Buy it here: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | PowellsAs the winter of 1941 blanketed Hood River valley with its first snow, Masuo found himself even busier than usual. His business ventures, now recovering from the worst of the Depression, kept him working late most nights. His community service, expanding as his own stature continued to grow among the hakujin (whites), demanded more time than ever. He was still the only Japanese member of the Apple Growers Association Board of Directors, representing scores of his countrymen who would otherwise have been voiceless in the organization that determined their livelihood. He was a model Rotarian. Now, with the war escalating in Europe and draft boards all across America readying themselves for the inevitable, Masuo was asked to perform yet another vital service as a link between Hood River's selective service board and nisei boys who might be called for military duty. The board wrote to him dozens of times throughout the fall of 1941, asking for Masuo's recommendations on various draft-eligible nisei. What was their family situation? Were they necessary to the operation of their farms? Should they be exempt from service? The board depended on Masuo's intimate knowledge of the community as well as his personal integrity. He responded promptly and succinctly, most often recommending against exemption.During the first week of December he was busy checking special orders for the hectic Christmas season. On Saturday evening, December 6, he, along with many members of the nikkei community, stayed late at the Japanese Hall rehearsing their annual Christmas show. The next day, early in the afternoon, he got a call from Hugh Ball, editor of Hood River's weekly newspaper, telling him that the Japanese had attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Masuo was dumbstruck. After a long moment, he managed to ask: "Is that an authentic report? Has that been verified?" Ball said yes.Masuo's first thought was to tell his countrymen. He grabbed a heavy winter coat from the closet and ran more than a mile to the Japanese Community Hall, where many of the valley's nikkei were gathered for a church service. "Remain calm," he told them, trying to keep his own voice steady. "Return to your homes." He ran home himself, panting and almost wild-eyed, stopping by a vacant lot where his sixteen-year-old son Homer was playing football with several neighborhood boys. Homer had never seen his father so agitated. "I didn't know what was going to happen," Homer remembered, "but I knew it wasn't going to be good."Masuo's next thought was for his son, Minoru, working in Chicago at the time. Min had gone through ROTC at the University of Oregon--the first two years were required of all men; he chose to continue for the final year--and held the rank of lieutenant in the reserve army. After shepherding Homer back home, Masuo ran downtown to the Western Union office to fire off a telegram to Min:AS WAR HAS STARTED YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOUR SERVICE AS A UNITED STATES RESERVE OFFICER I AS YOUR FATHER STRONGLY URGE YOU TO RESPOND TO THE CALL IMMEDIATELYThat night Masuo and the rest of America learned the details of what President Roosevelt was calling "a day that shall live in infamy:" more than two thousand Americans were dead; 150 aircraft and nineteen ships were destroyed. And that same night, the rumors began: the Hood River Japanese had known about the bombing beforehand; they were gathered at the Community Hall late the night before planning a victory celebration; they were flashing radio messages to Japanese submarines lurking off the coast of Oregon; they were plotting to blow up Bonneville Dam; they were conspiring to poison the town's water supply. The Hood River Japanese--the men and women who had lived, worked and raised their families in the valley for the past three and a half decades--were the enemy.On Monday, December 8, as Homer and Yuka sat in their Hood River High School classrooms feeling anxious, confused and somehow ashamed, Taiwan-based Japanese bombers struck two American airfields in the Philippines, destroying more than half of the U.S. Army's Far East aircraft. Fueled by rumors, propelled by panic, the gears oiled by a century of racism, the federal machinery jump-started. The day after Pearl Harbor the Treasury Department ordered all Japanese-owned businesses closed and all issei bank accounts frozen. In Hood River, armed treasury agents boarded up the Yasui Brothers Store and posted sentries at the front door. Masuo and Renichi had to get formal written permission to remove anything from the store, including perishable food items for family use.On Tuesday, December 9, FBI agents began arriving in town, and for the next two days, as Hood Riverites sat glued to their radios listening to reports of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, government agents fanned out throughout the valley, searching selected issei homes and confiscating firearms, radios, cameras and anything that looked suspicious to them. At the Yasuis' home, one of the first to be searched that week, agents confiscated an elegant Japanese scroll certifying Masuo's completion of judo training (at age fourteen), along with drawings and maps the children had completed as homework assignments. Later in the week, agents returned to arrest two valley issei, Mr. Akiyama and Mr. Watanabe, both of whom were active in the local Japanese Welfare Society, an