From the Archive
Over the last dozen years, Densho has collected hundreds of hours of video testimony and tens of thousands of historical images. From the Archive is a monthly feature that highlights primary sources from the Densho Digital Archive to illustrate themes in Japanese American history. We hope that it will give you a sense of the rich depth of materials in the Archive. To access the entire collection, simply register for a free user account.
- February 2010 - History, Memory, and the Japanese American Citizens League
- January 2010 - Beyond the Divide: Japanese American Responses to the "Loyalty Questionnaire"
- December 2009 - International Lives: The Horiuchi Interviews
- November 2009 - Profile in Courage: George Sakato and a Belated Medal of Honor
- October 2009 - Incarceration and Reservations: Japanese Americans Intersect with Native Americans
- September 2009 - Nikkei Women Tested: Daughter, Sister, Wife, and Mother behind Barbed Wire
- August 2009 - Families Untied: The Effect of Camp Life on Parenting
- July 2009 - Jazz Bands, Baseball, and Beauty Queens: Recreation in the Camps
- June 2009 - Canned Milk and Forbidden Grapes: Childhood Memories of the Incarceration
- May 2009 - Hatsuji Becomes Harry: Names and Nisei Identity
- April 2009 - Incalculable Losses: Japanese American Financial Damages
- March 2009 - Integration of East and West: Faith among Japanese Americans
- February 2009 - Frontier Colonies or Concentration Camps? Euphemisms for the Incarceration
February 2010 - History, Memory, and the Japanese American Citizens League
"The JACL focused more of their attention on loyalty and made that a litmus paper test… If you protested the evacuation itself, you had questionable loyalty. If you protested…actions that prevailed in the camps, you could be construed as disloyal. If you didn't go into the military service readily, you were disloyal."
-- Art Hansen
Last month's eNews article examined Japanese American responses to registration, a process implemented by the government to measure the loyalties of the incarcerated population. While controversies surrounding the "loyalty questionnaire" continued to haunt the community in the years after the war, the government's imposition of loyalty categories has been soundly critiqued, most notably in Personal Justice Denied, the report of the Commission on Wartime Internment and Relocation of Civilians. Most would now share Professor Roger Daniels' assertion that the "loyalty questionnaire" was "stupid and counterproductive."1 Yet, why does the issue of loyalty remain so divisive in the Japanese American community even today? This article looks at a painful and contentious aspect of the wartime experience - the role of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in crafting what scholar Eiichiro Azuma calls a "master narrative" of Japanese American history.2 This narrative, actively promoted by the JACL, constructed an image of Japanese Americans as superpatriotic and unwavering in their support of the United States - the "quiet Americans" as one Nisei author put it.3 Not an expose or attack on the organization, this article instead explores the process of history making and attempts to understand why, after seventy years, the Japanese American community has yet to fully reckon with the legacies of the incarceration.
The battle over the memory of the incarceration culminated not with the 1988 passage of the Civil Liberties Act, but in a quiet ceremony held at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California in 2002. It was there that the JACL issued a formal apology to Japanese American resisters of conscience who had been vilified by the organization (as well as by many in the community) for their refusal to be drafted from behind barbed wire. "Today's ceremony is a clear recognition," declared national JACL president Floyd Mori, "that JACL neglected to support the resisters of conscience in their protest against injustice."4 Nearly sixty years after President Truman pardoned the draft resisters, the JACL finally acknowledged its role in suppressing these voices of dissent.
Yet, Mori's statement, while certainly a much needed step in the process of reconciliation, only addressed the wartime actions of the JACL and not the calculated campaign of historical revisionism that occurred during the postwar years. The JACL systematically erased the presence of draft resisters and other resisters of conscience in all of their historical accounts of the war, instead portraying a docile and fiercely patriotic Japanese American population whose wartime incarceration instilled only a "greater desire to prove their love for country."5 Japanese American histories written by JACL leaders omitted any person who diverged from this rigidly defined category of loyalty.
In these accounts, the JACL stood as sole protector and defender of Japanese American rights. A brochure published in 1950 exemplifies the type of narrative promoted by the JACL. It positions JACL leaders, not Supreme Court defendants Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Minoru Yasui, as the ones who "officially protested the government policy to evacuate." According to this official history, the JACL only decided to cooperate with the removal orders once it became a matter of "military necessity," thus explaining their compliance as "a patriotic contribution to the war effort." (In reality, the JACL actively promoted the "evacuation" of the Japanese American community from the beginning.) To prove their loyalties to the U.S. government, Japanese Americans "flocked to join" the JACL, which continued its role as a "mature, fighting organization" for the duration of the war.6 While morally questionable, this sanitized history proved politically expedient and helped the organization push through several important pieces of legislation, including repeals of the anti-alien land law in several states and the 1948 Evacuation Claims Act, which enabled survivors to apply for token compensation for economic losses suffered during the war.
Roger Daniels describes the suppression of protest in historical accounts of the incarceration.
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Even in recent years, the JACL has remained hostile to views opposing this "master narrative." In 1989 the JACL, responding to a resolution introduced by the Seattle Chapter, hired attorney Deborah Lim to conduct research into the organization's actions during the war. Lim uncovered evidence revealing that several members of the JACL acted as informants for the FBI and reported on the activity of suspected "disloyals" before and during the mass removal and incarceration. Instead of dealing with this discovery in an open and productive manner, JACL leaders produced their own version that omitted some of Lim's more egregious findings. While Lim's original report eventually reached the public, JACL attempts to safeguard collective memories of the war reflect how deeply the incarceration experience continues to impact the writing and interpretation of Japanese American history.7
Scholars, public historians, community activists, and survivors have initiated the important process of recovering voices erased from Japanese American history. The story of the World War II draft resisters has become particularly well documented in recent years. As the 2002 JACL apology signals, perhaps as a community we can finally move beyond the resister-veteran divide to address other issues that remain controversial or otherwise unexplored. What about other casualties of this "master narrative" such as the Kibei, educated in Japan, who the JACL consistently portrayed as fanatical, pro-Japanese militants? Some Kibei vigorously protested the injustices of the incarceration, yet, unlike the resisters, have not been cast in the role of patriotic heroes. Is it somehow easier for us to acknowledge the denigration of the resisters than the Kibei, those who renounced their U.S. citizenship, and others targeted by the JACL? Do Kibei ties to Japan make it impossible for us to remember them without a hint of suspicion?
As a community, we must contend not only with the past but with interpretations of the past that continue to marginalize the voices, stories, and experiences of those who fall outside the accepted narrative of Japanese American history. By examining the role of the JACL in promoting one version of history, this article attempts to spark dialogue around issues that have, in the past, proven too contentious to broach. Next year marks the seventieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor. It is time to step out of the shadow of the incarceration and begin crafting new histories as well as re-interpreting old ones.
