INTERVIEW WITH EVELYN IRITANI

Evelyn Iritani (E) interviewed by Katrina Crosby (K) on Friday, June 30 in Seattle, Washington. (This transcript has been edited for accuracy, grammar and length.)

K: So today is June 30 around 9:18 am and I am sitting here with Evelyn Iritani who has graciously invited me over to her home in Seattle, Washington.

So let’s begin with asking can you tell me a little about yourself and where are you working currently?

E: I am a freelance journalist and I am currently writing a book about World War II. I was born in Champaign, Illinois, but grew up in southern Idaho and eastern Washington. My father was a professor of horticulture and he did research at Washington State University in Pullman. So I lived there from age thirteen until I went off to college. I grew up in areas that were very rural, and were primarily Caucasian. So I really didn’t have much of an Asian American identity until I went to the University of Washington in Seattle. That’s when I discovered that there were other people who looked like me and had a similar background, the children of immigrants. That was my discovery of a world beyond myself, my family, and the small towns I grew up in. I graduated from the University of Washington with a communications degree and got a job with the Seattle Post Intelligencer which was the morning newspaper here. I worked there for about 16 years and in 1995 I was hired by the Los Angeles Times to cover international economics. My husband, who was also a journalist, also got a job at the LA Times on the foreign desk and we moved to Los Angeles I worked there until 2007 when I decided I was ready for another adventure. For a few years, I worked for a PR Firm doing crisis communications work. I worked with several startup ventures and then did some freelance journalism. Several years ago, I decided to pursue my passion project which is the book that I’m working on now.

K: And how did you know journalism was something you wanted to pursue?

E: I didn’t really. When I went to college I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I liked to read and write and that was about the scope of my ambition. I was not one of those kids who grew up and knew they wanted to be a newspaper person and create a newspaper on copy machines and distribute it at age six. I wasn’t one of those people. I ended up going into communications at the university because I had to declare a major. I thought what could I do? I liked to write, I liked people, so I thought I would go into advertising. I was a big fan of Bewitched, this television show, and the husband Darrin was in advertising and it sounded interesting. I really knew nothing about it. In communications school you had to take journalism courses so I took a Journalism 101 course, taught by Professor Jackson who was very inspiring. We had to work for the university’s newspaper and I started working at the Daily and fell in love with newspapers. It was the Watergate era and journalists were portrayed as crusaders for the right cause. There were also civil rights issues being discussed on campus, so it was an exciting time to be a student journalist. I worked with a talented group of people. Many of them went on to run newspapers and have very storied careers. So it was fun, and I thought I could make a difference in the world.

K: Do you remember your first story?

E: I don’t. I really don’t. I remember we were writing a lot about clashes between the student government and the administration at that time. We considered ourselves investigative reporters so we focused on that kind of reporting. I don’t remember the first story though.

K: Do you remember one that stands out in your mind?

E: I remember some that we did. I went on to become an editor at the paper and at one point we sent a young reporter down to South Seattle to do an undercover story on escort agencies. Working with her on that story was a little dicey and I went down to help her. We weren’t in any physical danger, but we were reporting on things that people didn’t want to be publicized. There were other stories in which we were challenging the administration to open meetings that were closed and provide students with more information. I don’t remember the specifics of it, but I did realize that journalists have power. That was both exciting and also created a sense of responsibility. I started to get involved in the Asian American community and Asian American issues in college. I was at the PI when the redress movement picked up steam. But it was in college when I started to recognize that there was an Asian American community and there were issues that spoke to my experience and my family’s experience and were not yet considered significant civil rights and justice issues, My interest in journalism evolved from a desire to educate. I feel like there are a lot of ways to help people understand something and being a journalist is one of them, shedding light on issues that don’t get discussed or aren’t understood well.

K: What interested you in studying Japanese culture? Was it just in that transition into college and realizing there is an Asian American population that hasn’t been covered?

