We the People: Tsuyoshi Matsumoto

The December 1941 attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service on the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii had immediate repercussions for Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants living throughout the United States. Amid the nationwide confusion and anger that resulted from the bombing, individuals of Japanese descent were targeted for hostility. harassment and faced official discrimination.

Particularly targeted were the Issei, or Japanese immigrants. Barred by law from naturalization, the Issei received no legal protections of citizenship. Even before Congress voted for a Declaration of War on December 8, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a series of Presidential Proclamations which transformed the entire Issei population at a stroke of a pen into enemy aliens who were subjected to curfew, limitations on travel and freezing of financial accounts.

In the days that followed, hundreds of community leaders whose names appeared on custodial detention lists as potentially dangerous were arrested and held by the Justice Department. Other individual Issei were detained or held for questioning by the FBI. Perhaps the most curious was that of Tsuyoshi Matsumoto, whose wartime experience lay at the center of his many-sided life.

There he studied at the San Francisco Theological Seminary. In 1933, he received a bachelor's degree in divinity and was licensed as a Presbyterian minister. He then moved to New York and enrolled at Union Theological Seminary as a theology and music major. While there, he met Jay T. Wright, another student, and the two became good friends. Upon graduation, he returned to Japan where he married his wife, Emiko, a ballet dancer.

Tsuyoshi soon returned to the U.S. to avoid conscription and the growing militarism of the Japanese government. By 1941, he was engaged as a music teacher at the Trinity School in Athens, Alabama, a school for African Americans run by the American Missionary Association (AMA). The job came at the invitation of Jay Wright, who had become the school's director.

He had only been there for a short time when the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor occurred. The following day, Matsumoto was arrested and held at the county courthouse by local officials, allegedly so that people could see “what a real ‘Jap’ looked like.” He was taken to the county jail and then transferred into custody at Fort McClellan, where he remained for two months.

In the months between Matsumoto's arrival in Athens and his arrest, he enjoyed exploring the town and drawing the sights. He sketched gardens and their flowers; one of his favorite sketching spots was a local cotton gin. He loved the red clay and would take handfuls home to experiment, using it to make decorations. But to the local police, convinced they had caught a spy, they interpreted his curious explorations as acts of espionage.

Jay Wright traveled to Memphis to consult Fred Brownlee, general secretary for the AMA and acting president of LeMoyne College. Brownlee, in turn, wrote to Matsumoto to express concern over his care and inquire about his needs. This sparked a friendly correspondence between the two men, as evidenced by this letter from Matsumoto to Brownlee.

After undergoing a loyalty hearing by the Alien Enemy Control Board in February 1942, Matsumoto was released from confinement and returned to Athens, where locals continued to express hostility toward his presence. Following a sensational editorial in the weekly Alabama Courier newspaper, the town's mayor, R.H. Richardson, protested to Brownlee: “I understand that you have been informed about the Jap that is out at Trinity. That should never be, in times of war or peace."

The threat to Matsumoto's safety forced the school to find alternative employment and have him leave the town as quickly as possible. Wright drove him to Nashville to take a train to Chicago, where a colleague met him and drove the rest of the way to a new appointment in Madison, Wisconsin. In this letter from Wright to the AMA, he talks about the difficulty of finding teachers following the "Matsumoto incident." The music teacher position remained unfilled.

The "incident" scarred Matsumoto. He left the ministry and never returned to the South. During the war years, he served as a Japanese language instructor for military intelligence. Matsumoto’s wife, Emiko, had returned to Japan to renew her passport prior to his move to Alabama and could not return due to the war; the couple were separated for eight years, finally reuniting in 1950.

Matsumoto devoted many hours admiring and drawing trees at Torrey Pines, a nature reserve in La Jolla, California. He bequeathed his artworks to the Pines, and following his death in 1982, Emiko donated all proceeds from the sale of his artwork to support the reserve.