The Great Depression; Interview with Togo Tanaka. Part 5

INTERVIEWER:

So if you could just start by telling me about what you did in October of 1941.

TOGO TANAKA:

Well, in October I had suggested to Mr. Colmi, the publisher, that in the reading he had had me do in the law library-

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Let's stop. There's a fly and I'm picking it-

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

OK, marker. Mark

INTERVIEWER:

OK, if you could tell me about your trip to Washington.

TOGO TANAKA:

Yes, the, when I had reported to Mr. Colmi that during World War I German language newspapers owned by \"enemy aliens\" were allowed to publish under what was called the Espionage Act of 1917, and expressed to him the opinion that perhaps that might apply to us, if and when war came. He arranged with the Central Japanese Association, which was an organization of first generation Japanese, to have its president, a man named Nakamura, go to Washington and I would go with him, and Mr. Nakamura would take care of Central Japanese Association business and I would see Mr. Francis Biddle, the Attorney General, and ask him if he could then grant to the Rafu Shimpo the permission to publish. And, I did, I flew in, It was about two months before Pearl Harbor, to Washington D.C., the first time I really had been out of Los Angeles Country I think, since I'd moved here as an infant. And I saw Mr. Biddle, and I also then took that occasion to interview and visit about eighty members of the Senate and Congress, the House of Representatives, beginning with the California delegation, and wrote articles for the Rafu Shimpo for it. And in the, that experience I discovered that, you know, I was ordered by the War Department to appear the day after my visit with Mr. Biddle, to go to the Munitions building of the War Department, and I was interviewed and interrogated for a good part of the day by a man named Colonel Sumter Bratton, head of G2, which was intelligence of the army, and his assistant, a Major Wallace Moore. At that time I discovered for the first time to my surprise that the army had a complete set of the Rafu Shimpo, all the editorials that I had ever written in six years that I was an English editor. And they also had things in the Japanese section. And I was questioned as to whether or not I had written for both sections because they were in contradiction to one another: One waved the American flag, they said, the other waved the Japanese flag. And that they, you know, they made it quite plain that it looked rather suspicious. It was, for me, a learning experience of course.

INTERVIEWER:

They were really questioning your allegiance at that point, I guess?

TOGO TANAKA:

Well yes. How do you say that, you know, for the greater glory of the Emperor of Japan and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that the Japanese are like big brothers to the Chinese, you're going to teach them, you know, not only manners, but to be civilized.

INTERVIEWER:

Did that whole experience make you feel quite vulnerable at that point?

TOGO TANAKA:

Well, yeah, it shook me up, wondering what in the world—and then at that point I realized how inadequate I had been, because I didn't understand Japanese, I didn't read it and I didn't write it, and I'm, I was certain in my own mind, they don't believe a word that I said, when I said I don't know what's going on there.

INTERVIEWER:

Tell me about Pearl Harbor now, what, what happened-

TOGO TANAKA:

Well, Pearl Harbor, after I had been notified by a friend at the Los Angeles Examiner that, the Japanese were and had bombed Pearl Harbor, I drove down to the newspaper—by then I had come into an automobile, and didn't have to take a train or streetcar—and I spent the day there, on that day, we were answering inquiries, and I, I jotted down that, you know, a man named Damon Runyon came in to interview me about what, he wanted to know how I felt, and what was, when I said, \"What do you think's going to happen to us?\" he said, [laughs] \"Well, who knows.\" But, I, he wrote a column about Little Tokyo on that day, and

I remember being approached by two gentlemen from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who said they had a \"Presidential warrant for my arrest,\" and I must come along with them,

so I didn't have time to say—we had five or six staff people too there—

as well I want to call my lawyer, \"no, no time for that.\" I want to call my wife.

INTERVIEWER:

So how long were you there and did they ever let you call your wife?

TOGO TANAKA:

No, no they didn't. They moved me on the third or fourth day to Lincoln Heights. All of my friends, Japanese-American, they're all first generation Japanese, I knew them all. They moved us around and I was taken to Lincoln Heights, and then from there moved to County Jail on top of the Hall of Justice.

I was in for eleven days and nights, my wife thought I was dead, or-

You know there was a doctor from Gardena, I think his name was Honda, or Hone-da, and he committed suicide in there. He had been accused of being the head of the Japanese Veterans Association, he died in there, but they just released me. I think they, one reason I have a fetish about keeping a diary all of these years is that the FBI got a hold of my diary then, and of course I went everywhere as a, a, what is it, as a reporter and an editor. I know being, when I was interrogated on my way by the two agents I said, \"What are you,\" you know, \"arresting me for?\" and he says \"Well you've been there to see Attorney General Biddle, you've been in the White House to see Mrs. Roosevelt, and you've, all these congressmen, and your movements are so suspicious,\" you know, and I said, \"Well I'm a newspaper man, you see.\" But they told me that's the reason for, I'm held on suspicion. Years later under the Freedom of Information Act, oh, I was a member of the Black Dragon Society, I was a member of the Communist Party, I was an agent for the Imperial Japanese Government, and furthermore, they didn't believe that my name was my own, you see, because Togo was a name of a Japanese admiral who had sunk the Russian fleet in a battle during the Russo-Japanese War.