E: Part of it was my initial interest in learning about Asian America and Asian American issues and immigration more broadly. All of those things were new to me. I hadn’t learned them as a child and at that point, we did not learn the full story of immigration in school, If we did, it was much more focused on European immigration to the U.S. and how that launched the start of this country. At the Seattle PI, I started out as a general assignment reporter and did everything; education, cops, and courts. I was able, thanks to some really great editors there, to cover events that I was interested in. So I wrote about Asian American issues at a time when those issues were not regularly covered. It was in the early 1980s when the US-Japan economic relationship was becoming more significant to our readers. Although Seattle was a smaller city, you had a lot of trade and economic ties between the Pacific Northwest and Asia, starting way back when they were trading lumber and tea up to the 1980s when Boeing was becoming a bigger and bigger presence in Asia. Global markets were increasingly important to the aviation industry, and lumber, and fishing. So I became a business reporter and started covering those things, including the increasing tensions between the U.S. and Japan over trade. As Japan went through its boom period there was more and more fear here about Japan taking over the U.S. economy. I always felt uncomfortable that the trade relationship was portrayed in primarily militaristic terms. It was trade ‘wars’ or ‘us against them’. Their gain was our loss. I felt it was important as a journalist to be able to explain to people how complicated and interconnected these relationships are. That the future health of a company like Boeing depends on global markets. Its not a one way street. That fueled the next phase of my journalism career which was trying to take those big, global economic issues and translate them into stories that people here could feel and understand. Once again I had supportive editors at the PI who helped me start a Pacific Rim beat that allowed me to could travel to Asia. I was able to report on how this big, global boom wasn’t necessarily all good for Japan either. There were Japanese farmers, rice farmers, who were losing markets because they couldn’t compete with Vietnam. Japanese steel workers who were worried about their jobs to the Koreans. There were a lot of stories that I thought people in America could learn from and relate to. That was how I got more involved in covering Asia.

K: So when was the first time you were a writer for The Los Angeles Times?

E: I went there in ‘95.

K: What inspired you to write the article “The Other Japanese Internment Americans Still Hasn’t Fully Acknowledged”?

E: That was triggered by the Inter American Commission on Human Rights’ decision to hear this complaint filed by Japanese Latin Americans whose families were brought to American during WWII to be traded for Americans being held by Japan. I stumbled across this issue doing research for my book, which is about the exchange of civilian hostages between the U.S. and Japan during World War II.

