(film reel ticking) - [Tim] August of 2013, a young woman, a high school kid we brought in to help upstairs, to clean up some of the drawers upstairs.

They were kind of messy.

And she was doing some, clean things up, and she actually ran across an old 16 millimeter film in the drawer there.

A film that was shot about 1938 that shows the Japanese community here in Monterey playing baseball down at the Wharf having fun.

And so, gee, we'd never seen this film before.

So I began to look through the drawers and I see this sort of rolled up, uh, envelope.

So I pulled 'em out of a envelope, probably the first time since 1945, and I unrolled them and I saw what they were.

And, oh, holy mackerel.

(ominous music) (missiles whistling) (bombs exploding) - [Donald] What is the legality of rounding people up without trial, without evidence, and without any due process of any kind.

They were incarcerated merely because they looked like the enemy.

They lost their property, they lost their businesses, some had lost their lives.

And even after the war, after the people returned from the war, they were subjected to vandalism, attacks, threats, this sort of thing that was pretty commonplace.

(slow tempo jazz music) (seagulls squawking) The Monterey Petition is a textbook example of people standing up for what the country should be about.

For these people in Monterey to take a contrary stand and see the humanity behind it, it's pretty exceptional.

I think it's a lesson for all time.

(slow tempo jazz music) (brooding piano music) (waves splashing) (birds chirping) - [Geoffrey] Monterey was originally a Spanish town, Spanish capital of California.

- I mean, they were speaking Spanish here until the 1890s.

This was not your typical New England replica California town.

This was a different place.

- Very large Sicilian Italian population.

And we often forget about the important Japanese American contribution to the fishing community here.

- Sicilians and Japanese fishermen dominated the economy here.

- Japanese came here because of fishing.

So the Japanese came here for abalone and they also came here for salmon.

- And they've been completely sort of written out of that history.

It's all focused on the Italians and Sicilians.

- In the 1909 salmon season, there were 185 salmon boats working the Monterey Bay.

145 of them were Japanese owned.

- The Monterey Peninsula was such a multicultural, a wonderful mix of people, and many of the racist things that grew other places didn't take root here.

- But the Japanese who came to Monterey, one of the things they did was they westernized themselves immediately and got involved within the communities themselves.

Monterey is the only place where the fishermen here had one union, whereas in Southern California, Northern California, all the ethnic groups had separate unions.

Monterey had one.

Monterey is a small town.

These guys all grew up together and they all went to school together.

They all played together.

(film reel ticking) But the real key, at least for me, the real key with baseball.

(gentle jazz music) They all played baseball together.

And it was not uncommon for these young Japanese boys to learn to speak Italian before they learn to speak English.

And those Italian boys that learn to speak Japanese before they learn to speak English.

(glove thuds) And if you look at any photograph from any Japanese event that is going on, the first thing you'll see in every photograph is the American flag.

They always had that flag out there.

- Japanese owned farms all in the Carmel Valley and around the Monterey Peninsula.

- The Miyamoto family that farmed around Carmel Mission and lower Carmel Valley.

Before the war, they had strawberry farms and they would invite the local kids to come down to pick strawberries at 5 cents a basket.

And of course, we would steal a few as we were going along.

And I don't think I've ever tasted a strawberry as good as those.

No, I don't think the Miyamotos did farm down there anymore afterwards.

- After the war, they lost the land.

They lost the business, they lost all that.

- And I asked Maya Miyamato, why he has never been resentful.

And he said, "That's in the past."

"We've got to get over it."

- [Sandy] There's a Japanese saying, shikata ga nai, which kind of means unpleasantness is not to be noticed.

- It can't be helped.

You just have to suck it up and deal with it.

- Many Issei Nisei parents did not talk about camp life or the evacuation from their homes.

- They didn't talk about it.

They sucked it up and marched on.

- But over time, as it became more acceptable within the Japanese community to begin to talk about it, they did.

- I count myself as one of the lucky people who grew up during the time when Martin Luther King was alive.

Of course, during the struggle for black civil rights, we as Japanese Americans, as Asian Americans, wondered about our own past.

(gentle music) - The Japanese had no Navy to speak of at all in 1850.

Admiral Perry came and said, welcome to the world in 1853.

Japan immediately begins to ramp up.

Their technology explodes.

They, they're so good at stuff.

We brought them a model train, and they were making railroads in five years.

- There had been misunderstandings, disagreements between Japan and the United States, going back to 1900.

