Success in business and politics hasn’t erased youthful memories of prejucide and detention-camp life : Pain of Internment Is Slow to Fade

Forty-six years later, Jim Kanno still feels the anger. He will try to cover it with achievements in politics, academia and business. He will mask it with a smile. He will temper it with affluence.

But the bitterness won’t go away. What more can he do, Kanno asks, to convince others that he is a loyal American?

During World War II, the Kannos were among 120,000 Japanese-Americans, mostly from the West Coast, who were forced to leave their homes and live in detention camps. An estimated 16,000 people from Orange County alone were ordered to the camps.

A decade later, Kanno was elected mayor of Fountain Valley, an affluent and mostly white farming community, becoming the first Nisei (first-generation Japanese-American) to hold that office in the United States.

Yet even now, after a lifetime of farming in Orange County, Kanno, 62, still is asked if he is sorry he bombed Pearl Harbor.

And at his tennis club, he says, friends jokingly suggest that he run for president. They tell him, he said, “Hey, the Japanese are taking over the entire country and sooner or later they’ll take over the White House. We’d rather have you as president, Jim, because at least you’re Japanese we know.”

But he is not Japanese.

He is one of the 60,000 Americans of Japanese descent who would receive payments of $20,000 each as reparation for being incarcerated during the war, if legislation passed by the U.S. Senate last week becomes law. The federal government also would issue a formal apology to those people, most of whom were U.S. citizens.

Members of the House of Representatives have already passed the bill and are expected to approve the minor changes in the Senate version and send it to the White House, possibly this week.

The news of the legislation’s approval does not please Kanno, who says he fears it might awaken a new wave of anti-Japanese sentiment.

“It’s kind of nice that the government is doing this,” he said, “but I feel this is best left buried, put aside. This took place a long time ago, and time heals.”

Kanno’s blond, blue-eyed wife, Frances, sitting next to him in their posh Tustin home, said her husband would never criticize the United States or its legislation. But she is willing to put it more bluntly: “Twenty thousand bucks isn’t worth it if it’s going to stir up the people. If it makes them angry, it doesn’t pay off.”

Jim Kanno nodded and added, “We don’t want people to think, ‘First they bomb Pearl Harbor and now we have pay them.’ ”

Still, he said, the detention of Japanese-Americans in camps was wrong.

Kanno was born in Santa Ana, where his family had moved two years earlier to farm. Most elementary schools were segregated, and so were the barber shops. “Japs” were allowed only in the balconies at theaters and were banned from the best beaches.

“I grew up being called ‘Jap.’ It doesn’t really bother me,” Kanno said. “They used it so much, even people that didn’t mean it in a derogatory way would say that.”

When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Kanno was a junior in high school. He remembers addressing his class about rumors that Japanese-Americans would be relocated to detention camps for the duration of the war.

“I remember telling the class that we were fighting the war to preserve democracy and freedom for all religions and races,” he said. “So there’s no way they’re going to send us to government relocation centers.

“A month later they sent us there.”

Kanno was plowing land on May 12, 1942, when FBI agents and sheriff’s deputies pulled up in a car and made the arrests. He was 16 years old.

The Kanno family was taken to Parker, Ariz., with 20,000 other people. Bunk beds were hard and small, the floors and walls were cracked, the latrines were dirty and the mess hall food was bad, Kanno conceded, “but to me it was more like an adventure.”

Today, Kanno acknowledges that he resented the way he and his family were treated but added that he has tried to put it behind him.

“It’s like your parents punishing you when you’re a kid,” he said. “After a while, you don’t hold a grudge anymore.”

Economics, Kanno said, was one of the main reasons why Japanese-Americans were taken to camps. Niseis had a large share of California’s produce and fishing markets at the time, he pointed out, “and there were many pressures to get us out.”

But it was harder for Kanno to forget the way the war ended. Raising his voice for the first time, Kanno said the atomic bomb was “a horrible weapon used against my ancestors. Japan was totally defeated, and (the bombs) shouldn’t have been used.”

After 12 months in the camp, he contracted a fever and was sent to a hospital, where he spent a year and a half. But this bit of information comes from his wife: Kanno does not volunteer that the detention camp illness represents the most painful chapter in his life.

When the war ended and the Kannos returned home, Japanese nationals for the first time were allowed to become U.S. citizens. Kanno’s parents were first in line, he said.

Degree From UCLA

Kanno graduated from UCLA with a degree in agricultural engineering, and, with his brother George, bought farmland in Fountain Valley and prospered.

In 1957 Fountain Valley was incorporated, and Kanno became its first mayor.

“I wanted to show other Niseis that there were no limits to what could be done in this country,” Kanno said of his proudest moment. His election attracted the national media, and even Japanese reporters crossed the Pacific to interview him.

In 1970, Kanno returned to Japan for the first time in almost 50 years. He has visited frequently since, polishing his command of the language. He likes to visit, he says, because the gaigin (foreigner) is treated so well.

For years, the Kannos had abandoned the rituals of his ancestors. Even now they offer guests Coke or beer, but not tea. Few Japanese items decorate their spacious white stucco house with its Impressionist landscapes, French furniture and library of classics.

Still, this is the home of a wealthy man who venerates Japanese culture. Nowadays, Kanno said, most of his time is consumed by his duties as chairman of the Japanese American Council of the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County, which organizes Japanese art exhibits and dances and sponsors Japanese film series and concerts.

Japanese Studies

He also is an enthusiastic member of Konnichi Kai, a Los-Angeles based group that studies, in Kanno’s words, “the art and tradition of tea, and the philosophy of life contained in the mechanics of serving tea.”

At about the same time when Kanno began rediscovering Japan, a salesman came to his door and asked if the former mayor was sorry he had bombed Pearl Harbor.

Frances Kanno was even more angry years later when a grocery store clerk asked her 4-year-old daughter years if she spoke English.

“He thought my daughter was a boat person from Cambodia,” she said.

The daughter of well-to-do, “typical red-neck family,” Frances Kanno frequently has heard people call UC Irvine “the University of Chinese Immigrants,” a reference to the school’s large Asian student body.

And Jim Kanno, now a semi-retired real estate dealer, said he still feels excluded at times from deals by business associates who see him as some kind of Japanese entrepreneur, trying to take over. In fact, he said in arguing for a “one-world, one economy” laissez-faire economic system, there is nothing wrong with expansion of Japanese business in the United States. But there is something wrong with the fear of it, he says.

He points to the recent attempt by a Japanese firm to buy a Silicon Valley firm, a move blocked by the U.S. government. The company, he said, had been purchased a few years earlier by a French firm.

“So it’s OK to have a French firm in the Silicon Valley but not a Japanese company?” Kanno said. “It boils down to a racial thing.”