Book Description

Claude Morita's research of declassified materials int he National Archives in Washington, DC, convinced him that the United States planning for war against Japan began in about 1898. He examined the top-secret offensive strategy developed by the US government, named War Plan Orange, tracing its origins in the late 1890s through the interwar years to 1941. Morita shows that what was initially a strategic policy became a racist one aimed at anyone of Japanese ancestry, and uses as an example the life experiences of one individual, Hideo Okamoto. Born in Yokohama in 1892, Okamoto traveled to San Francisco in 1903, where he joined his father and older brother. He immersed in his new surroundings, played baseball, attended a Japanese-only high school, and then went to junior college, graduating as a business major. Okamoto moved to New York City and established his own company, which later went bankrupt at the start of the Great Depression. He quickly found employment with a Japanese import-export company. On December 7, 1941, he was on a business trip in Miami when FBI agents arrested him as an enemy alien. He was jailed and sent to a US concentration camp, despite having been a law-abiding resident for almost forty years. Okamoto was arbitrarily selected and traded as part of the first exchange of "prisoners of war" with Japan. He lost all his personal property and was forced to live out his life in Japan. While Okamoto did not express anger at these injustices, his biographer recounts a story that deserves to be met by outrage as well as remembrance.