Nisei Naysayer

The Memoir of Militant Japanese American Journalist Jimmie Omura

James Matsumoto Omura, Arthur A. Hansen, Arthur A. Hansen

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503606128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Among the fiercest opponents of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II was journalist James "Jimmie" Matsumoto Omura. In his sharp-penned columns, Omura fearlessly called out leaders in the Nikkei community for what he saw as their complicity with the U.S. government's unjust and unconstitutional policies—particularly the federal decision to draft imprisoned Nisei into the military without first restoring their lost citizenship rights. In 1944, Omura was pushed out of his editorship of the Japanese American newspaper Rocky Shimpo, indicted, arrested, jailed, and forced to stand trial for unlawful conspiracy to counsel, aid, and abet violations of the military draft. He was among the first Nikkei to seek governmental redress and reparations for wartime violations of civil liberties and human rights.

In this memoir, which he began writing towards the end of his life, Omura provides a vivid account of his early years: his boyhood on Bainbridge Island; summers spent working in the salmon canneries of Alaska; riding the rails in search of work during the Great Depression; honing his skills as a journalist in Los Angeles and San Francisco. By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Omura had already developed a reputation as one of the Japanese American Citizens League's most adamant critics, and when the JACL leadership acquiesced to the mass incarceration of American-born Japanese, he refused to remain silent, at great personal and professional cost. Shunned by the Nikkei community and excluded from the standard narrative of Japanese American wartime incarceration until later in life, Omura seeks in this memoir to correct the "cockeyed history to which Japanese America has been exposed."

Edited and with an introduction by historian Arthur A. Hansen, and with contributions from Asian American activists and writers Frank Chin, Yosh Kuromiya, and Frank Abe, Nisei Naysayer provides an essential, firsthand account of Japanese American wartime resistance.

ONE

Bainbridge Island Beginnings, 1912–1923

Katsusa is an expanding city in modern Japan, but in the embryo years of the Meiji Restoration¹ it was a typical farming and fishing village on the southwestern tip of the historic Shimabara Peninsula. It is here in this Japanese municipality, which I may never see except in my imagination,² that my familial roots are planted and where the family sepulcher holds the remains of my parents, two brothers, and a sister.

This memoir begins somewhere in the prefecture of Nagasaki with a male child’s birth, on July 3, 1871. The child was promised in adoption to Katsusa’s headmaster. His wife, Saiyo, had favored him with daughters but no son to carry on the family name. That this adopted boy, or yoshi, came from a family of equal or higher status was unquestioned, for in the exceedingly class-conscious social order of the period, it was beneath any Japanese family’s dignity to lower itself in the pecking order.

The headmaster’s surname was Matsumoto. Saiyo also came from a long-established Matsumoto clan in the region. The Matsumotos named their adopted infant Tsurumatsu. In 1882 the headmaster passed away when Tsurumatsu was eleven years old. His dissatisfaction with his adopted home life surfaced shortly after the funeral when Tsurumatsu proclaimed that he was going to Nagasaki to seek work.

There is no record of Tsurumatsu’s five-year sojourn in the ancient port city of Nagasaki. Furthermore, my father was never talkative about his past personal life. By the beginning of the 1920s, our family had moved to a beachfront bungalow on Eagle Harbor, near the Winslow ferry dock on Bainbridge Island, off the coast of Seattle, Washington. In a rare personal reminiscence, he explained to two of his sons, Kazushi and I, that he had scouted the vessels docked at Nagasaki and was aware that an American ship was preparing to sail on the morning tide. He then recounted his departure for America and the purpose of his decision.

It was a very dark night. I waited until very late that night and then crept aboard quietly up the gangway and hid on deck. The ship was well out on the high seas when I was discovered by a deckhand. He took me to the captain. The captain was most understanding and assigned me as a “Captain’s Boy.”³ I came to America as a stowaway on an American ship. I was sixteen years old. I would have to go into the army the next year. I didn’t want to go into the military!

In common with peasant youths throughout the realm, Tsurumatsu had a strong dislike for military service. For six and two-third centuries of the shogunate, Japan had been served by professional samurai warriors. In 1873 the Meiji Restoration’s Compulsory Military Conscription Ordinance went into effect. With the shogunate’s abolishment in 1868, a citizen army replaced the prevailing institution of professional soldiers. Opposition came chiefly from the three hundred thousand-strong samurai class and the rural peasantry. In 1877 thirteen thousand samurai, led by the disenchanted Saigo Takamori of Satsuma, clashed with a Meiji force of sixty thousand at Kumamoto in the greatest rebellion of the early Meiji years. The samurai were defeated and Saigo committed suicide. The incident is known as the Seinen War. It was followed in 1879 by the Peasants’ Uprising,⁴ which was quickly doused. Although this development did not result in the subjugation of the peasantry, many peasant youths went abroad—particularly to the frontier west of the United States—to evade military service.⁵ Tsurumatsu was among this group’s vanguard.