1. Roger Daniels, interview conducted May 20, 1995, Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Densho Digital Archive, Abe Collection, denshovh-droger-01-0005.
2. Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 211.
3. Bill Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet Americans (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1969).
4. As quoted in Martha Nakagawa, "Historic Apology Marks First Step in Reconciliation Between JACL and Resisters of Conscience," Pacific Citizen, May 17-June 6, 2002.
5. "For Better Americans in a Greater America: The Story of the Japanese American Citizens League," brochure published by the Japanese American Citizens League, 1950, p. 4. Densho Digital Archive, denshopd-p141-00020.
6. Ibid., pp. 3-4.
7. "Research Report Prepared for Presidential Select Committee on JACL Resolution #7" ("The Lim Report"), 1990, http://www.resisters.com/study/LimTOC.htm
The January and February "From the Archive" articles were written by Megan Asaka, Yale University graduate student and former Densho interview coordinator.
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back to topJanuary 2010 - Beyond the Divide: Japanese American Responses to the "Loyalty Questionnaire"
"The government is asking... a father and a son who have different situations, the same question, and on the basis of your answer your family might be broken up."
-- Frank Isamu Kikuchi
One of the most divisive legacies of the World War II incarceration remains the issue of loyalty. The loyal/disloyal divide continues to haunt the memory and interpretation of Japanese American history, as many in the community still grapple with what has become such a stigmatized and controversial label. This article examines what scholar Eric Muller calls the "loyalty bureaucracy" -- the registration and segregation program implemented within the camps to measure the "loyalty" of the imprisoned population.1 While Muller and other scholars have done important work in highlighting the absurdity of this premise, less explored are the varying ways in which Japanese Americans reacted to the government's efforts.2 This article looks at the wrenching decisions Japanese Americans were forced to make during this time, understanding that these decisions were not expressions of "loyalty" or "disloyalty," but measured responses to difficult and often extreme circumstances.
The "loyalty questionnaire" emerged as a compromise among government officials who disagreed on how to proceed with the detention process. Some wanted to keep all Japanese Americans imprisoned during the war, while others thought a select few should be allowed to leave the camps to fill labor shortages or serve in the military. By mid-1942, the need for Japanese American labor and military service overrode any arguments for total confinement. The War Department and War Relocation Authority (WRA), the governing body of the incarceration camp system, developed a process called "registration" in which a questionnaire would be administered to all the internees to assess who would and would not be allowed to leave camp. This became known as the "loyalty questionnaire" or the "loyalty oath." Ironically, the registration process contradicted the government's initial justification for mass removal and internment, which was rooted in the racist presumption of Japanese American disloyalty. Now, in the eyes of the WRA, Japanese Americans could "prove" their loyalty (or disloyalty) by answering a series of questions on a form.
The "loyalty questionnaire" immediately sparked confusion and anger among the detainees, who remained uninformed by camp administrators about the purpose of the questionnaire or how it would be used. Tensions surfaced among friends and families.
Frank Kikuchi remembers the difficulties Issei and Nisei faced in answering the "loyalty questions."
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Controversy centered around the final two questions, numbers 27 and 28. They asked: "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States?" and "Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America…and forswear any allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?" The last question proved particularly troublesome for the Issei who would be rendered stateless by forswearing the Japanese emperor, as laws of the United States prohibited them from becoming naturalized American citizens. The Nisei similarly encountered difficulties answering the question, which compelled them to relinquish a formal relationship with Japan that never existed.
Question 27 concerned the all-Japanese American regimental combat team, for which the War Department was soliciting volunteers. The creation of the Nisei combat team reversed a government policy that had prevented persons of Japanese ancestry from serving in the military. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japanese Americans already in service were reclassified 4-C, the status of enemy alien, while local draft boards prohibited further enlistment.
Question 27 angered some Nisei who felt that the U.S. government had no right to ask for volunteers from a population incarcerated behind barbed wire. Others viewed volunteering as a way to help their families or as the only opportunity to leave the confines of camp. The War Department expected 5,000 volunteers, but perhaps unsurprisingly, fewer than 1,200 signed up.
Detainees responded to the questionnaire in various ways and for a wide variety of reasons. Many Japanese Americans answered "yes" to both questions, while others answered "no." Some, like Chizuko Norton, answered yes-no or with qualified answers. Incarcerated with her family in California, Chizuko's mother became terminally ill, which forced her to make the difficult decision between leaving camp to go to college and staying with her parents in Tule Lake.
The results of the questionnaire became institutionalized, as the government used the answers to pursue a policy of segregation. Government officials designated Tule Lake incarceration camp in California a segregation center for Japanese Americans they considered "disloyal," including those who answered negatively on the "loyalty questionnaire," detainees requesting repatriation to Japan, and others deemed "troublemakers" by camp authorities. Beginning in 1943, camp administrators transferred the "disloyals" into Tule Lake and dispersed the "loyal" Tuleans into other camps. Peggy Tanemura's family moved from Minidoka to Tule Lake in 1943 at the request of her mother, who wished to reunite with family members in Japan. As a young child, Peggy remembers the traumatic impact of this decision.
Sarah Sato and her family also qualified their answers on the "loyalty questionnaire" and were sent to Tule Lake as part of the segregation process. In fall of 1944, when the Department of Justice announced that Japanese Americans could renounce their U.S. citizenship, Sarah and her mother both sent in applications. They made the decision to renounce in order to keep the family together: Sarah's father felt compelled to return to Japan to care for his ailing father, who lived alone. As Sarah's story illustrates, renunciation often involved practical concerns about family, not political affiliations or coercion by extremists. After a thirteen-year legal battle spearheaded by Wayne Collins of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), many people like Sarah Sato had their U.S. citizenship restored.
The flawed and poorly administered questionnaire provides one example of how the government attempted to measure the loyalty of the Japanese American population during World War II. Detainees responded to the questionnaire in various ways for reasons that defied the categories of "loyal" and "disloyal" the government sought to impose. The narrative of loyalty remains a potent one in Japanese American history. However, as these oral history interviews illuminate, it does not and cannot capture the complexities of individual experience.
1. Eric Muller, American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 2.
2. For recent works on registration, see Muller, American Inquisition and Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
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December 2009 - International Lives: The Horiuchi Interviews
"The Nikkei I knew that were involved in the occupation…they were able to work more closely with the Japanese because the Japanese looked upon them as someone that could understand their culture, their history, and their motivation."
-- Lucius Horiuchi
Last year Densho interviewed Maynard and Lucius Horiuchi in Sonoma, California. With a generous grant from the Tateuchi Foundation, their interviews became the first in the Densho collection to be translated into Japanese. Their bilingual presence in the Digital Archive is utterly appropriate since the couple met in Japan, where Maynard worked for the U.S. embassy and Lucius served in the foreign service after the war. Theirs is an international story in more than one respect.
