From the Archive

Henry's friend was upset.

Because most Nisei were in their teens or early twenties in 1942, many of the recollections Densho captures are told from the perspective of students. Seattle accepted refugees from Europe before war broke out, and at one of the city's junior high schools, Henry Miyatake befriended a boy who had the "most interesting story" of the entire class, shared in an essay read aloud:

Yes, he was asked to read it. And he was telling about the persecution of the Jewish people by the Germans. It was kind of unbelievable at that time because in the newspapers they would cover the stuff in a general form and they weren't talking about the uncivil behavior of the Germans towards the Jews at that time, not in the sense that we know it today. But he stated it very candidly and he told about his own family and how they were able to escape from the system and get to the United States...

He made this paper presentation, I think, October 1941, and this was before the war started. But you know, the war clouds were getting darker. And this thing about the last boat to Japan, it was in the newspaper, it was about that same point of time. He was concerned about whether or not there was going to be war with the United States, with Europe and also in Asia. He felt very comfortable being in the United States. But come the Pearl Harbor Day and the day after when we went to school, he told me all kinds of things are going to happen.

A customer of the Yamaichi family delivers a warning.

The boy was from a wealthy, educated family that had escaped through a network in England and New York. He tutored Henry in math, and in return Henry helped the boy in shop class. Teachers told the students not to talk about Japanese Americans being taken away, but somehow Henry's friend knew. When the teacher announced, "Tomorrow will be the last day for some of the students here," Henry's friend spoke up:

In the homeroom class, he was emotionally distraught. He stood up and said, "I didn't come to the United States to see this kind of thing happen. I don't know what's happening here, but this is not what I came for." And he made a very impassioned speech. He was very disturbed. But that's the way things were going at that time. He was more perceptive than I was.

When Henry returned to Seattle after leaving camp, he tried to find his friend but was told the family had gone back to New York. Henry remembers their last exchange: "The last day I was there, he did have an envelope for me. He put it into my pocket and said, 'Well, maybe you could use this one of these days.'" What was in the envelope? Henry replies, "Money."

Farmer before being removed to assembly center, 1942.

In San Jose, California, Jimi Yamichi's family operated a truck farm. Their best customer for years was the "very, very big" Consolidated Produce company. From 1933 the buyer, Ted Myer, a diminutive man like Jimi's father, purchased the best produce local Nisei farmers could provide. Jimi recalls how Myer and his father would drink and relax together after work was finished, enjoying each other's company despite the language barrier.

December 7th the war broke out, and late in the afternoon Ted Myers came by the house and told us -- he always called my father Yamaichi: "Hey, Yamaichi, I have to go to Los Angeles. My boss is calling me." He never liked to take a train so he drove down there. And Wednesday he came back. He didn't go home. He came directly to our house. We were surprised to see him back, "Back so fast?" He says, "Yamaichi," he leaned on my dad shoulder -- he's about the same height -- he cried. He says, "Yamaichi, they'll put all of you away. The big boss told me to look at all the farmland. 'Get the best farmland you can, and all the equipment, and see what you can buy. We'll buy everything. All these Japanese farmers'll be all gone, so prepare yourself and take inventory of the farms that's available that you think we should buy.'" And after that, Ted Myers was very, very disappointed. He just said he told his boss, "I can't do it." These people were good to him, all these years we were faithful to him.

Letters to the editor, Bainbridge Island Review, March 2, 1942.

When the exclusion orders came, the Yamaichis thought about sacrificing the farm and voluntarily moving east, but another family friend, of French descent, offered to oversee their farm while they were gone. Of his own accord, Charles Buron collected rent from tenants, paid the taxes, and reported each month on how much money was in the bank. When the family finally escaped tumultuous years at the Tule Lake, California, incarceration camp, they had the farm to return to.

Densho interviewees report mixed behavior among people they had considered friends before the war. In Fowler, California, Yoshimi Matsuura recalls some who started to use the word "Jap," and were happy to buy the family's tractor at half of its worth after the exclusion orders were posted. In contrast, while Yosh was detained at Gila River, Arizona, he learned that "Ma and Pa Kellogg," his civics and American history teachers, had been driven off of their farm for being too outspokenly supportive of their former Japanese American students.

Paul Bannai's friends are turned away from Manzanar.

Another demonstration of principled friendship at a personal cost took place at Bainbridge Island, Washington, where the Army removed the first Japanese American families under the authority of Executive Order 9066 in March 1942. Earl Hanson, who took time off from work to say goodbye to his many Nisei high school friends, remembers how Walt Woodward, editor of The Bainbridge Review, braved islanders' anger when he printed sympathetic reports about their missing Japanese American neighbors. (Woodward served as the model for the protagonist of David Guterson's novel Snow Falling on Cedars.) Hanson says, "Walt Woodward, you've got to pat him on the back because, boy, he stuck up for the people through thick and thin. And a lot of people quit buying the paper, they quit advertising, but he bulldozed his way through." In a letter to the editor, Ichiro Nagatani, on his way to captivity at Manzanar, California, told Woodward, "I really want to try and put across to you how much your friendship has meant to us�You were one person who had faith in us." His letter of thanks is followed by a reader's cancellation notice.

Letter from Nisei girl to former teacher, 1942.

Some Nisei remember friends visiting them behind barbed wire and sending requested items to them in camp. Authorities didn't make it easy for outside communication; strict restrictions applied especially in the early days, and packages were inspected and sometimes confiscated. Paul Bannai, who had overcome discrimination to obtain a job at a bank in Los Angeles, recalls his friends' frustrated attempts to visit him at the Manzanar, California, incarceration camp.