So to trace the origins of this story. In the late 1980s, a big Japanese paper company Daishowa bought a paper mill over in Port Angeles. This was a unionized paper mill and a very blue collar town. It was about as mainstream America as you can imagine. Folks had lived there for generations, worked in the paper mill for generations. Real salt of the earth people. There was a very small Asian community in Port Angeles, so there were a lot of concerns about the takeover. I went over to Port Angeles to do a story for the PI, but ended up turning that into a book. The book turned into a story about the relationship between Port Angeles and Japan over a century. It went back to the very first Japanese who came to the Northwest in the 1800s. They were shipwrecked sailors who ended up floating across the ocean and getting dumped at the Olympic Peninsula. For that story, I interviewed a gentleman here, Richard McKinnon who was a professor at the UW. His father was an American teacher in Hokkaido during the war and Richard was born and raised there. He spoke fluent Japanese and was bicultural. During the war, they were caught in Japan and ended up being traded back to America on two separate exchanges. I studied Asian American history and I thought I knew something about this period, but I had never heard of ths trade of civilians during WWII. At the time I thought, wow that’s really interesting. I mentioned it in my first book and then I went on with life. It wasn’t until 20 years later, after I took the buyout from the LA Times, that I decided to see if there was a book on the exchange. I started out with a fairly simplistic viewpoint. There were Americans trapped in Japan and Japanese trapped in the United States and the war breaks out and they had to be traded. I thought of it like a more typical hostage exchange. But what I found when I started getting into it was far more complicated. On both sides of the Pacific, there were people like the McKinnons who had really sunk deep roots into their adopted homelands. When the war broke out, suddenly they were the ‘other’. Just because of their citizenship they were suddenly suspect, disloyal, the enemy. But even after being unjustly accused and in many cases, imprisoned, some of them still did not want to be traded. They still wanted to stay, and this was true both directions. Injustices were committed on both sides. There were some troubling things done by the U.S. government, in part because it was so desperate to get the imprisoned Americans out of Asia and it was having trouble finding enough people to trade. There was a small Japanese population most of the Japanese in America were first generation immigrants who couldn’t become citizens and their American-born children who were U.S. citizens. These immigrants had sunk deep roots in America, starting businesses, marrying and having children. But when the war broke out, many of them were taken from their homes and accused of spying and espionage. Their businesses were taken over by the government. Most of them lost their homes, their cars, all of their precious belongings. And then the U.S. government came to them in prison and said ‘We’re doing this exchange and the Japanese government has a list of people they want to take back, and your name is on it. Do you want to go?’ In many cases the men were in one internment camp and their wives and children were in another. They were told the exchange was the only way they could be reunited. So they agreed reluctantly to go back and took their Japanese American kids with them into a country at war. In addition to that, the U.S. had made agreements with some Latin American governments before the war that if the war broke out they would round up the civilians from Axis countries who were considered dangerous and ship them to the US to be used in these exchanges. But like the Japanese interned in the U.S., most of these Japanese Latin Americans were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, They were businessmen and Japanese language teachers and priests. Eventually, the US brought several thousand Japanese Latin Americans to the US, most of them from Peru. The majority of them were eventually sent to Japan as part of these exchanges. The U.S. government went to another country and essentially kidnapped people who were not citizens of America or Japan, brought them to America, labeled them illegal aliens and traded them to Japan. The US government was under tremendous pressure to try and save Americans who were in Japanese prison camps and it was having trouble filling the ships. But in its pursuit of justice, other injustices were committed. One of the families I’ve interviewed for my book is a Japanese American family in Los Angeles. George Hasuike at the time of the war was one of the most successful Japanese produce operators in Southern California. He had a company called Three Star Produce which was doing about a half million dollars a year in business. That was a lot of money in 1941 dollars. He owned several houses and a big warehouse in downtown LA, and his son, Don, and two sisters had a very good life despite the racism that existed at the time. They had money and lived very comfortably. When the war broke out, Don’s father was among the Japanese community leaders who were arrested as dangerous “enemy aliens” and taken to prison camps in remote parts of America. Hasuike’s wife and three kids ended up being interned in a different camp when President Roosevelt ordered the internment of all Japanese on the West Coast. Don Hasuike is still alive and one of his sisters was alive when I started this project. Don was 13 at the time of the second exchange in the fall of 1943. His family was sent to the Hiroshima area, where they had relatives. By the time they arrived, the Japanese people were suffering. The U.S. had embargoed food, oil, and things like that, so people in some areas of Japan were very hungry and there were shortages of everything. Don didn’t speak Japanese so he was enrolled in a Japanese elementary school where the kids tormented him because he was the enemy, an American. In 1944, George Hasuike ended up taking his family to Japanese Occupied China because he couldn’t find any work in Japan. That move probably saved their lives, since Hiroshima was eventually destroyed by an atomic bomb. Don was working in a Japanese military camp when the war ended. Like most of the Japanese American kids on the exchange, Don eventually returned to America. He and his mother and sister saved up enough money to open up several laundromats in South Central LA. He’s in his 80s and still works several days a week at the two laundromats he still owns. Don is a survivor, but his story is a tragic one because it was a case where a series of decisions were made by the U.S. government that ended up pitting one group of Americans – Japanese Americans – against another group of Americans – the ones imprisoned by the Japanese. As part of my book I also researched how Americans were treated in Japan. Richard McKinnon was kept under house arrest for a few months, but his father was imprisoned from the beginning of the war until the second exchange in 1943. He was tortured and suffered tremendously. This has been a difficult story to research, in part because it was such a painful time for people. I’ve had the good fortune to locate several dozen people who were children at the time of the exchange and were willing to share their stories of the exchange. Some were on the American side and some on the Japanese side. I have developed a great appreciation for the strength of the human spirit and the will to survive. The survivors of the exchange have gone on and built their lives. But in the case of the Japanese Latin Americans, their situation is particularly unjust because the U.S. never acknowledged the wrong that was committed there. (Under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, Americans of Japanese descent who were interned received a presidential apology and $20,000) The Latin American Japanese fought to be included in the redress bill, but weren’t because they weren’t American citizens. They eventually joined in a class action lawsuit that was settled in 1998. But they were only offered $5000 and some of them refused to accept the settlement. Instead they filed a complaint with the Inter American Commission on Human Rights. The commission agreed to hear their testimony earlier this year and has not yet ruled on the case. For the Latin American Japanese, it wasn’t so much the money because even $20,000 doesn’t come close to healing the financial or emotional wounds caused by the internment. So it wasn’t a difference between five or twenty. But they felt it was a slap in the face to be told they did not deserve as much compensation as Japanese Americans. They also argued the U.S. government did not fully acknowledge its complicity in what was essentially illegal rendition.