Maynard Cooke Horiuchi traces her father's side of the family to an ancestor who arrived on the Mayflower, and her mother's side to an Irishman who immigrated before the American Revolution. Lucius's grandfather immigrated from Japan to Seattle at the turn of the century. His father came a few years later, and in 1917 brought his bride to Seattle from Japan. Both have illustrious relatives: Maynard's father was Admiral Charles Cooke, a top-level war planner and commander of the 7th fleet in the Pacific. Lucius's uncle was the famous artist Paul Horiuchi, and his father, Shigetoshi, helped found the collection of the Seattle Art Museum.
As the daughter of a high-ranking naval officer, Maynard moved frequently. Born in California, by the time she was nine years old she had lived in Washington, D.C.; Kalili Valley, Hawaii; Newport, R.I.; and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Lucius points out that she was "traveling the world while I was being raised in Seattle." When asked if her youthful travel was exciting, she replied, "No, it was just the way of life."
She does remember several dramatic homes. Outside Honolulu in 1934, the family rented a fabulous estate at Depression-era prices:
We lived at rather a distance from Honolulu, in Kalihi Valley in a beautiful estate which had been built by this man, really, for his wife. There were three buildings there…the first one was the ballroom and living room, and then there were two open spaces, roofed over, one of which we usually had our breakfast in. Then there was a building which was the bedrooms. And, let's see, it was three or four stories. Then the other building was the laundry and where the maids and cook lived. And all of this backed onto a hillside…The front of the house was right on the stream. The stream came down and there was a waterfall and a pool below, and you could dive from the second story of the house into the pool. And across, from the house, was this walkway, a bridge, over to the main road. And this man who built this was a great party giver. People had to drive up the road and park up around that way, in the back-- I think it was a 400 acre estate. So if the party was going really well and he wanted people to stay, he'd pull up the drawbridge on this path, and they couldn't get home.
Maynard describes her relatively friendless childhood: "I was the Commandant's daughter, and I'd gotten accustomed to a solitary life." Children of lower ranking military were discouraged from socializing with children of their superiors, so Maynard's playmate was her brother Charlie. She was a bookworm, a solitary diversion.
In Cuba, Maynard loved her pony, a gift from her father's friend. He was an ex-Navy man who had become a prosperous businessman:
I remember one time we went to visit him at his home, which was on the other side of Guantanamo Bay. And we went to the small village there where he had this car on the railroad, the wheels had been put on the rails there. So we traveled up in this automobile to his place, this estate that he had there. He had quite a lovely tropical mansion, and in his garden he had peacocks, tame peacocks all over the place. And also, he served peacock. My sister remembers that we ate peacock there, and said it was very tough, but I don't remember that.
Densho: It's almost like a scene out of a movie. This car on rails, and you drive up there, peacocks...
He took a liking to me, this man. His name was Shorty Osment. So after we went back to the naval base, he sent over this pony for me. And this pony must have been used as a cart horse or something, it had terrible saddle sores on it, it was in terrible condition. I don't know if you know about horses, but if you use the bridle too hard on them, their mouth gets very hardened and they won't pay attention to what you tell them to do. And when I first got him, if I wanted to get on him, I had to ride him bareback because he had to recover from these saddle sores. I adored him. He was the most wonderful horse in the world, as far as I was concerned.
Then between 1938 and 1940, the family moved back to Washington, D.C., and Maynard's father was deeply involved in multi-pronged planning for a coming war. In early 1941, they returned to Sonoma, California, and her father took command of the U.S.S. Pennsylvania at Pearl Harbor. Maynard and her mother passed the time night after night by listening to the radio and playing Chinese checkers.
Preliminary reports on December 7 stated that the U.S.S. Pennsylvania was among the ships sunk, and "all hands lost." To their tremendous relief, Admiral Cooke called his family to say he was alright. His ship had been in dry dock for repairs.
Life for the Horiuchi family was turned upside down on December 7. Lucius believes a family friend who was an FBI employee intervened so that his father was not separated from the family. They were sent to the Puyallup "assembly center" and then Minidoka, Idaho, War Relocation Authority camp. Lucius downplays his time in camp, though he does remember being hurt when he returned to Franklin High School and his former Caucasian friends would have nothing to do with him.
Determined to be defined not as Japanese but as American, Lucius enlisted in the Army immediately after high school. On assignment to the Army Graves Registration Service, he had the solemn duty of bringing home the remains of the first Nisei killed in Italy. After his military service Lucius graduated from Boston College. He had moved east thinking he would encounter less racial prejudice there. A brother-in-law opened the door to an interview with the foreign service, the elite tier of the State Department. Having done well on the exams, Lucius became one of the very few Nisei in the foreign service, whose staff was not only overwhelmingly Caucasian but Ivy League as well.
Though as a diplomat in occupation Japan, Lucius had a different role from other Nisei, he believes they were all effective because of their cultural understanding:
There were more senior foreign service officers that preferred, say, Nikkei, not to serve in Japan. Because the line of thought was that they may be overly sympathetic, overly empathetic towards the Japanese since most of us were, in that period of history, Nisei, children of immigrants. Not that they doubted our loyalty, but may have felt that we may see things in a different color because of our ancestry. And I would say, basically, that's not true. I think only of the positive aspect. That the Nikkei that I knew that were involved in the occupation at that time, and I was there during the latter part of the occupation, that they were able to work more closely with the Japanese because the Japanese looked upon them as someone that could understand their culture, their history, and their motivation. And I knew any number of Nikkei that were involved in the war crimes trials, and involved with Japanese that were being investigated for what they may have been doing during the war. And I know a number of them that became very close friends of the families of those that were put on trial. And I think in that case, and in all the cases that I know of, it wasn't because they showed favoritism towards the Japanese, it was only because they were, had more insight into the Japanese and were able to give them a fairer "trial," so to speak.
In 1944, Maynard found herself in Tsingtao, China, where the U.S. fleet was based. She had completed Santa Rosa junior college, unhappy at being denied a higher education while her brother, being groomed to follow in his father's footsteps, attended an expensive private school and then the Naval Academy. The family's residence at Tsingtao had been abandoned by the Germans. Maynard remembers the chandelier was shaped like a swastika.
As a matter of U.S. policy, her father strongly supported the Nationalists, then locked in civil war with the Communists. Maynard herself had doubts. She saw massive demonstrations against Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai, and observed how the poor were deprived of medical supplies.
But Maynard kept her opinions to herself as she and her family visited the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek at their headquarters. No motorized vehicles could reach the mountain residence at Kuling, so the party was carried up in sedan chairs. The evening started at the home of General George Marshall (of the Marshall Plan).
