During WWII: Working With Those Who Look Like The Enemy by M. Ruth Myers

“I’m American, born to American parents,” a young girl announces in the opening scene of Ration of Lies, the eighth and most recent book in my Maggie Sullivan mystery series.

Daisy Hashimoto is the fictional face of a little-known historical fact: Between 1943 and 1946, when most of America’s Japanese-American citizens were being held in remote internment camps surrounded by barb-wire fences and machine guns, more than 150 such individuals came to Dayton, Ohio, where jobs and housing had been arranged for them throughout the city.

The program that brought them to work in factories, hospitals, and agricultural enterprises, as well as other venues, was the result of work by a committee of the Church Federation of Dayton and Montgomery County. In addition to finding jobs for them, the Federation also found housing for them – no small task in a city already swollen by people arriving to meet the need for round-the-clock workers in factories and at nearby Wright and Patterson air fields. Most of the housing arranged for the Japanese-Americans was with families from the 129 churches participating in the project. Some communal dwellings were provided for single men.

To get a sense of the leap of faith ordinary Daytonians must have needed when these people who looked “different” arrived in their midst, consider:

• Newspapers and radio carried almost daily accounts of bloody battles between American and Japanese forces in the Pacific.
• According to the 1940 census, Dayton, a city of just over 200,000, had only two Japanese residents.
• When McCall Corporation asked members of its labor union if they were willing to have Japanese-Americans working alongside of them, the vote was a unanimous Yes.

Two and a half years earlier, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066 sending all Japanese-Americans living on the West coast, most of whom were American citizens, into “relocation” camps. They lost their homes, their businesses — and their dignity.

By 1943, the US government began making limited attempts to find jobs and housing for individuals confined to the camps if they were willing to relocate to other parts of the country. Most such attempts failed due to community hostility. Success rates were highest in the Midwest, where a handful of programs similar to the one in Dayton succeeded.

In Ration of Lies, a young Japanese-American man is suspected of starting a fatal fire in his workplace when he’s seen running away. His family hires private eye Maggie Sullivan to learn what became of him, and whether or not he’s guilty.

I gave my fictional family, the Hashimotos, another fact-based element that shows the deep pride Japanese-Americans felt as citizens despite the treatment they were receiving. The older of the Hashimotos’ sons is serving in the 442nd Infantry Regiment, a US Army unit composed primarily of Nisei (second generation) Japanese-Americans.

On May 28, 1944, this all-Nisei unit landed on Anzio Beach in Italy and fought their way through Tuscany. In late September, they landed in France where they fought in the Rhone Valley. They remain the most decorated unit in US military history. The losses they sustained were enormous. Nearly 60 years later, 20 men from this unit received the Medal of Honor.

Dayton’s experiment in opening its doors to Japanese-American workers succeeded without notable problems. At the end of the war, in fact, some of the families who came to the city through the Church Federation project elected to stay in the community and make homes of their own there.

M. Ruth Myers, November 4, 2019