Fumi Manabe Hayashi: From Berkeley High to a Horse Stall and Topaz

Family

• Her father came from Japan to Portland, Oregon, in 1911, then to San Francisco, where he became a Salvation Army officer.
• After the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923, the Salvation Army sent him to Japan to help the victims. There he married Fumi's mother, and they returned to the Bay Area.
• Their first child was born in 1924; Fumi was born on June 3, 1926, in Alameda.

School

Fumi started school knowing little English, and the teachers, children and rules confused and frightened her. Her older sister died of blood poisoning while Fumi was in first grade. Junior high was better: she caught up and loved English and music.

California's laws had targeted first Chinese and then Japanese immigrants: they could not become citizens or own land, and most industries would not hire them — but families and communities were strong, and people worked hard.

Tanforan

Fumi had just started Berkeley High School when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Although the FBI and Army and Navy intelligence found no sabotage by Japanese Americans, the family was imprisoned behind barbed wire under Army guard.

• At the Tanforan racetrack, the family of six lived in a horse stall meant for one horse: no water, no heat, partitions for walls, cots with straw mattresses. At first there were no latrines or mess halls.
• Classes met on picnic benches in one big hall.
• Badly prepared food sometimes sent everyone running to the latrines at night — and guards, thinking it an escape, turned spotlights on them.

Topaz

Just as life settled, they were moved to the Topaz Relocation Center in the harsh central Utah desert. Fumi spent three years at Topaz High School: few books, no laboratories and low morale. An honor student at Berkeley, she found an "A" easy at Topaz; many classmates wondered why bother with homework at all. Still, the school staged two plays, gave choral concerts, printed a newspaper and published a yearbook, and parents and teachers pushed most students on to further education.

Resettlement

When the camps closed, everyone had to leave — without jobs, housing or money. Fumi and her sister worked as babysitters and maids and went to school in St. Louis. More than four years passed before the family was together again in their Berkeley home.

Sources

Based on "Fumi Manabe Hayashi," one of the ID booklets of Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service, written by park rangers with the people profiled and their families; the booklet's first-person account is retold here, with short quotations. The booklet closes with "Wind and Dust," a poem written at Manzanar in 1943 by George Nishimura, age 16, which is not reproduced. For more on the ten camps, see the Park Service's "War Relocation Centers."