Mary M. Teramoto: A Farm Girl From Fowler in the Arkansas Camps

Her parents

• Her mother, Asano, was born in Hawaii and so was an American citizen, but her parents took her back to Japan when she was nine.
• Her father, Sawataro Teraoka, was a tailor in Japan until a depression drove him and his brother abroad. He worked in Hawaii's sugar cane fields and reached the mainland in 1906, then returned to Japan to marry Asano in a match arranged by a matchmaker.
• By marrying a Japanese immigrant, Asano lost her U.S. citizenship under the Cable Act.

The couple settled in Fowler, California, ten miles south of Fresno, as truck farmers growing grapes and vegetables. California's Alien Land Law barred Japanese immigrants from owning land, so Sawataro leased his farm — and later bought another parcel in the name of a nephew who was a citizen. Mary, her brother George and her older sisters Mikiye and Yukiye all worked the crops.

On weekends she went to a Japanese language school run by the Buddhist church, so the family would not lose its culture. Barred from citizenship and land, many Issei — first-generation immigrants — had thought of going back to Japan, but chose to stay once their children were growing up American.

War comes to Fowler

Mary was a ninth grader at Fowler High School, in the Scholastic Club and freshman student government, when Pearl Harbor was bombed.

• A curfew kept the family within five miles of home; she needed special permission to travel with school groups, and some classmates resented it.
• She did not feel different at first, but that changed as newspaper headlines turned against Japanese in California.
• The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), a civil rights group led by many young, college-age Nisei, tried to organize the removal and arranged immunizations. Some people then and now resent it for not opposing the removal.

Two weeks to leave

• The children rose in the dark to help harvest lettuce and carrots before school.
• Elderly English neighbors stored the family's refrigerator, washing machine, table and beds in their barn — but relatives of the neighbors later took some things, and the refrigerator and washing machine were looted.
• A neighbor offered a ridiculous price for the farm. Her father refused; he would rather lose it than sell to a man he had thought a friend. The farm was leased, and neglected while they were gone.
• Mary and her best friend, Yukino Sugimoto, swapped bracelets from the 1939 World's Fair in San Francisco; Yukino was going to Gila River.
• Their dog, Jackie, was left behind and, they learned later, shot soon after.

Fresno and Jerome

In May 1942 the family gathered at Fowler's Veterans Memorial Auditorium and were bused to the Fresno Assembly Center at the fairgrounds, where they stayed until October 1942. She learned to dance there and sang in a choir led by a Japanese American music student.

The family of six then went to Jerome, Arkansas, on a long trip: the train was often sidetracked, the old cars had gaslights, and the shades stayed down through California. Getting off, the first thing she saw was soldiers with guns. Home was one room for six people; the older people gathered scrap lumber to make it livable and coal for the stove.

• Each block became a community. Her brother was a camp electrician; a sister worked in the mess hall.
• School started in barracks with rows of chairs and few books. Many teachers were sympathetic — a social studies teacher from Hope, Arkansas, said, "I don't know why you people are in here," and shared her students' projects with the town. Others came out of retirement for the good government pay, and some were too old to teach; the principal refused to replace one the students complained about.
• She joined the Girl Scouts and her block's girls' club, and danced at the recreation hall.
• Living among strangers made her want to withdraw at first. When the guards left the watchtowers, she felt less like a prisoner.
• Mumps kept her out of school and cost her a failing grade. A teacher, once a missionary in Asia, told her God never gives us more than we can handle — which she found to be true.

When Jerome closed, the family moved to Rohwer. Mary, her parents and one sister left in October 1945 — the next-to-last family out.

Starting over

They came home to a farm in shambles and no money. Help from Japanese Americans who had returned earlier got them through the first winter; then they worked until they could buy fruit trees and a tractor. People were curious at first, then accepting. Camp left her wanting to show the world, "I'm human too."

• She moved to Los Angeles and worked 40 years as an apparel designer in lingerie.
• Her mother, once the law let Asian immigrants naturalize, became a citizen again, studying the Constitution at the high school.

What she took from it

Her Issei parents taught that some things in life you can control and some — like camp — you cannot. Having been a victim of intolerance, she said, she understood tolerance: it opens a world of knowledge and experience that a closed mind shuts out.

Sources

Based on "Mary M. Teramoto," 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."