Documents Offer Glimpse of WWII Detention Center : Tujunga: Priests and bankers were among those sent to temporary station.

“Today is the dawn of the CCC camp of Tujunga which is outside of Los Angeles. . . . We are prohibited to go within 10 feet of the fence, and it is most painful to be cut off from the outside world.”

--Daisho Tana’s diary, Sunday, March 15, 1942

From the day after the Pearl Harbor attack until the end of 1943, the Immigration and Naturalization Service ran a little-known detention center in Tujunga for civilians classed as enemies of the United States.

Daisho Tana, a teacher and Buddhist priest, was among them.

But his is a story that until now has been largely untold. Historians have focused on American citizens of Japanese ancestry ordered by presidential proclamation into camps tactfully called “relocation” centers.

Little attention has been given to the thousands of Japanese citizens and lesser numbers of Italian and German citizens taken to 10 permanent and 20 temporary detention facilities created by the INS during World War II.

One of them was the Tuna Canyon Detention Station, a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp six miles north of Burbank. The camp, now the site of the Verdugo Hills Golf Course, became the gateway to detention for the judo instructors, bankers, Buddhist priests and community leaders the U.S. government dubbed dangerous enemy aliens once war began.

Now, recently released documents promise to reveal their stories.

In 1991, federal archivists discovered by chance the Los Angeles-area enemy alien files, including 2,625 individual case files, but needed years to organize the material. The documents became publicly accessible just this year, said Paul Wormser, an archivist at the National Archives office in Laguna Niguel.

Those documents also reveal new information about a separate, U.S. Army-run detention facility in Griffith Park.

The new documents could fill gaps for historians, professional and amateur. Among the first to solve a family mystery is William Hohri of Lomita.

Hohri was a promising gymnast living in North Hollywood in 1941, the Americanized son of Japanese immigrants. His father, Daisuke, then 57, also living in North Hollywood, was a Methodist minister who served a mostly Japanese congregation that met at an American Legion hall.

Authorities arrested Daisuke Hohri within hours of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that drew the nation into World War II.

William Hohri wasn’t sure why his father, now dead, was detained--until he discovered the INS file two weeks ago in Laguna Niguel. It had been difficult to communicate with his Japanese-speaking father, who did not want to talk about it. The son found that the government had singled out Daisuke Hohri in part because he was a religious leader.

“I was just stunned,” William said, his voice quivering with anger. “I don’t think anybody can believe their rationale. Because he was a Christian preacher, he was more suspect than if he were a farmer.”

Daisuke Hohri was one of 311 Japanese citizens arrested by Dec. 10, 1941, in contrast to the arrests of 59 Germans and 10 Italians, the FBI’s regional office in Los Angeles reported.

Although authorities in other nations routinely detained citizens of countries with which they were at war, U.S. authorities were selective, detaining only those considered “dangerous.”

Stung by criticism that the United States had overreacted to the threat represented by German citizens during World War I, federal authorities were more discriminating in choosing Germans to detain during World War II, said Roger Daniels, a historian at the University of Cincinnati.

“Our security people felt that they could make judgments about white people,” Daniels said. Authorities at the time believed, for example, that if they examined the membership of a German-American organization, they could “figure out which were dangerous and which were not.”

Not so for the Japanese, whom Daniels said U.S. authorities found “inscrutable.” Immigration laws complicated matters, as Japanese citizens living in the United States, such as Daisuke Hohri, were barred from becoming citizens, regardless of how long they had lived here.

But in the charged atmosphere that reigned during the war, the public applauded. INS historian Marian Smith said few questions were raised at the time regarding the constitutionality of federal policies.

“You don’t do a lot of soul-searching when you have the support of the American people behind you,” she said.

And the U.S. government didn’t need much cause.

“It’s true they were on lists as being possibly harmful to the United States. But they were [listed for] doing things like teaching in a Japanese-language school,” Daniels said. “All of this is guilt by association.”

Daisho Tana was among those caught in the fervor.

He was 40 when the war broke out, a Japanese-language teacher living in Lompoc with his wife and two children. He told federal authorities he had studied at Kyoto Buddhist College in Japan and had come to the United States as a missionary seven years before the war began.

His ties to Japan troubled the FBI, which said Japanese-language schools “are a possible source of dissemination of Japanese propaganda.”

To bolster its case, the FBI confiscated 86 language textbooks, 83 Japanese penmanship textbooks, and dozens of other books, some of which pertained to Japanese expansion.

Like dozens of other language instructors in California, Tana was taken to the Tuna Canyon camp.

