Kazuko Toji Kato: A Nine-Year-Old at Manzanar

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

Family No. 3692 · Manzanar, California · Address 22-11-4

Glendale

Kazuko's mother met her father for the first time in June 1924, married him and came to America. They reached Los Angeles on the Fourth of July, and her mother, seeing the fireworks, thought it a beautiful place to begin. They settled in Glendale, where her mother worked as a laundress and her father as a gardener. Kazuko was the fourth of five children, in about third grade at Chevy Chase Grammar School when Pearl Harbor was bombed. She remembers little of it except her brothers saying they were called slurs at school; her parents kept their jobs.

Without her father

A few days after she turned nine, in May 1942, the family was sent to Manzanar. Her father had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and was sent to the Olive View Sanitarium, so her mother went to camp alone with five children, all under 12. They had almost no time and no luggage, and no long trousers — girls didn't wear them — so her mother sat up late sewing blankets, duffel bags and trousers for Kazuko and her sister, having heard camp would be cold and full of snakes. Her father sold the truck he used for gardening, and they sold their piano for $10. Their landlord let them store things in the garage, but after the war everything of value was gone.

Camp

Manzanar was dusty and she was tired. Walking to school every day, she met either heat or cold wind. In three years she went from third to seventh grade, and adjusted — in fact had a lot of fun, especially with a girls' group, the Jolliets, who ordered batons from the Sears catalogue and practised high-stepping and twirling. She knew nothing of the politics; the children were too young for the questionnaires. One day she was taken to the hospital to have her tonsils removed, as, she was told, many children's were; she still doesn't know why.

After

They left in August 1945 with little money: no job for her mother, her father still at Olive View, four children in school. Her brothers worked as live-in "schoolboys", earning their keep in other people's homes while attending school, and at 13 Kazuko became a "schoolgirl" too — partly for lack of money, partly because many people would not rent to Japanese Americans. It was the hardest time of her life.

She never spoke of camp until recently. Her sons ask why she told them nothing as they grew up. She compares herself to a victim of assault: ashamed to say she had been in camp, she shut it out of her mind. Her advice to students: remember who you are and where you came from.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Kazuko Toji Kato," an ID booklet. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/kazuko-toji-kato.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.