I remember that even though I was in camp, I had a lot of people that were friends outside. When I left the bank and went up there, one of the accounts was a company that had a lot of audio and visual equipment, and because they heard that I couldn't take a radio, they sent me a radio by mail. Well, unfortunately the camp director said he'd have to turn it down. But I had friends like that that would try to help in every way possible to make my life in camp a lot easier because they didn't know what the situation was. They were never allowed to come to Manzanar. They couldn't visit. They couldn't come in. In fact I remember one time that the gate at Manzanar -- they were very strict, nobody was allowed in. And any time that the so-called non-Japanese came to visit, they were not ever allowed into the camp.

While the memories of young adult Nisei resonate with viewers of the oral histories, perhaps even more poignant are artifacts in the Densho collection that preserve the feelings of children caught up in events beyond their understanding. Letters from Nisei students removed from Seattle's Washington Junior High School capture their efforts to remain cheerful, even as their words reveal starkly changed circumstances. A boy named Tokunari, held at the Puyallup Assembly Center on the Washington State Fairgrounds, writes to his teacher and past classmates: "We have one room shared among 7 pupils and the walls are full of holes and cracks in which cold and chill air struck us in a funny way that I could not sleep at all last night. We had so little to eat that after reaching our room I ate a sandwitch and some crackers. Our beds are on loose by the U.S. Army and our mattress is a cloth bag strawed by hay." He signs the letter, "your Seattle evacuee."

Report from Friends of the American Way, a Quaker support group, 1940s.

A girl named Mary, also at Puyallup, adds a postscript in a letter to her former teacher, "P.S. Please write to me, and the class also because it is lonely here." In answer to her classmates' questions she says, "We wait in long lines for our meals" and concludes, "The lights must go off at ten o'clock so I must stop." Mary doesn't add that when the barracks lights go off, sweeping searchlights go on. She finishes another letter, "When I'm not doing anything I think about Washington School and the children in it. Thank you for the letter and jokes. They gave me a good big laugh." She signs the letter "(who was) Your classmate, Mary."

As a young boy, Emery Brooks Andrews visited his Japanese American friends at the Minidoka, Idaho, incarceration camp. His father, Reverend Emery Andrews of the Japanese Baptist Church in Seattle, moved his family to nearby Hunt, Idaho, and braved insults and threats of the locals for his decision to minister to his displaced congregation. Japanese Americans fondly remember how Reverend Andrews drove back and forth from Seattle to see to their affairs and bring them belongings left behind. Brooks remembers seeing his friends' new surroundings during what was "a fracturing time" for everyone: "I have vivid memories of driving up the road to the guardhouse, to the gate there and seeing the barbed wire fence stretching, it seemed like for miles around the camp. And the guard towers, soldiers in the guard towers with guns, always pointing in toward the camp, never out."

One group of friends in name as well as deed figures prominently in the story of the Japanese American incarceration. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, adhered to their pacifist and humanitarian beliefs as they firmly opposed the forced removal and detention. Densho interviewees remember receiving Christmas presents donated by Quakers, learning about their constitutional rights from Quaker teachers in the camps, and staying in Quaker-run hostels after leaving confinement. Friends committees sponsored Nisei out of the camps and into colleges, and they helped former detainees find scarce jobs after allaying the fears of hostile communities.

Issei and children, Pontiac, Washingon, 1915.

Floyd Schmoe, a Quaker from Seattle (pictured in photograph at head of article), was an ardent advocate for Japanese Americans before, during, and after the war. He traveled to Hiroshima to help build housing for the atomic bomb victims, and assisted the redress campaign in the 1980s. Upon obtaining files compiled by the FBI, Schmoe learned that the government had contemplated filing charges against him but declined. Someone with a blacked-out name had called him "a yellowbellied Jap lover, " apparently deemed insufficient evidence for arrest.

The Quakers launched letter-writing campaigns to push for the release and resettlement of incarcerated Japanese Americans. A report from one Quaker committee, the Friends of the American Way, reveals that these were friends not just of individuals unfairly imprisoned, but also of the democratic principles that should have protected them:

August 2010 - Pioneer Generation: Remembering the Issei

The stories Nisei interviewees tell about their parents form a pattern: Fathers left the villages and rice farms of Japan at the turn of the last century to earn money in Hawaii and mainland United States. Some still in their teens, they took grueling jobs at farms, lumber mills, railroad camps, and fishing canneries; others worked as houseboys. Once they earned enough money, the men returned to Japan to find a bride or sent for a picture bride. Babies arrived, and the Issei built churches and Japanese language schools to educate the next generation. They formed business associations to support each other in an inhospitable country. They turned undesirable land into flourishing farms by working dawn to dusk, and even into the night. While many decided to make America their permanent home, others expected to return to Japan. As Ike Ikeda says, "I had a feeling that, like many immigrants, they were ready to make their mint. They thought they would really get rich in a hurry and go back. But that never happened." What happened to the Issei instead in the 1940s no one could have anticipated.

Kara Kondo remembers life on the farm.

Because Densho began collecting oral histories after most of the Issei generation had passed on, the stories we have of them come secondhand through Nisei memories. Fortunately, the family stories shared by many Nisei are vivid--fond and respectful as well. Interviewees speak of how hard their parents worked, and how they instilled in their children the values of integrity, tradition, and family honor.

Issei farm, Washington, c. 1915.

Kara Kondo describes life in Yakima Valley in Washington:

A lot of the Issei lives were the same in that we were a self-contained community. We were able to maintain our Japanese foods and customs, and on New Year's Day they had mochitsuki and the same kind of customs that they were used to. But it was a very difficult life, and I have a lot of memories about living out in the country and having wild horses come into our land and having to chase them out and having the sheep coming in to graze on the last bits of alfalfa in the fall. These are memories that you have. And very often we could hear the coyotes at night and often see them around the haystack...

Of course, and we realized that life was hard for all the Issei, or anybody, regardless of whether they were Caucasian, because they were pioneers in the Yakima valley. They were early pioneers. And especially on farms it was very difficult for them.

Kara's parents introduced new crops.