K: Why do you think there was no acknowledgement by the United States?

E: I think that the US government was forced into providing redress to Japanese Americans because there was a large group of Japanese Americans wiling to fight that battle, and they were able to convince, civil rights groups, and others to support them. At the end of the day, they were American citizens who were wronged. So even if some people didn’t like it, there were many prominent legal scholars, politicians, civil rights leaders and others who agreed that the WWII internment of Japanese Americans was one of the worst civil rights injustices in modern American history. There were laws subverted, and laws passed that were discriminatory. However, in the case of the Latin Americans, they were foreigners. They didn’t have a large group in America fighting for them, and because it’s been 70 years since it’s happened, there are very few people left who experienced it. After they were rejected by a U.S. appeals court, the Shibayamas turned to the international justice system. The US government has always had a love/hate relationship with the international legal system, that’s why we didn’t join the International Criminal Court. Some people believe global institutions represent an attack on American sovereignty. So we only want to participate in the international judicial system when we think it will work on our behalf. International human rights is a particularly difficult area because the definition of what a human right abuse is can be very different depending on the country and legal system and culture. I hope the Inter American commission rules in favor of the Japanese Latin Americans. I feel there’s no question that a wrong was committed. I have come across no cases where any of the people who were brought to America and sent to Japan had been found guilty of espionage against the US or its allies. Since 9/11, the US has been accused of overreach in its campaign to protect this country against terrorism. Similar abuses took place during WWII because some of America’s leaders believed they had the right to do anything to protect the country from another Pearl Harbor. There were concerns that Japan and Germany might launch an attack against America from Latin America. Most of them were based more on rumor than fact but the Nazis did have substantial support in Latin America. Still, the US and its allies could have been much more targeted in how they protected our country. I should say in the case of Latin America, there were also Germans and Italians who were brought to the US without just cause to be traded during the war.

K: Going back quickly to the restitution money that the families received, what is your opinion on that?

E: I don’t feel the people who were interned during World War II were properly compensated. But I don’t know what the right amount would be. There has never been a solid estimate of how much was lost by the more than 120,000 people interned in the United States or the people repatriated to Japan from North and South America. How do you measure the loss? You might be able to measure the financial loss, but even there, if someone was forced to sell their store for five cents on a dollar, is that fair? They sold it, they got some money. But how do you compare that with someone who lost everything or just their most precious things. I think it was important that there be redress and it’s important that there was a significant amount of money paid. But equally important was the official apology and acknowledgement by the U.S. government that the internment was wrong and violated American values and laws. In the case of the Latin Americans, it is not just financial redress they are seeking. They want the illegal alien designation to be expunged from their government records. They also want the US government to conduct a thorough investigation of what happened during WWII to the Japanese Latin Americans and they want their experience during the war to be included in the teaching of US history… The Japanese Latin experience has been examined by just a handful of academics here and in Peru. In Peru, this history is even less well known than it is here. The Japanese Peruvians are very reluctant to publicize these issues because there has been such a long history of discrimination against the Japanese in Peru. Before and during the war, there was a lot of resentment among the Peruvians because the Japanese had done well economically. The government exploited those fears to its political advantage and it could easily resurface. Restitution is important, an apology and acknowledgement of the wrong is important, but I would argue education is equally important..

K: So you’ve done so much research on so many different parts of this, is there one thing that has really stuck out to you as being the most interesting thing that you have discovered?

E: I think the Japanese Latin American experience was the most surprising because so few people know about it. . Also, the human tragedy that occurred on both sides of the Pacific. You see it today. People from the Middle East come here to put down roots and have families, and then suddenly, because of their religion become suspect. During World War II, people on both sides of the Pacific sunk deep roots, felt like they were part of the community and then the war broke out and all of those years and years of ties and trust disappeared. I have also been struck by how that pain has been passed on through generations. In the case of the Japanese Americans I interviewed, since they were kids they didn’t really understand what was happening at the time. No one understood why some people were chosen and others weren’t. There was a sense of betrayal and confusion. It is impossible to measure the emotional and financial costs for those Japanese who remained in the camps. After the war ended, they made their way back into society, worked hard to prove their loyalty – including going off to fight for their country – and rebuilt their lives. The people who were sent to Japan and came back after the war had it even harder. They suffered tremendously in Japan and when they returned, people treated them with suspicion, even in the Japanese community. Some people thought they were disloyal for going to Japan.

