The question I didn’t explore in my recent review of “Oppenheimer” was the possibility of Japanese and Chinese Americans in the Communist Party. I was reminded of this when I started to read Hayashi’s “Asian American Spies.”
- Shuji Fujii and the Hidden Lives of Japanese American Communists
- Numbed with Fear: Chinese Americans and McCarthyism (20 December 2019)
According to Jonathan van Harmelen’s 27 July 2021 article, “Shoji Fuji and the Hidden Lives of Japanese American Communists,” there were “a number of Japanese communists who exiled themselves from Japan during the Showa era in the United States, often joining forces with fellow Nisei (especially Kibei).”
In “Oppenheimer,” the Spanish Civil War is mentioned, and according to Jonathan van Harmelen, a New York-based Issei named Jack Shirai “was among the first American volunteers killed” while serving as a soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion.
One of the key characters in “Oppenheimer,” is Jean Tatlock who is played by Florence Pugh. Tatlock was a psychiatrist working in San Francisco. She was a member of the Communist Party USA, but she was also a writer for “Western Worker.” What are the odds that a female Communist activist writer would know or at least know of another Bay Area female Communist writer?
In early 1943, Nori Ikeda Lafferty (a prewar Bay Area activist who had been fired from her job at the Communist Party newspaper People’s World after Pearl Harbor) migrated to New York. Lafferty was hired as the first paid JACD staffer. She in turn inspired a group of fellow Nisei activists, including Ernest and Chizu Iiyama, Karl Akiya, Eddie Shimano , Kazu Iijima, and Dyke Miyagawa, to join her in New York.
- Karl Ichiro Akiya ” In the late 1930s, he was involved in recruiting Asian Americans as an organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations and National Maritime Union. He also joined the U.S. Communist Party.
- Koji Ariyoshi was in the San Francisco area in 1941
- Karl Yoneda (1906-1999): From 1933 to 1936, he served as editor for Rodo Shimbun , a labor newspaper focusing on Japanese immigrants published in San Francisco by the Communist Party. In 1934, he became one of the first Japanese Americans to run for political office, garnering more than a thousand votes in a campaign for a State Assembly seat from the San Francisco Fillmore District as a Communist Party candidate. In 1936, he married activist Elaine Black, daughter of Russian Jewish immigrant revolutionaries. Due to anti-miscegenation laws in California, the couple traveled to Washington state to be legally wed.
As a writer, you’d think that Tatlock might have also rubbed shoulders with an editor like Yoneda, even if he focused on Japanese immigrants. He did run for political office, too, as a CP candidate.
What should have drawn more attention to the Japanese American communists like Yoneda and Ikeda in the San Francisco area was they defied California anti-miscegenation laws. Travis Lafferty grew up in Oakland and studied at UCB. He and Nori married in 1943. Oppenheimer was at UCB from 1929 to 1943.
As the film notes, Oppenheimer is Jewish and Yoneda’s wife was of Russian Jewish descent. Surely she would have shared Oppenheimer’s concern for the Jews in Germany, France and Poland.
Unlike UCB and Caltech, where prominent members of the academic community, including an experimental physicist, were concerned for faculty, staff and students who were among the Japanese and Japanese Americans forcibly taken from their homes and interned in various locations, the Communist Party of the USA supported the internment. Belatedly, CPUSA did apologize.
On 4th of July, remember CPUSA’s commitment to patriotism (2 July 2015)
Unfortunately, the Communist Party, saying that it did not want to disrupt the coalition of anti-fascist forces that had coalesced around the Roosevelt Administration during the War, took a terrible position in support of the internment of Japanese Americans. In doing so it abandoned and even expelled Communist Party members like Yoneda and his wife Elaine. It was not until many years later that a resolution was passed at a CPUSA National Convention whereby the Party belatedly admitted its error and apologized for its shameful behavior to the Japanese American community. Yoneda himself was eventually reinstated after the War.
It should be clear that the FDR’s Executive Order 9066 was an issue that was debated and bore out differing actions amongst academics at Caltech and UCB as well as within the Communist Party. Within CPUSA, there were notable people who were Japanese American and who were affected by anti-Asian prejudice and yellow peril attitudes toward people of Japanese descent.
If the omission of Japanese people in “Oppenheimer” makes film’s moral question not fully formed, then the absence of Japanese, Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans within the Communist circles in the San Francisco Bay Area and within UCB is also highly problematic.
Age of the Geek 