Among the obstacles and discrimination the Issei faced, alien land laws prevented Asian immigrants from owning land. Kara's parents and thousands of other Issei farmers had to combine diligence and resourcefulness to turn a profit. In her case, the family leased reservation land from the Yakama Indian Nation. Along with other Issei pioneer famers, they cleared the land and planted new types of crops in the valley.

Issei identity card, Fort Missoula enemy alien internment camp, Department of Justice, 1942.

It was very difficult just to clear a land out of sagebrush with just horses and manpower. That's one of the reasons why they had small parcels of land, which led them to farming, crops that would produce more income from small acreages. That's when they introduced such products as the row crops of tomatoes and corn, and peppers and cantaloupes and the melons. They introduced these small crops that grew very well in the climate and the soil conditions on the reservation�At that time they did not go into orchards or trees because that required some permanence, and the Japanese farmers depended on leases. They would move from one parcel of land to another depending on, I imagine, the lease agreements and the kind of soil that they were seeking. So, in many ways, they pioneered different crops for the lower valley.

While farming supported a majority of Japanese Americans, many Issei owned small businesses that served the Japantowns of the West Coast. Densho interviewees describe living upstairs from a small grocery store, barbershop, photo studio, or five-and-dime store. Katsumi Okamoto says his family ate well because they ran a grocery store (also leased), and he remembers delivering groceries to a dentist in return for dental care. His father did well even during the Depression but lost the business when World War II started: "He seemed to have done very well, but his problem was he let people charge, and I wonder, I heard that he never collected on a lot of the bills. And once the war started, that was it. He lost a lot of money, but he was a very gentle-hearted person that helped people out."

Ayako and Masako Murakami tell how their father answered his interrogators.

The years devoted to building up successful farms and businesses went up in smoke after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Within hours of the attack, FBI agents swooped down on Japanese American communities and arrested thousands of Issei men whose names had been compiled years earlier as potentially "dangerous" aliens. Fathers who happened to be business leaders, Buddhist priests, Japanese language teachers, or influential in some other way were separated from their wives and children. Suddenly they were treated like criminals. Many were held for years in Department of Justice internment camps while their families were confined in War Relocation Authority camps. Once-proud Issei men eventually rejoined their families, but robbed of their authority and self-respect.

May Sasaki tells how the Issei were affected by the incarceration.

More fortunate Issei men arrested after Pearl Harbor escaped the separate confinement. Sisters Ayako and Masako Murakami, who ran the Higo Variety Store in Seattle, explain that their father always said, "America is my father, and Japan is my mother. They had to be on good terms." When he was taken to the immigration station for questioning, their father answered cleverly:

He was stuck at immigration for a while, but they released him. They questioned him, and Papa was telling us the kind of questions they asked. They came right out and said, "Who do you want to win the war, Japan or America?" And most of the Japanese gentlemen said America, but my dad says, "Neither." I said, oh you said that? He said, "Neither." He says couples fight like husband and wife, and says, "I don't want either one to win, or lose." And so they released him. I said, "Papa, you're really smart." I never thought of it that way, you know.

Some Nisei interviewees report that their parents believed Japan would win the war, and even at the very end believed that Japan would never surrender. Yet they encouraged their Nisei children to be loyal to their country of birth and citizenship. Other Issei had become more attached to America as the years went by, even though they were not permitted to become U.S. citizens. Paul Bannai recalls, "I remember when the war started, they emphasized the fact that they had been here for many years. I was born and raised here. I should think in terms of being a good American and serving this country, because there's no other country that I owe any allegiance to. "

In addition to depriving the Issei of their farms and businesses, the forced removal and incarceration permanently damaged their status as heads of households and communities. Camp administrators favored the English-speaking Nisei, placed them in positions of authority, and forbade the Issei from voting or holding office in what passed for self-government in the camps. Overnight, generational roles changed.

Sue Embrey remembers her mother's life at Manzanar.

May Sasaki remembers the idle old men at Minidoka, Idaho, incarceration camp:

They were the heads of families, and then they found themselves not the heads of families anymore. I think that was very difficult for them to accept. So there were times when there was tension and they were fighting--all the things that occur when the leadership is being challenged in one's family. That's too bad because the self-confidence, the feeling of pride in being the head of a family, when that is taken away from you, we found some Isseis that weren't ever able to get back that same feeling of what it is to be the head of one's family. I felt sorry about that. You'd see some of the older gentlemen kind of sitting there. They would pick up and do things like play go or hana or whittle or make things...

I know people like to joke and say, "Well, I had more free time on my hands so I like that," and everything. But I really think if they were to be given a choice as to whether to go to camp and get that forced retirement or stay out of camp and have their freedom and have their leadership and their sense of pride and self-confidence, I'm sure they would never have said that. But I think it's a matter of... what is it? It's a denial which then lets you survive a situation and just laugh it off and say, hmmm. It's like when you get hit doing something foolish, you say, "Oh, it didn't hurt me anyway." Well, it did hurt, and you could see it in some of the ways they were not able to ever regain a sense of who they were. And that was kind of a sad situation.

105-year-old Issei man receiving his redress check, Seattle, 1990.

The Issei women also lost their hopes for prosperity and self-determination. Sue Embrey, incarcerated at Manzanar, California, recalls her widowed mother's time at the camp. After a lifetime of endless work, some Issei could enjoy the enforced leisure, but Sue's mother had her sorrows too:

I think she got arthritis, because her whole left side, she was unable to move her arms, and we ordered dresses from the catalogs, Montgomery Ward and Sears, that had buttons all the way down the front so we could get her dressed. But she used to walk a lot around camp, and she took part in what they called utae, which is a capella singing, telling a story. She loved to sing, so she got involved with that. And later on she went to Red Cross classes where they rolled bandages for the army. I think for her it was probably a good time, but she never talked about the fact that we lost our grocery store that she had bought after my father died. She always said it was better to be in business for yourself. And so here she was, left a widow with eight kids, and so she cashed in her insurance policy, and bought this little grocery store outside of Little Tokyo, and she really enjoyed being a businesswoman. Then when we lost that, it was a little over a year, year and a half maybe, after she bought it that she lost it, she never mentioned it. But I think it really kind of killed her dream of becoming an independent woman. And we sold it to a young Mexican American couple, and they took care of it for a while. But she never really was able to get back into doing anything like that. I think that she probably was very disappointed about that, but she never, like I said, never mentioned it.

