UNFORGOTTEN STORIES
忘れ得ぬニューヨーク物語： 1940 年代の日本人と日系アメリカ人
The history of Japanese and Japanese Americans in wartime New York is often overshadowed by the mass forced removal and incarceration that took place on the West Coast. New York was outside the military exclusion zone, but the war nevertheless transformed the city’s Japanese community.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the federal government arrested Japanese nationals in New York under the Enemy Alien Control Program and detained many of them at Ellis Island. Families lost income and community institutions lost leaders. At the same time, Japanese Americans arriving from West Coast incarceration camps sought education, employment, and housing in New York. Churches, political groups, relief organizations, artists, students, and community leaders responded to these disruptions in different and sometimes conflicting ways.
Unforgotten Stories examines four interconnected histories: detention at Ellis Island, organizing around democracy and wartime loyalty, educational relocation, and the rebuilding of community in New York and the surrounding region. The exhibition does not present these developments as a simple progression from hardship to triumph. Instead, it considers how people acted within the constraints of racism, surveillance, incarceration, displacement, and war.
Japanese New York Before Pearl Harbor
In the early twentieth century, New York’s Japanese community included diplomats and corporate employees, merchants, industrial and domestic workers, business owners, religious leaders, artists, and writers. Many were Issei who were barred by federal law from naturalized citizenship. A smaller American-born Nisei generation was also coming of age.
As relations between Japan and the United States deteriorated during the late 1930s, some Japanese companies reduced or closed their New York operations, and some employees and their families returned to Japan. Those who remained faced growing uncertainty about their legal status, employment, and position within the city.
The connection between international diplomacy and local community institutions was visible in 1941. Kichisaburo Nomura was appointed Japanese ambassador to the United States on February 11. In Washington, D.C., he conducted negotiations with Secretary of State Cordell Hull as relations between the two countries worsened.
Nomura also visited New York. In March 3, 1941, the Japanese Association of New York held a reception for him at the Nippon Club. The gathering brought the ambassador together with leading members of the city’s Japanese business and community organizations. Within a year, many of those institutions would be closed or weakened, and some of their leaders would be in federal custody.
Enemy Alien Detention in New York
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Presidential Proclamation 2525 authorized restrictions on Japanese nationals classified as enemy aliens. Federal agents arrested religious leaders, businesspeople, journalists, professionals, and others whom the government considered potential security risks. Because Japanese immigrants had been legally excluded from naturalization, long residence in the United States did not protect Issei from enemy-alien classification.
These arrests were legally and administratively distinct from the mass forced removal from the West Coast. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. The order enabled the removal and incarceration of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, approximately two-thirds of whom were United States citizens. New York was outside the West Coast exclusion zone, but Japanese nationals in the city were still subjected to surveillance, searches, restrictions on travel and property, arrest, and detention.
Research assembled for this exhibition has identified approximately 440 Japanese men, one Nisei man, and four Japanese women who were held at Ellis Island. Hearing boards recommended parole, continued confinement, transfer to another Justice Department facility, or repatriation. Some detainees were released to approved sponsors and required to report to federal authorities. Others were transferred to Fort Meade, Fort Missoula, Kooskia, Santa Fe, and other facilities.
Ellis Island therefore served a different function from the War Relocation Authority camps in the West. It was a detention and hearing facility where Japanese New Yorkers waited to learn whether they would be released, transferred, or sent to Japan. The system disrupted households and institutions even when an individual’s detention lasted only weeks or months.
Hozen Seki: A Congregation Without Its Minister
Rev. Hozen Seki, founder of the New York Buddhist Church, was detained at Ellis Island and transferred among Fort Meade, the Kooskia road camp in Idaho, and Santa Fe. His detention removed a religious leader from a congregation that depended on him during a period of fear and uncertainty.
In his absence, Seki’s wife helped sustain the church and its congregation. The church offered spiritual and social support and became a gathering place for Japanese American servicemen, including members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, before their deployment to Europe. Seki’s story shows that detention affected more than the person in custody. It also altered the lives of spouses, children, congregations, and other people who relied upon community institutions.
Jiro Kozai: Detention, Family, and Repatriation
Jiro Kozai was a writer, editor, and publisher of the Japanese-language newspaper The Japanese American. He had served as president of the Japanese Association of New York and helped mobilize local support for the Japanese Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. After Pearl Harbor, he was detained at Ellis Island and Camp Upton.
Kozai was later repatriated to Japan with his Nisei wife and daughters. Their departure demonstrates how wartime detention and repatriation decisions could determine the future of an entire family, including family members who were United States citizens.
