Hikoji Takeuchi: From Little Tokyo to Manzanar and Tule Lake

A Little Tokyo childhood

Hikoji Takeuchi was born on December 18, 1921, in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. His parents came from Hiroshima and ran their own sushi restaurant. An older brother and sister lived in Japan; he never met them. A younger sister was born in America. His father liked to say, "Nothing like America!"

At Amelia Street School his classmates were Japanese, Mexican and Russian, and nobody sorted each other that way — they were kids having a good time. A teacher, Mrs. McDougal, told them America was strong because people from everywhere shared the same dream. At Japanese language school, too, he was told that he owed his loyalty to the country he was born in.

He finished Lincoln High School in June 1941. He had hoped for college, but his father had died in 1939 and the family could not afford it.

After Pearl Harbor

On December 7, 1941, he was washing dishes in the restaurant when a customer ran in shouting that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. He did not believe it until he turned on the radio.

• Outside the neighborhood, he felt hostile eyes on him. A man on a streetcar demanded his seat — "Why should a Jap sit down while I have to stand?" — and he got off. Another man tried to knock him down in the street.
• The FBI took his shortwave radio, bought with years of saved nickels and dimes, and his Kodak camera.
• The family had just remodeled the restaurant. When the exclusion order came they padlocked it and lost everything. His sister's cat, Fuji, had to be left behind; they never learned what became of him.

On May 9, 1942, with notices posted even inside the restaurant, the family left Los Angeles, told it was for their own protection. A priest drove them to the station and gave his mother a cup of coffee. Takeuchi never got to thank him, and still thought about it decades later.

Manzanar

It was his first train ride. The blinds stayed down, every seat was full, and two military policemen with bayonets rode in the car. Most people sat in stunned silence. From Lone Pine a bus took them to Manzanar.

He had never left Los Angeles or seen a desert. The first night he looked up through a knothole in the barrack roof and saw more stars than he had ever seen — "No one can take away the beauty of nature." The next morning a sandstorm blew sand through every crack.

Neighbors helped each other. The block latrines had no stalls, so they built stalls for the women out of cardboard.

The shooting

About a week after arriving, Takeuchi went to a pile of lumber by barracks still under construction, to make his mother a chair so she would have somewhere to sit besides her cot. He asked a military policeman whether he could take scrap wood, and was told he could. With an armful of lumber, he was called back — and saw the MP lower his rifle and aim at him. When the gun went off, he felt as if hot iron rods were running through his body.

A garden in the desert

Over time the camp changed. People got seeds and planted lawns and gardens between the barracks; some blocks built small ponds. Farmers grew crops, and the watermelon was so sweet he could still taste it.

The loyalty questionnaire

In 1943 everyone had to answer a questionnaire asking whether they would serve in the military and forswear allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Takeuchi had never known any country but America, and resented being asked to renounce one he did not know.

After the war began, he and two cousins had tried to volunteer for the Army and were thrown out of the recruiting office. Later, once the restrictions were lifted, both cousins enlisted and were killed; they are buried side by side in a West Los Angeles cemetery.

Because his country did not trust him, he answered "no, no." With several thousand others he was sent to the Tule Lake Segregation Center in northern California, and later to Bismarck, North Dakota.

After the war

• He went to Japan with his mother and sister after the war. His older brother and sister there had already died of disease.
• He worked in Japan as an interpreter for the U.S. forces.
• He came back to the United States in 1956 and spent his working life in the costume department of a movie studio.
• He married Ritsuko, from Japan — "the wisest thing I ever did" — and they raised four children, all Americans.

Camp dashed everything he believed in, and it took him a long time to come out of his shell. The government's apology to Japanese Americans in 1988, he said, took a lot of guts.

His advice

Get an education so you can get involved. Look at both sides of a question, and do not be afraid. As a boy he never gave the Constitution a thought; after what he went through, it held meaning.

Sources

Based on "Hikoji Takeuchi," one of the ID booklets of Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service, written by park rangers with the people profiled and their families, drawn from his oral history interviews; 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."