- In 1905, the Japanese Navy, they took on the Russians, the Russian fleet came all the way around, came up along the coast, and in the Straits of Tsushima, the Japanese Navy sank 'em, destroyed 'em.

(explosion booming) That is such a seminal event in the history of the world.

At that moment, brown people, particularly people who were colonials, all sat up and said, say what?

It became the inspiration for revolutionary movements everywhere in Asia.

(wind blowing) Japan was becoming a formidable country.

(tank engine roaring) - There grew increasing concern about the role of Japan and trade with the US.

- Pearl Harbor doesn't come out of nowhere.

Pearl Harbor comes out of the fact that the growing power had a natural resource deficit.

They didn't have iron ore, they didn't have oil.

Meanwhile, in 1905, the Asiatic Exclusion League was founded in San Francisco, which sort of picked up the anti-Chinese stuff, warmed it up and became the basis of the anti-Japanese movement in California.

- In 1924, US Congress passes legislation, which severely limits further Japanese immigration to the US.

- The Congress shuts off Japanese immigration altogether.

Huge uproar in Japan.

They lost face.

Actually on June 1st, 1924 in Tokyo, they had a national humiliation day.

Humiliation over the fact that America had snubbed them.

- Or more accurately the elite diplomatic community.

(flag rustling) (waves splashing) - So you can see this thing is building and the only thing between Japan and California is water.

By the thirties, internationally, everybody knew there was going to be a war between the United States and Japan.

I mean, this is not a secret, and it's making everybody very nervous.

(bomb whooshing) (explosion booming) (dramatic music) (plane engine roaring) (bombs exploding) The war with Japan was not a surprise.

Pearl Harbor was a surprise.

That was a shock.

That knocked everybody off their, off their balance.

- [Reporter] We interrupt this broadcast to bring to this important bulletin from the United Press.

Flash, Washington, the White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

- The way we spend an evening was around the radio, listening to the news.

I mean, that's the entertainment we had was the radio.

Everyone, of course, was crying.

We were all scared too.

We were terrified.

- Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor.

- There was no warning.

Oh, I was shocked when that happened.

I couldn't believe that Japanese soldiers attacked Pearl Harbor being that there was so many Japanese already there.

Well, some of the kids in my class, they had brothers that were killed in Hawaii.

And that really shook me up.

And here I'm Japanese so.

- We Americans tend to look at Pearl Harbor and then for some reason, don't know what happened between Pearl Harbor and say the summer.

The night of December 7th, that Sunday evening, I call it the night of the kitchen tables.

It's the night when everybody, everybody, not just Japanese, but everybody was sitting around a kitchen table going, what's going to happen to us?

What are we going to do?

How do we respond to this?

And by doing that, they turned in, they turned in and started to worry.

As we all naturally do about themselves.

And as they are all turned in, a community disappears behind them.

- After Pearl Harbor, the anti-Japanese sentiment really intensifies.

- General John L. Dewitt for example, said, "That the Japanese race is an enemy race."

"The very fact that no sabotage has occurred to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken."

Quote unquote.

What kind of conspiracy theory is that?

General John L Dewitt was a QAnon of his day.

- But critical to this whole story was the absolute palpable fear that was here on the coast.

Part of the plan, Japanese had in place Admiral Yamamoto to move the submarines onto the American coast.

There are nine, what are called I-boats stationed from Seattle to San Diego.

They're just off the coast.

And it starts for the Monterey Peninsula on the 20th, 20th of December.

And submarine I23 surfaces off of the Cyprus Point Golf course in the full view of golfers.

(club whooshing) So they come up and they chase a tanker across the surface using a deck gun.

And they don't hit it.

But in full view of God and everybody, right?

There's a Japanese submarine, 363 feet long.

These are big puppies firing this five and a half inch cannon, which makes an enormous noise.

Boom.

And chasing a tanker across, right across Monterey Bay, right in front of everybody.

Newspapers play it up because censorship came immediately after Pearl Harbor.

Local newspapers, national newspapers, their news is being controlled by the military.

Well, they couldn't not know this.

Boom.

- I can remember them talking about the submarines down the coast, right where mom and dad had lived when they were younger.

When when your parents are afraid, you're afraid too.

- They really did think they were going to be invaded.

And so fear does do horrible things.

- [Newscaster] Enemy planes and scare headlines on December 8th are purely imaginary.

But on February 23rd, 1942, a submarine does shell a refinery near Santa Barbara.

