A face from the past

By way of illustrating the preceding post ...

This is Tom Takeo Matsuoka, who died year before last at the age of 98 [I took this photo the year before, when he was 97]. Tom was one of the three men arrested by FBI agents in Bellevue, Wash., the night after Pearl Harbor. His arrest was one of many mistakes the FBI made in those sweeps; though only "enemy aliens" were supposed to have been arrested, Matsuoka was a citizen. But because he could not easily produce his birth records (which were kept at a tiny town in Hawaii), he was shipped off anyway to the Army detention camp at Fort Missoula.

Matsuoka was probably fingered for arrest because he was in fact a community leader in Bellevue. He was president of the Bellevue Vegetable Growers Association, which had become the main font of economic well-being for the little town's substantial Japanese population. (The two others arrested that night held similar positions -- one was the schoolmaster of the Japanese school, the other the head of the Japanese businessmen's association.) It was clear that the three were targeted mainly to decapitate, as it were, the Nikkei community, not because of any actual threat they might pose.

Matsuoka's case, I think, neatly illustrates the way even seemingly legitimate detentions can be used to intimidate and threaten the target communities.