Magazine Spring 2024 The Silent Generation

By Scott Craig

Many baby boomers grew up hearing about their parents’ experiences during World War II. Americans supported the U.S. effort by serving in the military, turning out the planes, ships and other supplies needed for victory, or doing other critical, war-related work. They coped with shortages, rationing and blackouts. In the years after the war, they regaled their children with selective stories about their lives at war.

But Paul Mori ’77, the son and grandson of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II, learned little from his family. To break their silence, he started asking questions.

“I sought stories of my parents’ generation because people didn’t talk about it — there was so much shame associated with the internment,” Paul says. “I think they just wanted to go on with their lives and kind of forget it. When the government treats you like a criminal, and everyone in society treats you like a criminal, you find ways not to talk about it.”

A conductor and longtime music professor at Westmont, Paul speaks publicly about the detainment of Japanese Americans and how it affected his family and all those imprisoned in the camps. In February 2023, he joined a panel with two survivors of the camps, Roke Fukamura and Hideko Malis, at the Santa Barbara Public Library’s Faulkner Gallery to discuss their ordeal. He searches for information about people who endured the camps and overcame years of privations, chronicling their experiences. He has also discovered a few heroes.

THE CAMPS

Paul says it’s important to share stories of this traumatic time in the lives of 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals forced to relocate during the war, many of them American citizens. Within months of the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. government began setting up what grew to be 10 camps in six states: Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.

The authority for this action stemmed from Executive Order 9066, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed on February 19, 1942. It allowed the U.S. military to expel Americans from designated areas along the Pacific Coast. Then the federal government created the War Relocation Authority on March 18, 1942, to “take all people of Japanese descent into custody, surround them with troops, prevent them from buying land, and return them to their former homes at the close of the war.”

“This is a personal story for me,” Paul says. “Both of my parents grew up in California. My father, Joe, was born in Santa Barbara and lived his entire life there, except when he was detained at the camp in Gila River, Arizona. My mother, Kikkie, who came from Imperial Valley, was taken to the facility in Poston, Arizona.

“Normally, when people meet, they ask where you are from or what you do for a living,” Paul says. “But it struck me as a young kid that when my parents met anybody who was Japanese American, they always asked what camp they were in. It was a defining moment in their lives, and it continued to shape them after the war.

“For example, my parents never gave us Japanese names, and we never learned to speak Japanese. They wanted to Americanize their kids so we wouldn’t suffer the way they did.”

Japanese Americans faced discrimination even before the war and even more so afterward. “My father was a farm laborer,” Paul says. “It was the only job he could get as many people didn’t want to hire Japanese Americans.” Such hostility likely contributed to the incarceration of so many people, even those who were American citizens.

The camps randomly combined Christians from a variety of congregations. “They had to learn how to cooperate and come together for church,” Paul says. “This kind of thing had never happened before. With the limited space, they had to hold joint services, and real battles occurred among people from different denominations before they worked things out.”

Throughout the early 20th century, Japanese Americans established churches wherever they settled. But with people being relocated during the war, these congregations all shut down. “Denominations refused to continue funding and supporting Japanese churches, identifying them as the enemy,” Paul said. “The hatred and distrust were so severe, it likely came from people blinded by their fear. It created a dilemma for pastors, who just gave up. There was nothing they could do. The Anglican Church in Canada even sold all the Japanese church properties so the congregations couldn’t return.”

Despite being designated as enemies, some Japanese Americans were allowed to leave the camps by volunteering to serve in the U.S. military. Paul’s uncle Frank went into the Army and attended military intelligence school. He was one of the first U.S. soldiers to go into Okinawa. Another celebrated Japanese American, Ben Kuroki, the father of Westmont parent and former staff members Kristyn Kuroki Thurman, who grew up in Nebraska, kept trying to enlist until he succeeded in joining the Army Air Corps. He went on bombing missions over Germany and was one of the few to survive one particularly treacherous raid. Despite the danger, he re-enlisted.

AFTER THE WAR

Paul has found his aunt’s description of preparing to leave the camp. “We’re getting out tomorrow, and we don’t know what we’re doing or where we’re going,” she wrote. “They received $25 and a bus ticket,” Paul says. “Japanese American churches ended up housing a number of Japanese Americans. My mother’s family lived in a converted water tank in Los Angeles. My grandfather went to a job fair in Los Angeles, where he met Avery Brundage, who needed a caretaker for his Montecito estate and was willing to hire him and teach him. So my grandfather, grandmother, mother, aunt and uncle moved to Montecito and lived in the servants’ quarters on the property. My mother and aunt befriended Chinese students at Westmont, their first contact with the college. But even after the war, my family still experienced hostility. People cussed at them and spit in their faces, and my mom never forgot this.”

Paul’s parents met in Santa Barbara. His father had returned home after serving in the U.S. army, and worked as a farm laborer, and eventually began working in people’s gardens. “My father was proud of his military service, and the prejudice he suffered stung even more given the normal treatment of veterans,” Paul says. “Japanese Americans who had owned farms lost them during the war and lacked the money to return to farming. Discrimination against Japanese Americans persisted, so they banded together in an association for Japanese gardeners, pooling money to buy supplies in bulk.”

Eventually, Paul’s father and uncle established Katashi Nursery first in Santa Barbara and then in Goleta, thanks to a benefactor who co-signed a loan so they could start the business. This woman used her wealth to help others succeed.