“At 1 p.m. some visitors came; today and Wednesday are visiting days and especially because today is the first Sunday after being put into camp, so many families were excited and came here. I think it is better that I didn’t have any visitors at all, so that I can live calmly. After 30 minutes of the visit, I can see people’s eyes filled with tears . . . as the visitors go to the distant parking area. What can they talk about for 30 minutes through the iron fence? And those who cannot speak English must talk through someone who can understand Japanese. “

Mabel Abe, a Japanese American who still lives in Tujunga, remembers the exchanges. As a teen-ager, Abe, now 72, occasionally accompanied her father to Tuna Canyon, where the longtime Tujunga produce seller translated. Families were allowed to see the detainees in a holding pen.

“My father used to call it ‘the kennel,’ ” Abe recalled.

William Hohri’s wife, Yuriko, then 12 years old, remembers those visits as well. At her grandmother’s side, Yuriko Hohri saw her father through the barbed-wire fence.

“It was a very long distance,” she said. “But I could see my father. And he was weeping.”

Daisho Tana’s diary, published privately in Japan, described the thoughts of those on the other side:

“And those who are in the camp might have just given up but they can only touch their fingertips through the fence when they say goodby. It makes their visitors appear to pity them. And it seems that the people in my barracks did not feel well after that meeting. I think it is not kindness at all to the internees to let them meet with their families and friends without giving them satisfaction.”

Officials were supposed to detain people in the khaki-colored barracks of Tuna Canyon temporarily, until they received a hearing. But usually they were held there until there were enough inmates to constitute a trainload to be moved inland, said Tetsuden Kashima, an associate professor of American ethnic studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Yet despite the guards, the barbed wire and the twice-weekly visitors, many Tujunga residents at the time never knew the true purpose of the rustic barracks, washroom and mess hall that were off a dirt road.

“It was kind of hush-hush because they didn’t want people to panic,” Abe said, recalling a time when strangers would threaten her on the street and her family had to turn in their radios and pocketknives.

“My mother would say, ‘What do you expect? We’re considered the enemy aliens. ‘ “

Even retired Tujunga postmaster Tom Theobald says now he didn’t realize the camp’s mission despite an encyclopedic recall of minute details of the town’s history, down to the addresses of businesses long since shuttered. He thought it held military prisoners of war.

Like those at Tuna Canyon, authorities at the Griffith Park camp maintained a low profile. The Los Angeles Board of Park Commissioners gave the Army the use of 18.6 acres on the northwest edge of the park, also a former CCC camp.

Now the site of the park’s Travel Town attraction, the detention area featured two separate but adjoining camps with fences topped by barbed wire, sentry boxes at each corner and floodlights.

Though constructed as a temporary internment camp, the Griffith Park site became a prisoner-of-war processing station in 1943, according to U.S. Army records.

But it was also a stop for civilian enemy aliens, INS documents show.

Some enemy aliens were given hearings in Los Angeles to determine whether they should be freed, paroled or interned. Others, like Daisuke Hohri, had to wait.

On Christmas Day, 1941, Daisuke Hohri and at least 90 others were attached to a party led by Immigration Inspector Edward M. Kline and placed on a train to Montana.

These trains typically had blacked-out windows, and Kashima said the detainees were not allowed even to shut the bathroom door during the trip. “They weren’t told where they were going,” Kashima said.

The INS also worried about external security on the journeys, fearing retaliation from people who lived in small towns along the tracks, INS historian Smith said.

“Reality was something else back then,” Smith said. “People were scared that the Japanese were going to come and attack the coast. People were afraid the world was coming to an end.”

Far from any witnesses who might testify to his character, Daisuke Hohri had his case heard at Fort Missoula, Mont. The hearing board ruled that a trip to Japan Hohri had taken before the war and his membership in a Japanese army veterans society, together with his religious role, constituted grounds for internment.

He would spend the balance of the war moving from camp to camp, and later told his son that one of the things he hated most was cleaning the latrines at Tuna Canyon. After the war, he returned to Japan.

“The internment camp experience was not pleasant for him,” his son said. “He might have just felt more comfortable in Japan.”

Tana, too, spent the war in confinement, earning release the year after the United States celebrated V-J Day, and then moved to Hawaii.

Digging up their stories and details about the camps continues to obsess such scholars as Kashima, who says he is motivated by the conviction that similar events could again occur in the United States.

“I think this can happen again to another group in terms of gender or religion . . . or racial background,” Kashima said. “Yet the strength of America is with respect to our Constitution and our way of life. We as a nation are brave enough to admit our mistakes.”

Policy documents, which could more extensively describe life at individual camps such as Tuna Canyon, are to be released by the INS to the National Archives next year, Smith said.

The scholars await them. And the family members, like William and Yuriko Hohri, will use them to learn what their parents could not explain.

“The only thing I can say is that I’m in the same boat as a lot of people,” William Hohri said.