The details of Tsurumatsu’s journey to America are unfamiliar, except that the American ship called at the Hawaiian port of Honolulu. He reached mainland America through the port of San Francisco, the West Coast’s only available port of that period. Tsurumatsu remembered Pacific Street and the wild goings-on in the Barbary Coast, but San Francisco was not a stop for long. At the time of his arrival, a restaurateur named Charles Tokujiro Sasaki was gathering a group of twenty-four Japanese for the purpose of opening an eatery in Seattle. Tsurumatsu joined the Sasaki troupe, and in that year, after Sasaki had opened the Lemon Cafe on the waterfront boulevard of Western Avenue, Tsurumatsu served a stint there as fry cook.

Seattle was simply a small village on the western shores of Washington Territory. Its 1880 U.S. Census count stood at 3,533. No transcontinental railroads linked the town, while the first steamship service to the Pacific Northwest was inaugurated in 1881 by the Kobe (Japan) to Vancouver (British Columbia) line. But Seattle was on the verge of phenomenal growth. By 1890 its population had increased to 43,825. In the year before Tsurumatsu’s arrival, the immigrant Japanese in the Puget Sound areas were almost all fugitives of cargo boats. The number residing in Japantown was nine, and even with the addition of Sasaki and his twenty-four helpers the number was less than forty. The total number of immigrant Japanese in the entire United States in 1887 was recorded at 1,352, half of whom were students.ⁱ Thus, history is the poorer for the sparseness of information available about Tsurumatsu’s first nineteen-year sojourn in the Pacific Northwest that preceded the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907.⁶

Upon his arrival in the United States Tsurumatsu acquired the name “Omura” and was widely known by that name. Within the white community, his given name became Anglicized to “Tommy.” Even though Tommy maintained his legal surname, during my youth on Bainbridge Island I never heard my father addressed other than by the Omura surname. It is my belief that Omura might well have been his birth family name prior to his adoption.

Only days before the 1942 military eviction of Japanese from Bainbridge Island, my eldest brother, Yoshito, legally changed his name to Ohmura, spelling his name with an h in accordance with its correct pronunciation. “Everyone called your father Omura-san,” a transplanted Bainbridge Islander in the Colorado city of Denver declared to me in 1988. I permanently assumed the Omura surname in 1931 and became quite well known as Jimmie Omura because of my occupation as writer and editor of various vernacular newspapers in California.ⁱⁱ Two days before his eightieth birthday, my second older brother, Kazushi (aka “Casey”) died in Seattle.⁷ Thereafter, a legal paper came to light among his documents addressed to our father and dated January 13, 1915. The document referred to Tommy O’Muir, the surname being an Anglicized corruption.⁸

My father had minimal education and none in English when he came to the United States. His later facility in English indicates his having attended some type of classroom while he lived in Seattle. The most likely possibility is a trade school such as Edison High School.⁹ Tommy was a jack-of-all-trades but his principal occupation was that of a builder and carpenter. He could build a house from scratch and outfit it with electrical components and plumbing. He possessed other skills, such as in oceanography and engineering and his ability to decipher architectural drawings. He owned a two-sleeper launch that he used for navigating around the Puget Sound on work assignments and for fishing expeditions. He is known to have traversed the Strait of Juan de Fuca and down the Pacific coastline of Washington as far south as at least Grays Harbor.

No information has been found to indicate when and how Tommy arrived on Bainbridge Island. The weather on the island is very similar to conditions at Katsusa, with the exception of the monsoons, and it is probable that familiarity with the climate and panorama drew him to the island. Bainbridge Island’s earliest immigrant Japanese residents used the portal of Port Blakely, but although my father was no stranger to Port Blakely or its shifting millworkers, his name does not appear in the Port Blakely Mill Company records. A journeyman butcher when he went to Winslow,¹⁰ he practiced that profession for at least three years after his 1907 marriage and his subsequent employment as a foreman at the Hall Brothers Winslow Marine Shipbuilding and Drydock Company.¹¹

Twelve miles long and four miles wide, Bainbridge Island lies eight nautical miles due west of the port of Seattle. Winslow, bordering Eagle Harbor, is the island’s principal community. Now primarily a bedroom community for commuters of the Queen City, the island also serves as a summer home for wealthy entrepreneurs and corporation executives, and as a tourist haven. Much of the island is canopied with trees, both deciduous and evergreen. Bainbridge Island also experiences a great deal of rainfall as it is adjacent to the rain forests of the Olympic Mountains. Winslow lies in the heart of perhaps the nation’s most aesthetic and tasteful panoramic wonderland, where the pristine nature of the Puget Sound Basin has been preserved from helter-skelter building. The view is breathtaking, with the majestic, snow-covered Mount Rainier rising sentinel-like behind the city of Seattle, the rambling range of the Olympics to the west, and in the distant north the hulking mound of Mount Baker near the Canadian border visible on clear days. Moreover, Bainbridge is economically the most significant of the many islands dotting the Puget Sound waterway.

