Kazuko Oyamada Iwahashi: A Berkeley Girl at Tanforan and Topaz

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

Family No. 13683 · