Starting Over
When the government forced Japanese Americans from their homes in 1942, entire neighborhoods emptied overnight.
In San Francisco, African Americans who moved to the Bay Area to work in local shipyards found housing in the vacated Japantown. Because the area had already been a racially mixed neighborhood, landlords welcomed Black migrants to fill the vacancies left by Japanese Americans.
Postwar, around half of the original residents of Japantown returned but found housing and jobs scarce because of continuing discrimination. In 1948, despite resistance from Black and Japanese American residents, the neighborhood was declared a blighted area and designated for redevelopment; over 20,000 residents were again displaced when a freeway was routed through it.
There were some flats open but the landlords just didn’t want me in there. A few places told me that they could not take in any Japanese…other landlords told me that the vacant flats were already taken, but I noticed that the signs were still up when I passed by a few days later.” – An anonymous Japanese American on their struggle to find post-war housing
Most Japanese Americans were not allowed to return to the West Coast until 1945; others decided to move to Midwestern or East Coast areas deemed less hostile. In Chicago, the Japanese American population jumped from approximately 400 pre-war residents to over 20,000 immediately postwar.
Photograph by Hikaru Iwasaki, September 1945. National Archives 539890. Photographer Hikaru Iwasaki was the only Japanese American to work in the WRA and document the incarceration camps as a full-time staff photographer.
As Japanese Americans left the camps, the government reallocated the land. At Arizona’s Poston War Relocation Center (built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation), Navajo and Hopi tribal members moved into the barracks as part of a government relocation program, though they did not originally live on that land. On September 1, 1945, 16 families – a total of 78 people – moved into the barracks at Poston. Here, residents pose outside of their new homes – drafty buildings made from tar paper, never intended to be permanent.
On Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) land, some buildings were sold to local Pima and Maricopa people for $1 each, but most infrastructure was torn apart. Water pipes and electrical wiring were removed, leaving behind broken foundations. In 1971, the GRIC brought suits against the U.S. government to recover fair compensation for the use of their lands from 1942-45. The GRIC won over $1.5 million in damages.
