Joe Grant Masaoka

Joe Grant Masaoka was born on May 1, 1909, in Riverside, California, the eldest of eight children of Eijiro and Haruye Masaoka. After a stint in Fresno, California, the Masaokas moved to Utah in 1916, where they came to own a small fish and produce store by 1924. The family fortunes changed dramatically with the death of Eijiro in a hit-and-run accident that year when Joe was fifteen. He subsequently bore much of the responsibility of supporting the family. Joe graduated from West High School in Salt Lake City in 1927 and attended the University of Utah for one year, withdrawing in 1928 to run the family businesses, which eventually grew to include three stores. Struggling during the depression, Joe and Haruye moved the family to Los Angeles in 1935, settling in the Japanese American enclave of Sawtelle in West Los Angeles and opening a fruit and vegetable stand on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. ^[1]

Despite his familial responsibilities and economic pressures, Joe played an active role in the emerging Nisei communities in both Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. In 1928, while at the University of Utah, he was elected president of the Salt Lake City based Intermountain Nisei Club and later was one of the founders of and president of a JACL-like organization there in 1935. After moving to Los Angeles, he became president of the newly formed Bay District Chapter of the JACL and was active in National JACL circles. A frequent speaker at community events, he also was a co-advisor of a "Y" boys club based in West Los Angeles. ^[2]

As tensions between Japan and the United States rose, Masaoka was among the Nisei leaders who defended Japanese Americans against claims of disloyalty and who advocated working with federal and military officials. "With the encouragement of the 11th Naval District Intelligence Service" and "in cooperation with Federal authorities," he drafted a plan to set up a Coordinating Committee for Southern California Defense that was adopted by unanimous vote by the JACL's Southern District Council in March of 1941. In a June press release, the CCSCD called for "exemplary personal conduct" by Nisei, "to cooperate publicly, even conspicuously if need be, in various defense movements when bona fide requests are made," buying defense bonds, getting typhoid shots, and being prepared for the draft. In a later report, his friend Togo Tanaka wrote that the CCSCD "was charged with gathering information on subversive activities; this information was to be turned over directly to Naval Intelligence...." As chairman of the committee, Masaoka gave talks to organizations such as the American Legion on the state of the Japanese American community. By November 1941, he was named by the national JACL to head a Coordinating Committee for National Defense. ^[3]

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Masaoka became a member of the Anti-Axis Committee of the JACL's Southern District Council that vowed support of the war effort and cooperation with law enforcement. The next few months saw Masaoka take part in community meetings that provided updates on the "evacuation situation" and engage in efforts to promote "resettlement" of Japanese Americans, while also forming a new West Los Angeles chapter of the JACL that split from the Bay District Chapter in January 1942 and being elected its president. Despite his efforts, Masaoka, along with his mother and younger siblings, were nonetheless sent to Manzanar in April 1942. One of his brothers, Mike , had moved to Salt Lake City where he served as the JACL's national secretary. ^[4]

Masaoka remained active politically at Manzanar. Reports Officer Robert L. Brown hired Masaoka and Nisei journalist Togo Tanaka as documentary historians in June 1942, seeking "more of a summary of the current life of the Center" that was being provided by the camp newspaper. The pair filed detailed reports on various aspects of life at Manzanar over the next six months. Masaoka and Tanaka were also among the leaders of the Commission on Self-Government at Manzanar and also among the leaders of the Manzanar Citizens Federation, a group that expressed similar views to the JACL. All of these activities—along with his prewar connection with the JACL and Anti-Axis Committee—drew the wrath of an increasingly embittered inmate population who turned their resentments towards inmates like Masaoka who were accused of being informers and of being too close to camp administrators. In November, Masaoka was one of three delegates from Manzanar to attend the JACL national convention in Salt Lake City. He apparently never returned to Manzanar, remaining in Salt Lake City, with his official departure from Manzanar listed as November 25, 1942. He thus missed the mass uprising at Manzanar that took place two weeks later. His name was among those on the "death list" circulated by dissidents who were unaware that he was no longer at Manzanar. ^[5]

