War between Japan and the United States

The only reference in the literature of the Japanese left to Noboru Tsutsumi's history of the 1920 Japanese plantation workers' movement in Hawaii (1920nen Hawaii sato^[*] kochi^[*] rodo^[*] undoshi^[*] , jo^[*] ) is a brief mention in Suzuki Mosaburo^[*] zenshu^[*] (The Complete Works of Mosaburo Suzuki). After working with Sen Katayama's left-wing group in New York, Suzuki visited postrevolution Moscow, and on his return to Japan, he worked as a newspaper reporter while joining a movement to launch a proletarian party. The proletarian party movement went through several splits and mergers among its rightist, leftist, and centrist factions before the formation of the National Masses party (Zenkoku Taishuto^[*] ) in 1930. Among the party's advisers were Toyohiko Kagawa and Toshihiko Sakai. Mosaburo Suzuki, along with Kanju^[*] Kato^[*] , Chozaburo^[*] Mizutani, Jotaro^[*] Kawakami, and others, became a member of the central executive committee. It is most likely that that is when Suzuki and Noboru Tsutsumi became acquainted.

Tsutsumi was closer to Ryusuke^[*] Miyazaki, a left-wing politician better known for having eloped with the poet Byakuren Yanagihara rather than for his radical socialist activities at Tokyo Imperial University. Tsutsumi damaged his throat so badly while campaigning for Miyazaki that he took to bed. His daughter, Michiko, who later became a doctor, thought his throat problem must have been a symptom of tuberculosis, an illness that he may have brought back with him from Hawaii. When he returned to Japan, Tsutsumi was already quite thin and often perspired in his sleep. Tuberculosis was a major cause of death in Hawaii, as it was in Japan.

Since his involvement in the Noda Shoyu^[*] company strike, Tsutsumi's movements had come under police surveillance. After his health deteriorated, the family had trouble feeding itself, so they moved to Chiyo's family's clinic in Nagahama. Tsutsumi's older brother, Ekan Kurokawa, who had returned from his studies in Germany, had opened up his

medical practice near Kyoto University. When Tsutsumi recovered somewhat in 1932 he did administrative chores at his brother's clinic. In May 1932 Chiyo died of acute meningitis. Tsutsumi wept aloud, not minding that his children saw him, as if to apologize for having acted selfishly for so long. In 1933 Shigenao Konishi, Tsutsumi's mentor during his student days, became president of Kyoto University, and through his influence Tsutsumi became director of administration at his alma mater, but he had to sign a statement promising not to involve himself in labor movement activities.

In November 1933 Sen Katayama died in Moscow, just before the Stalinist purges began. Although called stubborn and narrow-minded, Katayama had lived his life according to his ideology.

One year later, in December 1934, Japan announced that it would abandon the Washington Naval Limitation Treaty. In this same year Tsutsumi married his second wife, Tsuruyo, who had just graduated from a women's normal school. She was just three years older than his daughter. According to Tsuruyo, her husband's health was so delicate that she wondered if she had married him simply to become his nurse. Yet it was Tsuruyo who had sought out Tsutsumi, drawn by his calm gentleness and the erudition with which he answered her every question. By this time, in addition to his duties at Kyoto University, Tsutsumi had also become business manager of Kitano Hospital in Osaka, which was affiliated with Kyoto University.

Spirited and cheerful, Tsuruyo did not want to be Tsutsumi's nursemaid. Unlike Chiyo, she had the intelligence and interest to respond to his talk of politics and the world. It was the first time that he had found a partner willing to enter his world. In 1938, the year that the National General Mobilization Law was decreed, Tsuruyo gave birth to a son, Tamotsu, the third son for Tsutsumi.

