From Prisoners to Citizens: Incarcerated Japanese Americans and the Performance of Rights

As important as the 15^th and 19^th Amendments were to expanding suffrage, formal discrimination concerning who could become a citizen and vote remained a feature of American law until 1952. That year, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which granted Asian immigrants, who had been barred from naturalizing, the right to become citizens. During the Second World War, Seabrook Farms, an agribusiness in Cumberland County, New Jersey, recruited more than 2,500 incarcerated Japanese Americans from concentration camps in the West, to bolster its labor force. While many of the Japanese Americans released to Seabrook Farms left New Jersey after the war's end when they were again permitted free movement, a couple hundred remained with the company into the 1950s. At a naturalization ceremony that the company staged in 1953, Mitsuzo Funo, the man seen voting in the above photograph, was among 127 Japanese immigrants who took the oath of citizenship. I wonder what Funo, who at this point in his life had experienced harassment from American immigration officials, imprisonment despite never committing a crime, and parole to New Jersey, felt about exercising his right to vote as an American citizen? What did it mean to him?

Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center (SECC) Records, Rutgers University Community Repository Collection

11/2/1954

Andrew Urban

In this photograph, Mitsuzo Funo, a Tenrikyo priest and Japanese immigrant from Hokkaido, who first came to California in the 1920s on a religious visa, casts his first ballot as an American citizen in what was likely the 1954 election. That same year Funo traveled to New York City from Seabrook Farms to bless a Shinto temple that the Museum of Modern Art had imported from Japan. Funo passed away in Chicago in 1986.