Grace Kato Izumi: From a Fowler Grape Ranch to Jerome, Chicago and a Family Bakery

Manzanar National Historic Site publishes short "ID booklets" on Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. This is Grace Kato Izumi's first-person account, retold in hubnx's own words.

Family No. 29420 · Jerome, Arkansas · Address 46-9-C

Fowler

Grace's father, Kinjiro Kato, came from Hiroshima to Seattle as a 13-year-old schoolboy in the early 1900s; she remembers him reading the "Winnie Winkle" comic strip and enjoying cowboy music. Her mother, Kuma Kato, arrived around 1914. They settled in the farming town of Fowler, near Fresno, where her father was foreman of a large grape and fruit operation, hiring workers and keeping their time. There were three boys and two girls. Grace graduated from Fowler High in 1940 and helped on the ranch.

After Pearl Harbor

Her brother George, who had enlisted, was home on a weekend pass from Camp Roberts when news of Pearl Harbor broke, and every serviceman was called back at once. Grace was unsettled by storefront signs refusing trade with Japanese Americans, and by other Asian Americans wearing buttons declaring they were Chinese American. The family obeyed the rules: stay within five miles of home, and a curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. It was frightening outside, but inside, she says, she knew who she was — Japanese American.

The Feavers family her father worked for stored their belongings, and a friend took Grace's Persian cat; within a week of the evacuation a letter came saying it had died of a broken heart.

Fresno and Jerome

In spring 1942 the family of six went to the Fresno Assembly Center at the county fairground, and two months later by train — her first train ride, a real adventure — to Jerome, Arkansas, in a desolate area the incarcerated people made livable. The latrines were unfinished, and the showers had no partitions until later. She remembers the chiggers.

Grace worked as a diet aide in the hospital and met Japanese Americans from all over the West Coast. She enjoyed social gatherings and sports, made lifelong friends, and took day trips to nearby towns and Little Rock. Camp, she thinks, gave her parents their first chance to rest and take up crafts they had long set aside — crocheting, knitting, paper-and-wire flowers mounted in frames — and gave the women time with friends that their working lives had never allowed.

In 1943 she left with a friend for Chicago and worked six months in a candy factory with other Japanese Americans. On the journey she saw separate drinking fountains and restrooms for Black and white people, and Black passengers made to sit at the back of the bus — injustices, she says. Returning to her family, she moved with them to Rohwer when Jerome closed.

Brothers at war

Two brothers served in the Army: Roy in the United States, and George in the Military Intelligence Service in the Philippines, Australia and occupied Japan. George went to Hiroshima soon after the atomic bombing and found an uncle sick with radiation; their grandmother had been killed in the blast. A younger brother also served stateside.

After

The family went back to Fowler, welcomed by the friends who had kept their things; her father worked for them again until he bought his own grape ranch. The small town soon felt confining, and Grace followed friends to Los Angeles, caring for the children of a Hollywood producer. There she met her husband George, a baker in Beverly Hills, and they borrowed money from her parents to open his first bakery — the start, she says, of an exciting life of adventures.

She was neither miserable nor bitter about camp. Remembering the anti-Japanese signs, she concluded that it was for their own safety. Camp, the hospital, new friends and Chicago broadened her outlook. Her favourite song: "Que Será, Será".

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Grace Kato Izumi," an ID booklet. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/grace-kato-izumi.htm
• More: Manzanar ID booklets.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.