Eiko Yamada's Storage Basket: A Wedding Kimono Cut to Save It

Eiko Yamada's wicker storage basket, which hid the remnants of her silk wedding kimono. The original shipping tags to Manzanar, with family number 2811, are still attached. NPS Collections, Manzanar National Historic Site, MANZ 5170.

By Nicole Martin, for the National Park Service's Home and Homelands exhibition.

At first glance the basket looks ordinary. But it carried Eiko Yamada's silk wedding kimono on two life-changing journeys: when she emigrated from Japan to the United States, and when she was forcibly removed to the Manzanar War Relocation Center. The first time, the kimono lay folded inside. The second time, it was cut into strips.

Its story is one of leaving home for the unknown, building a new home in a new country, and having that home suddenly taken away: of what you choose to carry when you can bring only what you can carry.

To California

Eiko Muto was born in Tokyo in 1894 and married Tamizo Yamada in 1917. That year Tamizo left for the United States, arriving in San Francisco, while Eiko, pregnant, stayed behind. After their daughter Lily was born, Eiko crossed the Pacific alone with two-year-old Lily in 1920 to join him in California, carrying the wicker basket with her wedding kimono inside.

It is easy to see why she brought it. During the Meiji period (1868–1912), industrial silk production made silk kimonos available to women of every class, and Tokyo in the 1910s offered the latest designs, bright colors and bold motifs. A wedding kimono carried special meaning: its colors and motifs symbolized a woman's passage into a new life and home.

By 1930 the family, now with six children, lived in Los Angeles; the census listed Tamizo as a gardener and Eiko as "home." By 1940 Tamizo owned his own nursery, which Eiko helped run. Japanese immigrants and their children were crucial to the West's farm economy, even though discriminatory laws made it hard for Asian immigrants, then barred from citizenship, to own property. How Tamizo came to own the nursery is unknown; he likely put it in the name of one of his citizen children. Despite exclusionary laws and racial hostility, the family prospered.

A Japanese American family waiting for buses to Manzanar, Lone Pine, California, 1942. Library of Congress.

To Manzanar

In 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the mass forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. The Yamadas learned they would be sent to Manzanar in California's Owens Valley.

Manzanar was a place of repeated dispossession. The U.S. military removed the Owens Valley Paiute in 1863 to secure homesteads for white settlers. A farming town called Manzanar grew up in the early 1900s, but settlers left in the 1930s after Los Angeles bought up its land and water rights. From 1942 to 1945, more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated there.

Once again Eiko had to leave a home she loved, this time with six children aged five to twenty-two. She packed the basket with her kimono again, but first cut it into strips with a razor. Lily remembers her mother crying as she cut the silk. Afraid that authorities would confiscate the kimono, Eiko destroyed it in order to save it, and so kept a small piece of home.

A typical Manzanar barracks interior, with cloth partitions for a little privacy. NPS photo/MANZ.

Manzanar was barren and windy, scorching in summer. The family was assigned to Block 24, Barrack 8, Apartment 3, inside barbed wire watched from eight guard towers by military police with searchlights and guns. All eight Yamadas lived in one 20-by-25-foot room, with only hanging sheets for privacy. For daughter Cherry, the worst indignity was the latrines, which had no partitions between toilets.

Home again

Manzanar was the last place the whole family lived together; Cherry later said its conditions weakened their family ties. After the war only Cherry and her younger brother returned to Los Angeles with their parents, while the older children scattered across the country.

That return was a third journey into the unknown, and again Eiko carried her basket with the kimono inside. After a stay in a hostel, Tamizo and Eiko found a home, but like many former incarcerees Tamizo never recovered his nursery. He died in 1952. Eiko and Lily both became U.S. citizens after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 ended race as a bar to naturalization.

Lily Yamada's naturalization index record. Born in Japan, she could not become a citizen until the Immigration Act of 1952. National Archives and Records Administration.

In a 2016 interview, Cherry said she had not grasped as a child how much her parents sacrificed, giving up their business and losing everything but what they could carry; that only sank in as she grew older. The family gave the basket to Manzanar National Historic Site in 2006, preserving its story of courage in the face of losing home, family ties and livelihood.

Sources

• Nicole Martin, "Eiko Yamada's Storage Basket," National Park Service, Home and Homelands Exhibition: Loss: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/home-yamada-basket.htm
• The article draws on Sarah Bone, "Manzanar National Historic Site Curator Corner" (2020); Cherry Chiyeko Yamada Uyeda's 2016 oral history interview, Manzanar Oral History Project, MANZ 1453; Annie Van Asche on early-20th-century kimono fashion (2000); and Valerie J. Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place (1993).
• The NPS page's portrait of Cherry Yamada is not reproduced here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.