One of Paul’s uncles, Frank Fujii, designed and worked at Lotusland in Montecito and built the lovely Japanese garden

 there. His father, Kinzuchi, designed Storrier-Stearns in Pasadena, one of the finest Japanese gardens in the U.S.

In the 1950s, the U.S. State Department kicked off a campaign to improve Japan’s image, similar to what they did with the Marshall Plan in Europe. They spent millions of dollars sending messages about peaceful Japanese people being misled by bad individuals, and Japan became the only democracy in Asia. Slowly, Japanese Americans began reclaiming their lives and rebuilding their homes and businesses.

“Slowly, Japanese Americans began reclaiming their lives and rebuilding their homes and businesses.”

More than 40 years after World War II ended, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 finally extended an official apology for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and paid $20,000 to every living person who had been detained. A 1944 Supreme Court case upholding the imprisonment of Japanese Americans was finally overturned in 2018.

PAUL’S JOURNEY

When he failed to get answers from his parents and grandparents about their wartime experiences, Paul began a deep dive into the history of Japanese American incarceration. Just after the civil rights movement in the 1960s, his family began opening up about their detainment. “It was so painful for them to talk about it,” Paul says. “Yet they showed remarkable forgiveness.”

Joe Mori, Paul’s father, agreed to speak about his experiences in a history class at Westmont that Professor Shirley Mullen taught. It meant a lot to Paul to hear his story. “I still have a copy of that talk,” he says.

When Paul was earning his graduate degrees at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, his father called him about a racist letter in the Santa Barbara News-Press opposing reparations for Japanese Americans. Once Paul read it, he knew he had to respond, which he did immediately. The overwhelming and positive reaction to his letter surprised him. “Japanese Americans of my father’s generation came out of the woodwork thanking me,” Paul says. “No one had spoken up for those who were incarcerated, and the letter resonated with Japanese Americans. It was remarkable to receive this kind of gratitude from my parents’ generation. It taught me the power of language and inspired me to keep writing and studying history.”

When Paul went through his father’s things after he died, he found a copy of the letter he sent to the News-Press. Securely locked away in his father’s safety deposit box, he also discovered the letter of apology from President George H. W. Bush after President Ronald Reagan had signed the 1998 legislation authorizing reparations.

After graduate school, Paul lived in Seattle, where he taught music at Highline Community College and directed the Rainier Symphony. He began reviewing books about Japanese and Japanese American culture, history and literature for the International Examiner in Seattle. 

Through conversations with fellow Westmont alums, also Japanese Americans, Paul learned that they also encountered silence from their families about the war. “Both the late Jane Higa ’73, a longtime vice president for student life at Westmont, and Steve Yamaguchi ’75, who served as a college trustee, told me about similar experiences,” Paul says. “I realized how widespread this silence must have been.”

THE HEROES

As Paul chronicles the hardships Japanese Americans experienced at the camps and the difficulty of rebuilding their lives after the war, he also tells the stories of a handful of heroes. “So few people stood up for Japanese Americans during the war,” he says. “I find it fascinating that many of the ones who did were Christians.”

Japanese Americans established St. Peter’s Episcopal Parish in Seattle in 1908 and built a church in 1932. But 10 years later, members of the congregation were incarcerated in the remote camps, and the church closed for three years. “The Episcopal bishop in that region allowed members to store their belongings in the gym, promising to take care of them,” Paul says. “But others weren’t so lucky. So many Japanese Americans lost everything during the war. In his last sermon at St. Peter’s before people were sent away, the pastor said, ‘We have to be like the people of Israel going into wilderness. We don’t know where we’re going or when we’ll come back.’”

Walter C. Woodward Jr. and his wife, Mildred, who edited and published the Bainbridge Review during World War II, were the only publishers to condemn the incarceration of Japanese Americans as unconstitutional. “The author David Guterson drew on Woodward in shaping the character of the newspaper editor in ‘Snow Falling on Cedars,’” Paul says. “He strongly supported Japanese Americans when no other editors and newspapers did. His legacy lives on through books and films, and in the hearts of the Japanese Americans in the Pacific Northwest.”

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Woodward wrote, “If ever a community was devastated by events over which it had no control, it is Bainbridge Island this day … and we dare not forget our neighbors of Japanese ancestry.” He called the imprisonment of 278 local people of Japanese ancestry, including more than 200 U.S. citizens, a violation of the Bill of Rights. The couple also recruited residents of the camps to become Bainbridge Review correspondents. Woodward later received the National Japanese American Citizen League’s Edison Uno Civil Rights Dove of Peace Award, and the PBS documentary, “Visible Target,” features the couple.

“Rev. Herbert Nicholson served as a Quaker missionary in Japan prior to World War II,” Paul says “He was a saint to Japanese Americans during the war and did so much for the entire community. He raised money and organized the national Friends community to buy and wrap Christmas gifts for children in the camps. My mother’s cousin lived in Pasadena, where the Quakers helped the Japanese Americans return to their homes after the war by donating land so they could rebuild their lives, and paying for college.”

Nicholson spoke frequently at churches, organizations and military bases supporting Japanese Americans and calling for

 their release. He even went to Washington, D.C., to plead their cause. After the war, he continued his ministry of serving people in need, raising money to pay for goats to be flown to a devastated and starving Japan.

Reading about these people inspires Paul to continue his work documenting Japanese American history and educating people about their forced relocation during the war. “It’s a privilege to honor all those detained,” he says. “I want to be one of the people caretaking their stories, making sure their struggles were not in vain and the lessons learned will not be forgotten.”