INTERVIEWER:

So were you feeling rather desperate to the, for those eleven days? Or angry, or-?

TOGO TANAKA:

Well one, I was worried about my wife and she was pregnant,

she was nine months pregnant,

but you make the best of it and I prayed a great deal, and this young man gave me, this drug addict [laughs] gave me a crucifix. And I wasn't even properly churched, I had been married in an Episcopal service, but I had never been baptised, so I, you know.

INTERVIEWER:

Tell me about, you then went to the camps, and I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about what the climate was like there, what, what the attitude among the people inside the camps was towards America?

TOGO TANAKA:

I think people tended to accommodate, you know, they simply made the best of what they could, and I think the, the older generations said, 'well you know, it's got whatever happens, make the best of it.'

INTERVIEWER:

Well I guess I'm wondering about, when we talked on the phone, you mentioned there was sort of a bitterness about the way you were, you, not a bitterness, but it-

TOGO TANAKA:

I think it was a bitterness, we were mad. I must've found an outlet for it by writing to people that I had known. There was one gentleman who later became, he ran for governor of California, Robert Walker Kenny, he became Attorney General when Earl Warren was governor. And I had met Bob Kenny when he was a reporter, later became a Superior Court judge, and he was a great teacher about, you know, politics. And I corresponded with him, and I said, \"You know I don't understand, I'm now Enemy Alien 3C,\" yeah that's what it was. In 1944 when I was now out and a volunteer worker for the American Friends Service Committee helping to bring people out of, you know, Auschwitz and Belsen, and European death camps, and finding jobs for them in Chicago. He wrote me and said, \"I'm coming to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention,\" and he was a Henry Wallace delegate. So he invited me to the Palmer House and we had lunch. Now I could only go to a YMCA [laughs] and treat him, and he said, \"I finally found out that you're never, you still think you're going to be taken into either Naval Intelligence or into the Army,\" he says, \"Forget it! You'll never make it.\" And I said, \"Why?\" and he said, \"Well simple. You've got people on your draft orders say that 'You are a figment of some Japanese spy master's, that you've been planted in this country and that's why.\" I said, \"Well I don't even read or write Japanese.\" \"Well that's why you fit the need for,\" you know,\" them to find someone who-

INTERVIEWER:

Oh, John Malkovich.

TOGO TANAKA:

INTERVIEWER:

It's so good.

TOGO TANAKA:

Yeah, he was.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, we're rolling now. Tell me about the migrants and what you knew about the Okies and Arkies who were coming into California?

TOGO TANAKA:

Well, I learned secondhand about the overall problem in California from a man named Carey McWilliams, who was a wonderful teacher. He had become, I think under Governor Olson, a Democratic governor, had chief of Housing and Immigration, immigration referring to, you know, Oklahoma migrants who were coming here. And I shared with him the feeling that

the arrogance of the established people, who were well off in California and trying to exclude these people, was no different from the racial bigotry that victimized people who were not, you know, within the majority group.

And so, not only was I empathetic or sympathetic to their plight, but wondered what in the world people could do in any way, to help. And, later on in my Chicago years, I had the chance to become an editor of _The American School News_, which was a correspondence publication. And I met many, many people [laughs] from Oklahoma and I, and I found that I, you know, I had always felt deprived because of my race, and yet I had the ability now to help, you know, thousands, actually there were several hundred thousand of these students around the world, but in the United States, who were deprived of a decent education. And so I felt that it was an interesting topsy-turvy kind of role where you had an opportunity to use what you had to help others, and I think the blight of the Okies, you know, the Chief of Police of Los Angeles had patrols at the border to turn these people back in every way, and so, you know, when I mention the John Steinbeck's book and the movie that was made of it, I think that helped to enlighten people about the '30s and what the economic blight. In a way there are examples of that today because we have the same kind of problems on a bigger scale.

INTERVIEWER:

You went to the fair, I know, and I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about what it felt like that was all about to you?

TOGO TANAKA:

My recollection [laughs] is that, like everybody else, somebody said Sally Rand might be there from Chicago. [laughs] No, I, well I, that was my first World's Fair in Treasure Island, San Francisco, and I was impressed by the foreign exhibits, but it was nothing like subsequent fairs that I have been to. But I think it was California's effort to begin to dig itself out of the economic depression, and that kind of attempt, you see it even today, you hope that it succeeds.

