Anti-Japanese order affects families today
On a recent visit to the Presidio, Melissa Ayumi Bailey timidly entered the former military headquarters building now housing the private Bay School of San Francisco with an almost apologetic request: She wanted to see Gen. DeWitt’s office.
She expected she might be shown the exit instead, but soon was directed upstairs and down a long hall, past any number of students with backpacks, to Room 201, an empty corner office. Once inside, Bailey was possessed of a sensation she’d never felt before.
“The order that came out of this room irrevocably changed the course of my family,” she said. “Within the Japanese American community, we’re four or five generations in and we’re still
seeing the effect of the incarceration.”
The incarceration Bailey referenced was the imprisoning of people of Japanese descent during World War II, the result of the Civilian Exclusion Order issued by Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt from this very room 75 years before.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s infamous Executive Order 9066, issued in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 19, 1942, is what is remembered by historians. But it was DeWitt’s order, issued from the Western Defense Command at this former Army base in the following weeks, that put it into effect. Bailey’s maternal grandparents were among 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans relocated by the government to wait out the war in crude and humiliating internment camps in the country’s desolate interior.
Those in the northern part of San Francisco, including the Presidio, were affected by Civilian Exclusion Order No. 5, which was carried from the Presidio by military police and posted on area telephone poles on April 1, 1942.
Saturday, the 75th anniversary of its posting, is being marked by the opening of “Exclusion: The Presidio’s Role in World War II Japanese American Incarceration,” an installation at the Heritage Gallery at the historic Presidio Officers’ Club.
The free, yearlong exhibit marks the first time the role of the Presidio in the sad affair of Japanese relocation will be spotlighted by the Presidio itself.
“We’re really trying to help people confront what the exclusion order meant in their everyday lives,” said Eric Blind, director of the Presidio Heritage Program. “What would it have felt like if you were walking to the bus one day and you saw this order on the telephone pole on your street?”
Two sawed-off phone poles have been dragged into the gallery and stapled with copies of DeWitt’s boldfaced order: “Instructions To All Persons of Japanese Ancestry.”
The names of all 120,000 people put on buses and trains within 60 days of DeWitt’s order are stenciled in glass outside the gallery. Among them are the names of Bailey’s grandmother, Harue Okamoto, who was 20 and living in Watsonville (Santa Cruz County), and her grandfather, Hiroshi Kobata, 22, from Toppenish, Wash.
Bailey, 27, knows they arrived at the camp at Heart Mountain, Wyo., in summer 1942 and were not released until fall 1945. She also knows they met in camp and were married in Ogden, Utah, after the war, before moving to San Francisco.
For any questions she’s had beyond that, she has never gotten answers.
“A lot of the nisei just didn’t talk about what happened because it was very shameful,” she said, using the Japanese term for her grandparents’ generation. “You didn’t talk about being sent to prison. I’m trying to find documentation for what their story really was, because nobody knows.”
Another thing she did not know until she started investigating is that at the outbreak of World War II, her paternal grandfather, James Curtis Bailey, a 22-year-old Army private, was stationed at the Presidio.
“With my family there were always a lot of questions,” Bailey said. “My goal is to answer these questions.”
She has an advantage in her search; she works in the Presidio for the National Japanese American Historical Society. Searching online, she found her grandfather Bailey in the 1940 census report: occupation soldier, residence the Presidio. She took this information to Presidio Trust archivist John Bertland, who was able to identify Bailey as a private attached to either a quartermaster regiment or an infantry regiment.
She is still trying to determine whether Pvt. Bailey was in any way involved in carrying out the order that exiled his own future in-laws.
DeWitt’s order was issued in what is now Building 35. Pvt. Bailey’s barracks was just up the post, in Building 39, now home of the San Francisco Film Centre.
“I can’t tell you how many times I have hung out on the grass in front of this building,” she said, “and not known until now that my grandfather lived here.”
Blind, of the Presidio Heritage Program, has heard a lot of stories while putting together “Exclusion,” but he’s never heard one like Bailey’s, with both sides of her family affected in such opposite ways, and both ending up in San Francisco.
Bailey never knew her paternal grandparents. Her father, San Francisco attorney Patrick Bailey, died young. The only thing he told her is “my grandfather ended up in San Francisco after the war because that’s where the boat dropped him off.”
Bailey still lives in the Sunset District house she grew up in, with her mother, Cheryl Kobata Bailey. Her grandmother, Harue Okamoto Kobata, lived there until she died when Bailey was 16. But she never talked about her three years in the Wyoming camp beyond confirming that she had been in one.
All Bailey has to go on are a few pictures she carries that were smuggled out of Heart Mountain, where cameras were forbidden.
One image shows her grandfather in his high school letter sweater and his hair in a pompadour against a bleak backdrop. Another shows her grandmother in a pea coat with her name embroidered on the chest, standing in front of a tar paper wall.
When she looks at the pictures she thinks of all the euphemisms she has heard or read that aimed to soften the impact.
“Words like ‘evacuation,’ for forced removal, and ‘for their own protection,’ ” she said. “If they were being protected, why was there barbed wire and why were the guns pointing in?”
There is no sugarcoating of this history in “Exclusion.” Internment, for instance, has been replaced by incarceration. “Internment applies to enemy aliens, not to citizens,” said Blind. “Two-thirds of these people were citizens who were incarcerated.”
A central object in the exhibit is a vintage wooden Army desk “meant to evoke the seat of power where you would encounter a man like DeWitt making decisions that affect millions of Americans,” Blind said.
As part of “Exclusion,” the room that was once DeWitt’s office, at the Bay School, will be open to public tours starting at noon Saturday. In a year, when “Exclusion” closes at the Heritage Gallery, the exhibit will move permanently to the Bay School.
Until then, Room 201 is empty, but it still has a powerful presence for people like Bailey who need to feel this moment in history at its source.
Her grandparents on both sides were born in America and she is a second-generation San Franciscan. None of that would have helped if she had been alive on April 1, 1942. She would have been among 5,000 San Franciscans directly affected by the orders posted on the phone poles. Within a month, she would have been in the Assembly Center at Tanforan Racetrack in San Bruno, soon to begin a long train ride to parts unknown.
“If you were one-twelfth Japanese you were sent to the camps, and I’m one-half,” she said. “My Caucasian last name would not have made a difference. I still would have been incarcerated for three years.”