Other New Yorkers in Federal Custody
The detention program reached across professional and community life. Physician 村瀬九郎 was held at several federal facilities before being repatriated to Japan in September 1945. Dr. Sabro Emy, who treated many Japanese-speaking working-class patients, was released under restrictions and remained subject to federal monitoring.
Architect Yasuo Matsui (1883–1962) was detained at Ellis Island and faced reporting and travel restrictions after his release. Landscape architect Takeo Shiota (1881–1943), designer of the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, died in 1943 after being transferred from Ellis Island to federal custody in South Carolina. Artist and architectural photographer Yosei Amemiya (1888–1977) remained in custody despite outside appeals for his release.
These brief profiles are not interchangeable stories. Their experiences differed according to citizenship, profession, family circumstances, hearing-board decisions, and government classifications. Together, however, they demonstrate how federal detention removed people who had helped sustain New York’s medical, religious, cultural, and civic institutions.
米国フレンズ奉仕団ニューヨーク事務所による日本人抑留報告書。AFSCアーカイブ提供。
Families and Institutions Left Behind
Many detainees had been principal wage earners. Their spouses and children faced lost income, housing insecurity, disrupted education, and uncertainty about whether separated relatives would be released, transferred, or sent to Japan. Religious and private organizations, including the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America and the American Friends Service Committee, assisted some families with food, housing, employment, and parole sponsorship.
Detention also changed the structure of community leadership. Prewar organizations representing Japanese nationals were closed or weakened. New groups emerged to address discrimination, employment, civil rights, wartime loyalty, and the arrival of Japanese Americans from the West Coast incarceration camps.
Organizing Before and After Pearl Harbor
“Japanese American Committee for Democracy Newsletter, vol. 2, no. 2 (November 1943).” Courtesy of the Occidental College Library Special Collections
Political and social-service organizing in New York began before the United States entered the war. In August 1940, Issei and Nisei activists, religious leaders, artists, and journalists organized the Committee for the Democratic Treatment of Japanese Residents in the Eastern States. Rev. Alfred Saburo Akamatsu (1904–1981), pastor of the Japanese Methodist Church of New York, became its first president.
The committee assisted people who had lost employment as Japanese companies reduced their American operations, contacted churches and government agencies about relief, studied local social-service needs, and protested discrimination. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Consulate closed and federal authorities arrested Akamatsu and other Issei leaders.
A public meeting attended by approximately 150 people led to the formation of the Japanese American Committee for Democracy (JACD). Thomas Komuro was elected chair, six subcommittees were established, and the organization began publishing a newsletter. Its advisory board included Pearl S. Buck, Albert Einstein, and Franz Boas.
The JACD operated within a difficult and sometimes contradictory political environment. It protested racial discrimination and assisted Japanese Americans with employment, housing, and resettlement. It also publicly supported the United States war effort and condemned Japanese militarism. These positions reflected antifascist commitments, but they also developed under intense pressure on people of Japanese ancestry to demonstrate loyalty.
Nori Ikeda Lafferty and a Change in Leadership
In early 1943, Nori Ikeda Lafferty became the JACD’s first paid staff member. A Nisei activist from California, she arrived as increasing numbers of formerly incarcerated Japanese Americans were moving east. Her work helped expand the JACD’s employment, housing, political, and social programs and encouraged other Nisei activists to relocate to New York.
By 1944, the organization’s leadership had shifted. Issei board members resigned and Nisei members assumed a larger role. This transition reflected a broader transformation of Japanese New York. A community that had been composed primarily of Japanese immigrants before the war was increasingly shaped by American-born Japanese Americans arriving from the West Coast.
Lafferty’s story places organizational labor, rather than later fame, at the center of this history. The JACD depended upon people who answered letters, located rooms and jobs, edited newsletters, organized meetings, and connected newcomers with existing networks.
Artists, Propaganda, and Wartime Choice
Artists formed a visible part of JACD activity. Leo Amino (1911–1989), Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953), Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), and others participated in the Arts Council of Japanese Americans for Democracy.
In December 1941, Amino, Kuniyoshi, Chuzo Tamotzu, Noguchi, Thomas Nagai, Roy Kadowaki, Sakari Suzuki (1899–1995), and Bunji Tagawa signed a declaration condemning Japanese militarism. Taro Yashima (1908–1994) later produced visual materials for the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services.
Kuniyoshi produced pro-Allied propaganda and war-bond imagery and delivered a Japanese-language radio address for the Office of War Information. Chuzo Tamotzu (1888–1975) worked for the Office of Strategic Services in Southeast Asia. Noguchi, who lived in New York and was not subject to the West Coast exclusion order, entered the Poston incarceration camp voluntarily in an effort to develop arts and community programs. He soon encountered the restrictions of camp administration and returned to New York several months later.
