Henry Mittwer (1918-2012)

Henry Mittwer

His escapades, talents, and ways of being

"We humans are a strain of living creature of the animal kingdom like four-legged beasts,
and are born with an innate mechanism to move from one place to another."

These are the words of Henry Mittwer (1918-2012), among the scattered notes he wrote about his life in his twilight years. He confessed he had no idea what had motivated his father, Richard Julius Herman Mittwer (1876-1946), to board a ship from America to Japan in 1898. Evidence not available to Henry suggests that Richard came as a missionary, though by 1907, when he married Yamazaki Kō (1877-1955), he was running a one-man English school that promised "success" to those who learned to speak the language.

Richard Mittwer stayed in Japan 28 years -- long enough to father 3 sons with Kō and a daughter with Ikeda Hatsue. He returned to America with his 2nd son Frederick (1909-1981) in 1926, apparently not planning to return to Japan -- leaving Henry, barely 7, with his mother and his oldest brother John (1907-1999), and his daughter Mitsue (1919-1986), then 6, with Hatsue.

Henry, in 1940, when 21, not having seen his father for 14 years, went to America, purportedly not intending to stay. But 14 months later, on 7 December 1945, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. And by then, Henry had met a couple of women who, even had there been no war, might have kept him in California.

Internment

As fate would have it, Henry became one of the over 110,000 "persons of Japanese Ancestry" that the United States Army first evacuated from their west coast homes to assembly centers in the west coast states, then transferred to internment camps operated by the civilian War Relocation Authority. All 10 of the camps were in remote areas, 6 of them far to the east of the western halves of Washington and Oregon, all of California, and the southwest corner of Arizona, which the Army had defined as restricted military zones from which "all persons of Japanese ancestry" were to be excluded and removed.

The entire operation was carried out under the authority of Executive Order 9066, signed and issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 19 February 1942. The rationale for the removal of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent -- as well as law-abiding Japanese, who had legally become enemy aliens -- was "military necessity".

The objective, after internment, was to clear and resettle internees -- citizens and enemy aliens alike -- in localities to the east of the proscribed military zones -- if they were deemed to be loyal and to pose no security threat. All interned members of Henry's extended in-law families -- except Henry and his alien wife and citizen children -- were released from their various camps for resettlement.

Some members of Henry's extended family left the camps and resettled in early 1943, barely half a year after they had been interned. Because Henry had withdrawn his initial proclamation of loyalty to the United States, renounced his citizenship, and declared his wish to return to Japan, he and his wife and children were held at Tule Lake until October 1945 (Sachiko and Eric) and March 1946 (Henry and Gretchen). Henry would remain in federal custody until October 1946, and his renunciation would not be nullified until 1952.

Loses political innocence

Henry had not gone to the United States with the intention of being either loyal or disloyal to his country of nationality. He had not, in the first place, chosen to be a U.S. citizen. His nationality was an artifact of America's and Japan's nationality laws. He acquired U.S. nationality through his father by right-of-blood. He would also have acquired Japanese nationality by right-of-blood through his mother -- if she had not been married. As it was, he became only an American.

Anticipating compulsory evacuation from his residence in southern California, he volunteered -- upon the advice of his father -- to go to Manzanar, before the start of the evacuation, to help build the barracks and other facilities at the camp -- which became first an assembly center, and then a relocation center.

"Were you forced to go
to the internment camp?"

"No, no. I wasn't forced.
Nobody was forced.
Nobody was forced.
They were all, uh,
volunteers,
basically."

In 2007, at the Kansai International Film Festival (関西国際映画祭), after the screening of Regge Life's documentary film Doubles (Daburusu ダブルス), in which Henry appeared, and spoke of having been in internment camps in the United States during the Pacific War, Henry mounted the stage to answer questions. From the audience, the festival's organizer, Darryl Knickrehm, asked Henry, "Were you forced to go to the internment camp?"

"No, no. I wasn't forced," Henry replied. "Nobody was forced. Nobody was forced [repeats]. They were all, uh, volunteers, basically."

What exactly Henry meant by this is not known. It does not seem that he was referring only to the initial group of "volunteers" like himself. Most likely he was responding to images congered up by "forced" -- of people being prodded out of their homes by rifle muzzles and bayonets. Most likely he meant that people subjected to the exclusion orders peacefully complied with them, rather than resist or otherwise provoke the use of physical force.

Henry himself had "volunteered" with the understanding that he was merely submitting to the evacuation orders before they would come into effect, after which they would be enforced for those who didn't comply. He may not have known how his stay at Manzanar and elsewhere would evolve. But he knew that he and those who followed had come to the camps peacefully.

Compliance in the name of loyalty

That "all persons of Japanese ancestry" generally complied with the exclusion and removal orders was largely the result of urging by leaders of the Japanese American Citizens League, and others among the disparate communities of "persons of Japanese ancestry". In 1943, Army and War Department officials responsible for implementing the exclusion orders even thanked "the Japanese" for cooperating with their own compulsory evacuation and relocation (Final Report: Japanese Evacuation From the West Coast, 1942).

