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teachers refused to allow Japanese Americans to participate in each morning’s Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. Kay Uno of Los Angeles, a third grader, was walking to school the morning of December 8 when she heard someone call, “There goes that little Jap!”
    “I’m looking around,” she said later. “Who’s a Jap? Who’s a Jap? Then it dawned on me, I’m the Jap.”
    In Seattle that same Monday morning, Sumie Barta, a secretarial student, told this story:
I was at the bus stop going for a brush-up course at Knapp’s Business College. The driver did not greet me with the usual, “Hi, Sumi! How’s tricks!” I heard someone from the back of the bus yell, “Get that damn Jap girl off the bus, Curly.” He said, “Are you Japanese,” and I said I am an American Japanese. “You got any proof of that?” he sneers.… “I was born in King County.” Then Curly ordered me off the bus, saying, “You are still a damn Jap.” I could not continue my classes. I was suddenly afraid to be alone on the highway.
    The hatred continued to spread. The president of the University of Arizona, Alfred Atkinson, prevented the school’s libraries from lending books to students with Japanese names, saying, “We are at war and these people are our enemies.”
    Forcing Barta off the bus and blocking American Japanese at libraries were harbingers of what was to come. Within days, there was a brisk business in buttons sold to American Japanese and other Asians saying: “I am an American!” and “I am Chinese!” Most Americans, even on the West Coast, could not tell the difference. Life magazine, one of the country’s most influential journals, ran a section on how to identify the difference between a “Jap” and a “Chinese.” A popular cartoonist, Milton Caniff, creator of the comic strip Terry and the Pirates , published around the country a six-panel strip called “How to Spot a Jap.” The copy included:
A Chinese man or woman “C” is about the size of the average American. The Jap is shorter and looks as if his legs are joined directly to his chest.… “C” usually has evenly set chompers—Jap has buck teeth.… The Chinese strides. The Jap shuffles.… The Chinese and other Asiatics have fairly normal feet.… The Japs will usually have a fairly wide space between the first and second toes. Jap can’t pronounce our liquid “L” … hisses on any “S” sound.
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    Whatever goodwill there had been toward Issei and Nisei after Pearl Harbor was soon gone as news arrived daily of seemingly invincible and brutal Japanese armies running wild though the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. Tolerance of any kind was replaced by fear and by the greed of white merchants and farmers who wanted to eliminate competition from California’s six thousand Japanese-operated farms, which totaled at least 250,000 acres and were worth more than $75 million. More than 40 percent of California’s produce was from American Japanese farms that often stood on land white farmers ignored as too poor for cultivation.
    In the cities, many white businessmen coveted the stores, businesses, and fishing boats of Japanese competitors. The leader of one agricultural organization, Austin Anson, managing secretary of the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association of the Salinas Valley, told the Saturday Evening Post :
We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japanese for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man.… They undersell the white man in the markets. They can do this because they raise their own labor. They work their women and children while the white farmer has to pay wages for his help.
    Soon after Pearl Harbor, Caucasian shopkeepers joined the farmers in outspoken hatred, with signs saying THIS RESTAURANT POISONS BOTH RATS AND JAPS and OPEN HUNTING SEASON FOR JAPS . A barbershop