Wed, Oct 6, 1943: Pearl Harbor

“Today was a busy one for me.  I was well occupied from 1 to 6 P.M. with three classes -- Problems of Labor and Industry, Psychology (and the first pop quiz of the year), and International Relations, as well as A Cappella Choir and a talk in Naval History class by Seaman Wells.  He is one of the four or five men stationed here who went through Pearl Harbor, and his account of the raid was really good. Especially interesting were the facts that he brought that were withheld from the public for obvious military reasons for over a year.  For one thing 6 of our 9 battleships there were sunk -- and the only other three battleships we possessed were in the North Atlantic.  Also, civilian Japs living on the island attempted to break into Hickam Field, and the Japs had perfect information on the location of all major ships -- this happened to be the biggest concentration of ships in years there.  The most interesting parts of his talk were the numerous personal incidents he told about the battle.  I'll give you a better account of this speech when I return home.”

-- Letter from my father, Cape Girardeau, Mo., to my grandfather, Bloomington, Kans., Wednesday, October 6, 1943. 

            I apologize for the racial slur in this letter and I apologize to my father, who if he were alive would be chagrined to see how he expressed himself as a young man.  My father, a professor of Japanese history, would never have used that word later in life.  Indeed, when he transcribed some of these letters, he changed the word to "Japanese."  The word was considered offensive by Japanese Americans in the 1940s, but was widely used by white Americans to refer both to Japanese Americans and to their Japanese military enemy.  Only a few U.S. newspapers in the 1940s tried to avoid the term in news coverage.  The word appears throughout my father’s letters and it's impossible to quote the most interesting passages of these letters without using it.

            Seaman Wells was repeating unsubstantiated rumors that began to circulate immediately after Pearl Harbor: that Japanese civilians in the U.S. had aided the attackers.  Secretary of the Navy Knox began blaming the disastrous events of Pearl Harbor on a “fifth column” of Japanese Americans soon after the attacks.  Others in the administration, including J. Edgar Hoover and John Franklin Carter, disputed Knox’s assertions.  But those and similar rumors, along with existing racist attitudes, helped create the climate that led to the internment of Japanese Americans.

          (Sources: Tetsuden Kashima, Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997], 55; Daily Tulean Dispatch, November 6, 1942).