Twenty-year-old Interview Confirms Vanished Thesis

Two years after research began on why only two Nikkei families returned to Lompoc, a document has turned up which confirms the entire Vanished story.

An interview with Tony Armas, who worked as a mechanic for Jintaro Fukawa, tells the Lompoc Nikkei story and even adds a few details about postwar resistance that Vanished could not find -- like which oil company refused to deliver diesel to Victor Inouye. A transcript of the interview recently turned up in the files of the Lompoc Valley Historical Society.

We reprint it here, beginning in February 1942 when the FBI was arresting Issei leaders.

Tony Armas: They’d just go up to the house and knock on the door and ask for so and so and they knew where all of them were. They had a record, I guess, of all of them. And they went to the house where my boss lived and he was in the shop where I was working on a tractor. And so she told them what it was. They came over there and took out their billfold and a badge of some kind and said they were the authorities. And I happened to look over and I could see some other Japanese that I knew. They came in caravans – they wanted them all at once. And they took every Japanese alien, men, from this valley, I believe, in the first day.

Interviewer: What did they do with the families then?

Tony Armas: Families just stayed and tried to find out what’s gonna happen next. And they just brutally took their people away from their families. That’s the way I could put it.

Interviewer: They didn’t give them time to pack?

Tony Armas: They didn’t give them time, no more. My boss asked if he could get an overcoat in the house, and one of the officers went with him. They came back out and started to get in this truck, an army truck – it was green on the side. You could see it was a military truck. Then there was also a bus. I think the bus was mostly government people in case there was trouble or anything. Then no more than when he got ready to step up on the truck, (the tailgate was down), he took out his billfold and his wife started to cry and he gave his billfold to his wife.

Interviewer: They didn’t get to take anything?

Tony Armas: They didn’t get to take nothing. They did allow them to go in and get an overcoat.

Interviewer: Were these families compensated in any way?

Tony Armas: They didn’t give them nothing. They lost everything they had.

Interviewer: And then the families had to leave?

Tony Armas: Later the families had to leave. I wasn’t there when they took the families. It was about a month or two later, the families went to join them wherever they was at. I heard they had taken some down to Santa Anita Racetrack. They took the horses out and made housing for them to live in there. They took them to different parts of California. Some of them they took clear back into Colorado.

Interviewer: Did the government actually sell their land to other…?

Tony Armas: They didn’t own their land. There was only two Japanese families that owned land in Lompoc and that was the Inouyes and the Kitaguchis out here by Rivaldis. They were the only two that I know that owned land because they were American citizens. They couldn’t even have the lease in their name. They had an American citizen that used to sign all the leases in Lompoc for all the Japanese.

Interviewer: This was before the war broke out?

Tony Armas: Before the war broke out. He would sign all the leases. George Nishimura, he was about 35 or 40 years old – he was an American citizen. He was the one that had a packing shed here, and he signed all the leases for all the Japanese. And these two people that owned the land – they couldn’t take it away from them. People just started farming it because it was vacant. But they came back. These two families came back. The rest of them tried to come back and start businesses here and the attitude of everybody – all the farmers in the valley – banded together and they would just not lease a piece of ground to a Japanese. Now Guadalupe was a little bit different. They did come back there and started farming there.

Interviewer: The ones that left here then, more or less, just had leases?

Tony Armas: Just had leases.

Interviewer: The two that came back then, were they able to regain their property?

Tony Armas: They were able to start farming their property. One of them I knew real well. I was farming their ground because I went to school with one of the daughters.

Interviewer: Which one was this?

Tony Armas: Inouye, Toshi Inouye’s folks owned the land right back over here. There was fifteen acres in one spot and about ten acres in another spot. And I, on the side, was doing some farming. So I farmed that ground for them toward the end of the war. I mean, at first I don’t know who had it. Some person let it grow into weeds and nobody had it and then somebody went in there and worked it up and planted it. They lost all their equipment. Most of these farmers had tractors, big tractors, Farmall tractors, planters, rollers, everything it would take to farm vegetables. They just left it sit and most of them were paying on that so much each year. A lot of it got repossessed by the companies they had contracts with and some of it was sold for whatever they could get. Who was in charge of that I don’t know but I heard that Grossman was in charge of quite a bit of  selling some of the equipment. They got little or nothing for it.

Interviewer: Your boss’ name was……..

Tony Armas: He was George Fukawa.

Interviewer: The two who came back, was there strong feelings against them by the farmers in the valley?

Tony Armas: Yes, I heard it from the horse’s mouth that an oil company that was supplying diesel fuel refused to deliver diesel fuel to this one Japanese that wanted to start farming. He just flat refused to deliver fuel to him. This was Inouye, and they wrote to the oil company that they had credit with, Union Oil Company, that they refused to deliver diesel fuel to them. They were all banded together in Lompoc. They wasn’t gonna let Japanese back into Lompoc and they did a good job of doing that, because you don’t see any of them farming in Lompoc. I mean, I think there is one or two that were born here. They’re farming here. The company wrote to this oil company man and told him “You will deliver fuel to Inouye.” He made the brag that he wasn’t going to deliver any fuel to them, and later I heard the company gave him strict orders that he’d lose his dealership if he would not deliver fuel to them.