These artists did not share a single wartime experience. Their actions reflected political conviction, professional opportunity, personal history, and the constraints imposed upon people of Japanese ancestry. Their work should not be described simply as “anti-war art.” Much of it was explicitly pro-Allied propaganda produced within the American wartime information system.
Resettlement Work
Architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986) served as a vice chair of the Arts Council of Japanese Americans for Democracy and chaired the Resettlement Council of Japanese American Organizations in New York. The council assisted Japanese Americans leaving West Coast incarceration camps, many of whom arrived in the city without secure housing, employment, or established community ties.
In 1944, Yamasaki supported the opening of a hostel in Brooklyn for newly arrived Japanese Americans despite opposition from local residents and public officials. His wartime work reveals a lesser-known chapter of his life: before achieving international recognition as an architect, he helped displaced Japanese Americans establish new lives in New York.
1944年2月11日、「民主主義のための日系アメリカ人芸術評議会」会長、国吉康雄の声明。スミソニアン協会公文書館提供。
Women’s Public Voices
Women also shaped political education and public communication. Ayako Ishigaki, an Issei journalist, feminist, and author of Restless Wave (1940), began working for the Office of War Information in 1942. She and her husband, artist Eitaro Ishigaki (1893–1958), remained subject to enemy-alien restrictions and employment losses despite their opposition to Japanese militarism.
Kimi Gengo Tagawa wrote stories for The Bookshelf, a YWCA Girl Reserve publication. Through fictional conversations, she introduced young readers to immigration, American and Japanese culture, race, and belonging. Ishigaki and Tagawa demonstrate that wartime political work also took place through writing, religious organizations, education, and youth programs.
The JACD did not resolve the contradictions between civil-rights advocacy and support for wartime government policy. Its history is important precisely because it shows Japanese New Yorkers debating how to oppose racism, assist displaced people, and claim democratic rights while the United States was incarcerating people of Japanese ancestry.
Leaving Camp for School
アメリカの挑戦：日系アメリカ人学生の移住問題について。1942年。アメリカ・フレンズ奉仕団 (AFSC)提供。
The forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast interrupted the education of thousands of students. In March 1942, educators and community leaders in Berkeley formed a committee that helped approximately seventy-five students transfer to institutions outside the military exclusion zone. In May, Clarence Pickett of the American Friends Service Committee helped establish the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council.
The council identified colleges and universities willing to accept Japanese American students, raised funds, and negotiated with government agencies for permission to leave assembly centers and incarceration camps. Admission to a college did not by itself guarantee release. Students also faced government screening, travel restrictions, tuition costs, housing shortages, and institutional prejudice.
The program offered an important route out of incarceration, but it was not a remedy for forced removal. Students often left parents and siblings behind, and the freedom available to them remained conditional.
全米日系米国人学生転住審議会(NJASRC)発行の「日系アメリカ人学生の移転をいかに支援するか」1943年。アメリカ・フレンズ奉仕団 (AFSC )提供。
Toru Matsumoto: Connecting Camps, Churches, and Colleges
Toru Matsumoto (1913–1979) was detained at Ellis Island, Camp Upton, and Fort Meade. Following his release in late 1942, he became executive assistant to George E. Rundquist of the Committee on Resettlement of Japanese Americans, which was supported by Protestant church organizations.
Matsumoto served as general secretary of the Japanese Student Christian Association and collaborated with the World Student Service Fund. New York’s broader Christian network also included the Japanese American Christian Association. Matsumoto visited incarceration camps, raised funds, and encouraged students to pursue educational opportunities outside the camps. His work connected student relocation with church-based efforts to secure employment, housing, and other forms of resettlement assistance.
Matsumoto’s movements connected the East Coast detention system, national religious networks, incarceration camps, and New York educational institutions. His work demonstrates how religious and educational organizations helped Japanese Americans navigate the difficult transition from confinement to resettlement. His memoir, A Brother Is a Stranger (1946), provided an early published account of his wartime confinement and its consequences.
Students Arriving in New York
Institutions across New York State participated in student relocation. They included Alfred University, Bard College, Barnard College, Cornell University, Hunter College, New York University, Pratt Institute, the New School for Social Research, Teachers College, Union Theological Seminary, the University of Rochester, Vassar College, and other professional and secondary schools. A wartime survey published by Robert W. O’Brien recorded more than 320 students relocated to New York and more than 500 to the broader East Coast between 1942 and 1946.
