Philadelphia has earned its moniker as the “City of Brotherly Love” at key moments in national history. The establishment of a hostel for recently imprisoned Japanese Americans during World War II was one such moment. Current efforts to establish a historical marker for the now-demolished Philadelphia Hostel at 3228 Chestnut Street, spearheaded by Robert Buscher, Connor Nakamura, and the University City Historical Society, has brought renewed attention to this important part of the city’s history as a place of refuge.
Rows of desert living quarters at the War Relocation Camp in Poston, Arizona. | Photo courtesy of the National Science Foundation
After the Pearl Harbor attacks, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the removal of 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast to prison camps inland. This dark moment in U.S. history violated Japanese Americans’ right to due process, stripped many families of wealth, and caused great hardship. Some in Philadelphia supported the move. In a two-article run, celebrated Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Ivan Peterman mocked Japanese Americans and referred to them as “transplanted Orientals” unable to become loyal Americans. The Evening Bulletin agreed, noting the forced removal was the product of a “natural, and in many cases, justified prejudice.”
However, others in the Philadelphia region disagreed with the policy. Driven by a commitment to justice and pacificism, the region’s small, but influential community of Quakers stepped up to help. Philadelphian Quakers, like civil rights activist Henry Patterson, joined the federal agency, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), to shape the policy from the inside. Another group, the Philadelphia-based American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), provided food and other forms of aid. City residents outside of the Quaker community also dissented. In an interview, Buscher, a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), shared that city residents resisted the imprisonment of Japanese Americans they knew personally. According to Buscher, Edward G. Budd, a wartime contractor constructing anti-tank rockets and other wartime supplies, put his large war contracts at risk when he advocated on behalf of one of his employees, Penn graduate Yosuke Watanbe Nakano. Other city residents tried to protect their Japanese American friends as well.
A pamphlet from the 1940s advocating for the creation of a place in Philadelphia to resettle Japanese Americans recently imprisoned by the federal government. | Image courtesy of the University City Historical Society
Part of the resistance to displacement of Japanese Americans included finding ways to get them out of the camps. In May 1942, the AFSC convinced the federal government to approve the establishment of the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council. This organization, based in Philadelphia, helped Japanese American students leave the camps to go to universities. Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, and other local universities provided a place for displaced Japanese American students. This move transformed lives. In a private letter to his parents, George Inouye wrote that the opportunities afforded at Swarthmore and the friends he made there convinced him of “a God who watches us and takes care of us.” Other Japanese Americans had positive experiences. Many, including George’s brother William, made Philadelphia their home after the war.
The successful integration of Japanese Americans on college campuses supported the argument for a large-scale effort to vet and let them resettle around the country. Breaking up Japanese American neighborhoods and dispersing Japanese Americans were goals for Roosevelt and his administration, who looked at the East Coast and Midwest, where there were smaller groups of the population, as places to push Japanese Americans toward. To this end, the WRA opened an office in Philadelphia in July 1943 with Henry Patterson at the head.
This map, taken from promotional materials for the hostel, demonstrates the emphasis organizers placed on Philadelphia’s strengths as a transportation hub. | Image courtesy of Special Collections, Swarthmore College Libraries
Philadelphians wasted no time in launching a plan to help ease Japanese Americans into the community. They decided to establish a modest hostel for individuals that were newly released from the camps. On August 16, 1943, members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, The Philadelphia Federation of Churches, the Catholic community, the Jewish community, civil rights activists, and others met at Patterson’s office to organize. The group designated artist Henry Lee Willet, owner of a stained glass studio, to serve as chair. It also resolved to be careful of “too much advanced publicity” because the group anticipated resistance from some in the city.
Willet, Patterson, and their allies were right to be concerned. A few days after their meeting, a congressional committee attacked the WRA. A protest at the Tule Lake prison camp in November 1943 led the Philadelphia Inquirer to criticize the WRA for “namby pamby tactics” and argued that the agency should be replaced by the Army. Distrust of Japanese Americans continued into 1944.
Philadelphia Hostel at 3228 Chestnut Street circa 1940s. | Photo courtesy of the University City Historical Society
This, along with wartime housing shortages, delayed the project. In one February 1944 letter, Mildred Scott Olmsted, a Delaware County-based peace activist and Quaker, wrote that the group lost multiple chances to sign a lease for reasons including that “neighbors objected to any kind of boarding house coming to the neighborhood, but particularly one that would bring in Japanese Americans.” In time, the effort to establish a hostel’s fortunes would improve, and the groups supporting the hostel signed a lease for 3228 Chestnut Street. Organizers hoped that this location’s proximity to both 30th Street Station and the Baltimore–Ohio Railroad would ease Japanese American integration into the city and region. With a location selected, Women’s International League leader Katherine Arnett began organizing the work required to furnish and open the hostel. As a leading peace activist in the city, an alum of Bryn Mawr College, and a member of one of the families who helped found the Philadelphia Orchestra, Arnett had connections to the city’s faith communities and other sources of volunteers. Thanks to her and other’s efforts, the hostel opened in April 1944.