Interviewer: This was a representative here in Lompoc?

Tony Armas: Yes, the delivery man. Delivered here for years. There’s a few of the die-hard farmers, the bigger farmers here in the valley, that just didn’t want to see them come back. You see, they had gotten so poor while they were farming here. They figured they could do it good. We didn’t need the Japanese any more. But the Japanese came in here and showed them what they could do with these parts.

Interviewer: Anything else about the Japanese that you remember?

Tony Armas: Well, all I could say I enjoyed working for near five years for the one that I worked for. That’s the first job I had. After my dad passed away, he leased thirty-five acres. He didn’t even get a crop out of it. The river took it. He gave me a job knowing that I was alone. He helped me out with his equipment to do the farming. The rest of the farming that my dad used to do was with horses. My boss had these two big tractors and he says, “You getting ready to farm your ground? Here, take my equipment.” Never charged me a penny. Even furnished the fuel. 

The Rest of the Story on San Luis Obispo

As I began last week to tell the story of post-war resettlement in San Luis Obispo, here is the rest of the story. A longer version will be available as a supplement to copies of Vanished sold at the SLO Obon Festival.

When Eric Thomsen’s War Relocation Authority office for the California Central Coast closed in February 1946, resettlement numbers indicated that resistance had been more successful than not.

On January 31 Thomsen wrote, “Individuals and families constantly encourage other families to come West but not with much success up in San Luis Obispo County, where it is manifestly almost impossible for them to earn a living.”

Before the war one-quarter of the Tri-Counties’ Nikkei population resided in San Luis Obispo County, 925 out of 3700. But after the war, specifically by January 19, 1946, sixty days after closure of all but one of the WRA’s camps, Thomsen’s SLO statistics counted only 149 Nikkei who had returned.

In his entire three-county district, Thomsen had placed 1400 returnees, assisted hugely by the city of Santa Barbara which took in far more than its share. But the district total represented only 38% of the 3700 Nikkei sent away in 1942. San Luis Obispo County’s 149, reduced from 925, was even less, representing a return rate of only 16%.

San Luis Obispo a Lot like Lompoc

In advance of the San Luis Obispo Obon Festival, to which I have been invited by Heritage Source booksellers to speak and sign books, I have done a bit of research to compare San Luis Obispo County to the Lompoc area. Here's what I've found.

On at least one score, call it the Nikkei index, World War II-era San Luis Obispo was a lot like Lompoc. After Pearl Harbor much of the town turned against its Asian residents. The city council even changed the name of Eto Street to Brook Street before the Nikkei community was bussed away to intermountain “internment” camps in April 1942. 

By 1945 most camps were scheduled to close, in November. The Department of the Interior’s War Relocation Authority (WRA) was charged with assisting Japanese-Americans in resettling. They were free to leave camp beginning in the spring and many wanted to return to their pre-war hometowns. But fear kept the vast majority either in camp until they closed, or led them far afield to cities like Chicago, Cleveland and Philadelphia, none of them near California.

The WRA agent for San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties was Eric H. Thomsen, whose previous experience in relocation was with the Tennessee Valley Authority and then with the Resettlement Administration which assisted Dustbowl Refugees.

Thomsen considered public officials in his area to be allies in his agency’s efforts, with a few exceptions. SLO Sheriff Murray C. Hathway was one of them.

Thomsen’s reports to his superiors in Los Angeles pulled no punches. Thomsen labelled Hathway a “Nippomaniac.” He was, Thomsen wrote in August 1945, “of less help to us than any other public officer in the district.” Thomsen reports numerous examples, some involving Hathway, others business people or neighbors of would-be returnees, all of which contributed to statistics almost as dramatic as Lompoc’s.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK

Endo Family Discusses 'Vanished' in Reno

A big round of applause for the Endo Family Reunion which was held in Reno last week--

This was the twelfth biennial reunion of the Endo, Hirano, Iwamoto, Sugiyama, and Tachiki families. More than 230 attended. If that were not impressive enough, for a Saturday workshop to discuss Vanished and the importance of recording family histories it was expected that maybe twenty might attend.

To the organizers’ surprise the room was jammed with fifty people interested in the topic.

John McReynolds told stories about assembling Vanished, then offered guidelines that anyone can use to conduct an interview with a family member. After demonstrating, he helped the group to divide into eight or nine subsets to conduct brief interviews. After overcoming their hesitancy, the sub-groups could barely stop talking when it was time to close and give reports.  

“We learned so much we didn’t know, just in a few minutes,” exclaimed one group reporter. "I hope we can do more of this back home."

Many thanks for the invitation.