Their experiences extended beyond classrooms. Students sought housing and employment, joined churches and civic organizations, and encountered a city in which anti-Japanese discrimination coexisted with interracial and interfaith organizing.
New York University enrolled more than a dozen Japanese American students under Chancellor Harry Woodburn Chase, an advocate of academic freedom and racial and religious tolerance. Mitsuye Yamada, then Mitsuye Yasutake, studied at NYU during the war. She later became a poet, essayist, feminist, and civil-rights activist whose writing addressed incarceration and Japanese American identity.
A Wartime Traveling Art Exhibition
In May 1945, an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Issei and Nisei artists opened at the New Jersey College for Women in New Brunswick. It brought together works by ten artists then living in War Relocation Authority “relocation projects,” the government’s term for the incarceration camps, and sixteen artists who had been well known in the East for many years. More than 1,000 people attended the New Brunswick presentation before the exhibition went on tour.
The exhibition was supported by several religious and Japanese American organizations, including the New York Church Committee for Japanese Americans, the American Baptist Home Missions Society, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the Committee for Resettlement of Japanese Americans of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, and the Resettlement Council of Japanese American Organizations in New York City. Arrangements were made with assistance from the Newark office of the War Relocation Authority. The Resettlement Council subsequently sought a New York gallery for the exhibition, while the New York chapter of the JACL developed plans to circulate it to major cities across the country.
Education, Work, and Creative Life
Education and employment often proceeded together. Yuriko Kikuchi had taught dance to children at the Gila River camp. After moving east, she worked in Manhattan’s garment industry while studying at the Martha Graham School. Her experience illustrates the practical demands placed upon young resettlers whose professional training continued while their families remained dispersed or incarcerated.
Yoshiko Uchida was among the students who were relocated from incarceration camps to the East Coast. She pursued her studies at Smith College through the wartime student relocation program and subsequently taught at a Quaker school in Philadelphia for several years prior to relocating to New York. Uchida became a prominent figure in the discourse on the internment experience, openly discussing its implications and publishing books that focused on the Japanese American experience. Uchida collaborated with Henry Sugimoto, who also relocated from the camp, and provided the artwork for New Friends for Susan, one of her children’s books about a Japanese American girl.
Student relocation did not compensate for forced removal, family separation, or the loss of homes and livelihoods. It did help bring a new generation of Japanese Americans to New York. Their presence changed the city’s institutions, artistic networks, publications, and political organizations during and after the war.
Rebuilding Community in New York
Beginning in 1943, the War Relocation Authority increasingly encouraged Japanese Americans to leave incarceration camps for approved destinations outside the West Coast exclusion zone. Leave clearance required government approval and usually an employment or educational plan. It was connected to background investigations and to the controversial loyalty questionnaire administered in the camps. Leaving camp did not restore lost property, reunite every family, or end discrimination.
New York became an important destination for people leaving the camps for school, professional work, or new employment. They encountered an established Issei community whose families, businesses, churches, and organizations had themselves been weakened by wartime detention. Rebuilding in New York therefore joined two histories: the survival of a prewar immigrant community and the arrival of Japanese Americans displaced from the West Coast.
Resettlement in New York City
In 1944, the War Relocation Authority opened a hostel in Brooklyn Heights to provide temporary housing for Japanese Americans arriving from incarceration camps. Several hundred people stayed there during approximately two years of operation, and additional hostels followed. Some resettlers later lived near the Japanese Methodist Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side or in Inwood, where another Japanese American church operated.
New arrivals faced both formal and informal discrimination. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia publicly opposed the establishment of a War Relocation Authority hostel in Brooklyn and stated that Japanese American resettlers were not welcome in the city. Housing and employment discrimination persisted even as churches, private agencies, and established residents assisted newcomers.
Rebuilding Community Institutions
New York’s principal Japanese community organization had roots in the Japanese Mutual Aid Society, established in 1907 by Dr. Toyohiko Takami. In 1914, Takami, Dr. Jokichi Takamine, and other leaders reorganized it as the Japanese Association of New York.
The association ceased operating during World War II after many of its leaders were detained or repatriated. Reconstituted after the war, it initially concentrated on relief for Japan. Community members collected food, clothing, and funds through organizations cooperating with Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia.
As local needs changed, the association worked alongside the Japanese American Welfare Society (1946–1952), whose organizers included former detainees such as Rev. Alfred Akamatsu and Dr. Sabro Emy as well as Nisei leaders such as Dr. Masahiko Takami. In 1952, the two organizations merged to form the Japanese American Association of New York. The merger reflected a postwar community that included both Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans from different regions and generations.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 removed racial barriers that had prevented Japanese immigrants from naturalizing. This change allowed eligible Issei to apply for United States citizenship, although it came after decades during which exclusion from citizenship had intensified their wartime vulnerability.