all-male self-help and cultural association that sponsored picnics and parades. If there were any charges against the two men, no one was told what they were. The nikkei watched in stunned silence. The whites watched also. To them the arrests seemed to legitimize the worst rumors: there were "Jap spies" in the valley.The searches and arrests may have come as a complete surprise to West Coast communities, but such actions had long been planned by top federal officials. Five months before Pearl Harbor a special Department of Justice committee, with assistance from the FBI and the Office of Naval Intelligence, was busy preparing lists of Japanese and Germans "with something in their record showing an allegiance to the enemy." The so-called ABC List, which numbered two thousand by mid-1941, included "known dangerous aliens" whom the FBI had individually investigated (the "A" list), others about whom the government had suspicions (the "B" list) and hundreds of men with clean records who had never been investigated but whose position or occupation made them suspicious" (the "C" list). By midsummer 1941, federal officials had created a comprehensive interdepartmental plan that, in the event of war, called for FBI to arrest "potentially dangerous" aliens, the Department of Justice to run hearings to determine their loyalty and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to take custody of those deemed disloyal. During the week after Pearl Harbor, more than a thousand issei men were arrested up and down the West Coast. The FBI singled out community leaders, religious leaders, educators. They arrested businessmen, officers in Japanese associations, editors of Japanese-language newspapers, Shinto and Buddhist priests, teachers in Japanese-language schools. And, on December 12, they came for Masuo Yasui.He knew they were coming. There was little doubt in the Yasui household that Masuo, the most powerful and visible leader of the state's second largest nikkei community, would be picked up. Fourteen-year-old Yuka was in a state of "sheer panic" all that week. She'd walk home from school for lunch, tense, breathless, wondering: "Is he gone? Did they take him today? What will become of us? What will I tell people? What will they think if my father is arrested?"At 6:30 P.M. on the Friday after Pearl Harbor, the waiting ended. Two armed agents took Masuo from his home. There were no charges. The family was not told where he was being taken. As the FBI saw it, Masuo was "a wealthy, prominent Japanese merchant and farmer" who "it is report...is strongly Japanese and wants to do something for that government."Immediately after his arrest, the rumors personalized and intensified. His white neighbors reasoned that if Masuo was picked up, he must be guilty of something. The award he had received in 1935 from the Japanese Industrial Society honoring his business and agricultural achievements, the award the Hood River News called "a well-earned recognition," became, in the minds of some, a military award. (The head of the society was the prince of Japan who also held a military title, which may have been the source of the rumor.) Then the rumor mill transformed this imaginary "military award" into a commission in the Japanese navy. The Montgomery Ward console in his living room became a short-wave radio used to transmit coded messages either, as one rumor had it, directly to Japan or, as some were saying, to Japanese submarines in the Pacific. His business success was now thought to have been "funded" by the Japanese government, a carefully orchestrated plot to elevate him to a position of trust and authority in the community. Within days, "Mat" Yasui, the veteran businessman who had lived peacefully in Hood River for thirty-three years, became Masuo Yasui, the Jap spy. As Joseph Meyer, the mayor of Hood River, said after all the Japanese were removed from the West Coast: "Ninety percent of us are against the Japs! Why? Well, because we trusted them so completely while they were among us, while all the time they were plotting our defeat and downfall. They were just waiting to stab us in the back. One of our leading merchants was Yasui. He was a member of our Rotary Club. But I'm sure he was working for Tokyo--probably he even knew that Japan was planning to attack us! Anyway, he's now in the hands of the FBI."He was in the hands of the FBI, but that was all the family knew. Rumors raced through the nikkei community, the most persistent of which were that those rounded up would be shot or immediately deported to Japan. Chop Yasui, living on the Willow Flat orchard with his wife, Mikie, tried to find out where the agents had taken his father. He went to the local sheriff, who didn't know. He questioned the treasury agents in town, who wouldn't say. Then he called the U.S. district attorney in Portland. Meanwhile, Min, using his contacts from law school, was also making inquiries. Between the two of them, they managed to discover that Masuo was being held at the Multnomah County Jail in Portland. For an as-yet-to-be-determined time, he would be alien number 5 439 151.Multnomah County Jail was just a few blocks from Japantown and a two-minute walk from the Foster Hotel, where Min, back from Chicago, would soon set up his law practice. Masuo was held there without charges, without bail and with no outside communication from December 12 through December 27. On his second day in jail, he was questioned by an INS inspector who grilled him