The Pittsburgh Press (December 26, 1941)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SAN FRANCISCO – It happens, in this time of national peril, that I have one good friend in San Francisco who is Japanese.
Or rather I should say American-Japanese. For although this girl looks as Japanese as Hirohito, she was born in California, has never been to Japan, has never wanted to go, doesn’t know anybody there, and speaks very poor Japanese. She is 23.
She is as loyal to America as anybody, not because she is consciously and mechanically patriotic but because, hell, this is her country the same as mine, and always has been.
So I thought it would be interesting to chat with her, and see how the thousands of perfectly loyal American-Japanese like herself are faring these days.
Well, to tell the truth, they aren’t faring so badly. In fact, I’ve been sort of proud of the general attitude of Californians toward the local Japanese. I’ve seen very little display of dangerous fanaticism.
Goes about as she always did
But to get on with our girl friend. This is what she says:
She goes about the city just as she always did. She holds her head up and walks down the street and looks people in the face, because she is American. She was downtown every day in the Christmas rush, and nobody looked mean at her or said anything nasty to her.
Two days after war was declared, she called up two or three of the big downtown stores and asked if she could still use her charge accounts. They said, “Sure.”
My girl’s husband – they have been marred just two months – owns a store here. In the first two days of war, the Treasury Department closed every store in San Francisco that even employed an alien Japanese. But our couple had no alien employees, so they stayed open.
My girl’s store is being made a first-aid station in San Francisco’s defense scheme. And she herself has registered for civil defense. She doesn’t know what they’ll assign her to, but she can roll bandages and do lots of handy little things.
My girl has no accent at all. It sometimes seems incongruous to hear such wholly American speech coming from such a wholly Japanese face. She uses such phrases as “that hysterically hectic Sunday,” and “give the devil his due.”
She says she speaks Japanese only when she has to. She says the younger people hate to visit the older ones, because then they have to speak Japanese and they don’t speak it well.
She says the Government doesn’t have to work very hard to find out who are the disloyal Japanese in California, because they are turned in by the Japanese themselves.
My girl has considerable feeling against the Chinese. Not as between the two nations and their war, but just locally. She says the local Chinese have sure traded on America’s kind feeling toward China in the last few years.
Japs prepare ‘I am American’ pins
At one school here the Chinese children all showed up one morning with badges saying “I am Chinese.” So now the Japanese, in indignation, are preparing buttons for their children saying “I am an American.”
Financially, it is going to go hard with most of the American Japanese out here. Because many Americans who hire Japanese or patronize Japanese are going to quit. Not because they especially want to, but because they’re afraid they’ll be suspected if they keep on having Japanese in their homes or are seen taking clothes to a Japanese cleaner.
Thus poverty has already, in these few short weeks, begun to work itself upon the Japanese of California. And accentuating that poverty is the terrific Japanese pride.
The night I talked with my girl, she and her husband were making a tour distributing food and clothes to friends who were hard up. She said they had to be tactful about it, and under no circumstances could they offer money. She said some of the older people were so proud they’d had to send their gifts through the mail, anonymously.
At the end I asked my girl what conflict went on inside of people like her at this moment, for although they are Americans, pure Japanese blood does run in their veins.
And she said that most of them felt only a terrible shame. “We just feel that we must apologize to everybody for our ancestral people having done this awful thing,” she says.