It's a Free Country

As the time approached, thousands of levelheaded citizens caught the tension on the Pacific Coast, talked of "The Day the Japs Start Coming Back" as though it were in capitals, like a play title. But by the time the Army lifted its 22-month-old Japanese exclusion order last week it was already apparent that there was going to be no westward rush of Japanese-Americans from the camps.

At week's end only 27 had started for the coast. Most of them were men making temporary visits, like Indian scouts moving warily into another tribe's territory.

Many of the Japanese citizens who stayed in the interior had no intention of returning until the war's end, when they would get back property leased after Pearl Harbor. Many more had no intention of going back at all. Of 110,000 evacuated from the coast after Pearl Harbor, 35,000 had already settled in the East or Middle West; they had been received at farms and war plants with no outcry at all.

Other thousands who hoped to return eventually to their old homes on the coast delayed their going: they feared housing shortages and the open enmity of former friends and neighbors.

Friends. Many a West Coast citizen believed, with Dillon Myer, director of the War Relocation Authority, that the Japanese could resettle in coastal areas with little real difficulty. There were signs that most Pacific Coast citizens recognized the right of the Japanese to return and live in peace. Thousands more were warmly sympathetic toward the evacuees, indignant at the speeches against them.

There were dozens of instances of friendliness: Ray Sato, a 27-year-old Nisei from Hood River, focal point of Oregon racial intolerance, received 30 reassuring letters from former neighbors when he decided to go home. When Bruce McGill, a wealthy Sierra Madre (Calif.) businessman, ran an anti-Japanese newspaper advertisement, he found himself virtually ostracized by other citizens, who promptly ran a second ad, welcoming evacuees.

But the anti-Japanese feeling of a raucous minority still flared all along the coast.

Enemies. At Auburn, Calif., a deputy sheriff named John L. Shannon said: "I haven't any more use for a Jap than I have for a rattlesnake, and I don't care a damn if the whole world knows it."

In Washington's coastal White River valley, directors of an organization known as Remember Pearl Harbor League, Inc. ate a steak dinner, voted to boycott returning Japanese, listened with admiration to a member's opinion of Nisei in the U.S. Army: "They're all loyal to Hirohito."

Farmers crowded into the flag-draped town hall at Gardena, Calif, and applauded vociferously as Austrian-born John R. Lechner shouted: "We know the Japanese have super-submarines which carry 1,000 men--they're waiting for the return of California Japanese to start their invasion. They'll come in through the fog banks, led by 10,000 officers trained in American universities."

It was no wonder that among the dispossessed still in the camps there was indecision and bewilderment.

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