In the summer of 1933, the year Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first American president to visit Hawaii. He was making an observation tour to check the country's front line of defense in the Pacific, but publicly it was reported that he was on a fishing vacation with his sons. The Japanese community in Hawaii, seeing this as a good opportunity to improve strained relations between Japan and the United States, participated with enthusiasm in the events welcoming the president. When the cruiser Houston , with the president aboard, and several accompanying vessels first put in to the port of Hilo, they were greeted offshore by a fleet of more than fifty Japa-

nese fishing boats colorfully decked out. This seemed to have the opposite effect of what was intended, for it gave the impression that the Japanese immigrants in Hawaii were boasting of their influence.

Yet the Japanese immigrant community was making an all-out effort, and the stars and stripes were flown from all the Japanese shops along the road through Olaa Plantation as the president's convertible passed on its way to Mount Kilauea. Nisei schoolchildren and Japanese laborers at Olaa took the day off to wave small American flags by the roadside. Despite the midday heat, elderly immigrants of the Olaa Buddhist association stood at the roadside clad in black formal dress kimonos.

Juzaburo^[*] Sakamaki, the company interpreter on Olaa Plantation, was not among those paying their respects to the president. Sakamaki had arranged for his eldest son, who as a high school student had stood guard with a pistol until dawn on the night of the dynamite blast, to take over his work as interpreter and postmaster. Shortly after his retirement Sakamaki suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and bedridden. Six years after the president's visit to Hawaii, Sakamaki died at the age of seventy-one.

President Roosevelt received an even more elaborate welcome in Honolulu. On the last night of his visit a group of Japanese girls in cotton yukata danced a "Banzai dance" during a lantern parade. The president, whose legs were paralyzed by polio, pulled himself higher in the open car to watch them with great interest. The Nippu jiji noted that he was smiling throughout "like a doting father." When President Roosevelt toured the facilities at Pearl Harbor, the sole civilian among the high-ranking officers of the army and navy who escorted the president was Walter Dillingham, the former chairman of the Hawaii Emergency Labor Commission.

Eight years later the surprise attack by Japanese air forces on Pearl Harbor, the base of the U.S. Pacific fleet, sank five battleships, including the Arizona , and damaged three more. Casualties numbered 2,403 deaths and 3,478 wounded. A declaration of war from Japan arrived in Washington thirty-five minutes after the attack formally opened hostilities with the United States. In 1924 Soho^[*] Tokutomi had called the day that the Immigration Act of 1924 took force a "day of national humiliation." President Roosevelt now called December 7, the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, a "day of infamy."

Roosevelt appointed a commission to determine why the U.S. Navy was unable to foresee the Japanese attack and requested a thorough review of U.S.-Japan relations leading to "this cowardly attack." The first

item the commission checked out of the Library of Congress as a reference was the transcript of hearings of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. It is not difficult to imagine that the Hawaii Labor Committee's opening statement on "Labor Problems in Hawaii" must have attracted the most attention in the record. The commission's allegation that the 1920 strike was a Japanese conspiracy once again came to the attention of the federal government. This transcript was sent to FBI Director Hoover who was charged with overseeing domestic security issues.

In February 1942, two and a half months after the Pearl Harbor attack, President Roosevelt signed an executive order requiring evacuation to relocation camps of some 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, including many American citizens, from states on the West Coast. The Hawaiian Islands had already been placed under martial law, and a military administration was established. A document proposing relocation of Japanese in Hawaii was sent to the military governor, Lieutenant General Delos C. Emmons, but Hawaiian leaders, who appealed to the aloha spirit and a sense of fair play, took quick action to assure that the Japanese community in Hawaii was not relocated. Pastors, academics, and the major kamaaina industrialists without exception opposed the internment of Japanese. Even Walter Dillingham was among them.

On the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, however, local FBI agents acting under orders from headquarters in Washington arrested Japanese community leaders thought to be loyal to their homeland, Japan, the new enemy. Buddhist and Shinto priests, Japanese-language school instructors, members of the chamber of commerce, and members of prefectural organizations were sent to Sand Island, where the Bureau of Immigration was located, and some seven hundred of them were then dispatched in ten different groups to internment camps on the mainland.