We went to their house before dinner, which was going to be at the Generalissimo's. During the course of the conversation, it turned out that they had taught the Generalissimo how to play Chinese checkers. And Mother immediately said, "Oh, Maynard knows how to play Chinese checkers," and so they decided to try to see if the Generalissimo would play Chinese checkers with me. So we went and had a very nice dinner, Madame at one end of the table and the Generalissimo at the other. At the end of the dinner, we retired to a little sitting room where they put up this table, and the Generalissimo sat on one side with his military men standing around him, and I sat on the other side in my little Sonoma-made evening dress. And they pulled out the Chinese checkerboard, and it turned out that he only played one corner against the other corner instead of three against three. So the first time that we played, I beat him. So he wanted to play again, so we played again, and I beat him again. And then, well, he wanted another one, so I played him again and beat him again. I think he thought that was enough, and he sort of said, "Han ho," which means "very good," I think, in Chinese. And that was the end of the games. And my mother later said, "Maynard, you were so undiplomatic." But the Generalissimo told Madame to give me a wedding lamp, well, a pair of wedding lamps, and showered favors on me. So he obviously had not taken it amiss, at least, he certainly hid it if he did.
In 1947 Maynard took a job as an editor of classified reports in Washington, D.C., delighted to be independent at last. After five years, she accepted an offer to work in Japan, where the moment she landed she says, "I felt as if I had come home. I just felt immediately at home there."
Mutual friends had told Lucius and Maynard about each other, but they almost missed meeting. In 1958 Lucius was transferred to Seoul, Korea, and that year Maynard arrived back in Tokyo after a time in Washington, D.C. She had heard of Lucius that he had "nineteen concubines" and had a fabulous Chinese cook. He had heard she was "highly intelligent," and it was obvious she had "a gentle heart." Maynard by chance attended an embassy party, where Lucius "shook off all these ladies" to escort her to a night club.
Four dates and forty letters later, Lucius proposed. He says, "It was very fast. We met in August to say hello, I went back in November, and after four dates, we got engaged. I went to Washington, changed my assignment, came back to Tokyo, and we got married in January of '59." When asked if she had any doubts about entering an interracial marriage, Maynard simply said, "I didn't even think about that." When he was asked, Lucius replied that his father-in-law was completely open-minded.
Well, yes and no. By that time, I had met enough important men in the world that, like the old poem, "To deal with fools and kings," you know. And certainly you may be a little uneasy because you're meeting the father of the woman you love, the one you're going to marry, plus, he had been a prominent military officer during World War II. But he put me at ease very quickly. He was a matter-of-fact kind of guy, and in his heart of hearts, a very good -- I may not say tender -- but well, I would. A tender man, because I saw that later when I saw him dealing with Maynard's younger sister, who had physical problems. He was the most gentle, sweetest man I'd ever seen in my life, the way he treated his daughter, a cerebral paralytic who was damaged when she was born, in the naval hospital. And so when we flew down here, then I met the mother, and the mother wouldn't introduce me around as Maynard's fiance, and that hurt me a little. But I'd been around enough grande dames and older Caucasian that had prejudice, or some prejudice, and I knew it would work itself out. And it did; eventually I became her favorite son-in-law.
In turn, Lucius's mother had some misgivings at first, having heard of Caucasian women getting divorced, but she too came around quickly. In their full interviews, the couple describes their work in service of the United States, their lives as parents, and their profoundly international lives.
When asked about his life values, Lucius concludes:
There's something called nintai. And I think nintai really means "endurance," which I have always interpreted to mean, "Accept what comes your way and make the best of it," and I think that's been the basic philosophy of my life. I've always been an optimist, and regardless of what difficulties, challenges and tragedies that may occur in my life, you get over them as soon as you can. There are always elements within those tragedies that can help you move forward. And whether it's in your career and not making ambassador, but saying, "My God, I did well enough." I mean, for Nisei of my generation and age, I got involved in a profession that was unique, that most people find more than of passing interest, and would gain enough respect and appreciation for my work. But added to the nintai, I think the concept of the Japanese, of girininjo, of always paying due respect and thankfulness to the powers to be, and your parents and your family and your friends, has always been a principle, and basic principle in my life. And I give Maynard a lot of credit, too, because she's very firm in her moral beliefs that I've implemented in my life as well.
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November 2009 - Profile in Courage: George Sakato and a Belated Medal of Honor
"I'm no hero, but I wear it for the guys that didn't come back."
-- George "Joe" Sakato
George T. Sakato is the great-great-great-grandson of a samurai. Perhaps that explains his father's choice of a birth name. Sakato says, "Dad wanted to call me Jyotaro Sakato, after a sword-bearer for Musashi samurai. " But when the doctor submitted the vital statistics for the baby, "Jyotaro" became "George." An unassuming man, Densho's interviewee says simply, "All my life I've been called Joe." On October 29, 1944, in the Vosges Mountains of France, Private Joe Sakato's warrior ancestry saw him through a critical juncture in the storied Battle of the Lost Battalion.
Among the Nisei veterans who have shared their memories of combat for the Densho collection of oral histories, Joe Sakato tells an exceptionally riveting account of fighting in Europe with the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team. He volunteered for the Army in March 1944 from Glendale, Arizona, where his family had moved from Redlands, California, during the "voluntary evacuation" period. During his time in Arizona, Joe lost thirty pounds doing farm work in the extreme heat. He also did a little bootlegging at the nearby Poston incarceration camp.
Joe's first attempt to volunteer was met with rejection. Like other Nisei, he discovered the military did not want him: "I volunteered for the Air Force, but then my draft card says 4-C, enemy alien. 'Enemy alien? What do you mean enemy alien? I'm an American.' 'Your draft card says 4-C, enemy alien, we can't take you.' "After the 100th Battalion of Hawaii Japanese distinguished themselves in Italy, President Franklin Roosevelt permitted the formation of a volunteer unit from the mainland, which became the highly decorated 442nd.
Joe volunteered again in March 1944. He recalls, "So I signed up for the Air Force and I got on a train and I got out to Camp Blanding [Florida], and I'm looking out and I says, 'Where's the Air Force?' 'You're in the infantry. The 100th Infantry Battalion needs replacements for the wounded that was killed, and they need soldiers to replace them.' So I'm it."
By his own admission, Joe was not hero material. He had been a sickly child ("I was skinny and I got pneumonia, chicken pox, measles, anything that came by"). At five feet four inches tall, he was the smallest of five brothers. In basic training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, Joe says with a laugh, "I could crawl, but those little eight-foot, ten-foot-high walls, I could never climb up those. I went around 'em." He claims to have been a poor marcher and worse shooter:
They had a big door out there, target, 200 yards, height and windage, bang. And they had this red dot on the end of a pole, ten-foot pole, and that red dot would indicate target, part of the target to hit. One guy hit it up there, another guy would hit over here. When it came to me, I got this waving thing called Maggie's drawer. I missed the target? I didn't hit the target? I didn't even hit the target. Oh my god, I couldn't shoot that rifle. I didn't know, too much windy or too much elevation...
