Henry Mittwer (1918-2012)

Henry Mittwer

His escapades, talents, and ways of being

"We humans are a strain of living creature of the animal kingdom like four-legged beasts,
and are born with an innate mechanism to move from one place to another."

These are the words of Henry Mittwer (1918-2012), among the scattered notes he wrote about his life in his twilight years. He confessed he had no idea what had motivated his father, Richard Julius Herman Mittwer (1876-1946), to board a ship from America to Japan in 1898. Evidence not available to Henry suggests that Richard came as a missionary, though by 1907, when he married Yamazaki Kō (1877-1955), he was running a one-man English school that promised "success" to those who learned to speak the language.

Richard Mittwer stayed in Japan 28 years -- long enough to father 3 sons with Kō and a daughter with Ikeda Hatsue. He returned to America with his 2nd son Frederick (1909-1981) in 1926, apparently not planning to return to Japan -- leaving Henry, barely 7, with his mother and his oldest brother John (1907-1999), and his daughter Mitsue (1919-1986), then 6, with Hatsue.

Henry, in 1940 when 21, not having seen his father for 14 year, went to America, evidently not intending to stay. But 14 months later, on 7 December 1945, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. And by then, Henry had met a couple of women who, even had there been no war, might have kept him in California.

Internment

As fate would have it, Henry became one of the over 110,000 "Persons of Japanese Ancestry" that the United States Army first evacuated from their westcoast homes to regional assembly centers, then transferred to internment camps operated by the War Relocation Authority. All 10 camps were in remote areas, 6 of them far to the east of the evacuated west coast military zones.

The entire operation was carried out under the authority of Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 19 February 1942. The rationale for the removal of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent -- as well as law-abiding Japanese, though legally they were enemy aliens -- was "military necessity".

The objective, after internment, was to clear and resettle internees -- citizens and enemy aliens alike -- in localities to the east of the proscribed military zones -- if they were deemed to be loyal and to pose no security threat. All interned members of Henry's extended family -- except Henry and his alien wife and citizen children -- were released from their various camps for resettlement, some as early as August 1943, before Japan surrendered on 2 September 1945,

Henry had not gone to the United States with the intention of being either loyal or disloyal to his country of nationality. He had not, in the first place, chosen to be a U.S. citizen. His nationality was an artifact of of America's and Japan's nationality laws. Anticipating compulsory evacuation, he volunteered to go to Manzanar, then an assembly center, to help build the barracks and other facilities that became an internment camp.

Loses political innocence

There is no evidence that Henry Mittwer had a political bone in his body, until push came to shove in 1943. He and other male internees were given a questionnaire intended to determine who might be cleared for release from internment and resettlement, and who might be eligible for military recruitment or induction. Clearance hinged on answers to two questions -- (27) would he "serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?" -- and (28) would he "swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?"

Henry answered "Yes" to both questions. How much thought he gave them is not clear. By the time he was pressed to answer them, he was 2-months married to Sachiko Ester Egami (1920-2017) -- a Japanese subject and national who had migrated to the United States with her parents when barely 8 months old. Whatever it meant to be an "American", she had spent practically her entire 23 years of life trying or pretending to be one.

Anomalies

Sachiko, though an issei, meaning the 1st generation, namely the immigrant generation, was more like a nisei, referring to the 2nd generation, or the children born in America to issei. Nisei were birthright U.S. citizens, whereas issei were legally ineligible for naturalization on account of their putatively Oriental race.

If Sachiko was an anomaly, so was Henry -- born and raised in Japan, more at home in his motherland than his fatherland, who could have passed as a typical fresh-off-the-boat issei -- except that he had an American passport, was fluent in both languages, and on account of his parentage was a bona fide ainoko or betweener.

A doctor at the Manzanar camp hospital -- where Henry would work as a nursing aide after the assembly center he helped build became an internment camp -- had warned him to be careful. Some people would suspect that -- because of his nationality, bilingualism, name, and physical features -- he was a spy for camp administrators on the alert for anti-American and other disruptive elements.

By the fall of 1944, Henry had changed his "Yes, Yes" responses to the loyalty questions to "No, No", renounced his U.S. citizenship under a new renunciation enabling act passed that year, and asked to be repatriated to Japan. At the time, he was unable to say with certainty that he had not been a dual national, as some officials suspected. He told officials that he couldn't bring himself to point a gun at relatives and friends in Japan.

Tule Lake

Henry was homesick. He wanted to see his mother and big brother John -- even if it meant divorcing Sachiko, and leaving her with their son Eric (1943-2021) -- and a child on the way in February 1945, when the family was transferred to Tule Lake. By then, Tule Lake had become a segregation center for internees who, like Henry, had withheld their loyalty.

Gretchen was born in July 1945, and in late October, nearly 2 months after Japan surrendered, Sachiko was released to Chicago with Eric. Gretchen, only 3 months old, remained with Henry at Tule Lake until the eve of Tule Lake's closure in March 1946, half a year after the end of the war. when she was taken to Chicago to rejoin her mother and brother.

Henry -- now essentially stateless was awaiting deportation -- was sent From Tule Lake, by way of San Francisco, where he thought he might appear in court, to Crystal City, an Immigration and Naturalization Service camp in Texas. The conditions at the INS camp were better than those at the WRA camps, and in July 1946, Sachiko and the children joined Henry in Texas so the family could be together. Two months later, Henry was paroled to work at Seabrook Farms, a large frozen-food farm and factory in New Jersey, which, short of labor, had began recruiting Japanese Americans from internment camps in January 1944.

Reborn American

Henry, with many other renunciants who were slated for deportation, had petitioned a federal court for a stay of his deportation order and restoration to U.S. citizenship. The grounds, their attorneys and advocates argued, were that they had renounced their citizenship under duress.

The Department of Justice didn't see it that way. But one judge at a federal court in San Francisco, sympathetic to the duress argument, threw enough legal monkey wrenches into the gearworks of the government's prosecution, to eventually stop the deportations, and negotiate a nullification of the renunciations.

Finally, in 1952, having been paroled since late 1946, and reunited with Sachiko and their then 2 children, Henry is notified by one of his legal representatives that "your renunciation has been set aside by the order of the court, and you are an American citizen from the beginning." The action was pursuant to a mandate issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth District, and certified by U.S. District Court for North California, both in San Francisco.

But this was just the beginning of Henry Mittwer's reincarnation.

Continued on webpage when posted.