The highest military authorities are certain the enemy does not plan an invasion.

But behind the defenses, fear is screaming hate.

Columnist Westbrook Pegler wants all Japanese under guard.

And to hell with habeas corpus.

Columnist Henry Macklemore writes, I hate Japanese.

All of them.

- And what you find is at times of economic depression, economic challenge or war that the xenophobia springs up in California history.

- [Newscaster 2] Americans are remembering with vengeance in their heart.

- When conspiracy theories and alternative facts hold sway over the real ones, then a society can descend into a very dark place where neither facts matter, the law doesn't matter nor the constitution.

And at that point, not only do people suffer, in this case, Japanese Americans, but democracy itself is imperiled.

- [Sandy] The restrictions start actually in January, and they begin to tighten.

They tighten their bank accounts, they tighten, they collect all the radios.

But they did that actually for the Italians and the Germans too.

- A lot of, a lot of prejudice in those days.

Italians got a lot of prejudice.

Germans, there was a lot of prejudice.

Japanese the worst probably.

It was hysteria.

- But especially in time of war, there's no ceiling to human hate.

- [Geoffrey] The FBI had been targeting these people long before the war started.

They were looking for leaders in the Japanese community, the Italian community, and the German community.

(brooding music) - 15 individuals, men all were in fact arrested in the morning hours and taken away by the FBI.

This happened in several local communities up and down the west coast.

- Well, I was at school and I came home and my mother and my older sister were standing at the door waiting for me.

I said, "What happened?"

Said, "Oh, they took Dad away."

And then it came out in the paper.

There were about 12 or 15 of the Japanese community leaders that were taken to a place in San Francisco Sharp Park.

- I spent 30 years talking to people who were here during this period, during that period from December 7th to about the 1st of May.

And what I was curious about was, where the hell were you?

Where were you when this thing started to round up the very people that you knew, the people that you were your neighbors?

Why didn't you say something?

- You were disappointed, you know?

You're born and raised here and then all of a sudden they dragged your father.

- The first Japanese American arrested was a friend of mine named Tommy Kadotani.

They came at him with full force.

They threatened his loved ones, they threatened the community.

And I think that's an important reason why people accepted this.

It's a lot more complex if you think they should have rebelled early on.

- Executive order 9066 was issued on February 19th, 1942 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

What it did was establish the Western Defense Command, which was authorized to create military zones of exclusion leading up to the forced removal of 120,000 Japanese on the west coast.

- Tuesday, April 28th, 1942.

- Instructions to all persons of Japanese.

- All persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien.

- [Girl] Both alien and non-alien will be evacuated from the above area by 12 o'clock noon.

- President Roosevelt decided that the best thing to do would be to gather all the Japanese along the coast and take them away so that they would not be giving information.

This was our view of what was happening.

- You know, people in sitting in grammar school, you know, half the school, half the class was gone the next day.

- What is the legality of rounding people up on the naked accusation of the military alone that you're dangerous without trial, without evidence, without any due process of any kind?

- This is something the government said they wanted to do and they had to do.

And that was the word they used was internment.

It was a gentler word.

- They invented a whole language to justify the, that process, whether it was evacuation or relocation or internment.

Yeah, I think we're struggling to find a description of what America did to its own people.

There's words that have been used to soften it to such a point that it becomes meaningless.

It's not an evacuation, it's not a relocation.

It is the removal of a person's civil liberties.

I think incarceration is a more accurate way of portraying what happened.

- The public really had no choice.

You can't stop the US government doing things like that.

They'll shoot you.

- [Geoffrey] This just didn't happen in the United States.

In Canada, they made a move against Japanese and Italians.

They did it in Mexico.

- [Carlie] They were being taken away, leaving all of their possessions behind.

It was very scary for us to think that we could do that to them.

- How could right-minded people allow this to happen?

I mean, the government's basically stupid.

We know that.

- Fortunately, we now know because of Freedom of Information Act that it was a great deal, more sinister than that.

There was no reason to do this roundup.

That the incarceration result of very highly educated people intentionally suppressing facts, evidence, intelligence reports, in order to achieve a political end that would benefit them even if it meant lying to the US Supreme Court.

That's a very different story than saying that the Japanese American incarceration was a result of stupidity.

- And we were given approximately, if I recall, five or six days to pack up, sell Dad's business and be ready to report to one of 16, 17, so-called assembly centers, which were really detention centers.