The Japanese and Japanese American population of Hawaii at the time was 160,000, of whom only 35,000 were first-generation Japanese. It was they who occupied leadership positions in the Japanese community. After the FBI roundup leadership inevitably shifted to the nisei. The first measure taken by the younger generation was voluntarily to close the Japanese-language schools, whose numbers had increased after the victory in the suit against the territorial control law. The Japanese-language schools in Hawaii were destroyed by this act, and even after the war ended they did not reopen.

One of those arrested by the FBI was Nippu jiji president Yasutaro^[*] Soga^[*] . Since he was an earnest Christian, known for years to be pro-

American, news of his arrest shocked the Japanese community. Soga^[*] had many friends in haole society, but he faithfully attended events such as welcoming parties for the Imperial Navy fleet and he was also close to influential Japanese in Hawaii, such as the consul general, the branch heads of the Sumitomo Bank, the Specie Bank, and so on. Such "suspicious" behavior may have prompted the FBI to arrest him. During the war Soga was forced to live behind barbed wire in a desert camp on the mainland. When he regained his freedom at war's end, he returned to Hawaii. The Nippu jiji had been shut down at the start of the war, but he started publishing it again under a new name, the Hawaii Times . Turning his work over to his only son, he obtained U.S. citizenship and died at age eighty-three.

The most well known Japanese in Hawaii, Reverend Takie Okumura, was not arrested by the FBI. Until the start of the war he had single-mindedly pushed for Americanization, and he was too frail to arrest due to his advanced age. He died five years after the war ended, at age eighty-six, without witnessing the right of naturalization granted to Japanese. Since Okumura had constantly regarded the Buddhists as the enemy of his Americanization movement, the Japanese community in Hawaii remains reluctant to show much appreciation for his efforts.

Among those sent on the first ship to the U.S. mainland relocation camps from Sand Island was former Waialua union president Tokuji Baba, who had made a meager living as an innkeeper after his release from prison. He was one of eighty Hawaiian internees who chose to return to Japan during the war. Although he had given up his inheritance to his nephew, who succeeded to the family business, as an eldest son Baba retained his rights to become the head of the family. After spending twelve years idling away his days at his family home, he returned to Hawaii where he died at the age of ninety-two.

Chikao Ishida, who had returned to his post as Japanese-language school principal after release from prison, was relocated to the mainland along with his second wife and two preschool children. As the Japanese-language schools remained closed after the war, he had to put his children through school by working in a Honolulu macaroni factory. Ishida died at age seventy-nine, after obtaining American citizenship.

Many in the Japanese community in Hawaii wondered how Kinzaburo^[*] Makino, president of the Hawaii hochi^[*] , evaded arrest by the FBI. He led the campaign on behalf of the Japanese-language schools suit, and he constantly badgered the haole governing class by asserting the rights of Japanese residents. In contrast to Soga of Nippu jiji , however,

Makino was not involved with the Japanese consulate, nor did he have any dealings with the elite Japanese businessmen who looked down on immigrants. According to Yoshimi Mizuno, who served as a maid in the Makino household for many years (and was treated like a daughter), Makino packed his necessities in a suitcase in the trunk of his car so that he would be prepared in case he was arrested.

According to Mizuno, after the war began a "Mr. Shivers" often visited the Makino house. Robert Shivers, head of the FBI's Hawaii office, had been posted to Hawaii as relations between the United States and Japan declined. "Mr. Shivers would drop by on weekend evenings on his way back from a drive with his wife," she recalled. "He would talk for a bit with Uncle [Makino] and then go home. He never did stay for dinner." Mizuno took these lightly, as casual visits by a friend, but no one at Makino's newspaper knew of his association with Shivers, not even Kumaichi Kumazaki, who for decades worked closely with Makino and was in charge of accounting and other matters. Makino's residence, an isolated house facing the ocean at a distance from central Honolulu, was far from the gaze of others, ideal for clandestine meetings. Kinzaburo^[*] Makino had personally invested the profits from his Makino law office in real estate, not in the Hawaii hochi^[*] newspaper company. When he died at age seventy-six, eight years after the war, Makino left a large inheritance for his wife, far greater than others had imagined he had. If, at the end of his life, he thought that he had lost to Soga^[*] , his main regret must have been that, despite being very fond of children, he did not leave any successors.