Nisei soldiers visiting their families, Granada incarceration camp, Colorado, June 1943.
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Before being deployed to Europe, Joe and friends took a side trip from the New Jersey base. Joe had a bright idea: "So me, Tanimachi, John Tanaka and Sho Tabara and another fellow, we all went to New York City, and we're looking up, all these big high rises, and so we says, 'Why don't we check into the Waldorf Astoria to say that we stayed at the Waldorf Astoria?' So we each put ten bucks apiece, cost us forty dollars to go to this Waldorf Astoria, and we only stayed there for five, three or four hours looking out the windows."
Then came the 28-day ship's journey to Europe, memorable for seasickness and enemy submarines. Upon arriving in Naples, the recruits were divided among platoons; Joe was sent to the 3rd Platoon, E Company. After more basic training in Marseilles, he learned about combat in August 1944 in the Vosges Mountains of northeastern France.
Sakato: Going up to Epinal, we took these trains, they go up five miles and then they would back up two miles and wait, then they go one, five, six miles and they'd back up. They finally put us on trucks and trucked us just this side of Epinal, and from there we had to start marching. So we marched towards the hills, raining, muddy, mud's up this deep…So we got to the area, and then we had to climb that hill. But the damn thing's about a forty-five degree angle, and you're trying to pull yourself up, and I couldn't get up and I had my pack, George Kanatani takes my pack, somebody else took my shovel, all I had was a rifle. Pulling myself with the tree roots, I was the last one up the hill. The damn hill, god, I couldn't climb 'em. I'd have to rest every feet I go, and then I get another ten feet. So when I finally got up there, everybody else was already up there..
Densho: But they all helped you, though, Kanatani carried your pack, somebody else took your shovel...
Sakato: Somebody else took my shovel.
Densho: And was that the spirit of the unit, that everyone would try to help each other out?
Sakato: Oh yeah, helped each other out.
Joe's unit went to battle under the command of a "90-day wonder" lieutenant, a quickly trained and unprepared officer who fled during the fighting.
So then first day of the battle, 1st Platoon and 2nd Platoon are ahead, but couple thousand yards ahead, and we're back in reserve, 3rd Platoon. We had a new "90-day wonder" lieutenant join us named Lieutenant Schmidt. He was kind of worried, he's pacing back and forth, everything's quiet and he's nervous as all hell. So I stuck my two fingers under my nose and I, "Sieg Heil in case we lose." I thought he would laugh, he chewed me out. Then artillery shells started coming in... I tried to humor things, make people laugh. And other guys laughed but he didn't laugh; he chewed me out for that. So artillery shells, now I hear this one coming in, boom. That was incoming. I found out what incoming was. But when you hear it, little fluttering, that's outgoing, that was our guns going. But when you hear something go "vroom," that's incoming. So when that came in, blew me up and I was over there, ten feet, and ached all over, and got up, sores all, looked, and I got a nick here. But I looked down, Yohei Sagami from Wenatchee, Washington, was talking, we were talking what are we going to do when we get out and this and that. He's laying down, facedown, I picked him up, turned him over, he got hit in the jugular vein, and the pulse, blood was coming out every time he'd, pulse beating. And I couldn't stop it without choking him. I tried to put a pad on there, but still, he couldn't breathe, and had relaxed, but blood was coming out. Medics came, but he died, he'd lost too much blood, he died. So that was my, one of my first buddy dying.
With German tanks approaching, Joe dug for cover while checking for landmines. "I had to think back," he said, "Why, what am I doing here? I volunteered for this? So I went, kept on going, then we had, finally took the hill. I Company is down below, they had to go around and they went into the town of Bruyeres, hand to hand combat, house to house. "
Exhausted after the bloody fight to liberate the towns of Bruyeres and Biffontaine, the 442nd was within days sent back into combat. They were ordered to save a trapped unit of the Texas National Guard. The "Lost Battalion" was encircled by German forces, cut off from supplies. Two attempts to free them had failed when General John Dahlquist ordered the Nisei soldiers to save the Texans. On October 25, 1944, the 422nd advanced in the dark and foul weather, fighting from tree to tree. Joe's E Company was ordered to circle behind enemy lines in an attempt to secure a hill where Germans were firing down on the advancing Nisei troops. They marched single file, silently in the night, to surprise the Germans at dawn.
We chased the Germans off, and then artillery shells started coming in. So then we had to jump into the German foxholes now. So I'm on the bottom, ran to one foxholes, and artillery shells are coming in. Another guy from F Company, he jumps in. I didn't know who was jumping in with me, pretty soon I recognized him. "Hey, you're Mas Ikeda from Mesa, Arizona." He said, "Yeah." "What'd you hear about home?" We talked about home and the artillery shells were... boom, bang, didn't bother us a bit. We were talking about home. It's good to hear somebody talk about home. Artillery's going off, somebody else is hollering for medics, somebody else was... but it didn't bother us.
Artillery shells stopped, counterattack, so Mas Ikeda had to jump out of his foxhole, go to F Company and regroup… Next thing you know, I ran out of ammunition, both clips were gone. One German wanted to come up, going to throw a grenade at me. So I took the pistol, I couldn't get the other clips out, so I got the pistol, and pow, pow, stopped him. Then no more troop movements, and so I got down in the hole and started filling my clips up. Pretty soon I'm looking uphill, Germans would be down below. But they went around me while I was down in the hole, I didn't see 'em, and they started climbing that hill, they started taking the hill back. "Oh, my god," I started hollering at the guys, "watch out for the machine guns, they're taking the hill back." And Tanimachi, for some reason he got up and says, "Where?" and he got shot. So I crawled over to his hole and picked him up, "Why did you stand up?" And he's gurgling and he's trying to say something, blood is coming out of his... and he just, then he just went limp. Then he went, body went limp on me and then I knew he died. And I cried, hugged him, and, "God, why?" Laid him down and looked at all the blood in my hands and I said, "You son of a bitch." Picked up, threw the pack off, picked up the tommy gun and I got out of the hole and I zig-zagged back up, run this way and I'd run that way. I shot two or three guys, and then pretty soon the guys with white handkerchiefs were waving them, group of 'em coming out, and I made sure that nobody behind 'em had a gun, otherwise I would have had to shoot him. So the rest of the troop came up and took the hill.
The soldier who had so much trouble ascending hills explains, "If I was in my right mind, I don't think I would have done that. I'd have stayed in my hole and shoot, but then to go up and charge the hill was something else that I, I wasn't quite in my right sense of mind. But I was just mad, crying, I was crying." For his actions, Joe was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, hastily pinned on before he flew home to recuperate from a battle wound.
