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From Internment to Indiana
Japanese Americans, the War Relocation Authority, the Disciples of Christ, and Citizen Committees in Indianapolis
NANCY NAKANO CONNER
| On the eve of World War II, Indiana possessed almost no Japanese population and certainly nothing that could be called a Japanese American community. The attack on Pearl Harbor brought this tiny and obscure segment of the state's population into sudden prominence. On that fateful day, the Indianapolis Star managed to find two Japanese Americans to interview: Professor Toyozo W. Nakarai, a teacher of Semitic languages and literature at Butler University, and Harry Sasaki, operator of a coffee and tea stand in the City Market. Both proclaimed their support for the United States government, and, as the Star headline read, "Will Fight if Necessary, Say 2 Long Residents of Indianapolis."1 |
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That Nakarai and Sasaki were among a very small number of Japanese in Indiana in the early 1940s was the end result of a historical pattern that dates back to the late nineteenth century. As the American population diversified, Hoosiers held to an anti-immigrant position that was noticeably out of step with the expanding and increasingly urban Midwest. Even as most Indiana residents looked inward and tried to resist intrusive change from outside, however, a few had reason to take a much more transnational view. Among them were religious denominations with ties to the international scene through their missionary operations. I will show how a Protestant denomination with its international headquarters in Indianapolis, the Disciples of Christ, took a leading role in a well-coordinated, national public and private effort to move Japanese Americans out of internment camps and resettle them in towns and cities across the nation's heartland. While the number of resettlers in Indiana would remain small in relation to nearby states, the efforts of this dedicated group resulted in a tenfold increase in the Hoosier state's Japanese American population by the end of World War II.
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The Asian presence in Indiana had never been very conspicuous. Twenty-nine persons of Chinese descent resided in the state in 1880; a decade later their numbers were augmented by a handful of Japanese (see Table 1). The increased presence of Japanese immigrants here and elsewhere coincided with the beginning of the "new" or second wave of immigration that also brought growing numbers of southern and eastern Europeans to America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of the Japanese settled on the West Coast; those who came to the Midwest followed the pattern that James Madison notes of other second-wave immigrants, who settled in other states of the Old Northwest in much greater numbers than they did in Indiana. By 1920 Indiana had the largest proportion of white, native-born citizens in the nation.2
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