Mariagnes Aya Uenishi Medrud: Minidoka, and Refusing to Give Up America

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

Family No. 11191 · Minidoka, Idaho

Seattle

Her father, Joseph Kozo Uenishi, came from Japan as a boy with his parents; in 1923, at 23, he went back to marry Kane Katsuragawa. He helped build the Great Northern Railway across the northern states. Mariagnes was born in Spokane in 1925, and the family settled in Seattle.

Soon after Pearl Harbor the FBI picked up her father with other community leaders. He was held in Army and Justice Department camps for more than a year, never charged. Then Executive Order 9066 gave the Army power to move everyone of Japanese descent on the West Coast, citizen and alien alike, into "assembly centres".

They could take only what they could carry. The green '41 Chevrolet, the furniture and household goods went for a pittance; the rest was boxed in the basement. Her mother made them scrub the whole house first — an empty, spotless house as a memorial to what had been their home.

"Camp Harmony"

Told to report at 6 a.m., Mariagnes, her mother, sister and brother waited at the corner until nearly noon, hungry, before being taken to the Puyallup fairgrounds, called, with unintended irony, "Camp Harmony". For four months they lived in a horse stall with a dirt floor, one dangling bulb and four straw-mattress cots in a space built for one horse. Nights were worst: with only stall partitions and no ceiling, every rustle of straw, cough, sneeze, cry, whisper and sigh carried. Whitewash couldn't hide where they were; when it rained, as it often does, there was mud, crossed on wooden planks. Everyone feared the unknown, and at 16 she struggled to keep up at school while worrying about her father and helping her mother cope.

Minidoka

In September a train from Seattle's King Street Station, shades drawn and military police pacing the cars, carried them for two days and nights to a railway siding in a dusty, desolate, nameless landscape in south-central Idaho: Minidoka. Their home for more than two years was a room about 20 by 20 feet in a tar-paper barrack, with four iron cots, blue ticking mattresses, Army blankets and pillows.

The communal toilets were a metal bench with holes, flushed periodically by a rush of water — she soon learned to sit as far as possible from where it came in. Showers had no curtains, and there were no baths and no privacy. Meals meant queues three times a day for white bread, Vienna sausages and canned sauerkraut, and no rice. Clothes were scrubbed by hand in communal tubs. As the eldest child she helped her mother; what she missed most was school and the library. School finally began in October, in a barrack with no books, desks, chairs or blackboard, students on the floor or against the walls; she still wonders what the teacher gamely teaching civics thought of it all.

"Yes, yes"

The war was costly, and it made no sense to keep able young people from military service or war work. So everyone over 17 had to answer a loyalty questionnaire, including whether they would serve in the military and renounce allegiance to Japan; "yes" answers could earn "indefinite leave" from camp. Her father, then held in a Justice Department camp at Livingston, Louisiana, had given up hope of rejoining his family, and with his father recently dead and his mother alone in Japan, he asked to be repatriated with the family. If he answered "no", the family would be held for a prisoner exchange.

Mariagnes, 17, was determined to stay. Answering "yes, yes" meant splitting the family, but she was an American, and this was her country despite what it had done to her. She had never defied her father before, and relatives and friends pressed her hard, but she would not change her answers. In the end her father let her be, answered "yes, yes" himself, was released from the Army camp at Kooskia, Idaho, and joined them at Minidoka in December 1943.

Utica

A Catholic church in Utica, New York, sponsored her father to work at an orphanage, and they arrived in December 1944, in snow so deep they could not see across the street for weeks. The chaplain at Utica Army General Hospital asked whether the Uenishi daughters might visit wounded Nisei soldiers, most from Hawaii, hurt in Italy and Germany and passing through on the way home. Nothing prepared her for young men who had lost limbs or sight, wrapped in white bandages — her first sight of what war does to bodies. She doesn't remember what was said.

Waiting for the bus home, a woman came up to within inches of her face, cursed her with a racial slur, told her she had no right to be there and threatened to kill her. Mariagnes was numb. The woman had no idea what she had just seen — the young men who had fought for that woman's right to shout at her. Then people began pouring into the streets: it was VE Day.

After

That autumn the war ended. Mariagnes went to art school in New York City, finished college and taught for 20 years in public schools; the family never went back to Seattle or the West Coast. She speaks whenever asked about the violation of Japanese Americans' civil rights and the fragility of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: the Constitution protects everyone, and it is each person's job to make sure the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans is a lesson learned, so it never happens to any group again. War, she says, is never reason enough to target people by race.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Mariagnes Aya Uenishi Medrud," an ID booklet. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/mariagnes-aya-uenishi-medrud.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.