INTERVIEWER:

I wanted to go back and just ask you again about the Panay, if you could describe for me then, how you felt the night you heard about that and how you heard about it?

TOGO TANAKA:

Well, I think my first reaction was one of disbilief. That it was a flagrant demonstration of the, what the Japanese military were intending to do. I think they were flaunting and looking for, you know, some reason. But, I went dutifully to try to give the Japanese version of, of why it, it happened. The, the meddling by the United States. That if you get into a warzone you might get shot or you might get sunk. And I think it was the cries for boycott of Japanese goods and the anti-Japanese feelings that that engendered, you know, just generally in California and southern California, I think, spread a feeling of uneasiness among people who were Japanese-American readers of our newspaper.

INTERVIEWER:

I want to ask you to kind of reflect now on, on these years, we've talked a lot about some of the citizenship rights issues and, and I wonder, when you look back on them, how do you think those years shaped you or your attitude about this country?

TOGO TANAKA:

I think with, with all of the things that people say may be wrong with this, you know, my wife and I have visited, by last count, forty-three countries around the world, but since then we've been, we've been all over the world. We've met people, we've visited with them in their homes, we love to travel. With all of the things that are wrong, I think that, you know we talk about the goals in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, and these are, there's nothing static about them, and the fact that we have not been able to, you know, fulfill those goals. It's I, each time we come home to, this is home, whatever is wrong with it we prefer it to be here to any other place in the world. And we have, I think, a lot of friends who feel exactly that way.

INTERVIEWER:

You mentioned the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, do you think all of those, those kinds of rights were something, were something that was being tested and pushed and explored during the 1930s?

TOGO TANAKA:

Always has been and may still be.

INTERVIEWER:

Can you talk to me about that?

TOGO TANAKA:

Well, [coughs] I served on the board for a few years of an organization here called Constitutional Rights Foundation, and we observed the bicentennial of it I think last year, I no longer am on that board. And, you know, for about forty-five years I've been a recipient of the Lincoln Foundation's publication, and a few years ago, after you know, we had been enraged for all these years about what had happened to us and the violation of our civil rights, I learned that the \"Great Emancipator\" suspended the Bill of Rights in order that the Union could survive. And, if it's a question of survival, what choice do we have? The fact that we happened to be on the wrong end of the thing [laughs] made us, you know, victims, but had we been sitting where the people who had to make those hard decisions were, we might have done the same thing. But, ultimately, I think justice does prevail.

INTERVIEWER:

And, one of the other things I think that kind of went on during that period where there was a reexamination of the rights of poor people and how to, what are attitudes towards the poor were, and I, I wonder if you've given any thought to that when you think about the Okies or the migrants?

TOGO TANAKA:

Well, when [coughs] I had the privilege of working for the, and with the American Friends Service Committee in Chicago for, I guess it was 1943, '44, up to '5, so about two-and-a-half years, every morning, see I was not, [laughs] I never been a, I couldn't be a Quaker because I didn't feel I was good enough to adopt their principles, but every morning, you know, we'd hold hands in a circle, the whole staff would be, and they would pray in their fashion, whatever came to mind, you see. And, they defined it as, you know, not living by the teachings of Jesus that, you know, the lack of concern for those less fortunate, which typified the attitudes of so many people when they talked about the homeless, the poor, and the Okies. And then I remembered, we were rescued in the very depths of the worst experience we had when, we didn't know whether we were going to have to go back, whether they were going to kill us, or were they going to deport us to Japan. The Quakers came along and made it possible for us to get over that and come to Chicago. And, they were the first people who were welcomed on both sides of the battle zone, so we, and we look back and members of various Christian church groups did a great deal to salvage and to save, you know, us, why shouldn't we do the same for others? Now, I think this is one of the lessons that we learned out of our evacuation experience.

INTERVIEWER:

You talked to me a little bit about certain values that you thought you developed during the Depression years, what were they?

TOGO TANAKA:

Well, you die very hard. [laughs] You don't, you don't give up, and that whatever the obstacles may be, you do not lose faith. And, you know I choose to try to take the positive reaction to whatever may happen.

INTERVIEWER:

That's interesting. You think that's something you learned living through the '30s and the-

TOGO TANAKA:

I think so. If, you know you're going to go eventually, but you want to delay it as long as possible. But if you've been close to it, you get a sense of values, that, and I think it begins with family. We just celebrated our 52nd anniversary in, in Honolulu last month.

INTERVIEWER:

That's terrific, that's great.

TOGO TANAKA:

Yeah.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, I think we can cut. That's fine, we're just about out. So you're a free man now. Thanks.

TOGO TANAKA:

[laughs] Thank you.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

This is room tone in the Togo Tanaka residence. OK, quiet please.