Tessaku

Read Part 1 >>

Can you talk about meeting your husband? Did you meet him in Cleveland?

Shizuko Yamauchi (SY): No. He was in the service.

Nancy Dodd (ND): He was in the 442.

SY: Well we had a boarding house, so if they had any leave they would come and stay overnight and go back to the—wherever. So that’s how he came to—

So you knew him from San Luis Obispo. Were you corresponding all throughout the war?

SY: Yes, but he was Kibei. So I always guessed that he had somebody write for him but I never ...

“All I saw was cots and there were bales of hay or something, straw, that we were supposed to fill the mattress like, for our mattress. That I remember. We just took it, couldn’t be helped, you know. No point in complaining. ”

— Shizuko Yamauchi

In the spring of 2019, I was asked to conduct an oral history interview by the daughter of someone who had been in camp at Poston. It was a normal enough request, with one extraordinary fact: The woman I was to interview was 101 years old. At the time of Pearl Harbor Shizuko Yamauchi, then ...

Read Part 1 >>

Now when you started, it was 1942 by this point and the war between the U.S. and Japan was official. Did you experience any backlash being an American?

No, not too much. But I had to get used to the cold. The winters were really cold. And we didn’t have that kind of jackets or overcoats. Salinas was quite foggy and cool but not like the winters in Japan. And it was hard to buy anything around that time. Getting food was hard, too. Fortunately, my father was working at a farm but then each ...

“I think that Nikkeis were quite lucky in that sense, because we always worked so hard and our parents always taught us never say or do anything that is troublesome or bothers other people — have good respect for people and manners.”

— Rose Tsunekawa

Along California’s Central Coast in the farming town of Salinas, Rose Tsunekawa grew up as the eldest daughter of an Issei father, Yasuichi Ito, and a Kibei mother, Kikuyo Yonemoto Ito. Despite the fact that her father was prohibited from owning land and the Depression years defined her childhood, photos of the Itos in the 1930s ...

Read an interview with Earl Santo >>

Helen, could you introduce yourself with your full name, your birthday, and where you were born?

Helen Hiroko Kodama, now Santo. I was born October 26th, 1935. So I must have been seven when the war broke out. And I always thought I was born in Los Angeles but someone stole our box with all our birth certificates. And all the local ones you could get one in San Jose. But I was born down south, and I always thought it was Los Angeles and I found out that it was Norwalk. I knew ...