Isaku Kida: Newspapers, Relief, and Community Memory
Isaku Kida (1905–1996) moved to New York in 1932. During World War II, after being detained at Ellis Island, he was released to work as a Japanese-language instructor for the Office of Strategic Services.
In December 1945, Kida joined the newly established Hokubei Shimpo. He became chief editor in 1949 and assumed responsibility for the newspaper’s operations in 1952. An editorial he wrote calling for aid to people facing severe hardship in postwar Japan contributed to the formation of Artifact not found in 1946, in which he participated.
The newspaper published the New York Binran in 1948–1949. This directory documented wartime organizations, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, community institutions, and notable Japanese New Yorkers. Kida’s work demonstrates that rebuilding also required creating records through which a dispersed and changing community could understand itself.
Kida collaborated with Karl Ichiro Akiya, a labor and political activist who had been incarcerated at Topaz before leaving camp to teach Japanese in an Army-sponsored language program at the University of Michigan. Akiya participated in the Japanese American Citizens League, the Furniture Workers Union, and the Communist Party USA. Their different organizational connections reveal the political range of postwar Japanese American life in New York.
Art, Testimony, and Postwar Public Life
Artists who had participated in wartime cultural and political organizations continued their work after the war. In 1948, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented a retrospective exhibition of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the first retrospective the museum devoted to a living artist. The exhibition brought national recognition to an artist who had supported the American war effort but had remained legally ineligible for citizenship throughout most of his life.
Miné Okubo (1912–2001) moved to New York after leaving Topaz to complete an illustration assignment for Fortune. She had produced thousands of drawings documenting life at Tanforan and Topaz. In 1946, she published Citizen 13660, combining concise text and drawings to describe incarceration from the perspective of a Nisei prisoner. Okubo’s work brought an individual record of confinement into postwar American public culture.
Community Legacies
Wartime resettlement created relationships that continued beyond the 1940s. Kazu Iijima and Minn Matsuda later helped establish Asian Americans for Action in 1969, and Yuri Kochiyama became active in Black liberation, political-prisoner, and Japanese American redress movements. Suki Terada Ports (1934– ), who grew up in Morningside Heights during the war, became a health-care and Asian American community advocate. These later histories belong here as a brief legacy, not as a separate account of the 1960s and 1970s.
The effects of wartime displacement also became visible in public spaces. The Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, designed by Takeo Shiota, was restored after the war by Frank Masao Okamura (1911–2006), who had been incarcerated in California. George Yuzawa (1915–2011), formerly incarcerated at Amache, built a floral business in New York and later served the Japanese American Association of New York in several leadership roles.
The postwar community was not a restoration of the Japanese New York that had existed before Pearl Harbor. It brought together Issei who had survived detention, Nisei arriving from incarceration camps, students, artists, professionals, activists, and families with different relationships to Japan and the United States. Their institutions grew from wartime disruption, but they also developed new forms of political, cultural, and social life in New York.
REFERENCES
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北米新報編集『ニューヨーク便覧 1948–1949』、ニューヨーク、北米新報社、1948年
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CREDIT
This exhibition was organized by the Digital Museum of the History of Japanese in New York.
This exhibition was made possible with support from:
J.C.C.ファンド
在ニューヨーク日本国総領事館
三井住友銀行国際協力財団
The UCLA Asian American Studies Center and the Aratani C.A.R.E. Award
Project Manager: マック・ギル
Curator: 横山由香
Exhibition Advisors
Greg Robinson, Professor of History, Université du Québec à Montréal
ゲンジ・アミノ、レオ・アミノ・エステート 取締役
Shun Ito, Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Education, Okayama University
スペシャルサンクス
野田 美知代、ニューヨーク日系人会事務局長
Eiko Aono and Akemi Takeda, JAA Archive Volunteers
Jamie Henricks, Archivist, Japanese American National Museum
Hoshina Seki, New York Buddhist Church
Kathryn Bannai, Board Member, Japanese American National Museum
Lance B. Stuart, Donor of the Jiro Kozai Family Collection
Materials appearing in this exhibition are provided by:
Japanese American Association of New York
Lutnick Library, Haverford College
シーブルック教育文化センター
ラトガース大学図書館
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
ディスカバー日系
伝承
Japanese American National Museum
ニューヨーク公立図書館
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
レオ・アミノ・エステート
アメリカフレンズ奉仕団（AFSC）
Additional credits appear in the individual image captions.