Members of the Dewey Wright Quintette of Philadelphia sing for the residents of the hostel in July 1944. | Photo courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley
African American support for the hostel, then located in a predominantly Black neighborhood, eased the path for many Japanese American arrivals. African American Pastor William Stevenson, an alum of West Philadelphia High School, pledged support and provided an invitation for Japanese Americans to worship with his congregation in the welcoming materials for those arriving at the hostel. Stevenson was quoted in a pamphlet, “We understand well the difficulty one encounters when confronted by race prejudice.” Penn lecturer Buscher noted many others in the African American community near the hostel understood that the decision to imprison Japanese Americans “had to do with racism in the context of the institutional decisions of the United States government.” In the spirit of fellowship, an African American choir visited the hostel. It received favorable coverage in the Philadelphia Tribune in September 1944.
The Inouye family rests on the steps of the Philadelphia Hostel. Saburo and Michiyo Inouye are standing with their daughter, Miyoko. William and George Inouye are seated. William stayed in Philadelphia after World War II, serving as a full professor of surgery in the Penn School of Medicine. A faculty award is named in his honor at Penn today. | Photo courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley
A key staffing choice also helped the hostel thrive. Early on the hostel hired Inouye’s parents, Saburo and Michiyo. The Inouye family had lived in Sacramento for more than nine years when they were forcibly removed from their home and put into prison camps. In an interview, Penn student Nakamura characterized Saburo and Michiyo’s role in the Philadelphia hostel as “house parents” or comforting family figures. Saburo and Michiyo later became permanent residents of Philadelphia, celebrated years after the war not only for their service to the Japanese American community, but also for the help they gave to many college students and others in West Philadelphia.
Recent Japanese American arrivals walk through Fairmont Park in August 1944. Pictured in the front are Toshio Ino and Virginia Yanagisako. In the back are Lucy Yoshioka and Jack Fujiki. Jack Fujiki organized social events at the hostel to welcome new arrivals. After the war, he lived in Mount Ephraim, New Jersey and worked at Philadelphia’s Farm Journal. | Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Those who came through the hostel or received help from the Inouye family provided the best evidence of why the hostel mattered. Grayce Uyehara, later a resident of South Jersey, recalled that coming to the Philadelphia Hostel marked “a turn in the direction of my life” because it was during that experience that she got involved in supporting the Japanese American community. Uyehara would go on to be an important leader in the movement for the government to compensate and apologize to those Japanese Americans the government displaced during World War II. Herb Horikawa, a young child during the war, recalled that when his family moved to Philadelphia, they “met and became friends of virtually all members of the [Japanese American] community here,” including the Inouye family at the hostel. This sense of community helped the Horikawa family find a home in the Philadelphia region.
A flyer advertising the Philadelphia Hostel. Date unknown. | Image courtesy of the University City Historical Society
In the end, more than 1,100 Japanese Americans came through the hostel. Resettlement increased the Philadelphia region’s population of Japanese Americans to a few thousand from less than 300 before World War II. In the years after the war, Willet successfully convinced Arnett and others to provide a loan to the Inouye family to help them buy property to continue to run the hostel. They later forgave some of this loan. Redevelopment of West Philadelphia led to the tearing down of the old hostel building. The effort to put a marker at the hostel’s old address would, if approved, be a reminder of a moment when people in Philadelphia came together to help persecuted and displaced Americans in need.
There was an excellent surgeon at HUP named Inouye (Bill or William) and I wonder if he was from this family.
Yes, that was my father William (Bill) Inouye who practiced and taught at Penn. He also served as a surgeon at Jeanes Hospital. He was drafted in 1957 when he was doing his surgical residency and we lived in La Rochelle, France for two years while he served at the Army hospital that was there at the time.
I was one of many many University of PA medical students, general surgical residents that were trained by your father. In fact one of my proudest moments in my professional life was winning the William Inouye Teaching Award as a resident.
During my residency at Penn and later as a Cardiac Surgeon from Temple I also worked at Jeanes Hospital. There I learned even more stories regarding your father.
My mother when she lived in the USA was often in the company I believe of your grandmother’s at a house o43nd and Spruce St.
You were all a pillar of the community. This article brought back such great memories!
Yes. Bio at thebottom of this page. https://www3.pennmedicine.org/departments-and-centers/department-of-surgery/education-and-training/residencies/general-surgery-residency/awards/william-inouye-faculty-award
I am happy to have read this bit of Philadelphia history. I never knew that Philadelphia played a part in housing Japanese American refuge victims of internment camps.
I am proud to know this import piece of Philadelphia’s history.
Robert Fried, yes, that’s the surgeon Dr. William Yoshio Inouye (“Bill”) that you are thinking of: it was his parents who managed the Philadelphia Hostel. Bill and his two siblings were among the very fortunate students who were able to leave the prison camps to attend Swarthmore College. As a surgeon Bill did practice at HUP.