A Child’s Exit Card

Many Fourth of July holidays have come and gone for Paul. He now values the card as evidence of a time that should not be forgotten but also as a sign that history repeats itself.

“I felt sick,” he said, when he learned of infants and children being torn from their parents at the southern border and incarcerated in metal cages, tent cities and converted box stores. “We have really hit the bottom of the barrel to even think about that,” he said.

“Same thing, different era.”

His thoughts were echoed by former First Lady Laura Bush, who described the “warehousing” of migrant children at the border as “eerily reminiscent of the internment camps for U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.”

Paul’s mother, Bessie Tomita, was 29 at the time of the family’s release from Minidoka. She defied government instructions and kept the cards. When the children reached high school age, she gave the leave cards to Paul, Deanna and Emiko to remind them of a history that they had lived but hadn’t learned about in school.

Racial hatred, political expediency, greed and groundless fears of espionage led to the mass expulsion of 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast after President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February, 1942. 

More than 40,000 children were imprisoned that spring, one third of the total. Even babies and children in orphanages, including those of mixed race, were rounded up.¹ Activist Raymond Okamura later regretted that no one had thought to file a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a child, to challenge the lack of due process.² 

A majority of the imprisoned population, in fact, had exited the camps before the last one closed in 1946. Soon after the first camps opened in 1942, the government began developing policies to release select groups of approved citizens and immigrants back into society after intensive vetting. There was concern that innocent captives would turn bitter and disloyal if kept under armed guard for too long. It also was expensive to operate a string of federal concentration camps whose population would eventually swell to 120,000.

Various types of civilian leave were gradually permitted: short-term leave to fill the labor gap on farms, permit to exit to attend colleges that would accept American Japanese students, and “indefinite leave” for those who had obtained proof of a job and a place to stay in a community that would accept them.⁵ In addition, military clearance was issued to those entering the U.S. Army and other branches of service.

Having incited fear by exiling an entire racial group under the guise of “military necessity,” the government now had to convince the public that it was safe to release these so-called security risks back into society. “Wolves in sheep’s clothing” is how one editorial cartoonist depicted the newly released.

Such social conditions may partly explain why the camp leave procedure was documented by government photographers. The public needed to be reassured that inmates were being properly processed before their release.⁶

The original leave permit was a one-page, typed document. In March, 1943, the wallet-sized card replaced it, with the addition of a photo and fingerprint.⁷

Paul and Bessie Tomita, the parents of Paul Jr., were born in Seattle and Thomas, WA, respectively. The death of Paul’s immigrant father, Kannosuke, in 1920, in a motorcycle accident, left his widow, Shigeno, with three sons. She returned to her native Hiroshima to raise the children. The three American boys attended school there and became fluent in Japanese.

Shigeno and her boys returned to Seattle in the mid-1920s. Her son, Paul, and his younger brother eventually opened a printing company and typeset menus and material in Chinese, Japanese and English for restaurants and shops.

The exclusion orders came in 1942 and the Tomitas became family No. 11940. Shigeno joined Paul’s family in the barracks. But when her son and the family were released, she stayed behind, moving into a different barrack with a single woman. She lived in confinement for two more years.

Paul Sr. passed the highest level of clearance in order to take a job with the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA. “From suspected spy to real U.S. spy,” Paul observes now. 

His father’s fluency in Japanese helped the war effort. He was assigned to  translate U.S. propaganda material into Japanese and typeset the leaflets in a print shop at Georgetown University. The flyers were dropped on enemy Japanese soldiers in the South Pacific, urging them to surrender.

After the war ended, the Tomitas returned to Seattle, among the 60 percent of Japanese Americans who returned to the West Coast. One of the relatives didn’t return. He went to New York and didn’t come back to the West Coast for 50 years, he was so angry, Paul said.

The Tomitas’ neighbors in Seattle had stored the family’s printing machines in their basement, a kindness that enabled Paul Sr. and his brother Theodore to restart the typesetting business after the war ended.  

Theirs was an unusual case. “Many people who stored their belongings in commercial places came back to find that everything had been looted and they had no recourse but to start all over from nothing,” Paul said. “We Japanese Americans weren’t in a position to sue.”

Paul eventually became a counselor, a decision he attributes partly to the childhood trauma of incarceration.“Even to this day, here in America, I’m always on guard.”