Hand-drawn map of Crystal City internment camp, Texas.

A frequent refrain of the Nisei is to lament that the Issei generation had been the most harmed by the incarceration, and yet so few lived to see redress arrive. So many had died before they could receive the much-deserved presidential apology for their wrongful imprisonment. After money was appropriated to fulfill the promised $20,000 to each survivor of the incarceration camps, the checks went to the oldest first. Photos from 1990 of checks being handed to Issei elders drive home how much time had passed since the camps closed before the injustice was acknowledged.

The Nisei take consolation in knowing that their parents' Japanese culture helped them cope with the indignities of racism and the losses of incarceration. It may be hard for younger generations raised in the post-Civil Rights era to understand, but the common memory is of Issei parents saying shikata ga nai, "it can't be helped, it must be endured"--a passive expression, but spoken by a generation that was anything but weak.

June 2010 - International Internees: The Family Camp at Crystal City

Days after the Texas Board of Education voted to amend the state's social studies curriculum in order to correct a perceived liberal bias, a Texas chapter in Japanese American history comes to mind. According to press accounts, among the changes the school board made to the curriculum is "an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism."¹ An internment camp in the south Texas town of Crystal City did hold German and Japanese internees, as well as prisoners deported from Latin America and a half-dozen Italians. Other internment camps across the country held a mix of foreign nationals. But the fact that the U.S. government interned European immigrants in no way negates the racism that led to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans.²

Inspecting baggage of women transferring to Crystal City, Texas, 1946.

If not enough people know about the mass removal and incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II, it is quite likely that even fewer know that individuals of German and Italian descent were also interned by the U.S. government during World War II. During the course of the war, the Department of Justice (DOJ) interned over 11,500 German immigrants and over 2,700 people of Italian ancestry. The U.S. government also arranged to have deported and detained more than 2,250 Latin Americans of Japanese descent, held hostage to be possibly exchanged for American prisoners of war.³

"Crystal City Reunion Camp Being Readied for Families."

Regardless of nationality, internees shared painful experiences: fathers separated from families, damaged reputations and self-respect, loss of property and livelihoods, and the postwar stigma of assumed guilt.⁴ But one critical difference points to the role racial bias played in the government's policies: European enemy aliens were not targeted en masse. Government officials adopted a policy of at least attempting to determine whether German individuals were loyal, and largely dismissed Italians as a threat. In contrast, nearly a century of anti-Asian discrimination led the same officials to distrust everyone of Japanese ancestry, simply because of their ancestry. General John DeWitt, in charge of defending the West Coast, put it bluntly: "The Japanese race is an enemy race."⁵

Japanese Peruvian baseball team, Crystal City, c. 1946.

Here we must distinguish between internment, the legal detention of selected foreign nationals under the Alien Enemies Act of 1918, and the indiscriminant incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans under the sweeping authority of Executive Order 9066.⁶ Two-thirds of those taken away after President Roosevelt signed the order were U.S. citizens, not legally subject to internment. Yet they and their families were held in guarded compounds for years without any charge of wrongdoing. Executive Order 9066 was not applied to U.S. citizens of German or Italian extraction.

Mako Nakagawa rejoined her father at Crystal City.

Crystal City was unique in its designation as a family internment camp, a slice of Texas history that should be understood in the larger context of the mass incarceration. In November 1942, the Immigration and Naturalization Service converted a former migrant farm worker camp in Zavala County to a facility where families could be reunited with their interned fathers. Though the camp was intended to hold Japanese aliens and their children, the first families to arrive were German, along with one Italian family. By summer 1944, Crystal City held 804 people of German ancestry, 4 of Italian ancestry, and 2,104 of Japanese ancestry; of the Nikkei, about 50% were from Latin American countries, primarily Peru. Because Peru refused to take back their people of Japanese descent after the war, many remained at Crystal City until the camp finally closed in February 1948.⁷

A circa 1943 government newsreel about the Crystal City internment camp can be viewed online (scroll down to Alien Enemy Detention Facility: Crystal City):

Painting a rosy picture of life in the internment camp, the newsreel shows detainees living under "traditional, American standards of decent and humane treatment." The script does concede, however, that people suffer "imaginary" illness traceable to "detention, the fence, the loss of freedom."

Mako Nakagawa describes family life in Crystal City.

At the age of seven, Mako Nakagawa, with her mother and three sisters, transferred from the Minidoka, Idaho, WRA camp to rejoin their father at Crystal City. After two years of separation, Mako remembered her father primarily from a formal photograph her mother cherished.

I don't recognize him. I do not recognize him and my kid sister was scared of him, ran away from him. I was too big to run away from him. I wish I could have. I didn't like this man. He looked dirty and he looked kind of disheveled and I was expecting this handsome, distinguished, well-dressed, groomed man. And this man was a disappointment, but my sisters were hugging him and they were so happy to see him, and my mom looked pretty happy. And I tried to pretend like I was happy. I wasn't. It took me a while to really get used to him, and he was, he really was. He was very different from what I hear from my friends. He was a gentle person. He was a loving person. I guess later on when I took his story, the fact that the baby ran away from him just hurt him really bad. He said, "My own daughter, my own daughter is running away from me."

Art Shibayama recalls communication difficulties.

Mako quickly warmed to her father, who told her stories and took her to the swimming pool (a converted irrigation reservoir). After years of unhappy separation, her mother revived upon being reunited with her husband. Mako recalls that life as a family was much improved at Crystal City.

Densho: Were you able to be a family in Crystal City?