- You know, my father, he received his diploma from Berkeley mailed to him while he was being held in a horse stall.

My father's family and my mother's family too, almost 8,000 Japanese Americans were put in Tanforan Assembly Center.

That was a horse track converted into a temporary detention camp.

Men, women and children were put in horse stalls, which is the naked light bulb, no heat, no hot water.

- It was kind of scary thinking where would we go?

All the Japanese American, Japanese of ancestry were herded up and put into camps.

And one of the camps was in Poston, Arizona in the middle of the Arizona desert.

There were thousands of us there.

- [David] A typical barrack was 20 feet wide and 120 feet long.

By being a family of six, we got a room that was 24 by 20.

- They all suffered, you know, some of 'em were beaten pretty badly by the guards, you know, they just, of course they had kids that died at Pearl Harbor or something like that.

- [Donald] There's a few instances of people who walked too close to the wire and were shot dead.

- [Hiro] And we, I spent my sophomore, junior and senior year there.

- Well, we wrote letters every day to Washington.

Please release my dad.

And so they finally did let us join him in Crystal City.

And it was a family camp.

There were about maybe about 3000 of US families, fathers and mothers and kids.

- The beginning of 1943, people began to get drafted out of those camps to serve in the US Army.

My father was drafted.

(dramatic music) - [Narrator] The Americanism of the great majority of America's Japanese finds its highest expression in the thousands who were in the United States Army.

Almost half of them are in a Japanese American combat team.

Some of the volunteers came from Hawaii, hundreds of them volunteered while they were in relocation centers.

- Volunteers out of camp, about 1200 out of the camps, young men that formed the 442nd, which went on to fight heroically and in the European Theater in Italy, all the way up to Germany, which incidentally turned out to be the most decorated military unit in all of American military history.

- And my husband was in the 442nd.

Yes, he was the first sergeant of service company.

He didn't talk about it very much.

- No.

- No.

He was in Europe fighting in France and Italy and his parents are in camp like that, you know, and that's where we stayed for three years during the war.

(traffic humming) (group chattering) - Is there anything left of the old Japan town?

A few homes, residential homes, and the JCL Hall.

(keys clanging) (door clicks) - So we knew there had been this petition drive in May of 1945, but we never knew this petition still existed.

We didn't even think about it.

We just assumed they were long gone.

August of 2013, a young woman, a high school kid we brought in to help upstairs to clean up some of the drawers upstairs.

(door clicks) And she actually ran across an old 16 millimeter film in the drawer there.

(upbeat music) A film that was shot about 1938, it shows the Japanese community here in Monterey playing baseball down the wharf, having fun.

So I began to look through the drawers and I could see some blue things hanging out of it.

And I thought it initially, it looked like blueprints.

So I pulled 'em out of a envelope probably the first time since 1945.

And I unrolled them and I saw what they were and oh, holy mackerel.

I realized how important they were and so, and how they tied all the story together.

- [Sandy] And I first heard about it from Tim.

He sent me an email and said, you'll never guess what I found.

- [Geoffrey] The petition in Monterey was a direct response to an advertisement taken by a group in Salinas.

- And it was essentially an organization that stopped the Japanese from coming back to the west coast.

- There was just one name attached to it, and it was the Monterey Bay Council on Japanese relations.

We tracked down who that was.

- [Tim] Edward Seifert, who I believe was a lawyer and worked for an organization called the Salinas Valley Grower Shippers Association.

- [Geoffrey] He was very powerful, he was very well funded and he had control of the grower's community throughout the valley.

Seifert's anti-Japanese activities stretched back to the 1930s.

The Japanese were targeted here almost as soon as they arrived.

They threatened the power structure of California agriculture.

- A lot of the anti-Japanese stuff is economic, it's competition.

- I think that there was an advantage to some of the farmers in the Salinas Valley, especially of not wanting the Japanese to come back.

- They were very hard workers and very successful.

In other words, they were rising competitors.

And when you get too close to taking away my business and job, I'm going to find a way to push it back.

- But, but, comma, but you also, there's the element of race there.

- They go hand in hand.

And I use this metaphor because one doesn't exist without the other.

- In 1942, a representative of the Salinas Valley Growers Association was interviewed in the Saturday Evening Post.

He finally just says it, we don't want to compete with him, we don't want him to come back.

He just says it flat out, we don't want him to come back.

You want this coast for white people or brown people?

