Film details eviction of Hawaii’s Japanese Americans during WWII

Claire Takashima remembers a chilling moment that happened to her family, the Uyedas, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: “The guard came and he said, ‘You have 24 hours. You have to vacate this property. You’re gone. No one can be here.’ So they panicked, right? Because they had to be out. I mean, can you imagine moving your whole house in 24 hours?”

Takashima recounts the incident in a new documentary, “Removed by Force: The Eviction of Hawai‘i’s Japanese Americans During WWII,” by Ryan Kawamoto, a filmmaker from the Big Island who has made several documentaries about the injustices the U.S. government visited on Japanese Americans during World War II.

The film tells the little-­known, complicated story of about 1,500 Japanese Americans in Hawaii who were evicted from their homes during the war and left to fend for themselves, and their fight for redress nearly 50 years after the war ended. Their story has often been overshadowed by the story of the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans — about 2,200 from Hawaii — who were taken from their homes and incarcerated in concentration camps on the U.S. mainland.

“There’s no real good name for them, so we’re using the term ‘evicted,’ or ‘removed by force,’ ” Kawamoto said of the evictees. He recalled hearing about them while making an earlier film and being “blown away by all this information, because I’d never heard about this before.”

Oahu attorney William Kaneko has written a book on the subject and is a producer of the hourlong film, which will be screened twice at the Hawai‘i Convention Center in mid-August.

Kaneko was president of the Honolulu chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League when the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was enacted, granting reparations of $20,000 and a letter of apology to each Japanese American wrongfully incarcerated during the war.

But at the time, the issue of the evictees was virtually unknown, and their eligibility for reparations was unclear.

“You had all these pockets of AJAs (Americans of Japanese ancestry) that were just basically kicked out (of their homes),” Kaneko said. “When all the publicity about the internments came about, these unique cases started to surface. And so the question was, were these AJAs who were not interned but relocated eligible for redress?”

The film features the experiences of families such as the Uyedas, who have run a shoe store in Honolulu since 1915; the Iwaharas, who owned a major hardware store near downtown Honolulu; the Nishioka family, who had a farm near Pearl Harbor; and the Tanaka family, who ran a bar near Schofield Barracks. In the film, members of these families recount being ordered to pick up and leave their homes, but not told where to go.

“Being Japanese, I guess we were asked to move out,” recalls Jane Endo, a member of the Tanaka family, in the film. “So we ended up going to my relatives. … We just had the clothes on our back.”

As would eventually be discovered, these families were evicted because they lived near train tracks, military installations, or other facilities deemed to be of military importance, according to the documentary. That contrasted with those who were incarcerated, who were suspected of having “perceived ties to Japan,” Kaneko said, and included Japanese-language school teachers, martial arts instructors, Japanese newspaper editors and community leaders.

The film also delves into the legal battle for redress for the 1,500 evictees, which takes place after the reparations bill had been enacted. Kaneko, then leading JACL efforts to find redress recipients, was visited in 1991 by Dr. Donald Kanemaru, whose family had been living near an ammunition depot in West Oahu’s Lualualei Valley and had been evicted.

At the time, there was no known documentation proving the evictions even occurred, in contrast to those who were incarcerated, whose names were listed on camp rosters and arrest records, Kaneko said.

“The internment story is very, very well-documented,” Kaneko said. “But the eviction cases, there was really nothing.”

Collecting evidence

Soon other similar stories started to surface, from other farmers in Lualualei, former residents of Pauoa Valley, Kahuku, even other islands. The film reveals that while many of the evicted Japanese Americans were able to find housing with friends or family, others did not fare as well. Karl Sakamoto, an attorney who later worked with the evictees, tells of a person living in a chicken coop during the war, and of evictees watching their homes being used for target practice or as a brothel.

But then the question arose as to how to prove the evictions happened and that they targeted Japanese Americans in particular.

A key discovery at the time was made by Pam ­Funai, then a graduate student in American Studies at University of Hawaii at Manoa. She had been researching war records at Hamilton Library when Kaneko asked her to look for anything related to evictees.

“My first thought, ‘There’s no way I’m going to find that,’ ” Funai said in a phone call from New York, where she now lives. “I’m thinking, ‘That’s a total needle in a haystack, if the military even bothered to document it.’ ”

But in a folder labeled “Food Production,” she found a document ordering “all alien Japanese and citizens of Japanese ancestry residing in the areas hereby designated will be evacuated.” Funai thinks the order was in the folder because of the importance of farming in wartime Hawaii. Eventually 23 specific locations around the islands were found to have been subject to the same kind of evictions.

“People say, ‘Wow, you did such a great thing, but I’m like, ‘No, it was really luck,’ ” said Funai, who worked in social services for decades and now works in philanthropy. “I don’t think I did anything special except come across the right box of documents.”

Kaneko and a host of other young attorneys, working pro bono, then collected evidence of discrimination against Japanese Americans provided by their former neighbors. Chinese, Filipinos, Native Hawaiians and others testified that they also were initially evicted from sensitive areas, but “they were allowed to come back,” Kaneko said. “In some cases, the Japanese could only stay in places like at their farms during the day, but they couldn’t come back at night. So how they handled the Japanese American evictions was very different from how they handled the non-Japanese.”

Eventually about 1,500 evicted Japanese Americans qualified for redress, resulting in compensation totaling $30 million along with the letters of apology from the president of the United States.

Emotional response

At a screening in June, coincidentally held on the day that the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action, the film drew a powerful reaction from the crowd, revealing the depth of emotion that still surrounds the actions targeting Japanese Americans during the war, as well as feelings about confronting racism in general.

“In light of what’s happening in the Supreme Court and what’s happening around the nation, this is a really important story to tell and that we cannot lose,” said Karen Ginoza, a retired teacher who knows some of the evictees through her church. “What’s being lost in our books today, it’s information about history and what’s being done about discrimination.”

“This story needs to be told, because it’s as contemporary as it can be,” said former Gov. Neil Abercrombie. “We actually have someone (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) who’s running for president of the United States who’s going to attack a baby’s birthright if you’re born to an immigrant person in the United States of America, even though we have the 14th Amendment absolutely guaranteeing your birthright (to U.S. citizenship).”

Now a University of ­Hawaii regent, Abercrombie promised that “what happened at the Supreme Court is not going to happen at the University of Hawaii.”

With the documentary and Kaneko’s soon-to-be-­released book now bringing the issue to light, there’s hope that the full story of ­individual evictees, would be more widely known and understood.

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Upcoming screenings

“Removed by Force: The Eviction of Hawai‘i’s Japanese Americans During WWII”

>> Oahu: Hawai‘i Convention Center, 7 p.m. Aug. 17 and 10 a.m. Aug. 19. $10.

>> Hawaii island: Hawai‘i Japanese Center, Hilo, 2 p.m. Sept. 23. Admission TBA.

>> Maui: Nisei Veterans Memorial Center, Kahului, 1:30 p.m. Sept. 24. Free.

Visit jaclhonolulu.org for tickets and more information.