Hawaii - Jeff Campbell [19]
Then, on December 7, 1941, a surprise Japanese invasion, consisting of 47 ships and submarines and 441 aircraft, bombed and attacked military installations across O’ahu. The main target was Pearl Harbor, the USA’s most important Pacific naval base: among other damage, nine battleships and other ships were sunk; seven battleships, cruisers and destroyers were damaged; and over 3000 military and civilians were killed or injured. For more on the attack, Click here.
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Memoirs of a Buddhist Woman Missionary in Hawaii (1991) by Shigeo Kikuchi is a fascinating firsthand account of Japanese sugar plantation life and of the fears and prejudice suffered by Japanese in Hawaii during WWII.
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This devastating attack instantly propelled the USA into WWII. In Hawaii the army took control of the islands, martial law was declared, and civil rights were suspended. Immediately following the Pearl Harbor attack, around 1500 Japanese residents were rounded up, arrested and placed in internment camps.
However, a coalition of forces in Hawaii successfully resisted immense government pressure, including from President Roosevelt himself, to follow this with a mass internment of Japanese on the islands, to match what was being done on the US West Coast. Ultimately, around 110,000 Japanese were interned on the US mainland, but the majority of Hawaii’s 160,000 Japanese citizens were allowed to live independently – though they suffered sometimes-intense racial discrimination and deep suspicions over their loyalties.
Further, in 1943, the government was persuaded to reverse itself and approve the formation of an all-Japanese combat unit, the 100th Infantry Battalion. Over 10,000 nisei volunteered for the 3000-soldier unit. This was sent, along with the all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team, to fight in Europe, where they became two of the most decorated units in US military history. By the war’s end, Roosevelt proclaimed these soldiers were proof that ‘Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart,’ not ‘race or ancestry.’
The 1950s would test this noble sentiment, but Hawaii’s unique multiethnic society emerged from the war severely strained but not broken. Afterward, Japanese nisei and war veterans became some of Hawaii’s most prominent politicians and businessmen.
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The Island Edge of America (2003) by Tom Coffman tells the story of 20th-century Hawaii, emphasizing the impact of Japanese immigration and WWII on island politics.
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THE 50TH STATE IS PARADISE
The Territory of Hawaii had lobbied for statehood ever since it was created, but statehood bills always failed mostly because of US political reluctance to accept its multiethnic, Asian-majority population on equal terms. After WWII and during the Cold War, Southern Democrats in particular raised the specter that Hawaiian statehood would leave the US open not just to the ‘Yellow Peril’ (embodied, as they saw it, by imperialist Japan) but to Chinese and Russian communist infiltration through Hawaii’s labor unions. Further, they feared that Hawaii would elect Asian politicians who would seek to end the USA’s then-legal segregation. Conversely, proponents of statehood increasingly saw it as a necessary civil rights step to prove that the US actually practiced ‘equality for all.’
In the late 1950s, both Hawaii and Alaska (which had suffered similar denials) were competing to be admitted as the 49th state. Alaska won, being approved in June 1958, but Hawaii was not disappointed long; eight months later, in March 1959, Congress voted again and finally admitted Hawaii. On August 21, President Eisenhower signed the bill that officially made Hawaii the 50th state of the USA.
A few years later, surveying Hawaii’s relative ethnic harmony, President John Kennedy pronounced, ‘Hawaii is what the United States is striving to be.’ More than optimistic symbolism, Hawaii’s two new senators (along with those from Alaska) helped secure the passage of America’s landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s.