Word: nisei
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Whatever our fellow Japanese-Americans might have done in Hawaii at the time of Pearl Harbor attack, we Nisei on the California coast certainly do not wish to be looked upon as potential saboteurs or fifth columnists. Neither do we have any desire to be charged responsible if and when any single bomb is dropped here, for it is quite certain that enraged public will look for a scapegoat in us on such event...
...demand for indiscriminate expulsion of first and second generation Japanese in California did not come from the masses of the people. Even when Californians were still stunned by the sudden attack on Pearl Harbor, there was great sympathy for the Isei and Nisei [alien and citizen Japs] placed in this tragic position through no fault of their own. Most Californians were content to let the FBI weed out the undesirables...
...enough. So they began to pack their keepsakes, lift their slant-eyed children on their arms, and start on the long migration east across the Sierra Nevadas, to dreary inland country far from the blue sea. They were some of the West Coast's 70,000-odd Nisei. Their honorable ancestors were Japanese...
...Lieut. General John Lesesne DeWitt, chief of the Western Defense Command, marked off a strip of land curving some 2,000 miles along the Pacific, along the Mexican border, from Canada to New Mexico. Out of this coastal region all the thousands on thousands of enemy aliens and all Nisei must...
From strategic military areas all racial Japanese including Nisei, must go first. From less important zones, evacuation will be gradual, and voluntary - for a while. About April 15, the screw will probably be turned: slow-moving Japs will be sped eastward. Impractical, said General DeWitt, were immediate mass evacuations. Germans and Italians over 70 years of age, or any who have sons or brothers serving in the U.S. armed forces, will not be required to move unless suspicion touches them. But all Japs, no matter how old, must leave the Coast-even if they have sons in the Army...