All the standard racist stuff that had been going on since 1905.

- The ad that appeared in The Herald was unsigned.

And from my point of view, that's about as gutless as it gets.

The anonymity of it, sort of reeked of what was going on over in Germany.

People in the community of Monterey were shocked and they took that initial shock and took it into action.

- If you go through The Herald, the ad comes out first and then the next day the rebuttal letters start, these individual letters, Charis Weston, Toni Ricketts is in there.

And then there's Mrs. Sumida's wonderful letter that comes out of camp.

- I am an American citizen of Japanese ancestry and formerly a resident of Monterey.

At present, I'm in a relocation camp in Poston, Arizona where at one time over 20,000 Japanese made their homes.

Last week when I received my issue of The Herald, I was quite hurt to read the large ad in the paper, quote, to discourage the return of the Japanese to the West coast, unquote.

My husband is fighting in Italy now, along with hundreds of other Nisei soldiers fighting for what he believes is right, the American way of life.

Someday when the war is over, we hope to return to Monterey with our little son.

I want to thank the people of Monterey who wrote to The Herald to defend us.

I know as long as there are people like that left in this country, all the Nisei boys did not die in vain.

And what they fought for will live on.

Respectfully yours, Mrs. Yukio Sumida.

- And so this group of sort of forward thinking citizens said, no, that's, no, these are American citizens.

They were born here.

They have as much right to be as we do.

- Okay, specifically Toni Ricketts, Edward Ricketts.

And I saw Steinbeck in here someplace.

- John Steinbeck signed this.

I go to Salinas High School and John Steinbeck went to school there.

Yep, so of course I know who he is.

I've read "The Red Pony", I think.

"Grapes of Wraith", good stuff.

Heck yeah, Steinbeck, you rule.

- Literature that he wrote, the predicament of ordinary people caught under circumstances that are out of their control, victimized, in that sense it doesn't surprise me, but this is quite a historical document.

- The cannery season was a very, very lively, very noisy and stinked, very bad smell.

I'm Ed Ricketts Jr. My father was Ed Ricketts senior and he lived at the, what they call the lab on Cannery Row.

- Ed was of course a well-known, famous marine biologist, made famous really by John Steinbeck in the books "Cannery Row" and "Sweet Thursday".

- [Ed] There were three houses of prostitution on Cannery Row.

The lab was right smack across the street from the biggest one.

My dad had an awful lot friends.

They were older than I, but younger than he.

- I know they had this whole kind of art artist colony, Henry Miller and Steinbeck and all these people I just imagined their lives was fascinating lives.

I did know that Doc was characterized after Ed Ricketts.

- Everything is based a little bit on a truth.

But John was able to exaggerate an awful other things.

Physically they were opposites.

John was a big monster.

Dad was a little short guy.

- And god bless Ed Ricketts.

Ed Ricketts wrote a letter to the Monterey Herald in which he compared this movement in Salinas to what was going on in Germany.

And he referred to it specifically as a form of Hitlerism and fascism.

- So Toni Ricketts and Toni Jackson actually the same person.

Toni Jackson was the girlfriend of Ed Ricketts at that time.

But if you look at the petition, she actually signs it as Toni Ricketts.

- Toni was concerned about the treatment of the Japanese in World War II.

Toni didn't like it.

And so she was giving speeches in favor of the Japanese people.

She was the one I guess who started all this.

(woman chattering) - It's just the kind of thing that I could imagine my mom saying, well, why?

Let's get a petition going and let's knock on doors and let's let people know.

'Cause even in her faith of humanity and the fundamental good, she would assume that if people really understood what was going on, they would see the light and they would join the movement.

- [Toni] These families have made their homes here for many years and have been part of the life of our community.

- I know that this is the typewriter that was used by dad with a small print.

Elite, not pica.

It was typed and composed by Toni.

- She was the fastest typist at Ricketts's lab.

She was probably the fastest typist in Monterey.

I can now hear the za, za, ding.

(whooshes) Za, za, ding.

(whooshes) (typewriter whirring) (typewriter dings) - I was able to interview Nancy Costello, who actually signed the petition and was actually an organizer of that group.

And she told me that with this outrage and shock, they wanted to mobilize and to respond as an interracial community to this racism from Salinas.

(insects chirping) What they decided to do was create team leaders to hand out the petitions.

If you look on the top of the petitions, you can see who actually carried them around.

And they came from different quarters in the community.

Nancy took one, Toni Ricketts took one.

