Southland’s Way Station for WWII Internees

On the night of Feb. 21, 1942, the FBI surrounded the Torrance home of Nikuma Tanouye.

“They didn’t even bother to knock, just kicked the door down,” Tanouye’s granddaughter, Diane Tanouye, said in an interview. He was arrested and imprisoned along with four other Japanese nationals.

From days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor until the end of 1943, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ran a detention center in the Crescenta Valley for civilians classified as “dangerous enemy aliens.”

The elder Tanouye, 56 at the time of his arrest, was a martial arts specialist and kendo instructor. His skills and his standing in the community made him a suspect -- leaders were considered a threat.

Documents at the National Archives in Laguna Niguel help tell Tanouye’s story and that of nearly 2,700 other Japanese citizens and a smaller number of Germans, Italians and others who passed through Tuna Canyon Detention Station.

Federal archivist Gwen Granados said the first 35 Japanese nationals arrested here after Pearl Harbor were sent to Griffith Park, where there was a makeshift jail with tight security. They were transferred to Tuna Canyon, which opened Dec. 15, 1941; it had fences topped by barbed wire, sentry boxes at each corner and floodlights.

“They weren’t just enemy aliens,” Granados said. “They were arrested for immigration violations,” overstaying visas or sneaking into the country illegally. “They were mostly fishermen who worked on Terminal Island in the canneries. They were picked up rather quickly because of their proximity to the naval base.”

The Tuna Canyon facility was a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp built in 1933 on 54 acres near Glendale. It could hold 300 detainees. Authorities maintained a low profile there, as at the Griffith Park site (where Travel Town now stands).

Detainees were subject to Justice Department hearings and trials for such offenses as curfew violations and failure to register as an enemy alien. Their detention ranged from a few days to a few months.

Documents from 1942 show that arrests for curfew violation were common. Michelangelo Papaluca, Joseph Petrilla, Karl Haas and Soly Stern were among those detained for being out after 8 p.m.

American law officers also went to Latin America in 1942, where they rounded up more than 2,000 Japanese nationals and brought them back to centers such as Tuna Canyon. Those detainees were held to exchange for American civilians trapped in Japan. As many as 500 Japanese Peruvians were traded, The Times reported in 1998, but it’s unclear whether those prisoners came from the Los Angeles sites.

Kakuaki Kaneko was one of 173 Japanese Peruvians sent to Tuna Canyon in early February 1942. He recalled gorging himself on rice and fish dished up by a prisoner chef, according to C. Harvey Gardiner, author of the 1981 book “Pawns in a Triangle of Hate.” Within weeks, Kaneko and the others were shipped to a Texas internment camp.

Daisho Tana, another prisoner, was a teacher and Buddhist priest who kept a diary during his incarceration. His name had been on a list of people “possibly harmful to the United States” because he taught Japanese in Lompoc, where he lived with his wife and two children. Japanese-language schools were considered a way for the enemy to disseminate propaganda.

During his two-week stay at Tuna Canyon in March 1942, he recorded his humiliation, hardships and dislike of the menu, including oatmeal and black coffee. He also recorded the names of other prisoners, including Shuyu Shimakawa, a Buddhist priest from Santa Barbara.

“We are prohibited to go within 10 feet of the fence, and it is most painful to be cut off from the outside world,” Tana wrote, according to Duncan Williams, associate professor of Japanese Buddhism at UC Berkeley. Williams is translating Tana’s memoirs, which exceed 1,600 pages.

Tana, 40 at the time, told authorities he had studied at Kyoto Buddhist College in Japan and had come to this country as a missionary in the early 1930s, Williams said in an interview. After Tana’s detention at Tuna Canyon and later in Santa Fe, N.M., he moved to San Mateo and eventually to Hawaii. He died in 1972.

At least one woman, another Japanese-language teacher, was confined at Tuna Canyon, Quaker missionary Herbert Nicholson wrote in his 1978 book, “Valiant Odyssey.” The woman he refers to only as Mrs. Imamoto was accused of using a textbook that had a photo of a Japanese soldier and the imperial icon of the rising sun.

At her hearing, she tearfully assured the Justice Department that she had replaced “the rising sun with the Stars and Stripes,” Nicholson wrote.

Everyone at the detention camps was held “without a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing, held like criminals on suspicion alone,” wrote Nicholson, who rallied to their defense at trials in federal court.

Officials were supposed to detain people at Tuna Canyon temporarily, until they had received a hearing. But “temporarily” fluctuated: Usually they were held until there were enough inmates to fill a train, Nicholson wrote; then they were moved to inland internment camps.

Nicholson, who had spent 25 years as a missionary in Japan, was living in Pasadena and running errands in his truck for Japanese friends at Tuna Canyon. He wrote that he hauled “everything from pianos to canary birds ... and the ashes of a friend’s beloved son” back and forth to families in internment camps in Arizona and California. He was entrusted with safe-deposit keys and authorized to sign “valuable papers.”

Immigration laws of the era complicated matters: Japanese citizens living in the United States, such as Nikuma Tanouye, were barred from becoming citizens regardless of how long they had lived here.

Tanouye spent a few days at Tuna Canyon before joining his family at Santa Anita racetrack, an assembly center for Japanese. Later, he and his family were shipped to an internment camp in Arkansas. One of his sons, Ted Tanouye, joined the Army and won the Medal of Honor. He was killed in action.

“My parents never talked much about my grandfather’s arrest,” said Diane Tanouye, 54, of Torrance, who learned the family history from an uncle. “They were pretty tight-lipped.” It was considered shameful to have been arrested and interned.

U.S. Border Patrol Officer Merrill Scott supervised Tuna Canyon. In a May 25, 1942, report to the State Department, he listed 76 Japanese, 10 German and 16 Italian male inmates. The only complaints, Scott reported, came from detainees wishing for “speedier hearings.”

Most of the Japanese imprisoned there eventually joined their families in internment camps. Germans and Italians were usually released on a sort of parole: They were monitored, forced to give up possessions considered security risks -- such as binoculars, pocketknives, radios and flashlights -- and required to curtail travel, carry IDs and observe curfews.

But many Italians were moved away from the coast, their jobs and their homes. The Italian fishing fleet at Monterey was decimated just as the government was urging patriotic Americans to eat more fish.

On Oct. 12, 1942 -- Columbus Day -- the government decided most Italian immigrants were no longer “enemy aliens.” Those who had been relocated returned home. Most of the Italian internees were released after Italy’s surrender in September 1943.

Tuna Canyon closed at the end of that year.

A year later, the Los Angeles County Probation Department took over 10 acres as a center for male juvenile delinquents.

In 1959, the county sold the property for $54,000 to a group of investors, who turned it into Verdugo Hills Golf Course.

Now a proposed condominium project would displace all or part of the golf course. Members of the Little Landers Historical Society are trying to have the Tuna Canyon Detention Station site designated a state historical landmark.

The designation would not stop the development, but it would add another link to the area’s history.

cecilia.rasmussen@latimes.com