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Historians say the World War II documents shed light on what was happening in Stockton, Calif. outside of the internment camps.
By Christine McFadden, Special to the Pacific Citizen
Published February 5, 2010
Japanese American residents in San Joaquin County, Calif. had no idea that they were under state investigation during World War II until recently when two boxes were discovered containing government documents tracking their activities in an attempt to find them in violation of the Alien Land Laws.
The boxes, uncovered on the eighth floor of the San Joaquin County Courthouse by mistake during a move to a new administrative building contain papers dated in the mid-1940s detailing the government’s perspective on property claims made by JA families living in the area.
Lois Sahyoun, the clerk of the county board who discovered the unmarked boxes, presented them to the county council, legal department, and district attorney. She has spent the past five years sorting through the documents. What she found surprised her.
“I didn’t [know what they were] until I started looking through them,” Sahyoun said. “I was just amazed. I know a lot of these families — many of the names were familiar to me.”
In December, the presidents of the Stockton, Lodi, and French Camp JACL chapters were invited by the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors to receive the boxes. The moment was especially significant for Stockton JACL President Aeko Yoshikawa, whose father Richard Yoshikawa was the first Asian Pacific American to be elected to the board of supervisors in 1975.
“They [the board] could have just taken the information and trashed it, but thank God the clerk of the board thought they were of significance, and rightly so,” said Yoshikawa.
Rights Violated by the Alien Land Law
According to Yoshikawa, the documents are separated into folders, with one folder enclosing the legal brief from the Oyama vs. State of California case, a key court decision involving the California Alien Land Law of 1913.
The law prohibited people who were ineligible for citizenship from owning property in California. This caused many to purchase land under either their children’s or friend’s names in order to bypass the law. This loophole, however, led to trouble with the state.
“In 1920, they [the government] changed the Alien Land Law,” said Yoshikawa. “It said that if the land was put in somebody else’s name, the state didn’t even have to prove that the alien was trying to get around the land law, it was a presumption.”
The recently discovered documents show that the government built cases against Japanese immigrants in the county in an attempt to prove that their properties were in violation of the Alien Land Law. Among the documents discovered are bank account statements, receipts, and witness testimonies. The government went so as far as to document who purchased fertilizer for farming, said Yoshikawa.
Nisei Fred Oyama was just a child when his father Kajiro Oyama purchased six acres of land in Southern California in 1934 and two more in 1937. Kajiro Oyama, an Issei ineligible to become U.S. citizen, purchased the land under his 6-year-old son’s name.
According to Yoshikawa, during WWII, the Oyama family moved inland to Utah to avoid the internment camps. Shortly afterward, the state of California attempted to reclaim the Oyamas’ land by alleging that it had been purchased with the purpose of avoiding the Alien Land Law.
“He [Kajiro Oyama] didn’t want to go down without a fight,” said Yoshikawa. “He got a lawyer and he went to the JACL.”
Kajiro took his case all the way to the Supreme Court where the justices ruled that California violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by denying his son Fred Oyama equal protection as an American citizen.
“When the Supreme Court reversed that decision, those cases that were being prosecuted here in San Joaquin County were dismissed,” said Yoshikawa.
Although the Oyama case did not overturn the Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1920 (it would take until 1956 to do so), it proved to be an important precedent and allowed for the Oyama’s and numerous other JA families in California, namely in San Joaquin County, to keep their land.
This, said Yoshikawa, is reflected in the approximately 10 legal briefs represented in the two boxes. Several of the cases that she came across were labeled as dismissed. She thinks the families targeted in these cases were most likely the ones who had the monetary resources to defend their land and fight the government’s claims. But many other families were not so fortunate.
“I’m thinking there are a lot of cases that didn’t get prosecuted where the Japanese aliens of the families… probably didn’t have the funds to launch a legal defense,” she said. “They didn’t have the resources to fight it [the state] and they probably lost their property.”
The San Joaquin County JACL chapters plan on contacting the families of those mentioned in the recently discovered cases to see if they are interested in receiving copies of the documents. The originals have been given to the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. to be kept in its archives.
“There’s a lot more research that we need to do,” Yoshikawa said. “It’s bringing history back to life.”
Preserving the Papers
The Holt-Atherton Special Collections at the University of the Pacific Library recently received the contents of the two boxes, according to Michael Wurtz, University of the Pacific archivist.
The archives, which currently hold over 400 different collections ranging from The John Muir Papers to photos from Japanese internment camps (including photographs taken by Richard Yoshikawa), have never seen anything “specifically like this” before, said Wurtz.
“The wonderful aspect of this collection is it gives us an idea of what’s actually happening here in Stockton during WWII,” he said. “Whereas the material we have about Japanese American internment camps tells us an awful lot about the camps, now this will help us to understand better what was going on in Stockton while a lot of folks were in camps.”
He is beginning to sort through the documents and plans to make descriptions and inventories of the material and make the findings available for research purposes. The library is also going to make the JACL photocopies of the entire collection, said Wurtz.
Two photographs — one featuring what looks like JA students in front of a Stockton Buddhist Church, and another of a mix of APA students attending an unknown conference in Northern California — were discovered in the boxes. The photos are dated Sept. 3, 1940, and either April 27 or 28, 1940, respectively.
One of the folders also has written works by a member of the Native Sons of the Golden West, a group of Caucasian, “native-born” Californians who openly opposed Asian immigration. The papers document the history of California’s “Japanese problem.”
“We were really happy to receive the documents,” said Yoshikawa. “The harder thing is when you sit down and start reading what’s happening in these cases.”
“It makes you mad,” she continued. “It makes you really mad. There’s a part of our history you may not like, but it’s again [about] preserving the documents. It’s a good learning experience.”
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