- [Tim] I think they just went down the street and whoever they ran across in the neighborhood, like stood on the corner, said, hey, can you sign this petition?

- [Geoffrey] Toni Ricketts of course she takes that to her friend.

- [Tim] And I can look at the one for example, that was signed by Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck.

I can look at that and I can tell exactly where they were.

(glasses clanking) (group chattering) - Everyone around there, everyone loved their people and they were shipped out right away.

Great big family of Japanese.

Maya Miyamoto, I used to go to school with him.

It was a dirty trick.

So of course my dad was angry.

He could sign a thing like that right away.

- I suspect that it was Toni Ricketts who took the petition and brought it to Robinson and Una Jeffers in Carmel and also the Westin clan.

They were all part of the art colony down there at the time.

'Cause she was writing for a literary magazine at the time that a lot of the Carmel artisans were writing in and contributing artwork to.

- Jeffers was a very important poet to my dad.

Very, very important.

I don't think they knew each other.

- You know, they were both people of great compassion.

So it's not surprising that they signed the letter, but at the same time it is surprising.

So it's one of those kind of enigmas.

And when I think of Jeffers, you know, I've been thinking about it and the only thing that comes to mind is a line from his poem, the answer where he says, "To maintain one's integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil."

And if that's the way he understood integrity, then the signing of this document certainly fits in and explains it I think.

- Read that petition carefully because to me it's a wonderful testimony to the 442nd regimental combat team.

It doesn't say we believe the camps were a mistake, a da, da, da.

That's not what it says.

It says, we join the Department of Defense in welcoming back.

(typewriter clacking) - [Toni] The War Department believes that the people of the Pacific Coast area will accord returning persons of Japanese ancestry.

All the considerations to which they are entitled.

- It hitches their wagon to the government, which is very smart.

And I think at the time, I don't see any other way they could have done it.

The war's not over when this petition is going around.

- Take California, South America, Brooklyn, Europe.

Take all the world.

(missile whistling) (explosion booming) (dramatic music) - The government is continuing to keep connected.

All of the caricatures of the Japanese military that you see in the press and the posters and everything.

You want people to subscribe to war bonds.

You want people to continue to volunteer to go in the army.

(plane engine roaring) We got some really serious stuff going on in the Pacific.

Bloody messy, awful stuff.

We got Iwo Jima, Okinawa.

People's kids are being shipped home dead, right, from the Pacific.

(bullets whooshing) But it isn't easy.

I can't imagine going door to door in Salinas trying to convince the good people of Salinas that their son was just killed in the Philippines by Japanese people who had nothing to do with the strawberry grower.

- I think they were afraid.

I think they were afraid of what would happen, how they would be treated by their neighbors, by the people they work with.

I think there was a lot of fear about it.

Fear of retaliation, fear of, you know, why are you supporting, you know, these Japanese folks who were coming back and you know, they were our enemies.

I'm sure they got a lot of doors slammed in their face.

- I'm not signing nothing for no dirty Jap!

Go to hell!

- For me, that makes it even braver for these folks who did sign these petition.

- Yeah, I think that they had both compassion and courage to do this because I'm sure they had friends that were really against it.

- Wouldn't it be nice if you could talk to all the people who signed is, you know, why, why'd you do this?

You know what, what, what gave you the courage to do this?

And then what we do is we bottle that and we spread it around the country.

- All right, I suspect that each one of these person had a good reason for wanting to sign this.

- I think the reason so many people signed it is that the Japanese were very much integrated into the community.

- I've been to Manzanar and that's a dreadful place.

I think my dad signed it because he really honestly believed very strongly that what had happened was wrong.

Going back to his childhood, when he experienced prejudice himself, he really felt that there had been an injustice done.

I think it had a very strong impact on him.

- Yeah, I recognized the signature.

He loved people and I think that his feeling was probably, well we were at war with the country of Japan, but that doesn't mean we were at war with all Japanese people.

(man chattering) - We know there were maybe 15 or 16 of these petitions where they were passed all around the whole entire Monarch Peninsula gathering signatures, not just from famous people but from all the local, anybody who had signed this petition.

And that resulted in an ad that appeared in The Herald in May of 1945.

This is the only place on the West Coast where this happened.

- [Narrator 2] We, the undersigned then believe it is the privilege and responsibility of this community to cooperate with the national government by ensuring the democratic way of life to all members of the community.

