Grace Shinoda Nakamura: Manzanar, and the First Japanese American Teacher in Pasadena

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

Manzanar, California · Address 29-7-4

Before the war

Grace's father, Kiyoshi Shinoda, came to the United States at 12 and graduated from UC Berkeley as an electrical engineer. Her mother, Hide Watanabe, arrived as a one-year-old with her parents — her father was a librarian — and graduated from Woodbury College. The couple met and married at the Union Church of Los Angeles, where Grace and her brother Lawrence ("Larry") were baptised. Their father died when Grace was six and Larry three.

The family heard about Pearl Harbor on the car radio driving home from church on December 7, 1941. As American citizens, they could not believe it when President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 ordered everyone of Japanese ancestry off the West Coast. Grace notes that no person of Japanese ancestry in the United States or its territories was ever convicted of a disloyal act.

One week

Grace was 15 and Larry 12. They had a week to deal with everything — house, car, pet — since they could take only what they could carry, with no idea where they were going or for how long. Each stuffed a duffel bag with clothes, blankets and towels; Grace added her Bible, a watercolour box and brush, and a small sketchbook.

Early on May 16, 1942, a neighbour drove them to Los Angeles Union Station. Among the hundreds waiting, she never forgot one young couple in their Sunday best: two toddlers clinging to the mother's coat, a baby twin in each of her arms, all four crying, the father with diapers and blankets strapped to his back and a huge suitcase in each hand. The train's shades were drawn, armed soldiers stood all around, and no food or drink was given.

Manzanar

They arrived at dusk and filled muslin bags with straw for mattresses; Larry joked that he felt like the baby Jesus asleep in the hay. Seven of them — their grandmother, their uncle Dr. Tom Watanabe, one of the camp doctors, two aunts, Grace and Larry — shared a room with beds and nothing else, while wind and dust blew in through cracks in the tar paper and floor. They later moved to Block 29, Barrack 7, Apartment 4, next to the hospital but at the far end of camp from the school, where students sat on the floor in dust so thick they could hardly see one another, until camp-made benches arrived months later.

Larry built his mother and grandmother two reclining chairs with armrests from crates that had held toilets, and people came from all over camp to see them. He became a world-famous transportation designer, known for the Corvette.

In December 1942 a large protest broke out over government employees stealing food meant for the incarcerated people. Grace ran to watch; the military police fired into the unarmed crowd, and her classmate Jimmy Ito was killed. It was terrifying.

After

In spring 1944 Grace, Larry and their mother took a bus to Reno and a train to Grand Junction, Colorado, where her mother cared for their paternal grandfather after a stroke, on the sugar beet and dairy farm of relatives who had avoided incarceration by leaving California. They skated on the frozen farm pond with borrowed skates until a bull charged and they escaped into the corn crib.

A scholarship from the American Friends Service Committee's Japanese American Student Relocation project took her to the University of Redlands — she says she was the first Japanese American college student to return to California. She graduated with honours and started teaching in the Pasadena School District the next day, its first Japanese American hire. She earned two master's degrees and made a career in education and fine arts. She married Yosh Nakamura, an art professor; their children are Linda, an immigration lawyer, Daniel, an electrical engineer and computer scientist, and Joel, an internationally recognised artist. The family has held seven "A Family Creates" exhibitions, the latest at the University of Redlands' Peppers Art Gallery with all eight of them, Larry included. She remains, she says, a teacher, a learner and a helper to others.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Grace Shinoda Nakamura," an ID booklet. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/grace-shinoda-nakamura.htm
• Related: Lawrence Kiyoshi Shinoda, her brother's booklet. The two booklets give the family number differently — 2083 here, 20983 in Larry's — so neither is repeated here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.