about ties to his native land."How many trips have you made back to Japan?" asked Inspector C.J. Wise."Just once since the first time I came," replied Masuo."What relatives do you have in Japan?""I have one brother," answered Masuo."How long has it been since you've written a letter to this brother?"Masuo's last communication with his older brother Taiitsuro had been after the Yasuis returned home from their one and only trip to Japan in the late summer of 1926. "I wrote one letter informing him of my safe arrival," answered Masuo. "That is all."The inspector persisted. "How long has it been since you've written to any person in Japan?""The last letter I wrote to Japan was last year, 1940, in August.""Who did you write to?" asked the inspector.Masuo named a few names."What was the purpose of writing these letters?""My girl made a trip to Japan last summer," answered Masuo, referring to Michi, "and I wrote to express my appreciation.""Have you written to any person in Japan concerning the military condition in the United States?""Absolutely not," answered Masuo.On the basis of this sworn statement and unsubstantiated "reports" of his allegiance to Japan, Masuo became, in the parlance of the day, a "detainee." On December 27, 1941, he and a group of fellow detainees being held at the jail were taken under guard to Union Station and put on a train bound for Fort Missoula, Montana, where the Department of Justice was conducting hearings to determine the loyalty of Japanese aliens. It was an eight-hundred-mile overnight trip that began with heartbreaking familiarity as the train snaked its way up the beautiful Columbia River gorge through the town of Hood River and then through mile after mile of the bleak and windblown dry lands of eastern Oregon and Washington.Fort Missoula was a small, old army post with the standard forty-bed wooden barracks, mess hall, canteen, assembly hall, hospital and laundry. But the compound was customized for its new purpose, encircled by a heavy galvanized iron fence dotted with floodlights and punctuated by tall guard towers, where armed sentries stood watch around the clock. When Masuo arrived on December 28 with, as the Department of Justice carefully cataloged, "one box, one suitcase, one bundle," the air was frigid, the ground was covered by a thick blanket of snow. The converted facility had been operating for only ten days. Eventually Fort Missoula would be a temporary home to more than twelve hundred Pacific Coast issei as well as an almost equal number of Italian aliens.Through the winter and early spring, while the Japanese were held with no charges and no hint of what the future would bring, life at Fort Missoula settled into a pattern. Department of Justice officials organized the Japanese contingent into a self-governing unit with representatives elected from each barracks, and a mayor, assistant mayor, treasurer and secretary as spokesmen for the whole group. Committeemen were assigned to oversee the operation of supplies, mail, the mess hall and other services. During the day some detainees worked in the mess hall or the laundry, where they washed and ironed not only their own clothes and bedding but those belonging to the Italians. But most men had little to do. During the bitter cold winter days, they stayed in the barracks playing go, chess and hana. In nicer weather they played baseball against the Italians or strolled the compound collecting unusual stones that they later polished. Masuo, neither a card player nor a hobbyist, spent his days thinking, praying and writing letters. On Sunday morning he attended nondenominational Christian services; on Monday evening there was hymnal practice and on Wednesday evening a prayer meeting. Time passed slowly.As the winter dragged on with no change in his status, Masuo began to worry seriously about family finances. With no income from the store and his assets frozen, meeting bills and his children's tuition expenses required careful planning and mountainous paperwork. Each month he had to itemize and justify every family and business expense for government officials and apply for these funds to be unfrozen and disbursed. He worried about the burden that fell on Shidzuyo, the decisions she would have to make in his absence. He worried about his own fate, about his future. But mostly he kept his worries to himself, writing reassuring letters to his family. "We are all spending our days comfortably, without inconvenience, day after day. Please never worry about me," he wrote to Shidzuyo. "I am getting along very nicely under the circumstances, and keeping my usual good health," he wrote to his son Roku. But it was impossible for him to hide all traces of anxiety and confusion. "Who would have predicted such an unexpected misfortune would strike us?" he wrote to his wife after he had spent two months behind the high fence at Fort Missoula.Meanwhile, Masuo's relatives in Japan were desperately trying to discover what was happening to the American branch of their family. Taiitsuro, Masuo's older brother, sent at least three telegrams during the early part of the war, hoping for news and reassurance. "How are you getting along? We are all worrying day and nite," read one. "...Have inquired about your safety but no reply as yet," he wrote a month later. "We are worried." Masuo received the telegrams, which were sent through the auspices of the Red Cross of Japan, carefully translated and then vetted by government censors, but he did not