Nakagawa: Much more so. For one, we did not eat in mess halls. We had little duplex where in-between there was a bathroom, benjo, and then everybody cooked and ate for themselves. So there was a sense of privacy, a sense of family. There was a sense of community. One of my dad's recollections was in Crystal, they called us Mr. Takahashi, Mrs. Takahashi. I guess that's not the way they were addressed before. We were just things. There was a much healthier sense....

We went to Japanese school after American school, and then we went to Japanese school all day Saturday, and then we went to church on Sunday, so there was school every day in one form or another. Lots of activities for kids that were programmed, and it seemed like everybody was involved....From my perspective and from what I read, and from my sisters and from the tone, it was just a much healthier place. We were incarcerated. There was no doubt about that and the bitterness of the incarceration was there, but they were able to circumvent it somehow and live a pretty decent, closest to a community family life that was impossible in Minidoka.

Densho interviewees describe Crystal City as being segregated into ethnic sections. Most Nisei say they had little contact with the German American children. They also had difficulty communicating with the Japanese Peruvians who spoke Spanish, as the Nisei were not fluent in their common language of Japanese. While Japanese Americans went to Japanese school after their regular school, the Japanese Peruvians took English classes.

Cast of a play, Crystal City internment camp.

Art Shibayama was shipped with his family to Crystal City from his native Peru. In his interview he recalls interacting with the Japanese Americans of his age.

Densho: About the relationship between the Japanese Peruvians and the Japanese Americans, did you mix very much?

Shibayama: Not too much because we were one of the last ones to go into camp...in '44 so it was late. They had to build a new barracks for us to live in, so we were all put into one side of camp all together. Because the softball league was already established, we made our own team and then so that way we were intermingled with the Japanese Americans. And then in judo, too, because we had to take judo the same place, so we kind of got mixed with them there. But it was hard to communicate because they didn't speak Japanese and we didn't speak English, so it was hard...

We didn't have any friction. The only thing was that we couldn't communicate very well. So it was mostly by sign language, by expression. Or we'd talk to them in Japanese and they would answer in English. Because a lot of them understood but they couldn't speak.

Satoru Ichikawa left Crystal City when the war ended.

Unlike in the WRA camps, where Americanism was promoted and Japanese culture discouraged, at Crystal City, the recreation was much more ethnic, presumably because some internees had requested repatriation or were expected to be deported. German, Spanish, and Japanese films were shown, and traditional Japanese arts and sports were practiced. Sumo matches were popular, and children learned Japanese songs and performed in Japanese plays.

Takashi Matsui describes generational ideas about mixed marriages.

Satoru Ichikawa was the son of a Buddhist priest in Seattle. His father was arrested after Pearl Harbor and moved from one DOJ camp to another. Luckier than the stateless Japanese Peruvians, the Ichikawas, like other families headed by former enemy aliens, could return to their homes when the war ended.

Densho: When you found out you were going to leave Crystal City, how did you feel about that?

Ichikawa: I thought it was great. Finally we could leave this camp. Because all the time that I was in camp, my hope was that I could get out. I would always be thinking, "Why are we here? Why are we in this camp, and when will we get out of this camp?" So when we were told that we could leave now, we're gonna go, that was a big day for me.

All I can remember is the day that the war was over, the boys were out in the softball field playing baseball. And then all of a sudden somebody came over to say, "The war's over, the war's over." Of course, we all immediately stopped the game and went back to our homes to find out more, what's going on. And of course we all had radios in our homes... So we were trying to listen to see what the heck's going on. I thought it was tremendous that the war was over, yeah.

Densho: And what was the reaction of your parents during this time?

Ichikawa: I thought they were very happy that it was over, too. But I think some of the Isseis, they didn't know whether to believe it or not, until the emperor came on and he definitely said that this is over now.... I'm sure that they had a tremendous sense of relief hearing that the war was over. I don't think there was any bitterness on their part or anything like that. There was a tremendous sense of relief that it's finally over.

3. Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), pp. 94, 124.

5. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied (1982-83; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press), p. 66. In arguing for the exclusion of Nisei from the West Coast, DeWitt told Secretary of War Henry Stimson: "In the war in which we are now engaged racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted. "

May 2010 - Exceptions That Prove the Rule: Interracial Nisei Marriages

To examine Japanese American history is to encounter generalizations about generations. Familiar characterizations emerge from the family stories of Densho interviewees: tradition-bound Issei, bicultural Nisei, and integrated Sansei. Marriage stories follow the same route: After establishing a foothold in the United States, Issei fathers brought back brides from the home country. Upon leaving camp for military service, college, or careers, Nisei sons and daughters married other Nisei sons and daughters. As Nikkei communities dispersed, growing numbers of Sansei and Yonsei grandchildren married other Asian Americans, Caucasians, and occasionally African Americans or other ethnicities. And now we have Shin-Issei narratives - new families bound to the old country. All of which raises the question, is Japanese American identity being developed or diluted?

Statistics bear out the generalizations. The Nisei rate of interracial marriage was very low for a second- generation group. According to one historian, only 2 to 3 percent of prewar California Nisei married non-Japanese. After anti-miscegenation laws that banned interracial marriage were repealed, the rate rose to 10 percent of Nisei men and 17 percent of Nisei women by the late 1950s.¹ Densho interviews with Nisei who married "out" reveal intriguing variations on the norm. The individuals who risked parental and societal criticism by marrying someone of another race or ethnicity report that levels of acceptance and rejection evolved over time.

Joe Ishikawa describes how his father-in-law and father reacted to the mixed marriage.

