to be part of resettlers’ race work. They would have to probe Chicago’s racial attitudes house by house, bracing for resentment, hoping for acceptance.

As we know from the rent control stories, finding housing in Chicago was not for the timid. The very congestion that offered resettlers a “cloak of indifference” made finding a place to sleep almost unattainable. Hoofing it around the city, placing a desperately worded ad in a newspaper (should they divulge their race?), tapping into existing networks, and, of course, bunking with family until something came through, these were all a start. In a way, resettlers actually had a slight advantage at this stage because of the religious and mutual aid groups arrayed to help them. Fresh off the train, they could lean immediately on a member of the Friends Service Committee (who was often at the station to meet them) or on the downtown YMCA (where staff were attuned to their special needs). In fact, internees awaiting their work release while in camp could even reserve a bed at the Friends’ hostel, and if there was no space when they arrived, they could at least sleep on a couch or the floor, something a random newcomer who spent a night in the train station would have jumped at.

Finding permanent accommodations proved much harder, though. Aid groups sometimes did advanced reconnaissance to see what was available or what might soon turn over. As described in Shotaro Miyamoto’s report, Friends staff, for example, “would canvass whole residential areas of the city, jotting down addresses of vacancies, making inquiries, talking to apartment managers,” and taking scrupulous notes so they could later describe a “desirable and undesirable area.” Even the director of the Friends’ hostel devoted over half of each workday to sniffing out new leads and verifying tips from other referral lists.⁴³ What these staffers learned from walking the beat was that no one could count on stability in the housing market; war migrations fluctuated in response to local and national economic factors, the situation in camps, even the weather. Turnover was the only sure thing, and even the hostels set up to ease this volatility experienced this. The Church of the Brethren lost its lease in the fall of 1943, and it was lucky to find another building after a determined hunt. The Friends had no such luck when their landlord terminated the lease, so they had to shutter their hostel in November 1943, just as evacuee numbers were swelling.⁴⁴