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that Japanese farmers were cutting or burning arrows into their fields to guide Japanese planes to American bases and factories.
    The rumors won the day. By Christmas of 1941, soldiers, FBI agents, police, and local authorities were conducting raids on homes across California, Oregon, and Washington, arresting people whose names had never appeared on the sloppiest government lists. Sometimes breaking down doors, the agents and police were confiscating ordinary radios and binoculars along with guns and anything with Japanese characters on it. After raids on Japanese farms in the Palos Verdes section of Los Angeles, city law enforcement officials proudly showed the results of the raid to local newspapers: a length of water pipe called a possible cannon part; wires for hanging clothes identified as a possible shortwave radio antenna; and insecticides, which were called poison gas. “Our goose was cooked,” wrote Thomas Sisata, after seeing such photos in the Los Angeles Times and after his fiancée was fired from a housekeeper’s job on the day after Pearl Harbor. “I really began to believe,” he wrote in a college paper, “that the average intelligence of people in the United States was that of a high grade moron.”
    The FBI officials and local police reported that they had confiscated guns in the hundreds from Japanese residents of California. What they did not report was that most of those arms were collected at Japanese-owned or -operated sporting goods stores, of which there were more than a hundred in a state noted for its hunting. The count of confiscated items for the three West Coast states came to 2,592 guns, 199,000 rounds of ammunition, 1,652 sticks of dynamite, 1,458 radios, and 2,015 cameras. The Justice Department secretly advised the president, “We have not, however, uncovered through these searches any dangerous persons. We have not found a single machine gun nor have we found any gun in any circumstances indicating it was to be used in a manner helpful to our enemies.”
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    When the war began there were only a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans, mostly farmers, living east of the Rocky Mountains. In Hershey, Nebraska, Ben and Fred Kuroki, who had been at the North Platte church meeting where Mike Masaoka was arrested, told their father that night that they wanted to join the army. “This is your country,” said their father, Shosuke Kuroki. “Fight for it.” So the next morning the brothers got in the farm truck for the 150-mile drive to Grand Island, the nearest army recruitment station. They filled out the papers but then never heard back. Two weeks later, Ben Kuroki heard on the radio that the Army Air Corps was looking for men and had opened a station in North Platte. This time they were accepted. When they asked why the Air Corps would accept them, the sergeant in charge of the office said, “I get $2 for every enlistee. Welcome to the United States Army Air Corps.” A photo of the Nisei brothers taking their oath to serve the United States made the front page of the state’s largest newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald .
    But it wasn’t all quite that easy for the two farm boys. Even on the train ride to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a couple of other enlistees began hassling them. “What are those two lousy Japs doing here?” one said. “I thought this was the American Army.” Fred was assigned to digging ditches and Ben, who had learned to fly in a little Piper Cub, spent his first twenty-one days in the army peeling potatoes—and pretending not to hear the “Jap” jokes and threats of white soldiers and airmen. “We were the two loneliest men in the United States Army,” Ben recalled.
    Finally, the Air Corps separated the brothers, sending Ben to clerical school at Fort Logan, Colorado. Then it was on to Barksdale Field near Shreveport, Louisiana, and more KP, peeling potatoes again. He was depressed and lonely, and his misery got worse when he learned that