K: On the note of rebuilding a life and returning to normalcy, did you and your research find any businesses or companies that were more willing to give the jobs to Japanese Americans who have gone through this? Or did they get more racism and prejudice after the war?

E: I haven’t seen much data about what sectors of the American economy were more accepting of the Japanese after the war. Most of what I have heard is anecdotal. I know that is part of your research and I will be very interested in finding out what you learn. There were cases of individual companies that welcomed the internees when they left the camps. There were people who took care of people’s homes and farms while they were gone. But most of the repatriates lost everything when they were sent to Japan and there was a lot of prejudice when they returned to America. In the case of George Hasuike, he did business with a lot of grocery stores. The government gave each of the enemy alien prisoners a loyalty hearing to determine whether they would be kept in prison, be paroled or let go to the internment camp so they could be reunited with their families and save their businesses. One gentleman, Mr. Morris, whose family owned several grocery stores in Santa Monica, travelled to Fort Missoula to testify at Hasuike’s loyalty hearing. He testified that he was a loyal American and said he would be responsible for him, and take care of him, and make sure he wouldn’t do anything bad, There were also a number of people who submitted affidavits on behalf of Hasuike. But the government still decided to keep him in prison and the family lost everything. It appeared to be the religious communities, particularly the Quakers, that took the lead in helping the internees during and after the war. It wasn’t necessarily the leaders but people within the organizations. The Quakers helped people find jobs outside the internment zone. The University of Washington and other West Coast universities found places for their students in the East where the Japanese were not interned. After returning to the U.S. in 1948, Don Hasuike got a degree at USC in accounting. He worked in the laundromat and went to school part-time. But he could not find a job as an accountant anywhere after he graduated There was just a lot of discrimination, particularly in California.

K: Do you see something like this ever happening again?

E: I might have been less sure of that before 9/11 but there is no doubt in my mind now given the actions of the Trump administration and the broad support it continues to receive among the general public. Unfortunately, we are seeing serious civil rights violations against Muslim Americans or countries that are predominantly Muslim or countries that are believed to be in some way tied to terrorism. We have people, prominent politicians, and others openly saying the World War II internment was right and we shouldn’t step away from considering internment of Muslims. Look at what the U.S. government did after 9/11 at Guantanamo and other places where enemy combatants have been held without due process. I guess it’s been a reminder to all of us that the values that we believe in have to be fought for forever. That’s just part of, in some ways you can argue, that’s what makes America strong. We are forever challenging things and sometimes improving our country. Unfortunately, we are seeing this country backslide in terms of protection of civil liberties. We are a nation of immigrants and it is hard to believe that people can so easily forget that at one point their ancestors probably came from another place. They might even be from a country that we were at war with at one time or another. That’s a long answer to your question.

K: If you could provide future generations with advice, what would it be?

E: Know your history. I refuse to give up the belief that facts matter. I got into journalism because I wanted to educate people about issues that are important to their lives and help them understand why America is such a great country. We are not a great country because we put up walls or throw people in jail because of the color of their skin. We are a great country because we welcomed people from different places and educated them and gave them an opportunity to contribute to society. I do believe it is important to tell people about their history, just as you are doing. World War II has been written about a lot and all of us know something about it. But there’s still so much that isn’t known. And that’s just one war. There are the civil rights movements and so many other parts of our history we can learn from. In my book, U.S. diplomats were trying to bring back Americans who were being held by the Japanese and that was a just cause. But in the course of pursuing that justice, they committed a grave injustice against others, some of whom were also Americans. We have to stay the course. So I hope my book can shine a light on a small but important piece of that history.

K: I have to read it. And lastly, is there anything I did not ask you that you would like to share with me?

E: Boy, you asked good questions. I don’t think so. You did a good job.

K: Thank you, and thank you so much.

E: You’re welcome.