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Imperial Japanese warplanes that bombed Pearl Harbor and outlying airfields 80 years ago propelled the U.S. entry into a world war that touched every American family, including my five uncles and one aunt.
These bombings on Dec. 7, 1941, also touched off another Pearl Harbor that has escalated to engulf us today and in the foreseeable future.
The Other Pearl Harbor began as Imperial Japanese warplanes began disappearing from Honolulu’s skies. Then U.S. government agents in the Territory of Hawaii and on the mainland unleashed a stealth attack by rounding up targeted Japanese American residents. In Hawaii, a National Park Service website states, “Roughly 800 people were interned.”
This attack is etched out in a riveting new book published by University of Hawaii Press, “Remembering Our Grandfathers’ Exile: US Imprisonment of Hawai‘i’s Japanese in World War II,” written by my friend, Professor Emerita Gail Y. Okawa.
She spent 18 years tracing and chronicling the secretive arrest, interrogation, exile from Hawaii and incarceration of her grandfather, the Rev. Tamasaku Watanabe and other exiled Hawaii residents.
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All had been handpicked by U.S. agents because they were community influencers described as “enemy aliens” suspected of disloyalty; all were first-generation Japanese immigrants — Issei — prohibited by law from becoming citizens. This roundup included priests, a coffee farmer, a newspaper editor and teachers. Citing others, Okawa notes that U.S. agents “seized more than seven thousand Japanese resident aliens from the continental United States and the Territories of Hawaii and Alaska.”
On that particular Sunday, Watanabe, a Protestant minister at the Olaa Japanese Christian Church on the Big Island, was arrested in his parsonage. In the last entry in his pocket diary for the day, he unwittingly foresaw the loss of freedom that awaited him and other Issei: “Legend of the Wingless Birds.”
He was taken to the Kilauea Military Camp at Volcano, and about 10 weeks later, had a hearing before a four-member board in Hilo. He was grilled on his work for the Japanese Consulate, in which he had helped his parishioners fill out papers.
He was asked, “Which side do you want to win, your country or our country?” He replied in English, “I don’t like to think such things, only I want to come peace quickly.” The board found his activities had been “pro-Japanese though not necessarily anti-American.” The military judge recommended he be interned for the duration of the war. The two civilian board members and a military captain recommended his release.
Instead of release, he was shipped 10 days later to the Immigration Station in Honolulu, then to the Sand Island Internment Camp. Then he and 690 other seized Issei were shipped to the mainland over 22 months.
Watanabe arrived in mid-1943 at the Sante Fe Internment Camp, his “behind-barbed-wire” home until several months after the war ended. He returned home “a changed man,” his family told Okawa. He died in 1968 of cancer.
Rounding up Watanabe and his fellow Issei so swiftly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor was made possible because decades earlier, the federal government began compiling dossiers of paper documents and photographs on selected individuals. “America did not develop a systematic national collection of criminal records until the 1930s,” writes Kenneth Laudon in “Dossier Society.”
How this dossier-collection system played out in Hawaii for Issei was detailed by Okawa. She quotes President Roosevelt’s memo of 1936: “every Japanese citizen or non-citizen … who meets these Japanese ships [calling at Hawaii ports] or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble.” Four years later a special list was authorized by Congress with enactment of the Alien Registration Act.
(This Other Pearl Harbor is often overshadowed by the mass, indiscriminate evacuation of entire families — toddlers to grandpas — from the West Coast two months later. These unjustified roundups and internments of Japanese residents so shattered the bedrock values of the United States and its Constitution that the nation made an apology and reparations in 1988.)
Locating Watanabe and other Issei was also facilitated by gleaning personally identifiable information from the U.S. census taken only a year earlier. Although the U.S. Census Bureau assures confidentiality to individuals answering questions, this promise was broken, scholars report, and census data were used to hunt down targeted Japanese.
In today’s more mobile America, 10 years is too long a period for the government to track down the whereabouts of persons of interest. That’s why when we apply for a driver’s license, we must provide three credible examples showing our place of residence during the past three months. And we must provide our fingerprint, historically used only by police for processing criminal suspects. Since the 9/11 devastation of New York’s Twin Towers in 2001, face-recognition cameras photograph our mug shots when applying for a driver’s license.
The roundup of Rev. Watanabe and other Issei gives a blueprint for today’s surveillance system of us by federal government agencies that can be linked to state and local data collections. This silent surveillance system has since the new millennium tremendously shifted power to the government and away from the very individuals who had once sought protection from it.
Paralleling this political shift in power is an evolving economic order called surveillance capitalism. It is “an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data” globally to maximize profits, according to Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor emeritus, who wrote “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”
She names the private surveillance corporations: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, five of the six largest publicly traded companies globally.
Like Rev. Watanabe 80 years ago, she notes, “Users did not suspect that their data was secretly hunted and captured from every corner of the internet and later from apps, smartphones, devices, cameras and sensors.”
Zuboff warns of the wreckage surveillance capitalism causes: “the wholesale destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the poisoning of social discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions.”
These two revolutionary, post-2001 political and economic orders — the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism — flow from the old-fashioned blueprint used to hunt down, round up and imprison Rev. Watanabe and his fellow Issei. These Issei are worth remembering, because we all are as vulnerable as they were 80 years ago.
Beverly Deepe Keever, a journalism professor emerita at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, authored “Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting.”
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