Abstract
Studies of the Japanese American press during the war have tended to focus on newspapers published in the concentration camps set up by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which forcibly evacuated citizens of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. Greg Robinson’s book fills a gap in the historical record by examining the main Japanese American newspaper published outside the camps. Thriving Japanese American papers along the West Coast, home to 90% of Japanese Americans, shut down as relocation took away subscribers and staffs. Four papers continued to publish during the war in the Rocky Mountains, east of the exclusion zone. Of those, the Pacific Citizen, with its national circulation base of 7,000, was by far the largest. It moved from California, where it began as the newsletter of the Japanese American Citizens League, to Salt Lake City, Utah. Journalist Larry Tajiri and his wife, Guyo, agreed to put out a real newspaper, starting at first as a weekly and converting to biweekly. They worked on a shoestring budget, operating as the paper’s sole journalists. They reported on issues of interest to Japanese Americans, including military service, camp riots, and civil liberties. In so doing, they earned high praise from Office of War Information Director Elmer Davis, who called Pacific Citizen the best weekly in America.
Historians interested in the mainstream Japanese American journalism of the war can thank University of Quebec history professor Robinson for compiling and editing significant works of the Tajiris and opening a window to an American minority’s response to troubled times. The newspaper remains the best single source for news for and about Japanese Americans during World War II.
That this newspaper, or any Japanese publication, could exist during World War II remained an open question for several months after December 1941. Federal officials fretted about the possible security threats posed by newspapers published by citizens whose ancestors came from Axis countries. One option was to shutter them for the duration, another was to keep them open but impose censorship, and a third was to let them publish but monitor their content. Larry Tajiri argued for the third case in a 1942 letter to Alan Cranston, a bureaucrat in the Office of Facts and Figures and, much later in life, a U.S. senator from California. Japanese Americans needed their own press, Tajiri said. “People left in the dark are less likely to maintain a proper perspective and hence are more susceptible to be influenced by rumor and inimical gossip,” he said in the letter, which the book reprints. In addition, the educational function of the press could prepare Japanese Americans to support “democratic and liberal” ideas.
Chapters cover Larry Tajiri’s prewar writings, wartime columns and editorials, writings that appeared in mainstream publications, wartime letters, postwar writings, and selections from his career after leaving Pacific Citizen in 1952. There also is a chapter devoted to the writings of Guyo. She trained at the University of Missouri and worked as her husband’s equal partner. Yet she preferred to remain virtually anonymous and deflected Robinson’s initial questions about her role in the Pacific Citizen during interviews he conducted for the book.
What’s perhaps most striking in the excerpted works is Larry Tajiri’s swing from endorsing the Japanese Empire during the early 1930s to his support of the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Pacific Citizen called upon Japanese Americans to enlist and not to riot or otherwise break the law in response to bigotry, relocation, and seizure of property. Rather, the newspaper fought the equivalent of the Pittsburgh Courier’s Double-V campaign, pushing for changes through legal means while criticizing, but still supporting, the government. Larry Tajiri did not like the concentration camps, but he put a positive spin on internment by suggesting that time behind barbed wire, as well as exposure to violent racism, would hasten integration into wider American society.
The calm voice seems surprising when measured against the massive violation of civil liberties endured by the Nisei, the Japanese Americans born in this country and overwhelmingly loyal to it. Tajiri underscored this loyalty by repeatedly noting that no Nisei ever was found to have committed sabotage. Tellingly, he observed that the relocation order was put into effect in March 1942, four months after the United States declared war on Japan. If disloyalty were the primary concern behind relocation, he asked, why were there no disloyal acts by the tens of thousands of Nisei on the West Coast during that period?
Strategies behind the Tajiris’ actions mostly must be inferred from the writings. Perhaps Larry Tajiri read the writing on the wall and chose the middle way between militant opposition and subservience as the most pragmatic way to achieve long-term goals. His balanced approach is evident. Pacific Citizen assailed the anti-Nisei statements by certain lawmakers, blaming them on racism and what Robinson calls “opportunistic politicians” bent on clearing a racial minority off the West Coast. But the paper also characterized rioters in the concentration camps as pro-Axis troublemakers and supported their removal and segregation from other prisoners.
Larry Tajiri’s faith would be rewarded in time. Apologies and reparations to the Nisei eventually were offered, and racial barriers began to come down. He would not see the future he longed for, dying of a heart attack in 1965 during his time as a drama critic at the Denver Post.
Pacific Citizens would be a welcome addition to college journalism classes about race, class, and gender, and as a supplemental book for classes on minority journalism.