- And the newspaper was very influential on anything that was in this area.

Everybody read The Herald.

- People didn't put their lives in jeopardy to sign a petition, I don't think.

But they took, but certainly put their professional lives in jeopardy.

A young woman contacted me, she said she recognized her mother's signature on there.

And she told me her mother was about 18 at the time and was working at the Hovden Sardine Cannary, where the Monterey Bay Aquarium is today.

Italian woman, her name was DiMaggio.

- She was very strong in her own opinion, didn't really brag about signing that because she needed the money to go help the family.

- And I was just blown away by that.

The fact that she signed this.

Hovden was to put, a good way to say it, he was sort of a racist gentleman.

And so it took a lot of guts on her end to sign this and keep her job down there.

- Oh, I think if Mr. Hovden had found out she signed the petition and he had a sign saying only white people touched your fish, she would've been fired.

- What makes a person sign a petition?

Sometimes that requires a real act of courage, like in the case of Mary DiMaggio, but it requires an act of stepping forward and you step forward because you are emotionally convinced, you know of the stakes of the petition.

And you believe that if enough people sign it can make a difference.

Once you get people to like think on those two things, if they're a yes on both of those, they're going to sign your petition.

- Oh, this is, yeah, that's my mother's signature.

The reason she signed it is was our close relationship with the Kadani family.

- When I was a senior in high school, they still required you to memorize the preamble.

and my father would sit with me while I was memorizing it.

He said to me, "Now, you know the words that make this country so great."

That was my dad.

- My mother was Democrat.

She had been a social worker before she married, had worked with the migrant laborers in Salinas.

My father was fairly conservative.

He was a Republican.

He'd lost his sight when he was at Stanford Law School, but I had never seen him as an activist.

- My father, he has a character in the pipe dreams based on "Cannery Row".

But here on chapter 37, it opens up, Dr. Horace Dormody hated night calls.

- It, it brings them back, right back into the room.

Marie grew up in San Francisco, was a debutante and then did the big reverse and became a bohemian, which happened in those days.

- You know, those 500 people that signed this back in the 1940s certainly wouldn't have known that 80 years from now it might be a teaching tool to show other students, communities, you know, the leaders on how to construct a petition and make a difference.

And that is so powerful.

When I think about the people who will read this and start their own petition, the things that they will change in their own cities or states or countries are, it's almost unfathomable, right?

It could be anything.

- I didn't know at the time, but he was very special.

He understood.

He didn't take me out and play catch with me, for instance, and go fishing.

We, it was always talking and always talking at the lab.

- It's more about being deeply moved.

It takes courage to take a risk 'cause you're going against the grain for what is right.

That's much more than being proud.

She fundamentally was a humanist, believing we're fundamentally good.

And there's other stuff that gets in the way.

I remember once, I think there was somebody murdered somebody or something and it was in the papers and I asked her, "Mom, why do people do something like that?"

You know, thinking they're evil, they're bad, they're horrible.

And she said, "Oh no, it's that horrible things must have happened to them."

- I think the petition really was wonderful support for all of us who went through what we had to do during the war.

I think we appreciated that.

- We were sure happy to see the welcoming back ad.

That was a message really saying, we welcome you back.

Feel safe as long as we are here.

- And my mom said that she kept that petition.

It was in The Herald, right?

So it meant a great deal to her.

- Oh, I was very grateful.

In fact, we got together and put an ad in the paper thanking them for all they had done for us, you know.

- It was kind of a hard time to get back to normal life again after spending three years in a camp like that.

- There were anti-Japanese groups.

Many of them work very hard to say, don't come back.

We don't want Japs back in our community.

- There's always people that hate people, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

- Approximately 30 cases of violence directed against Japanese living in California.

So you can imagine as these stories start buzzing around the camps, parents are going to say, do I want to go back?

Do I, do I really feel safe and secure?

Will I have a job?

Will our home be there?

- The personal loss that people suffered, the family losses.

- The economy really is affected by these concentration camps 'cause number one, that they had to sell all their, their businesses pretty much for pennies on the dollar.

Or if they were lucky, someone would maintain it for them.

It was California, for example, prior to World War II, there were literally hundreds of Japanese fishing boats.

After World War II, you can count on one hand how many owned fishing boats.

- Economic greed is such an important factor in determining, shaping human behavior.

Approximately 70% of the people who were forcibly removed, 70% of that 120,000 came back to the West Coast eventually.