Ichiji Goto^[*] , who assisted the aging Makino until the end, shouldered the editorial work of the Hawaii hochi . Goto never forgot his debt of gratitude to Makino for hiring him after his release from prison. He too evaded arrest after the war began. Shortly after Makino's death, Goto left with his second wife to retire to Kannawa hot springs in Beppu City, Kyushu^[*] . A deeply religious man, he spent each day reading a verse from the Bible until his death at age eighty-eight.

Hiroshima was the home prefecture of the greatest number of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii, so many returned there before the war broke out. Many experienced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, among them Hiroshi Miyazawa, secretary of the Federation of Japanese Labor during the 1920 strike, and Jiro^[*] Hayakawa, who was secretary general of the association after the strike. Unable to work as a pastor after his release from prison, Miyazawa had left Hawaii for Hiroshima, his wife's hometown. During the war he found himself under harsh police surveil-

lance because he had lived abroad, but the atomic bomb liberated him. Fortunately Miyazawa survived the blast to live nearly twenty years more; he died at age seventy-seven.

After Japan's defeat, the Allied Occupation forces arrived in Japan to bring democracy to Japan's burned out cities and devastated population. The first general election under democracy was held in April 1946. In the first electoral district of Shiga prefecture thirty-five candidates ran for six seats, numbers that reflected public enthusiasm for the new political era. Seven of these candidates belonged to the newly organized Japan Socialist party. Two of the Socialist candidates won. One was Kizaburo^[*] Yao, president of Shiga Nichinichi Tsushin^[*] press, who had been in the prefectural assembly for many years; the other was Noboru Tsutsumi, an unknown candidate.

Tsutsumi ran as a Socialist but was not officially recognized as a candidate by the party. When Tsutsumi saw his comrades from the prewar proletariat movement declare their candidacy (Mosaburo^[*] Suzuki in Tokyo, Suehiro Nishio in Osaka, and Chozaburo^[*] Mizutani in Kyoto), he could not remain a bystander. Although he had neither campaign funds nor physical strength, he wished to be part of the new era. He declared his candidacy from his childhood home, the temple at Kozuhata^[*] . Carrying rice balls in a lunchbox tied to his waist, he campaigned on a bicycle with a megaphone in hand. His eloquence of twenty-six years earlier came to life again, as he spoke of his experience leading the Hawaiian sugarcane workers in their demands for a wage increase. At first his only ally was his wife, Tsuruyo, but later his second son, then a university student, and the cousins he had grown up with plunged in to help with the campaign. In the end, beating all predictions, Tsutsumi won election with 39,225 votes, the third largest number.

Since food was still scarce, Tsutsumi, the newly elected Diet member, left his wife and family in Kyoto. He boarded the packed train to Tokyo alone, carrying rice and soy sauce on his back and finding a seat only in the rest room. His throat, which he injured in the campaign, never recovered. At the end of the year, he collapsed in the National Diet building. Tsuruyo, who had just given birth to a daughter, Mihoko, in January 1947, rushed to Tokyo with the new baby on her back. With difficulty she purchased penicillin on the black market, but Tsutsumi's tuberculosis had progressed too far. On February 20, 1947, Noboru Tsutsumi died at age fifty-seven. The inscription on his gravestone at the temple at Kozuhata, his family home, reads "Remains of Noboru

Kaishinin Shakuho^[*] , third son of fifteenth-generation head priest Reizui." Tsutsumi had never told Tsuruyo that he had been baptized as a Christian.