In Salt Lake City, Masaoka took a position with the JACL as director of the associated members division by early December 1942. In the meantime, his fiancee, Mary Ann Sakamoto—who had been a nurse in Los Angeles prior to the war—arrived from Gila River , and the couple married in Salt Lake City on December 16. In June of 1943, the Masaokas moved to Denver , where Joe opened the JACL's Denver office. At around the same time, he began writing "Colorado Calling!" pieces for the JACL newspaper the Pacific Citizen . In addition to trying to build up the membership base in the growing Japanese American community in the Denver area, his two year stint in Colorado is perhaps best remembered for his efforts to counsel imprisoned Nisei draft resisters . Alongside Minoru Yasui —who had famously challenged in the legality of the exclusion orders in 1942—Masaoka visited imprisoned draft resisters from Heart Mountain at the Cheyenne County Jail and from Amache at the Federal Correctional Institute Englewood, where they urged the resisters to rethink their actions for the good of the Japanese American community in the hope of dissuading further draft resistance. ^[6]

In June 1945, the Masaokas moved to San Francisco, where Joe opened the JACL's San Francisco office, replacing Teiko Ishida , who had established the office in January as the West Coast was opened up to Japanese Americans, and eventually serving as the organization's Northern California regional director as well as the West Coast regional director of the JACL Anti-Discrimination Committee. In that capacity, he was involved in efforts to challenge alien land laws (including a case involving his own family ), gain naturalization rights for Issei, and other efforts to fight discrimination against Japanese Americans. He left the JACL in 1951, succeeded by Haruo Ishimaru. ^[7]

Over the next fourteen years, he took on various jobs and enterprises. Upon leaving the JACL, he was hired by the Committee for Justice to Japanese Americans, where he successfully lobbied for legislation to return payments by made by Japanese Americans to settle alien land law prosecutions in California during the war. In the late 1950s, he served as the executive director of the California State Florists Association. In the early 1960s, he ran an employment agency that specialized "in Nisei temporary workers for the office, shop and warehouse." In his UCLA biography, he lists his salary as $15,000 per year during this period. His and Mary Ann's family grew to include three sons and two daughters. ^[8]

In 1964, Masaoka was hired by UCLA to serve as the administrator of what would become the Japanese American Research Project (JARP). Initiated by the JACL as the Issei History Project in 1960 and supported by various grants, JARP included a sociological survey and a book project as well as efforts to collect documents and conduct oral histories. When the project's initial director, T. Scott Miyakawa , was let go in 1965, Masaoka took on a larger role in the research aspect of the project despite his lack of academic training. Over the next few years, he traveled the country extensively to conduct oral history interviews—he spoke Japanese well enough to conduct interviews with Issei in that language—and to collect key documents, sometimes alongside new JARP director and UCLA Professor Robert Wilson. Masaoka also contributed regular feature articles to the Rafu Shimpo holiday editions informed by his travels and research. ^[9]

In 1967, Masaoka was a panelist at the pioneering conference titled " It Did Happen Here ," marking the 25th anniversary of the mass removal and incarceration. When UCLA's Asian American Studies Center was founded in 1969, he taught one its first classes, "Wartime Relocation of Japanese Americans: Its Antecedents, Developments During and Consequences of," offered in the fall of 1969 and spring of 1970. His guest speaker list included Manzanar figures such as Frank Chuman , Karl Yoneda , and Togo Tanaka, as well as young activists such as Warren Furutani and Victor Shibata. ^[10]

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June 1970 and died one month later at the age of sixty-one. His papers are archived at UCLA as part of the JARP Collection that he played a major role in building. ^[11]

A Buried Past: An Annotated Bibliography of the Japanese American Research Project Collection . Compiled by Yuji Ichioka, Yasuo Sakata, Nobuya Tsuchida, Eri Yasuhara. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. https://archive.org/details/buriedpastannota00ichi

Finding aid to the Joe Grant Masaoka Papers, UCLA Library, Department of Special Collections, http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf229004bv/

Hosokawa, Bill. JACL in Quest of Justice: The History of the Japanese American Citizens League . New York: William Morrow, 1982.

Masaoka, Mike, and Bill Hosokawa. They Call Me Moses Masaoka . New York: William Morrow, 1987.

Obituary, Pacific Citizen , July 17, 1970, 1.