Major funding for Backstories provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstories.

Welcome to Backstories, a facility that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Nathan Connolly. I'm Brian Vallow.

I'm Joanne Freeman. If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians, along with our colleague Ed Ayers, and each week we explore a topic in American history.

We're going to start today on a farm in California's Central Valley in 1941, where 10-year-old Masumi Kamura lived with her parents.

Central Valley, California is a place where a lot of Japanese American families were involved in migrant farm working or in her case, they actually owned their home.

This is scholar Duncan Reuchen Williams. Several years ago, Masumi Kamura told Duncan about her family's experience living in California after the attack at Pearl Harbor.

She said that one day shortly after the attack, she came home from school and immediately noticed something was terribly wrong.

She comes home from school and she sees her dad at the front door of her farmhouse being beaten by some men and suits and she peers into the living room.

She sees her mom sitting really still at the kitchen table with somebody pointing a shotgun to her mom's head.

She knew in that moment she's only 10 years old that she had to be calm and go in the midst of that to serve as a translator because her parents are from Japan and they don't have much English.

She could tell these men and suits did not have much Japanese. She goes in and what she discovers in the work of translating was that these men were FBI agents and that they were there because her dad was on the board of the local Buddhist temple and that her dad had been out in the lettuce fields and some rabbits or something.

He had a shotgun and he was shooting in the air to scare them off but that was unfortunate that precise moment when these FBI agents arrived.

Despite only being a kid, Masumi was able to talk down the FBI agents and diffuse a situation but that wasn't the last time they showed up at the Kamura family's doorstep.

They actually came back several times to question him about his involvement in the Buddhist temple and whether he was a threat to national security.

But in the midst of all of that the dad says look just because we're a Buddhist we're not a threat to America but we need to somehow demonstrate to these people that we're loyal to this country.

Our daughter is born here and we've lived here for decades so in a fire he kind of takes everything in the house that has like made in Japan or Japanese characters, things with Japanese language and just throws that in the fire.

Even before Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Duncan says the federal government were surveilling Japanese Americans who they deemed as a national security threat and Buddhists were at the top of the list.

They believed that Japanese Americans who were Christian would likely be more loyal to the United States compared to Buddhists.

Right after Pearl Harbor, Buddhists priests are very very first people picked up by the FBI.

Back then it's perhaps parallel to say Islam in America today.

There was a generalized fear in the media among the general public and certainly among the government officials running the intelligence services of the army that Buddhists priests and temples were potential people.

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