Widowed at the age of thirty-four, Tsuruyo decided to fulfill her husband's dreams as a politician, despite opposition from those around her who thought it ill-advised. Undiscouraged by defeat in her first attempt, she was elected to the Diet two years later, her little daughter Mihoko at her side. She carried on her husband's political legacy for three terms. From a woman's perspective she pursued such issues as the repatriation of Japanese emigrants from abroad, aid for war widows and surviving families, and the curbing of prostitution. She also served as director of the Socialist party's Shiga prefecture union women's department.

In 1951 Tsuruyo Tsutsumi was a member of the Japanese delegation to the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty that marked the end of the six-year Occupation of Japan. On her trip back to Japan Tsuruyo was able to realize her husband's dream of visiting Hawaii once again.

More than thirty years had passed since the second Oahu strike. Although the six-month strike had shaken the haole governing class in Hawaii, Tsuruyo could not find anyone who remembered Noboru Tsutsumi's name. The Hawaii that Tsuruyo saw on her visit was no longer the Hawaii that Noboru had known. During the war Hawaii's military-dependent economy had grown, with accompanying rapid changes, such as new roadways on a par with the mainland. Thousands of American servicemen had passed through the islands during the war, and on the mainland the public now saw Hawaii as a "tropical Paradise." Air travel accelerated Hawaii's growth as a tourist mecca, and from 1945 income from tourism grew 20 percent per year on average. At the time of Tsuruyo's visit tourism was about to overtake the sugar industry as the major source of revenue for Hawaii.

In the cane fields mechanization progressed, resulting in annual decreases in the labor force. The number of Japanese laborers declined drastically. The issei who had gone to Hawaii to work the cane fields were now elderly, and the nisei had acquired education that freed them from backbreaking physical labor. The vast majority of nisei employed on the sugar plantations now worked in the company's business office or as skilled workers in the mills.

The majority of the field laborers were Filipino, many of whom had left the plantations during the war to work on military construction sites.

Construction jobs were plentiful and pay scales were the same as on the mainland. In 1946 organizers sent by the International Longshoremen Workers' Union (ILWU) to unionize the sugar plantation workers in Hawaii staged a major strike. It centered on Olaa Plantation, the site of the Sakamaki house dynamiting, where second-generation Japanese Americans organized a local labor struggle. The strike victory telegram sent to ILWU headquarters on the mainland declared that Hawaii was no longer a "feudal" territory and that paternalism had been over-thrown.

As the labor union movement spread, the wages in Hawaii's sugar plantations became the highest in the world for sugar industry labor. Indeed, rising wages were a major factor in the decline of the Hawaiian sugar industry, which had to compete with cheap labor elsewhere. As tourism supplanted the sugar industry in economic importance, plantations were reduced in size or closed down. All over the Hawaiian Islands, cane fields were turned into housing developments, airports, golf courses, and resort facilities. By the 1980s many of these projects were financed by Japanese capital.

Olaa Plantation (now called Puna Sugar Company), one of the few plantations left on the island of Hawaii, closed down in 1984. It was not only the Japanese community that changed as leadership passed from one generation to another after Pearl Harbor. With Hawaii placed under military control after the war began, the kamaaina, the plutocracy that dominated prewar Hawaii, lost their clout overnight.

Walter Dillingham was an exception. After the war he expanded his businesses even further. Not only did he sell his land and plantation to the military at an opportune time, he developed the Hawaiian Dredging Company into a construction company to build tourist facilities. Many high-rise hotels and major shopping centers that Japanese tourists have visited over the years were built by Dillingham's company. A nine-page article in the February 10, 1961, issue of Life magazine introduced Walter Dillingham's family as "Hawaii's first family." A photograph of the entire clan showed that even at eighty-five Dillingham remained the powerful head of the family. According to the article, Dillingham still went to his office several times a week to look after his various enterprises.

