Healing Wounds of War : Archives Tell Story of INS Camps for Civilians Held as Enemies

“Today is the dawn of the CCC camp of Tujunga . . . it is most painful to be cut off from the outside world.” --Daisho Tana’s diary Sunday, March 15, 1942

From the day after the Pearl Harbor attack until the end of 1943, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ran a little-known detention center in Tujunga for civilians classed as enemies of the United States.

Daisho Tana, a teacher and Buddhist priest, was among them.

But his is a story that until now has been largely untold. Historians have focused on U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry ordered by presidential proclamation into camps tactfully called “relocation” centers.

Little attention has been given to the thousands of Japanese citizens and the smaller number of Italian and German citizens taken to 10 permanent and 20 temporary detention facilities created by the INS during World War II.

One of them was the Tuna Canyon Detention Station, a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp six miles north of Burbank. The camp, now the site of the Verdugo Hills Golf Course, became the gateway to detention for the judo instructors, bankers, Buddhist priests and community leaders that the U.S. government dubbed dangerous enemy aliens.

Now, a series of recently released documents will help to bring their stories to light.

Federal archivists discovered the Los Angeles area enemy alien files, including 2,625 individual case files, by chance in 1991, but they needed years to organize the material. The documents became publicly accessible just this year, said Paul Wormser, of the National Archives office in Laguna Niguel.

Professional and amateur historians are digging into the documents, which are helping them to fill in gaps of information. Among the first to solve a family mystery is William Hohri of Lomita.

Hohri was a promising gymnast living in North Hollywood in 1941, the Americanized child of Japanese immigrants. His father, Daisuke, 57, was a Methodist minister who served a mostly Japanese congregation that met at an American Legion Hall.

Authorities arrested Daisuke Hohri within hours after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the nation into World War II.

William Hohri wasn’t sure why his father, now dead, was detained--until he discovered the INS file recently in Laguna Niguel. It had been difficult to communicate with his Japanese-speaking father, who did not want to talk about it. He found the government had singled out Daisuke Hohri in part because he was a religious leader.

“I was just stunned,” William Hohri said, his voice quivering with anger. “I don’t think anybody can believe their rationale. Because he was a Christian preacher, he was more suspect than if he were a farmer.”

Daisuke Hohri was one of 311 Japanese citizens arrested by Dec. 10, 1941, compared to 59 Germans and 10 Italians, the FBI’s regional office in Los Angeles reported.

Stung by criticism that the United States had overreacted to the threat represented by German citizens during World War I, U.S. authorities were more discriminating in choosing Germans to detain as “dangerous” during World War II, said Roger Daniels, a historian at the University of Cincinnati.

But the same was not true for the Japanese, who Daniels said U.S. authorities found “inscrutable.” Existing immigration laws complicated matters because Japanese citizens living in the United States, like Daisuke Hohri, were barred by law from becoming citizens, regardless of how long they had lived here.

But in the atmosphere that reigned during the war, the public applauded the arrests. Marian Smith, the INS historian, said there were few questions about the constitutionality of the federal policies.

But Daniels, the Cincinnati historian, said placing of names on a list of people “possibly harmful to the United States” amounted to “guilt by association.” “It is true they were on lists . . . but they were [listed for] doing things like teaching in a Japanese language school,” said Daniels.

Daisho Tana was among those caught in the fervor. He was 40 when the war broke out, a Japanese language teacher living in Lompoc with his wife and two children. He told authorities he had studied at Kyoto Buddhist College in Japan and had come to this country as a missionary seven years before the war began.

Those ties to Japan troubled the FBI, which said Japanese language schools were “a possible source of dissemination of Japanese propaganda.” Like dozens of other language instructors, Tana was taken to Tuna Canyon camp.

Mabel Abe, a Japanese American who still lives in Tujunga, occasionally accompanied her father to Tuna Canyon as a teen-ager. Families were allowed to see the detainees in a holding pen.

“My father used to call it the kennel,” Abe, now 72, recalled.

Officials were supposed to detain people in the barracks of Tuna Canyon temporarily, until they received a hearing. But usually they were held there until there were enough inmates to constitute a trainload to be moved inland.

Yet despite the guards, the barbed wire and the twice-weekly visitors, many Tujunga residents at the time never knew the true use of the rustic barracks, washroom and mess hall that were located off a dirt road.

“It was kind of hush-hush because they didn’t want people to panic,” Abe said, recalling a time when strangers would threaten her on the street and when her family had to turn in their radios and pocketknives.

“My mother would say, ‘what do you expect? We’re considered the enemy aliens. ‘ “

Like those at Tuna Canyon, authorities at a Griffith Park camp maintained a low profile. Now the site of Travel Town, the detention area had two separate but adjoining camps with fences topped by barbed wire, sentry boxes at each corner and floodlighting.

Though first constructed as a temporary internment camp, the Griffith Park site became a prisoner of war processing station in 1943, according to U.S. Army records. But it was also a stop for civilian enemy aliens, INS documents show.

On Christmas Day, 1941, Daisuke Hohri and at least 90 others were placed on a train to Montana. There, at Ft. Missoula, far from any witnesses who might testify to his character, Daisuke Hohri’s case was heard. The hearing board ruled that a trip to Japan that Hohri took before the war and membership in an Japanese army veterans’ society, together with his religious role, constituted grounds for internment.

He would spend the balance of the war moving from camp to camp, and later telling his son that one of the things he hated most was cleaning the latrines at Tuna Canyon.

Tana, too, spent the war in confinement, earning release in the year after the United States celebrated V-J Day.

Scholars are awaiting the release of more documents next year. And the families, like William and Yuriko Hohri, will use them to figure out what their parents could not explain. “The only thing I can say is that I’m in the same boat as a lot of people,” Hohri said.

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Detention Camp

During World War II, the Tuna Canyon Dentention Station became home to Japanese, Italian and German citizens whom the U.S. goverment deemed dangerous enemy aliens. The site, a former Civilian Conservation Corps. near Burbank, is now occupied by the Verdugo Hills Golf Course.