In the six days of brutal combat, over 200 Japanese American soldiers were killed or wounded to save as many Texans. Some have questioned the relative value placed on Japanese American versus Caucasian lives. Joe himself uses the term "cannon fodder." In 2000, Joe Sakato and nineteen other Nisei soldiers (most posthumously) had their decorations upgraded to the Medal of Honor at a White House ceremony.
To recover from the war trauma, Joe traveled and opened up about his experiences: "If I had to stay home and think about the war, you know... I have to talk about it. If I had to keep it in here, I think I would go crazy. That's why I thought in my mind I'd rather talk about it, so I'd get it out of my mind." Even now, Joe has occasional nightmares about combat. He has made a point of speaking, to any audience who cares to listen, about what the Nisei soldiers went through while their families remained in detention camps.
Joe Sakato is a modest man. On receiving the Medal of Honor, he declared, "I'm no hero, but I wear it for the guys that didn't come back." Joe concludes with a laugh, "After ninety days of battle, all I had was nine months in hospitals, basic training, and a total of eighteen months, total service. That's why I'm just still a recruit, I'm still a private. I'm going to stay a private."
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Incarceration and Reservations: Japanese Americans Intersect with Native Americans
"This country has had a history of forced evacuation and detention of non-white Americans."
-- Bernie Whitebear, United Indians of All Tribes Foundation
Politically oppressed people of color share storylines in American history. Asian immigrants and their descendants were subjected to legal discrimination designed to diminish them as individuals and economic competitors. African Americans experienced as much and worse. The story of how the first Americans were driven from their lands, traditions, and livelihoods stands as a terrible precursor for the government's treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The connection is more direct than some would suspect. Like the Bureau of Indian Affairs, charged with managing the country's displaced Native American population, the War Relocation Authority managed the displaced Japanese American population by penning them in desolate government-controlled territories. The connection does not end there.
In western states, Japanese Americans occasionally intersected with various Native American tribes before the war. Densho interviewee Kara Kondo explained how Japanese Americans leased land from the Yakama tribe in central Washington: "The reservation land was quite open land, although it was under the Yakama Nation. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had their land managers, and they had allotted the reservation land to various Native American families....It was an open land, and leasing was made easier for the Japanese."
Rick Sato's family also leased farmland from the Yakama. He recalls:
Densho: Now your farm, did your parents lease the farmland?
Sato: Yeah, it was leased land from the Indian and most of the Japanese, I would say, was leasing land from Indian. And you know when you rent Indian land, it involves about ten ownership sometimes. Because the Indians got a tenth owner and another one's got another tenth and so forth. So we had to -- it was quite a mess trying to get all their signatures in the springtime to lease the land.
Densho: But what about the relations between the Japanese farming families and the Indians who were leasing the land?
Sato: We had good relationship with the Indians. And in fact the Indians told me that they would rather lease to the Japanese than to anybody else... I heard that many, many times over there. I guess they're closer to Japanese than, you know, hakujins [Caucasians].
Densho: So, did you ever experience any kind of prejudice from the Indians toward you because you were Japanese?
Sato: No, I have never experienced that from Indians. I might have heard some, very few or very seldom being called "Jap". But otherwise they were really -- they were okay.
When the WRA established ten incarceration camps for Japanese Americans in 1942, they sited the facilities on remote lands under the jurisdiction of the federal government. The two Arizona camps were erected on Indian reservations, over the objections of the tribal councils. Confinement and Ethnicity, an archaeological study published by the National Park Service states, "The Gila River site was approved, in spite of objections by the Gila River Indian tribe, on March 18, 1942."1 About establishing the Poston (or Parker) WRA camp, the National Park Service says:
The Colorado River Indian Reservation Tribal Council opposed the use of their land for a relocation center, on the grounds that they did not want to participate in inflicting the same type of injustice as they had suffered. However, the tribe was overruled by the Army and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In a verbal agreement the WRA turned over administration of the center to the BIA. The BIA considered the relocation center an opportunity to develop farm land on the reservation with the benefit of military funds and a large labor pool. The WRA did not take full control of the center until December 1943.2
"Schooled in the U.S.A. '44-'45; Third Grade Class - Poston, Arizona III,” drawing by Ruth Okimoto.
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A 2008 documentary entitled Passing Poston: An American Story explores this little-known aspect of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. At Poston federal officials took advantage of the "large labor pool" to improve the Colorado River Indian Reservation for future inhabitants. The plan was conceived by John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
Unlike the nine other internment camps, Poston was unique and was built with a very different purpose. It served as a place to house thousands of Japanese detainees but also the infrastructure created by and for them served to recruit more Native Americans from surrounding smaller reservations to the much larger and sparsely populated Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT) reservation, after the war.
The Japanese detainees held at the three Poston Camps were used as laborers to build adobe schools, do experimental farming, and construct an irrigation system that could later be used by the Native Americans, thus aiding the settlement of the area as planned by the Office of Indian Affairs (known today as the Bureau of Indian Affairs).
When the Japanese detainees were released in 1945, attention turned to settling the camps with Native Americans. "Colonists" (as the government referred to them) from the Hopi and Navajo tribes as well as other tribes living along the Colorado River tributaries. These people, in turn, moved into barracks built for the Japanese detainees. The colonists were recruited by the Office of Indian Affairs and lured by promises of fertile farmland and plentiful water. They joined the Mohave who had lived on the reservation since its creation in 1865, and the Chemehuevi who arrived shortly after 1865. The colonists found a working canal system to irrigate farmland, school buildings, and many other necessities for their relocation. For some from the less developed areas of other reservations, it was a step up with running water and the opportunity to farm.3
The premiere of Passing Poston was held in February 2008 at the Colorado River Indian Reservation, with Native Americans in attendance. A Los Angeles Times reporter quoted Dennis Patch, an educator at the Colorado River Reservation tribal museum, as saying many Indians felt empathy for the Japanese Americans. The tribes themselves had been herded up and forced onto the Colorado River Indian reservation when it was established in 1865 to open land for white settlers. "They saw people captured and put some place they didn't want to be, and they understood that," Patch said.4
Authorities discouraged contact between the Native Americans and Japanese Americans in the Arizona camps, but several Densho interviewees recall interacting with Indians living nearby. At Gila River, Helen Tanigawa Tsuchiya remembers a "three-year-old little girl, Indian girl, used to ride her pony with her grandpa, and come up to the barbed wire. And then all the little kids would go over and they'd try to touch the pony and they had a real good time." The little Indian girl went on to be a nurse on the reservation, and Helen met her on a visit to the site of her wartime confinement.