Takashi Matsui, a Kibei originally from Hood River, Oregon, describes how he felt when his son married a Caucasian:

I think it's a difficult issue, but it's an individual choice. We cannot tell our children what to do or what not to do. The first generation was, you might say, narrow-minded. So they even thought that the second generation like us should not marry anybody outside of their community. In other words, our folks came from Fukuoka and they thought that we should find somebody from Fukuoka and not Hiroshima or some other place. They were against that. Well, that was one thing. Then they thought that Japanese should stick to the Japanese, but the second generation didn't marry out. But when it came to third generation and fourth they had more freedom, independent thinking, and Issei parents all gone, and the new parents were more broad-minded. So it's getting to be that way.

On the eve of World War II, Betty Fumiye Ito was a high school beauty queen in Bellevue, Washington. She was popular but says, "In those days, our parents didn't want us to marry Caucasians, and they didn't want me dating Caucasians, so I didn't date anyone. I was invited by a young student to attend the junior prom, and my mother shook her head, so I didn't go." Fred Shiosaki lived further east in Spokane, where there were scarcely any Japanese Americans he could date. He remembers, "I didn't go to dances, except the afternoon dances, I would go there and at least would be a wallflower. They did have senior proms, but obviously, I didn't go to that."

Then there were the exceptions. Mae Iseri Yamada, who grew up in rural Washington, speaks of her Caucasian sister-in-law: "My oldest brother was married in 1938, and he married a hakujin. Of course, you can imagine what kind of commotion went on then, the oldest son in the family, and he's married a hakujin, and oh, brother. But my brother was determined. He says, 'Well, she said she would do whatever it took for her to be a responsible wife.'" Mae knows her parents would have preferred their eldest to marry within the Japanese community, but her mother said, "Well this is America, and I guess this is the way it's gonna be." Mae reports that her sister-in-law did prove to be a good wife, undeterred by the looks and comments the couple drew from white people.

Chizuko Norton breaks the news to her father.

Another exceptional marriage was that of Joe Ishikawa, who left confinement at Amache, Colorado, to accept a scholarship to the University of Nebraska. He met the "beautiful" Olivia Brandhorse, lost track of her, and encountered her again three years later working in a department store. They decided to marry but lived separately in St. Louis and Los Angeles for a year, to allow the families to "get used to the idea."

We were kind of friends, but they really didn't want her to get married. He had grown up in Oklahoma, and knew about "squaw men," men who married Indian women and so forth. And so he was really very nervous about it. Her mother, of course, went along with him, although I invited her to come to our wedding when we were married in Denver. I went there with my best man, and we were married in a little church in Denver with no family from either side. And it's funny because--selective memory-- my mother-in-law once said to Livie, "So-and-so got married, I feel so sorry for her. Can you imagine? Her mother wouldn't even go to her wedding." And Livie thought, "Gosh, Mom, you gotta pick your targets better than that." She had selective memory about that...

My father, who was living with me, was the best of all. I was over thirty at this point -- he said, "You know, you ought to think about getting married, and it's okay if you marry a hakujin, a Caucasian." And I thought, "I'm going to put this old boy to the test," so I said, "What if I married a black girl?" Because I'd been active in the black community, so it wouldn't be out of the realm of the possible. And he says, without hesitation, "Well, if you loved her and weren't doing it just to try to prove something, make a political statement." And I thought, "That's the right answer." I thought that was very good.

Family on pilgrimage to Tule Lake, California, 1997.

Chizuko Norton returned home to Seattle after being confined at Minidoka, Idaho, where her mother died. She vividly remembers her anxiety over telling her father that she planned to wed a white man.

Chizuko: It took me two weeks. And I will never forget. My father was reading the paper, and I was sitting in the rocking chair getting more nervous. My sister and brother-in-law---I had discussed it with them, and they said they would position themselves outside the apartment door so that when Father would explode, they would dash in and save me.

Densho: So you were anticipating some kind of...

Chizuko: Oh, yeah. My husband had come to the apartment, but a few of my Nisei men friends had come, too. I wasn't dating them, but we would all go out together. And so he finally said, "I wish you wouldn't be rocking like that, you're making me nervous." He was trying to read this paper, and so I said to him, "I have something to tell you." He slowly put the paper down and said, "What is it?" So I told him and his response was, "Dame, dame," that's not good. I don't know what possessed me, I said, "Well, my mind is made up." And I almost flopped over dead when he said, "Well, if your mind is made up, I guess there isn't anything I can do about it, but we can talk about it." And, of course, "What about the children? You're going to face a lot of discrimination." He said, "I think you could take it, but what about your, your friend?" So I said, "Well, we've discussed it, and we know it's not going to be easy." So, we got married.

Roger Shimomura remembers his parents' change of attitude.

While her father accepted the decision, their Japanese American and Caucasian friends did not approve. Chizuko reflects, "For us to expect everyone to think this was great was asking a bit too much. I think we both went into it with our eyes wide open. And if I were to do it again, I would do it again." Chizuko took care to tell her biracial daughter that she was "just as good as anyone else," and "how exciting it is to have two different cultures that you could mix together."

Mess hall food, Manzanar incarceration camp, California, 1942.

True to the statistical pattern, Sansei interviewees describe dating and marrying members of diverse cultural groups.² Roger Shimomura, raised in Seattle, describes the evolution of his family's attitudes toward intermarriage. They started by telling him, "Only date Japanese women. Don't date Chinese. And don't date Filipinos, and above all don't date white people." Roger rebelled and brought home several women his parents disapproved of.

I started dating this other girl that was mixed, from Hawaii. But her uncle was the governor of Hawaii, so I was impressed by that. And she was this absolutely beautiful person. All my parents heard was that her uncle was the governor of Hawaii. I think they assumed that if you're Hawaiian, you're Japanese. So I said I was gonna bring her home for dinner. My mom said, "Fine, bring her over." The minute they looked at her they knew she was mixed. And they didn't say anything, but when dinner was ready, my mom got two TV trays and brought them downstairs and put them in the basement, and essentially said, "You guys can eat down there." That's when I realized just how impossible this situation was. And I was in college.... They obviously grew out of that because as it turns out, my sister married a Caucasian right in the middle of all this. And then I dated a lot of Caucasian women that they met and I ended up living with an Iranian woman. They had to put up with all of this and soon, in their older age, like a lot of older people do, became a little bit more liberal in their values. So, before they passed away, it really didn't matter.

1. Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 38.

2. Some studies show that by the 1980s, 60 percent of Sansei were marrying non-Asian partners. See Harry H. L. Kitano et al., "Asian-American Interracial Marriage," Journal of Marriage and the Family 46, no. 1 (Feb. 1984): 179-90.

April 2010 - Bad Meat and Missing Sugar: Food in the Japanese American Camps

When asked to share their strongest memories of the Japanese American incarceration camps, many survivors talk about the food. Life-sustaining but boring is the consensus. Worse than boring was the food served in the early days of the "assembly centers" in spring and summer 1942. Untrained cooks, unsanitary kitchens, and unreasonable food allowances added up to episodes of food poisoning in various camps and increased the misery of the displaced Japanese Americans. While false reports claimed that detainees were being treated to rich and costly meals, in reality they were fed a dismal diet of wieners, dried fish, pancakes, and other cheap starches. Canned and pickled vegetables replaced the bounty of fresh produce Japanese Americans were accustomed to. As with other aspects of camp, food quality improved only through the efforts of the detainees themselves.

The stated policy of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the agency in charge of running the detention camps, was to provide a diet like that of other Americans, but the reality was different. The daily per-person allotment could not exceed 50 cents, the amount allowed for Army rations. In fact, only 31 to 45 cents were spent for each detainee, partly because the WRA was acutely aware of criticism that they were "coddling" their wards.¹

Frank Kikuchi describes the type of meat served.

Far from being overindulged, young mothers reported that milk was difficult to obtain while they were pregnant or when their babies were born. Minimal provisions were made for individuals with special dietary needs, such as people with allergies or diabetes. Food was contaminated by insects and windblown sand. At the Minidoka incarceration camp in the Idaho desert, Frank Yamasaki remembers, "When you go to the mess hall, when you chew the food, you can feel the grit of the sand. And it's amazing, even that you get used to it. I gradually got used to the mixture of sand and food. It was terrible."

Jim Akutsu is told about black market food.

Male interviewees who were fast-growing teenagers at the time complained about never getting enough meat, and what they were served was revolting: organ meats, tough mutton, and Vienna sausages. At Minidoka, Gene Akutsu forced himself to eat beef tongue and boiled liver: "It was a matter of either eating it or going to starve. And me being raised through the Depression, I learned to eat anything. If it tastes bad, just don't breathe and just chew it and swallow. And that's how basically I got through without starving." Frank Kikuchi, who was at Manzanar, California, recalls craving meat.

Meat was a precious item. You would hardly ever get meat. And what's galling to me, even now, is when I think that the Hearst newspapers used to always say, "Here outside Americans are being rationed, and these Japs are getting steaks and chops and eggs and eating high off the hog," which was an absolute lie. ... I never had steak in camp, not even once. The only thing resembling steak was they would bring in mutton once in a while and they'd slice and bread the holy heck out of it so it would be a decent thickness, and I guess you can call it chicken fried steak... And you might have weenies or bologna served for dinner once in a while. That's about it for the meat.

Mess hall, Santa Anita "assembly center," California, 1942.

The lack of decent meat and an accompanying shortage of sugar--both rationed food items--were explained by numerous reports of corrupt WRA employees stealing food to sell on the black market.² Densho interviewees relate how Caucasian workers were caught with food intended for the detainees concealed in their car trunks. Jim Akutsu, who was sometimes escorted from Minidoka to work with government engineers in the town of Burley, tells how he learned of the food theft.

To go out to Burley, Idaho, we had to stop in a place called Eden to have coffee. At the beginning, the proprietor of a small cafeteria, run by a man and wife, we weren't talking too much. But I'm kind of curious so I get talking to him, and he told me how the camp is being ransacked. He says, "The coffee you're drinking, hey, somebody stole it from camp. The sugar you eat, stole from camp." So, I said, "Well, who is it?" "It's the camp personnel." And they said, the big boxcar from where they steal these things, you got two big doors. They come together and have a one-inch iron bar and at the bottom have a flange with a hole. So they line the holes up and instead of snapping the lock, they would just line it up so somebody could come up and just turn the lock open and steal whatever -- and at our cost.

Detainees making tofu, Tule Lake incarceration camp, California, 1945.

In addition to unappetizing food, former detainees recall having to stand in long lines for an impersonal group feeding. Some who were young children complain less about the food. At Manzanar, Shimako "Sally" Kitano remembers, "All I know is we were always in long lines. That's all I can remember other than carrying those heavy, heavy plates and mugs, and the food never bothered me." Sally liked pancakes, and Manzanar served plenty of eggs because the camp had a chicken ranch.

Yukiko Miyake remembers Japanese food at camp.

The overall diet improved as Japanese Americans, of their own volition and at the behest of authorities, established farms and planted vegetable gardens. They raised livestock as well. On September 1943, the Minidoka newspaper ran the story, "Local Hogs Slaughtered; Debut on Mess Hall Tables Seen in Near Future," which detailed the arrival of pork in the camp's butcher shop. The article goes on to enumerate the harvest of "12,240 lbs. turnips, 13,250 lbs. of squash, 14,722 lbs. of peas," and other vegetables as well as the "much anticipated watermelons." Large quantities of produce were shipped from camp to camp as needed.

Carolyn remembers the excitement of returning to Los Angeles.

With one mess hall serving each block of barracks, some were luckier than others in the assignment of cooks. Edith Watanabe, who was sent to Tule Lake, encountered a couple her family had known in their hometown of Burlington, Washington: "I can't remember ever seeing him do any cooking at home. His wife did it all. But when he went to camp he took on the job as cook. Oh, wow, but the food was terrible." Yukiko Miyake was luckier at Minidoka.

