Hayao "Hy" Shishino: Denied His Diploma in 1942, Given It in 1988

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

Family No. 9361 · Gila River, Arizona · Address 33-9-C

A florist's family in Los Angeles

Hy Shishino's father, Fumio Shishino, came to America from Kagoshima, Japan, in 1910 and worked for years as a labourer and fruit picker. In 1919 he went back to Japan to marry Toshi Kodama Shishino, returned alone, and saved for a year to bring her over. They settled in Los Angeles near Washington and Vermont Streets and had four children: John (1922), Hayao (1924), Masako (1926) and Takao (1928).

From 1921 Fumio was a florist. On holidays Hy went with him to the wholesale flower market at 5:30 in the morning, and every other school day he rose half an hour early to change the water in the big flower pots.

The diploma that was withheld

Hy was a high school senior when Pearl Harbor was bombed. The family had many friends and met no discrimination from their neighbours. But as they packed to leave, the principal, Paul Webb, called Hy into his office and told him that he and 14 other students did not deserve diplomas for the spring 1942 class and would not get them. The 15 went unrecognised as graduates for decades.

His parents lost everything — the business and their belongings. The shop's equipment was abandoned, and what they could sell went for ten cents on the dollar.

Santa Anita

On April 26, 1942, the family and some 33,000 other people of Japanese ancestry were taken by bus, under military police with rifles and bayonets, to the Santa Anita Racetrack, used as an assembly centre. Some people were put in horse stalls; the Shishinos were luckier, in a 60-by-20-foot barrack split into five or six units, with a cot and straw mattress each. Fences, guard towers and machine guns pointed inward upset everyone.

When Hy turned 18 in June 1942 he had to register for the draft in camp. A few weeks later his classification arrived: 4-C, enemy alien — as it was for everyone there.

His worst memory is Thursday nights, when mutton stew was cooked and the whole camp smelled of soap. By midnight hundreds of people with diarrhoea were queuing at the latrines, the cesspools overflowed, and trucks pumped out the tanks all night.

The Shishinos were among the last to leave, so they watched group after group of 500 depart on dirty old railway cars for the Gila River camp, while a recording of Guy Lombardo's "Auld Lang Syne" played over a loudspeaker. The grief of friends and families being split up still returns to him whenever he hears that tune.

Gila River

On October 27, the family was put on an old, dusty train in the middle of the night, under guard, and arrived the next morning in hot desert on Indian land known as Gila Bend, Arizona. The Gila River Relocation Camp held them with 13,300 others from across California, in 120-by-20-foot barracks of six units, with only a cot each.

Hy volunteered for the Army's camouflage net programme. Eight-man teams were paid by the piece, so they worked hard in 100–110-degree heat and dust, and finished a one-year contract in five months. At weekends he played some basketball to pass the time.

When the loyalty questionnaire asked whether he would renounce allegiance to Japan and serve in the U.S. armed forces, he answered "yes, yes". He did not want to be separated from his family: many who answered "no, no" were sent to the maximum-security segregation centre at Tule Lake.

Minnesota

Anyone who took a job away from the Pacific Coast got a one-way rail ticket and $25. On June 8, 1943, Hy left for a summer resort job in northern Minnesota with friends. It was his first real job: $20 a week, $16.67 after tax, working 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 to 9 p.m. seven days a week — 90 hours — for pay, room and board.

Afterwards he and his roommate went to Minneapolis, where he was hired on his first day as a cook's helper at the Radisson Hotel. The people he met were friendly and helped him start again. He brought his family there and, a few months later, bought a house — the family together again after two and a half years apart.

On his 21st birthday, June 24, 1945, a group of them went swimming in Lake Calhoun. His brother, not knowing the lake, swam a few yards into deeper, freezing water and went under, with hundreds of people nearby and no one noticing.

In January 1946 Hy was drafted. That same day his father went into hospital with a terminal illness. On a chaplain's advice Hy applied for a dependency discharge — he had a house to pay for, his mother and younger brother to support and his father in hospital. An adjutant refused, and he was sent to Sheppard Field, Texas, for Air Force basic training; it took 75 days for the discharge to come through. Soon after Hy got home, his father told him he could die in peace knowing Hy was back to look after the family. He died a month later.

With no job, Hy sold the house and moved back to Los Angeles with his mother and brother in July 1946. Unable to continue his education, he worked as a cook for 43 years until he retired.

Graduation, 1988

In 1988 two classmates urged him to tell the Board of Education about Principal Webb's prejudice. He wrote to Warren Furutani, the first person of Japanese ancestry elected to the Los Angeles Board of Education. Board President Jackie Goldberg was astonished by the letter; the board investigated and found his account true.

On October 28, 1988, the board held a formal graduation for the class: 12 surviving classmates, with some 200 friends, relatives and reporters. The Los Angeles Times gave the story half a page, and seven TV channels, plus two from Japan, covered it. Justice took decades, Hy says, but it exposed the injustices and the denial of constitutional rights in wartime.

Being called enemy aliens and held in concentration camps, he says, is an injustice none of them will forget. They overcame the poverty and hardship, and they keep working to teach Americans what happened, so that it never happens again to people of any other nationality.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Hayao Hy Shishino," an ID booklet. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/hayao-hy-shishino.htm
• More: the ten War Relocation Authority centers; Manzanar ID booklets.
• Corrected: the booklet spells the Texas base "Shepherd Field"; it was Sheppard Field.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.