Chiyoko Yagi remembers her three years at Poston concluding with new tenants moving in: "We went in July of '42 and went out August of '45. My sister-in-law wanted to start school, and we wanted to get her back in time for high school. But my father-in-law couldn't come back because he wasn't free, he wasn't cleared for California... So he had to wait until they got the clearance, and by the time he left, there were Indians moving into the barracks around him."
Underscoring the connection between the camps and the reservations is a detail of one government employee's career. After serving as the director of the War Relocation Authority for the four years the camps were in operation, Dillon S. Meyer went into managing public housing and then, from 1950 to 1953, worked as the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
One of the most tragic aspects of the mass removal and incarceration during World War II is the suffering inflicted on the nearly 900 Native Alaskans who were taken from the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands. What was initially intended as a humanitarian evacuation from an active combat zone became a nightmare for the Aleut families. Except for 50 people sent to the Seattle area, they were held for years in southeastern Alaska in squalid abandoned mining and cannery sites. Insufficient drinkable water and lack of medical care contributed to epidemics that raged through the crowded, underheated, and unsanitary dormitories. More than 10 percent of the evacuated natives died. When the Aleuts were allowed to return north, they found their villages burned, boats missing, and their sacred artifacts defaced or stolen. The government made no effort to compensate them for their losses.
Densho interviewee Yosh Nakagawa was moved from Seattle as a third-grader and incarcerated at Minidoka, Idaho. There he recalls befriending an Aleut boy, though he was ignorant of the boy's plight:
Nakagawa: Everybody was of the heritage of being Japanese. The irony is I didn't even understand enough to know why the Indians of Alaska, who weren't Japanese, were my classmates. I didn't even understand that significance. And his name had nothing to look like mine, his name was Speardon Hunter.
Densho: And he was a classmate of yours?
YN: He was a classmate, lived behind my barrack.
Densho: Did you ever interact with him?
YN: Absolutely. He was a hero. We had no sleds or anything. When, when snow came to Minidoka, [his parents] made a sled, and we were the dogs and we pulled the sled. As a child, it's clear as a bell. None of our parents could make a sled that the Eskimos might have used for every day, but I never understood why they were there until after I studied [the internment story].
Densho: He was just another playmate of yours?
YN: That's right. But we didn't, not all, treat him well. The Japanese, they looked down upon them, and I remember that feeling of being outside the community.
Densho: And through what kind of actions did you know that people looked down on upon them?
YN: Because their mother and father didn't have friends. And some of my classmates didn't like him to be on our team because he was different.
Densho: So how did you make sense of that?
YN: I couldn't, I didn't, make sense of it. I wish I could have said I was so smart that I knew the... no, he was my childmate playmate. He was my friend and that's it... He came and we played. In camp we had marbles. For some reason, some of the parents must have thought it was important, they took marbles with them, so we played marbles, and he was very good.
Densho: Did you ever have conversations about what Alaska was like?
YN: It never dawned on me. I didn't know Alaska from Siberia. All I knew, clearly in my mind, he wasn't Japanese.
Redress testimony of Bernie Whitebear, United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, 1981.
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When a congressional commission was formed to research the Japanese American incarceration and consider the case for redress, commissioners heard testimony from not only Nikkei speakers but also Caucasian supporters (and some opponents). At the Seattle hearings held by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in September 1981, one person who spoke in favor of redress legislation was Bernie Whitebear, the executive director of the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation. Whitebear was a lifelong activist for Native American rights. In his testimony he remarked, "People may ask why a Native American would be interested in this issue." He then named several reasons: in times of peace and stress the government must protect all people's Constitutional rights; Native Americans -- the Aleuts -- were also deprived of their civil rights without due process of law; schoolchildren cannot be taught that the U.S. honors fundamental civil liberties unless the government acknowledges and atones for the wrong done to Japanese Americans. Whitebear also pointed out what no Native American can ever forget: "This country has had a history of forced evacuation and detention of non-white Americans."
1. Jeffery F. Burton et al., Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites (Tucson, AZ: Western Archeological and Conservation Center, National Park Service, 1999), p. 61.
2. Ibid., p. 215.
3. Website for Passing Poston: An American Story, Joe Fox and James Nubile, directors.
4. Teresa Watanabe, Celebrating a Shared History: Indians Laud WWII Japanese American Internees Who Developed Their Land," Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2008.
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Nikkei Women Tested: Daughter, Sister, Wife, and Mother behind Barbed Wire
"I was very angry and felt so responsible for my child."
-- Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga
Women's lives revolve around relationships, no matter what the time period. In 1942, Japanese American women's family roles were suddenly complicated by the forced eviction from their homes, and for some, the disappearance of fathers or husbands in the FBI arrests following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Densho is dedicating resources to record interviews with Nikkei women, whose stories are often less documented in oral history collections. Female narrators share their memories of fulfilling universal social and emotional duties: to be a good wife, mother, daughter, sister, is hard enough in wartime, they can attest. Imagine the additional strain of caring for family members in a primitive camp, with no personal freedom and an uncertain future.
Because the Nisei generation was primarily in their teens or young adulthood, a common thread in the interviews is a rush to marry partners rather than be separated in different incarceration camps. Kay Matsuoka had a successful dressmaking shop in Los Angeles, but was persuaded to marry a shy young man through the intervention of a matchmaker. She joined the ranks of young brides who suffered the lack of privacy in the crude conditions at Gila, Arizona: "One barrack was me and Jack, and his father and mother, and his sister and husband, and two of our…nephews. All of us in that one. If we were lucky to bring an extra bedspread, we put it up. But it wasn't soundproof or anything. We were just married one month, and you can imagine, that was our honeymoon."
One day, her husband, Jack, started hemorrhaging. Kay recalls, "At that time, my mother-in-law came to me and says, 'Don't take it bad now.' I was only married three month, so she was afraid that I'm gonna just leave him. And especially Japanese, when they detect if it's TB, that was one of the dreaded disease. It ruins the whole family lineage. So she kept saying, 'Oh, he was probably too hot and got sun stroke on the roof.' But I knew in my heart that he had TB." Kay defied the Japanese prejudice against tuberculosis:
I knew how the Japanese reacted to TB. And so when this happened to my husband, and then he being the first one to get TB in that camp, with no preparation… I said, "If there was a God," I said, "Why did he make my husband get sick?" That's how I felt. I almost rebelled, thinking, "Why?" So I had this knowledge that Japanese think it a shame, and they hide it... And there was one Issei doctor -- that was our family doctor from Los Angeles working at Gila River -- and when he heard about my husband getting TB, he called me in and said, "I wanna examine you." I said, "What for?" He said, "I wanna make sure that you're not pregnant. If you're not pregnant, I strongly urge you to separate from him." See, it's the Isseis' thinking. "Because, even if he recovers, he's gonna be an invalid and you're gonna have to take care of him. And you've only just been married three month," so he said, "I highly recommend that." Well he examined me, and I wasn't pregnant, and then he urged me. But I said, "You know, doctor, what if this role was reversed, and I had the TB? And what if he left me?" I said, "No, I'm gonna stick by him. I'm gonna make sure that he gets well. I'm gonna do all I can. I'm not gonna get divorced." And then he said, "Well, it's your choice." But that's when I really got close to him… I just vowed that I'm gonna really stick by him. And so everybody says when we get introduced, it's always together, "Kay and Jack." We go together.