We had real cooks that used to be cooking before the war, and so they came in and took over. I even remember the cook's name: Mr. Ogawa. I don't know the block 40 names, but they were supposed to be real good cooks. And so he really tried hard to make things easy for us. Otherwise, we had hard-boiled eggs or fried eggs. Oh, god. And then cold toast or hot cakes and by the time we got it, it was so cold we couldn't eat it. So Mr. Ogawa used to make Japanese food for us and that was more enjoyable.

More enjoyable still was regaining your freedom and being able to choose your own food, even if it was modest. Edith Watanabe was released from Tule Lake because her fianc�, who was in the Army, successfully argued that her health was in danger. After a lonely bus and train trip across country, she and Harvey married and moved to Minneapolis. In their first months together, they lived on Harvey's Army pay of $21 per month. When asked what kind of food they could buy on that budget, Edith replied, "Well, for our first Christmas dinner we had a bag full of White Castle hamburgers. They were a nickel a hamburger, and we bought twenty of them. But you know, when you're in love and you're first married, anything is good. We were together."

1. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (1982-83; reprint Seattle: University of Washington, 1997), pp. 162-63.

2. The Manzanar uprising in December 1942, which resulted in the fatal shooting of one detainee and the wounding of ten others, escalated from Harry Ueno, a camp cook, discovering that sugar was being diverted to and stolen by WRA staff.

March 2010 - Japanese American Women Remember the World War II Incarceration

Last month's eNews article tackled the difficult topic of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and its role in promoting a sanitized version of the World War II incarceration. In keeping with the theme of power and the historical record, this month's article concerns the marginalization of Japanese American women's voices in the archive. Japanese American history, with its emphasis on military service and, recently, draft resistance, leaves little room for the stories and experiences of women. Based on a series of oral history interviews, this article explores how memories of the incarceration shaped the lives of four Japanese American women in the years following World War II, illuminating the central, though largely unacknowledged, role of women in postwar Japanese American history. Far from silent, these women, in various ways, all drew on their experiences as a source of empowerment and means for enacting social change.

Carolyn re-lives a traumatic memory.

Carolyn Takeshita grew up in Los Angeles and was incarcerated with her family in Poston, Arizona. A young child during the war, Carolyn's most vivid memories surround the period of resettlement when her father decided to move the family to Denver, Colorado, joining the thousands of other Japanese Americans the government deemed loyal enough to leave the camps. Colorado stood as one of the few states that allowed Japanese American settlement, and Denver became a hub for Japanese Americans awaiting the re-opening of the West Coast. After a few years, Carolyn's family moved back to California, settling in Boyle Heights, a multi-ethnic neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Chizuko describes her first meal back in Seattle.

While Carolyn remembers very little of her time in Poston, several incidents that she experienced later in life triggered the trauma she had suppressed as a child. A friend once opened a can of condensed milk and she immediately felt nauseous, the smell sparking an "emotional memory" of the terrible food she ate in camp. A more severe incident occurred when Carolyn, then a mother of two and college student, attended a protest against the Vietnam War and the sight of the National Guard reminded her of the armed soldiers in Poston. Re-living this trauma prompted Carolyn to re-evaluate her life and she embarked on a career counseling child survivors of abuse. As she recalled, "I think that my own experience helped me understand in later life how things that happened to people when they were children really do, they don't go away."

Chizuko discusses illness in the Japanese American community.

Memories of the incarceration also guided Chizuko Norton's professional life during the postwar years. Chizuko, unlike Carolyn, was an adult when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of persons of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast. Imprisoned first in Pinedale assembly center and then Tule Lake, Chizuko remembers the loyalty oath and segregation process as a particularly trying period for her family. Chizuko's mother became terminally ill during this time, which forced her to make the difficult decision between leaving camp for college and staying with her parents. Though Chizuko remained with her family in Tule Lake, she returned to Seattle after the war to attend the University of Washington, eventually receiving a Master's Degree in Social Work.

Kara recalls arriving to Portland assembly center.

While Chizuko rarely spoke of the incarceration with her family, focusing instead on "becoming successful," memories of her mother's illness and death in camp stayed with her. Chizuko also started to witness a proliferation of physical ailments among Japanese Americans during the postwar years, which she connected to the suppressed emotional trauma of the incarceration. Motivated by these personal and collective experiences with loss, Chizuko co-founded the Separation and Loss Institute at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, a training center for medical professionals to better understand the impact of emotional and psychological trauma on physical health.

Kara's written testimony submitted to the CWRIC.

Kara Kondo was born and raised in Wapato, a small farming community in Eastern Washington's Yakima Valley. Like many other Issei in the area, Kara's father operated a produce farm on land leased from the Office of Indian Affairs. When Kara was young, white arsonists firebombed the porch of her house in one of many incidents of racial violence targeting Issei farmers. This violence escalated following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as whites vandalized the Japanese Association offices and burned other Japanese buildings and homes. "We were made aware, very much aware," remembers Kara, "that there was a great deal of hostility." This racial hostility lingered as the war ended and Japanese Americans began returning to Eastern Washington. Kara estimates that only 2 percent of the original Japanese American community remained in Wapato after the war, many of them unable to find homes or dissuaded by whites from staying in the area.

Lillian talks about the involvement of women in the redress movement.

In the early 1970s, Kara helped organize a reunion of Japanese Americans who lived in the Yakima Valley before the war, bringing the community together for the first time since 1942. The success of the reunion motivated Kara and others to produce a community history, using the Japanese Association of 1935 census to track down all the Yakima Valley residents and their descendants. Kara furthered these efforts when she testified at the Seattle hearings for the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). Unlike most witnesses who recounted their individual stories, Kara waived her personal testimony to discuss the impact of the removal orders on Wapato's Issei population. These memory projects - the reunion, community history, and testimony - enabled Kara and other Wapato residents to carve out a space for themselves and foster a sense of collective memory shattered by racism and forced displacement.