reply. The INS inspector in Portland had made it clear from his questions about letters Masuo wrote to Japan that any correspondence to anyone in that country for any purpose would be suspect. "Have sent you two message but no answer. We are all worried," Taiitsuro wrote again. More than two years after the first telegram, Masuo finally replied: "Thanks for your message. Though we are not living together we are well and safe."On February 3, eight and a half weeks after being taken from his Hood River home, Masuo got his first inkling of what the future might hold when he was called before the Enemy Alien Hearing Board convened at the fort. Attorney General Francis Biddle had established a national network of these hearing boards early in the year for the purpose of questioning some twelve thousand aliens whose loyalty was suspect. Some two thousand were issei leaders; the rest were either Germans who belonged to pro-Nazi groups or Italians who were members of fascist organizations. Each three-member board, staffed by a U.S. attorney or assistant attorney and representatives from both the FBI and INS, was empowered to conduct what the government was calling "informal hearings." There was no judge, no specific statutes to guide the proceedings and no legal counsel permitted for the alien "suspect." Everything about the hearings was casual except the outcome: after questioning the detainee and discussing the case, the board had the power to decide the man's future--unconditional freedom, parole or internment. Fewer than half of the Italians and Germans were ordered interned; more than two thirds of the Japanese spent some or all of the war years in detention camps.Min, back in Portland, wrote to the superintendent of alien detention requesting permission to attend his father's hearing. Cautioning him that he could not act as legal counsel and could not meet with any other issei at Fort Missoula, officials allowed Min to sit in. He found the hearing a "complete farce" and "a kangaroo court." The proceedings began with a recitation of seemingly innocuous facts: Masuo Yasui was "an influential leader in the Japanese community" who had "extensive property interests." He had visited Japan once in 1926 for three months. But it quickly became clear that the government official running the hearing saw nefarious connections between Masuo and his homeland. The official made much of a wooden cup Masuo had received from the Japanese government, as if it were proof of his disloyalty rather than a symbol of his efforts to foster good relations between the two nations. And the official made a case that Masuo had strong, recent ties to Japan through the Japanese consulate in Chicago. It was true that his son Min had secured a job there after law school, thinking that a diplomatic career might be in his future. And it was true that Masuo had written a letter of introduction for his son. But it was not true, as the official implied, that Min was hired because his father had great influence or connections in high places. Masuo did not.Min tried to argue the point. "I had an excellent record in college," he told the members of the hearing board. "I was Phi Beta Kappa. I had won speaking contests. That's why I was hired." In fact, several people had written letter of recommendation to the consulate for Min, including Wayne Morse, dean of the University of Oregon Law School during Min's tenure there.But the most damning "evidence" against Masuo came when one of the hearing officers produced drawings the FBI had confiscated during the search of the Yasuis' home."Mr. Yasui, what are these?" he demanded, showing Masuo a stack of childishly drawn maps and diagrams with the name of one of his children scrawled on the bottom of each page.Masuo looked at the drawings. "Those look like drawings of the Panama Canal," he said."They are," said the official. "These were found in your home. Can you explain why they were in your home?""If they were in my home, it seems to me that they were drawings done by one of my children for his schoolwork," Masuo replied."Didn't you have these maps and diagrams so you could direct the blowing up of the canal locks?"Masuo was visibly taken aback. "Oh, no," he almost shouted. "This is just schoolwork of my young son.""We believe you had intent to damage the Panama Canal.""No, no, no.""Prove that you did not intend to blow up the Panama Canal," demanded the official.Min was incensed at the treatment his father received. But Masuo accepted it stoically, not so much with a sense of shikata ga nai (it can't be helped) but with stubborn faith that the American system would work for him, that eventually the truth would be known, his innocence confirmed and his name cleared. Min reported to his younger sister that Masuo was "very philosophical" about his situation and "willing to accept whatever the U.S. government told him to do." As a Japanese national in federal custody, he had little choice.Finally, a month after the hearing and almost three months after his arrest, Masuo was informed of the government's decision. Based on the recommendation of the hearings board, he was pronounced "potentially dangerous to the public peace and safety of the United States." Above the signature of the attorney general on the official order of March 6, 1942, were the words that would determine his life for the next four years: "It is ordered that said alien enemy be interned."Buy it here: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powells