Farmland, real property and business property, $3 billion.

That's what they lost.

Dad was a junior partner and worth about $235,000 in 1940 dollars.

And they got $15,000 back.

- And of course, the people who run this country needs to understand what causes things like that to happen.

You know, and we were, we were one of the victims of what happened during World War II.

We were there for three years.

- He was a man of few words.

He didn't say much, but you know, he was in the 442.

There was a lot, I mean, he didn't talk about what happened at all, really to us very little.

I think he just put that way in a little box for 50 years, you know?

- Many Issei Nisei parents did not talk about camp life with their kids.

You know, kids are pretty smart.

They pick up on cues and I could see the, almost, it's like life energy being sapped out of them.

- [Mike] All this history has passed, and we're still wrestling with some of the same exact issues.

- When people don't believe in facts or science anymore, and demagoguery takes over, a lot of the civil liberties we take for granted will go down the drain.

That was true then.

And regrettably, that is true now.

- You're asking me if there could be another internment of a racial or ethnic group in this country.

First of all, it's already, it takes place today.

Native American Indian reservations is a form of that.

- I, I fear that it could happen very easily the way things are now.

It could sneak up on us.

- Can history repeat itself today with this kind of incarceration?

Yeah, it's happening today.

Yeah.

So many Asian American communities are the target of violence, of hate, of derogatory language, but there is also a pathway to address them.

And I'm thrilled that petitions can play a part in that because you see real tangible change come from them.

(group chattering) (gentle music) - I think it was unfair, but the good thing is, I met my husband there, otherwise I never would've met him.

Get married to him.

(group singing in foreign language) - Yeah, I always ask my dad why he named it Owl.

He says, "I don't know."

And I look at the building and he's got two owls up there on the building and-- (laughs) And the guy that's got it now, he's still using owl.

- I mean, and it's frightening when you think about that.

It's frightening to me that it could happen again today.

I like to think it couldn't.

- Well, I think we can work to prevent this from happening again by educating people.

- Make people aware of what happened in the past so that hopefully we can avoid having it happen again in the future.

- The petition to me is the very first part of that, but it's the most important because if you can get someone to add your name to an online petition today, that's the way to engage them in deeper action.

Whether it's, you know, going to meet with their legislators, getting out in the streets for a march, going to a company's headquarters and delivering their petition, you know, it's just like, it's the entry point and it's fueled by compassion.

- It's going to be interesting.

I mean, you know, this country is resilient and as bad as we think things are today, we're going to overcome it.

You know, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Depression.

And we're still here.

- The constitution is always interpreted and it's interpreted by power.

It's an ongoing discussion that we'll have to have continually.

- And this month alone have seen countless petitions asking for, you know, communities to take violence toward Asian Americans more seriously or for schools to address it with curriculum or for media outlets to write about the stories of Asian Americans who've experienced hate crimes.

- Americans as good as they are good comparatively, if they could somehow have more faith in the ability to think for your, for themselves.

Think for yourself.

- Enculturated history is learned, parent to child, but we teach 'em hate.

We teach 'em kindness.

Do whatever you can that you consider best for your children.

(man chanting) - We could support acts that give people rights instead of focusing on acts that take rights away from people.

We can give more to the people and expand their opportunities in all manners instead of just confining them simply out of plain fear or unbased ignorance.

(bell dinging) (birds chirping) (car engine humming) - Japanese American internment has been swept under the rug of American history ever since it happened.

This sort of homogenized notion of American history where we're this big melting pot who all come together is a big myth.

And it's only when we demand that this history get placed in curricula, get placed before young children growing up in our country, that they know about it.

And if they don't know about it, then they can't understand how it could happen again.

- [Narrator 3] Regional government by ensuring the democratic way of life to all members of the community.

- I think petitions are a real lesson in social history and cultural history in civil rights history.

- This is a national story because it shows us the light.

That's what this shows us.

It shows us the better part of us, not the bad, dark, ugly part of us.

And America's encompassed by both.

- Saying something is the absolute best thing that we can do anytime something like this happens, that's the model.

That's the way people are supposed to.

It gave that wonderful group of people a wherewithal to say the right thing.

Just say the right thing and say it over and over.

- The past is prologue.

So what do the petitions mean?

It is past history.

An event that happened with a ton of significance attached to it, which will carry on as prologue for the future and carry a legacy and a story for all future generations.

(upbeat jazz music) (upbeat jazz music continues) (upbeat violin music)