Doctors Found a Way to Treat Tradition of Bias

A 72-year era ended in July, 1985, with the closure of City View Hospital in Los Angeles. It was an era most Californians probably did not realize existed.

In a recent study, a doctor of Japanese descent details how earlier generations of Japanese, well before Pearl Harbor, set up their own hospitals because of discrimination.

At one time, thriving Japanese hospitals in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Fresno, Stockton and San Jose served as silent precursors to one of the darkest episodes in U.S. history.

Although most Americans are aware that 110,000 Japanese-Americans, 75,000 of them U.S. citizens, were forced into internment camps during World War II, only recently has the earlier example of discrimination been publicized.

Dr. Troy Tashiro Kaji, a 1986 graduate of the School of Medicine at the University of California, Davis, says in his study that the development of Japanese-American hospitals in California was prompted by prejudice.

Disproportionate Deaths

Denied “sympathetic medical care” by most hospitals, Kaji said, Japanese-Americans suffered a disproportionate number of deaths from such disasters as the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Kaji said Japanese-Americans responded by beginning to form their own hospitals in California in 1913.

Other factors contributing to the development the ethnic hospitals, Kaji said, included the immigration of about 220,000 Japanese people to California in the first 30 years of this century, the difficulty Japanese-Americans physicians encountered in their attempts to obtain California medical licenses, and the language barrier.

Even before Pearl Harbor, Kaji said, the Japanese were not welcome in the Golden State.

Kaji quoted a 1922 state report titled “California and the Orient,” which read: “ . . . The people of California are determined to repress a developing Japanese community within our midst. They are determined to exhaust every power in their keeping to maintain this state for its own people.”

Kaji became interested in the history of ethnic hospitals because his grandfather, the late Dr. Kikuo Tashiro, helped form and incorporate the Japanese Hospital of Los Angeles, which later became the City View facility.

The efforts of Tashiro and four other resident Japanese physicians to incorporate the hospital in 1926 led to a discrimination case that eventually reached the California and U.S. supreme courts.

The incorporation petition was refused by the secretary of state’s office, which said that “aliens ineligible for citizenship” could not incorporate under a 1911 treaty between the United States and Japan.

Japanese and other Asians, Kaji said, were at that time ineligible for citizenship.

Kaji said his research showed that “the secretary of state, among others, was then engaged in actions against the Japanese, as part of a statewide anti-Japanese movement in the years leading up to World War II.”

Victories in Court

The California Supreme Court sided with the doctors in 1927, and in 1928 the highest court in the land agreed.

The hospital’s articles of incorporation were approved on Feb. 2, 1929, but because of the 1911 treaty, the new hospital had to be organized as a commercial venture.

That paid off, Kaji said.

“With the outbreak of war between the United States and Japan,” he said, “the Japanese-American community was subjected to increasing pressure to evacuate the West Coast.

“The trustees (of the hospital) sought a way to maintain the hospital should the evacuation take place.”

A neighboring Seventh-Day Adventist hospital agreed to maintain the Japanese hospital during the war. When the Japanese doctors were released from internment camps in 1945, the hospital became theirs again.

If the hospital had not been incorporated as a commercial venture, Kaji said, it probably would have been seized in 1941 along with many other Japanese holdings.

The hospitals eventually fell by the wayside because of the lack of paying patients and the refusal of non-Japanese people to use the Japanese-run facilities.

Special Ward

Kaji said that although City View Hospital may be a thing of the past, the Japanese-American community in Los Angeles is still being served.

The City View staff, he said, uses a 16-bed wing at St. Vincent’s Medical Center as a special Japanese-language ward.

Kaji said that although the closure of City View marked the end of a 72-year era, the need still exists for such hospitals in cities with large ethnic concentrations.

“I think they can be unique and excellent training areas for ethnically oriented hospice care, premedical community health awareness and ethnically oriented programs,” Kaji said.