Second-Generation Immigrants with Changing Mindsets: The Little-Known "Nyho Island Incident"

Wen | Yan Bin

The first generation of Japanese immigrants generally maintained a deep loyalty to Japan, no different from the Italian immigrants in New York who supported Mussolini, who supported, celebrated, or justified Japan's aggression. But in the hearts of the second generation of Japanese Americans, they are proud to be American citizens of Japanese descent and do not mind fighting any enemy of the United States, including their own ancestral countries.

Many old immigrants, worried that their descendants have lost their roots in Japanese culture in North America, insist on sending them to Japanese schools on weekends, where teachers are usually hired from Japan. These teachers sometimes instill in their students the ultra-nationalist and militaristic ideas that prevail in Japan, which many second-generation Japanese-Americans find difficult to accept, but in a changing world, bigger tests await them.

The most criticized domestic policy of the United States in World War II was the mass expulsion of Japanese-American citizens. In the minds of most modern Americans, this ugly event, like the pension march in 1932 and the University of Kent incident in 1970, is forever engraved on the pillar of national shame in the United States. But history tends to be more complex and darker than events that the public usually learns about.

In July 1920, a committee member of the U.S. Congress checked the passports of Japanese "photo brides" on Angel Island, California

After World War I, the United States successfully broke up the Anglo-Japanese alliance in the Far East and led the establishment of the Nine-Power Pact, the Washington Treaty, and other arrangements for the post-war international order in the Far East. As Britain and France continued to decline, Tsarist Russia completely collapsed, and Germany withdrew from the competition in the Far East, the contradiction between Japan and the United States suddenly rose to become the main contradiction between the great powers in the Pacific region.

Between the two world wars, one of the focuses of Japan's foreign intelligence work was to collect intelligence against the United States. Before the war, the Japanese consulate in Hawaii, with the help of information provided by the Japanese diaspora, clarified the location and activities of important U.S. military targets in Pearl Harbor. Japan also established a spy network code-named "Tachibana" within the Japanese community in California. U.S. counterintelligence agencies have long noted unusual interactions between the Japanese community and Japanese intelligence. When Pearl Harbor occurred, California's "orange" spy network was wiped out by the FBI, and the losses they caused to the allies were negligible.

Even before pearl harbor was attacked, the U.S. military had intelligence that the Japanese community might launch a riot instigated by Japanese intelligence and destroy important facilities such as U.S. military airfields. Lt. Gen. Walter Short, the supreme commander of the Hawaiian Army, specifically ordered that in order to prevent the destruction of the "Fifth Column", the aircraft of the US airfield must be densely arranged to concentrate on guarding, but this became an excellent target for air strikes.

In the early morning of December 7, 1941, a 17-year-old Japanese boy named Daniel Inoue in Honolulu was preparing to go to church to worship when he suddenly heard a local radio station exclaiming that Pearl Harbor was being attacked. He rushed out of the house and saw puffs of smoke billowing from Pearl Harbor not far away, "three gray planes with big red dots just passing overhead," Inoue recalled years later: "For me, the end of the world has arrived, and I have reached the age of realizing that everything in the future cannot be the same as before." ”

At that time, there was also the little-known "Neho Island Incident". Nyho Island is the westernmost island in the Hawaiian Archipelago, and there were only 136 inhabitants on the island at that time, most of whom were native Hawaiians and a small number of Japanese residents. On the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the "Zero" fighter of the first class flying soldier cao Xikaidi Chongde from the Japanese "Flying Dragon" aircraft carrier was injured by the US military and forced to land on Nihao Island. The Japanese man on the island, Harada Shi, was a "righteous emperor" who jumped out to play for the tiger, assisted Xikaidi in repairing airplanes, and drew guns to coerce the indigenous people who tried to resist and burn down their houses. Until the evening of the 13th, the indigenous people took the opportunity to resist and killed Xikaidi in the fight, and Harada committed suicide in fear. The US military authorities did not know about the incident until the 14th.