The extent to which JACL was complicit with helping the federal government engineer cooperation, rather than advocate for the rights of at least U.S. citizens to remain free -- and its failure to support Americans of Japanese ancestry like Minoru Yasui (1916-1986), who peacefully resisted the indiscriminate racism -- remains controversial today. For certain, in 1942, JACL advocated only compliance as proof of loyalty. It also supported the loyalty oaths that would later provoke Henry Mittwer to decide that, under the circumstances, he did not wish to be a U.S. citizen.

There is no evidence that Henry Mittwer had a political bone in his body, until push came to shove in 1943 -- when he and other male internees were given a questionnaire intended to determine who might be cleared for release and permitted to resettle, and who might be eligible for military enlistment or induction.

Qualifications for clearance or military service required answering "Yes" to 2 questions -- (27) would he "serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?" -- and (28) would he "swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?"

Henry answered "Yes" to both questions. How much thought he gave them is not clear. By the time he was pressed to answer them, he was 2-months married to Sachiko Ester Egami (1920-2017) -- a Japanese subject and national who had migrated to the United States with her parents when barely 8 months old. Whatever it meant to be an "American", Sachiko had spent most of her 23 years of life trying or pretending to be one.

Anomalies

Sachiko, though an issei -- meaning the 1st or immigrant generation -- was more like a nisei, referring to the 2nd generation, or the children born in America to issei. Nisei were birthright U.S. citizens -- whereas under America's then Naturalization Act, issei were legally ineligible for naturalization on account of their putatively Oriental race, also referred to as "national origin".

If Sachiko was an anomaly, so was Henry. Born and raised in Japan, Henry was more at home in his motherland than his fatherland, where he could have passed as a typical fresh-off-the-boat issei -- except that he had an American passport and was fluent in both languages. And, on account of his parentage, most Japanese and Japanese Americans would have seen him as someone of mixed-blood -- then called "ainoko" (betweener) or "konketsuji" (mixed-blood child).

A doctor at the Manzanar camp hospital -- where Henry would work as a nursing aide after the assembly center he had helped build became an internment camp -- had warned him to be careful. Because of his nationality, bilingualism, name, and physical features, some people might suspect that he was a spy for camp administrators on the alert for anti-American and other disruptive elements.

By the fall of 1944, Henry had changed his "Yes, Yes" responses to the loyalty questions to "No, No", renounced his U.S. citizenship under a new renunciation enabling act passed that year, and asked to be repatriated to Japan. At the time, he was unable to say with certainty that he was not a dual national, as some officials suspected. In his autobiography, he reported that he told an Army officer handling his renunciation that, given his internment, his U.S. citizenship was useless -- and he couldn't bring himself to point a gun at relatives and friends in Japan.

Tule Lake

Henry was homesick. He wanted to see his mother and his oldest brother John -- even if it meant divorcing Sachiko, and leaving her with their son Eric (1943-2021) -- and a child on the way in February 1945, when the family was transferred to Tule Lake. By then, Tule Lake had become a segregation center for internees who, like Henry, had withheld their loyalty or been disruptive.

A daughter, Gretchen, was born in July 1945. Then in late October, nearly 2 months after Japan formally surrendered, Sachiko was released to Chicago with Eric. Gretchen, only 3 months old, remained with Henry at Tule Lake until the eve of Tule Lake's closure in March 1946, when she was taken by another releasee to Chicago to rejoin her mother and brother.

Henry -- now essentially stateless and awaiting deportation -- was sent from Tule lake to Crystal City, an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) camp in Texas, by way of San Francisco, where he expected to appear in court with the attorney who was representing his appeal to nullify the effects of his renunciation of citizenship. When the court appearance didn't materialize, he was escorted to Crystal City, and found the conditions there considerably better than those at the War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps.

In July 1946, Sachiko and the children joined Henry in the INS camp so the family could be together. Two months later, Henry, with his family in tow, was paroled to work at Seabrook Farms, a large frozen-food farm and factory in New Jersey -- which, short of labor, had began recruiting internees from WRA camps in January 1944. Sachiko also got a job at the cannery.

Reborn American

Henry, with many other citizenship renunciants who were slated for deportation, had petitioned a federal court for a stay of their deportation orders and restoration to U.S. citizenship. The grounds, they argued through their attorneys, who to a point were backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, were that they had renounced their citizenship under duress.

The Department of Justice didn't see it that way. But one judge at a federal court in San Francisco, sympathetic toward the duress argument, threw enough legal monkey wrenches into the gearworks of the government's prosecution, to eventually stop the deportations, and negotiate a nullification of the renunciations.

Finally, in 1952, having been paroled since late 1946, Henry was notified by one of his legal representatives that "your renunciation has been set aside by the order of the court, and you are an American citizen from the beginning." The action was pursuant to a mandate issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth District, and certified by the U.S. District Court for North California, both in San Francisco.

But this was just the beginning of Henry Mittwer's reincarnation. In 1952, he found a book titled The Religion of the Samurai (Bushi no shūkyō) by the Buddhist scholar Nukariya Kaiten 1867-1934, in his brother's garage. And in 1955, Henry met and become a disciple of Senzaki Nyogen (1876-1958) -- the first step of his return to Japan as an ordained Zen monk.

Continued on yet-to-be published webpage.