In 1962, the year after the Life article appeared, Dillingham's third son ran for the Senate as a Republican party candidate. The campaign became the most costly ever waged in Hawaii. Despite predictions to the

contrary, he was defeated by the Democratic candidate, Daniel Inouye, a second-generation Japanese American.

When the war began the nisei, despite their American citizenship, were given a draft classification as "enemy aliens," which kept them out of military service. Swallowing this humiliation, many nisei from Hawaii and mainland detention centers volunteered for military service to prove their loyalty to the United States. The 442d Regimental Combat Team, made up of nisei troops, became the most highly decorated unit in the wartime history of the United States and ensured future standing for the nisei as loyal Americans. Dan Inouye, the son of an immigrant field worker from Fukuoka prefecture, was a member of the nisei battalion and lost an arm on the Italian front.

The Walter-McCarran Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 finally gave to Japanese and other Asians the right to naturalize. What swayed Congress in favor of this bill was the war record of the nisei battalion. Nisei soldiers who returned safely from the front used the GI bill to go to college, opening the way to positions that their parents never imagined possible.

In Hawaii, many nisei veterans used their war records to go into politics. Voted in by the Japanese American population majority in Hawaii, these nisei politicians were so influential that they practically took over the Hawaiian political world. Dan Inouye, the most successful, entered politics as a member of the House of Representatives in the first Congress after Hawaii gained statehood, and two years later, he successfully ran for Senate.

Walter Dillingham, the last surviving member of the powerful kamaaina governing elite, died at age eighty-eight the year after Inouye defeated his son in the Senate race. His entry in the Hawaii Who's Who runs several pages, longer than any other, and it mentions what may be his only failure, the petition for renewal of the importation of Chinese labor. The entry notes that he did his utmost on the issue but does not mention what the result was.

In his autobiography Yasutaro^[*] Soga^[*] described the 1920 strike as follows:

The strike was settled after some difficulties. But the aftereffects of the Olaa dynamiting incident were not allowed to remain untouched. After the earnest effort of investigation by the district attorney's office, fifteen members of the Federation of Japanese Labor including Tsutsumi were arrested for conspiracy. . . . They were all declared guilt. . . . and sent to prison. . . . Not all of the defendants had conspired to commit the crime. Among those Federation

leaders who were imprisoned, apparently some know nothing of the incident. . . . It is unknown how much was gathered during the second great strike for the strike fund from the islands. It was said that the amount was at least $200,000–$300,000.^[15]

The discrepancy between the figures publicly reported by the federation at the time of the strike and the amount noted by Soga^[*] indicates that he had not necessarily checked the facts. Soga was more than seventy years old when he wrote his recollections, based on his memory of the trial twenty-one years earlier, but his comments appear to justify the testimony of Matsumoto and Saito^[*] , the two key prosecution witnesses.^[16] As a record of the recollections of a respected newspaper editor who was knowledgeable about the events of his day, Soga's comments on the 1920 strike and the trial of the Federation of Japanese Labor leaders who led it have been treated as fact by others.

In 1964 members of Hawaii's Japanese-language press published Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi (History of Japanese Immigration in Hawaii) to commemorate the centennial of Japanese immigration to Hawaii. An important volume that traced the footprints of the Japanese immigrants for the first time, it was regarded as historically factual, but it treats the Sakamaki case very much as Soga did: "The Sakamaki house dynamiting case was detrimental as the strike had gone on in a just and fair manner without any incidents of violence. After this incident, the situation changed entirely."^[17] The entry was even shorter than Soga's, and concluded that the federation had certainly been involved in the Sakamaki house dynamiting case. It also noted that reasons for the failure of the strike were "the lack of character and aptitude among some of the leaders [and] misappropriation of funds. . . . The local labor unions organized by them disappeared after the end of the strike." This last sentence is the only one that is close to being accurate.