The first white men seen on the island were Lieutenant Charles Wilkes (1798–1877) and members of his 1841 expedition, which was commissioned by the Congress of the United States to learn more about the disputed Oregon Territory. The Lewis and Clark Expedition had surveyed the land portion and Wilkes was dispatched to seek aquatic information. Flora and fauna were ordered to be collected wherever Wilkes made land, and it was for that purpose that he anchored his ship on the southernmost harbor of the island. He named the site Port Blakely and the second harbor, three miles north, Eagle Harbor. The island was named Bainbridge in honor of a naval hero of the War of 1812, Captain William Bainbridge (1774–1833). It is not difficult to understand Wilkes’s rationale in conferring the name Eagle Harbor, because of the large number of eagles that inhabited the harbor.¹²

In 1854 a British naval expedition, headed by the explorer Captain George Vancouver (1757–98), arrived in the same Port Blakely Harbor at which Wilkes had made his original stop. Accompanied by an armed tender, Vancouver anchored his sloop in the shadows of Restoration Point¹³ at the mouth of the harbor. There he found the island populated by a Salish native tribe called the Suquamish. Mistaking their hunting huts as villages, he demonstrated disdain for their dwellings. Chief of the southern tribe was Sealth and the northern chief was Kitsap, a leader of the warrior tribe. Sealth was intimidated by the British show of arms and chose to cooperate. Kitsap wanted to fight. Under tribal law, autonomy for the decision rested with Chief Sealth because of Captain Vancouver’s site of landing on the island. Chief Sealth signed the unjust Treaty of Point Elliott,¹⁴ which turned over the island to the British. The island had served as a homeland for the Salish tribe for as long as five thousand years. Under the treaty negotiated by Vancouver, the native people were compelled to begin an exodus to a site on the eastern Cascades. The gunboat intimidation of Captain Vancouver was a mere echo of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s subjugation of Tokugawa Japan, almost in the same year.¹⁵ Although Port Blakely became a key logging center, loggers and homesteaders had already penetrated this wooded island around Madison Bay prior to Vancouver’s arrival.

In speaking of Bainbridge Island, it would be impossible not to mention Port Blakely. Even though Port Blakely was long past its glory days when I was born, it remained the principal subject of conversations. The first Japanese on the island were recorded by the Kitsap County Census of 1883¹⁶ as two cargo boat escapees discovered at the Port Blakely Mill Company. Around the turn of the century, a Japanese village was established on the harbor’s south side across from the mill. It became the island’s only self-contained community of minority people. Within its perimeter were a dance hall, theater, silent movie house, and a plethora of commercial establishments, including an ice cream parlor, a poolroom, a barbershop, a jeweler, a watch-repair shop, a laundry, a grocery, a hardware shop, and a community bathhouse, or furoya.

The Bainbridge Japanese village, at its peak, hosted upwards of eight hundred immigrant Japanese. The majority of them used Port Blakely as a stepping stone to greater economic prospects in California and the vast inland empire to the east, and for work in the Pacific Northwest. The mill itself employed three hundred Japanese at any given time, and most of these worked just long enough to build a nest egg for more lucrative prospects.

Port Blakely’s economic importance got a shot in the arm in 1863 when a retired British naval captain named William Renton (1818–91) relocated his sawmill to the harbor from Port Orchard on the Olympic Peninsula, where huge cargo boats were finding difficulty in maneuverability. Renton had first established his sawmill at Alki Point in what was later to become West Seattle. He was compelled to move because of the high wind factor.

William Renton was born in the sawmill town of Acadie in what is now known as Nova Scotia. Members of his family were confirmed believers in the sixteenth-century British ideology of the dominance of white people over their darker-skinned counterparts.

The dominant groups on Bainbridge Island were people of British, Scandinavian, and Euro-American nationalities. Thus, Renton’s devotion to Anglophilism led to the perpetuation of the Elizabethan ideology, which in 1944 was well delineated by the then-prominent U.S. historians Charles and Mary Beard.

England had been torn by religious controversies and the intrigues of Europe that resulted in constant warfare when high-spirited Queen Elizabeth [I] rose to power in 1558. Much versed in the secular learning of the Renaissance, she was determined that her dominion would be Protestant under the Church of Englan...