Episode 625 – An Ocean Between Us, Part 2

This week: rumors swirled around Port Angeles for decades after WWII that a Japanese man, Osasa Masaru, who had lived there from 1930-39 was in fact a Japanese spy who’d been sent to Port Angeles to report on the movements of the American Pacific Fleet. The reality is at once far more interesting and far more mundane.

 

Sources

Iritani, Evelyn. An Ocean Between Us: The Changing Relationship between the United States and Japan, Told in Four Stories from the Life of an American Town. 

Densho.org’s digital repository has some good examples of “Yellow Peril” scare stories from before the 1924 Immigration Act.

Images

The posters that started going up in April and May of 1942 up and down the West Coast.

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