Young wives became young mothers by the thousands in the detention camps. Densho interviewees describe the difficulties of caring for babies in quarters with no running water, and without basic necessities for infant care. Shigeko Sese Uno was allowed to stay in a Seattle hospital after giving birth in May 1942, while her husband and family were sent to Puyallup "assembly center." She recalls feeling luckier than her hospital roommate:
But, there's a girl in the bed next to me who was crying all day long…Our babies were born the same time. I asked her, "What's the matter?" She says, "Well, my husband is in the South Pacific somewhere." So I thought, I should be very grateful. She doesn't know where her husband is, but at least I know where my family is, even though they were behind barbed wire.... At least I knew where they were….So two weeks later, then I was able to go to this Fujin Home, the Japanese women's home, the Baptist group. I was able to stay overnight. And my husband called me, because we were told to take only what we could carry. Well, how can you carry cribs or -- all the simple things we couldn't take. So my husband says, order the kettle and pot -- he knew we needed a kettle and something to sterilize the baby's bottles and little things like that. Of course, I couldn't carry the crib there. But he asked me to pick it up, so a friend of mine did.
Many Densho interviewees recall the challenge of tending to ill children. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga expresses anger at being powerless to properly care for her daughter:
First my pregnancy. Since I was young, it was a pretty easy nine-months' gestation. It would have been easier if we had not had to have our meals, three meals outside of our own apartment. Our own apartment finally -- served as bedroom, living room, and of course, the main things we lacked were kitchen and bathroom facilities. So three meals a day we had to get in line for food, and being pregnant and suffering what most pregnant women go through -- morning sickness and nauseous period -- waiting in line for our meals during that period was very, very difficult under the conditions that existed there: the dust storms, the heat, the cold.
Then when I think of the lack of real good milk, which was considered very important for pregnant women to have, that, I think, affected my fetus a great deal. When my child was born in the camp hospital, she was born with an allergy to the powdered milk that they permitted babies to have during that time. And it was not diagnosed that she had an allergy to this powdered milk and that she should have Carnation milk in a can. I requested that for my child, but they said, "No, all that has to go to the army." To the men in the armed forces, and we would not be permitted to unless we could afford to send for it from outside. And, of course, we couldn't do that, we were earning minimum salaries which ran from twelve dollars a month, sixteen dollars a month and nineteen dollars a month...We could not afford to buy canned milk. So my daughter suffered tremendously. She was hospitalized in the camp, went in and out, in and out, with stomach disorders because of her inability to get this milk, which was, of course, the lifeline for infants at the time. Most children double their birth weight, at six months. My child had not doubled her weight in a year, she was so sick…I was very angry and felt so responsible for my child. There's nothing, nothing at all that I could do about it. And I think the lack of this important nutrition at this time of her life has affected her whole entire life. She didn't have the basic ingredients to be a healthy person.
Aiko and other mothers remember ordering baby supplies through catalogues, and laundering diapers in the common latrines, after being accustomed to using washing machines:
Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Wards…probably made a whole lot of money on the Japanese camp residents. We read those two catalogs like Bibles. I remember memorizing what page the chocolate candies were on in the Sears Roebuck catalog. What page the diapers were on, all those necessary things were in the Montgomery Ward catalogue. We bought diapers -- during those days there were no Pampers or Huggies. We bought diapers through the catalog. Baby clothes, layettes… I remember going through these books and thinking well, this costs three dollars, we only get sixteen dollars. How much of that -- what do we have left for the rest of the month?
The latrines, the men's latrine, the women's latrine and the laundry room, those three structures were built between rows of barracks. We mothers especially, young mothers, knew we wanted to wash our diapers in real hot water, so we'd have to get up very early in the morning before the hot water supply would run out. We'd get up very early, do our laundry and, of course, there was no washing machine then. We had a washboard, and some very rough soap, that looked like lye, big soap. Washing, rinsing and drying on the clothesline. No sooner than we had hung our diapers, we would hear somebody yelling, "Here comes a dust storm." We'd rush and take these diapers, thirty-six diapers usually for me, every day. And try to get them off the line before the dust storm came, oftentimes successfully, sometimes not. When we were not successful, there we were again back in the laundry room washing all of this again. And it wasn't just diapers, of course, it was all the other clothes, the sheets, everything was done by hand.
Ironically, living in confinement could help a mother keep track of rambunctious youngsters. Betty Fumiye Ito recalls how other women at Tule Lake, California, helped keep an eye on her daughter Ayleen:
Betty: When we were at Tule Lake, she was pretty young... I was very strict about raising my family, and if I would discipline her, she'll say, "I'm going to go far away." I said, "Oh, okay, goodbye," knowing that she couldn't go anywhere. We're in camp, you know. And she'd go around away from our barrack to another barrack, and somebody will come and say, "Oh, Mrs. Ito, did you know Ayleen is in Block so-and-so?" and I said, "Yes, I know. She said she was running away."
Densho: Were there very many other young mothers with young children?
Betty: Yes, there were lots. And then she was too young to go to nursery school, but she would sneak over there and go into the classroom, and then they'd come and tell me, "You know, Mrs. Ito, your, Ayleen is over here." It was pretty hard for me to keep her away from that school because the children were there.
Densho: Well, it sounds like Ayleen's a very independent, strong individual.
Betty: She always was.
Letter from sister at Manzanar incarceration camp, California, to brother in Chicago, 1943.
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Girls too young to be wives and mothers have left their own impressions of life in camp. A collection of letters in the Densho Digital Archive documents a high school girl's thoughts and experiences in consecutive years of letters and postcards written to her brother Joe, who left the Manzanar incarceration camp in California to attend college in Chicago. Signed "Just Masako" or "your sis," the letters describe weather, food, and goings on in the camp, from gambling at the Mayedas' to farewell parties for people leaving for the outside. She complains about final exams, asks her brother to send KoolAid, and advises him not to mention girls in his letters because "Mama" reads them and gets upset. In one letter dated February 21, 1943, Masako writes, "Mama says 'hello' & take good care of yourself. Every time she thinks of you big tears are filled in her eyes." Joe's little sister reveals how much she misses him by her conclusion:
P.S. Write soon.
P.S. Hoping to get a letter from you pretty soon.
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