Locals’ hard-learned, oft-repeated lessons from 1940s Japanese American experience relevant again as Trump invokes Alien Enemies Act

When I first read that the Trump administration was poised to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to enforce its deport-’em-all immigration policy, I thought instantly of Mas Hashimoto. Then I thought of Jeannie Houston. 

For those not lucky enough to have known Mas, he was a teacher and activist, a Watsonville lifer, a paragon of decency and energy, and a deeply proud Japanese American. It was, in fact, exactly that pride that pushed him to make it his life’s mission to ensure that Americans never forget what their government did in the 1940s to his family and thousands more like him.

Mas’s friend, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, was another beloved Santa Cruz figure whose memorial service took place earlier this month at the Cocoanut Grove. I was there, like many others, because Jeannie, as I knew her, was a friend and a mentor, a warm and lively presence in any room she occupied, and a living, breathing beacon of aloha.

Taken together, these two Santa Cruz County people — with one significant experience of their youth in common — did as much as perhaps any two people in keeping alive the story of the unjust incarceration of thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans without a trial or even an accusation for years during World War II. 

But what do they have to do with President Donald Trump’s latest incursion into his move-fast-and-break-things style of governance? The Alien Enemies Act, which Trump mentioned by name in his inaugural address in January and moved Saturday to invoke, endows the president with the authority to order detentions and deportations. And when was the last time this little-known 18th-century law was invoked? Cue our friends Mas and Jeannie. 

Mas died in 2022 at age of 86, so I suppose we can at least be grateful he was spared the anguish and/or outrage that this news would surely have caused him. The Alien Enemies Act was part of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the notorious and, some would argue, shameful set of four laws passed during the John Adams administration in 1798 to restrict immigration and free speech. Of those four measures, the Alien Enemies Act is the only one that survives today as part of American law. It has been invoked only three times in American history, most recently by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to justify his Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced relocation of more than 120,000 Japanese and Japanese American people into internment camps throughout the American West, all without the due process of law.

A young Mas Hashimoto was one of those displaced people. He was born on Union Street in Watsonville, but at the age of 6, he was relocated with his brothers and widowed mother to a camp in Poston, Arizona, more than 500 miles from home, where they stayed for the duration of the war, more than three years. Two of his older brothers, in fact, were serving in the U.S. Army at the time.

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The sense of injustice that a government would disrupt the lives of thousands of innocent people for a false sense of security rooted in racism gnawed at him his entire life, so he accepted every invitation to schools, colleges, civic groups and others to talk about 9066, Poston and the resulting stain on American history. He did a widely popular TED talk, which he began with, “I was a prisoner of war, during World War II, held by my own country.” In 2002, he even envisioned and led a dramatic reenactment of the mass roundup of Japanese Americans, turning Watsonville’s Mello Center into a makeshift prison camp. 

After Poston, the Hashimotos returned to Watsonville, where Mas eventually became a teacher at his own alma mater, Watsonville High School. No one was more committed to Watsonville than Mas Hashimoto, and, last we checked, Watsonville was an American place.

“He had every reason to hate the American flag,” Cabrillo College historian Sandy Lydon told me shortly after Mas died. “But he loved it. He believed in it. It was in his heart.”

Perhaps there were moments during his lifetime when his story wasn’t as relevant to the political moment of the times. By the 1970s, the federal government had formally rescinded and apologized for Executive Order 9066, and by the ’90s, former internees had received redress payments. Someone else might have considered the matter closed at that point, an ugly moment in U.S. history firmly planted in the unenlightened past. Not Mas. As a history teacher, he knew in his bones that the story of Japanese Americans during World War II must be told and retold, lest it happen to future generations.

“He knew it would be repeated again,” said his wife of 51 years, Marcia Hashimoto. “But he thought, ‘Who’s going to be next?’”

Marcia is now the co-chair of the Santa Cruz/Watsonville chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), which Mas used as his platform to keep his story alive.

But Mas Hashimoto was not even the most prominent survivor of the Japanese American concentration camps in Santa Cruz County. That was Jeanne Houston, who died in December at the age of 90. In 1973, she co-authored, with her husband, James D. Houston, the landmark memoir “Farewell to Manzanar” that was instrumental in bringing the once-buried story of Japanese internment to the mainstream public. The book was made into a movie, and eventually became a curriculum staple in schools across the country, particularly in California. 

Like Mas, Jeannie spent a significant part of her childhood in an internment camp, this one in Manzanar, California, in the remote Owens Valley. They were both nisei, native-born Americans of Japanese parents. They are also both now gone, and with them living connections to an episode that Americans should never forget.

With birthright citizenship in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement mobilized and Guantanamo again part of the American vocabulary, and now with the Alien Enemies Act — which Congress considered repealing as recently as 2022 — roaring back to life, the story that shaped the remarkable lives of these two Santa Cruz County people is now our story to keep sharing. 

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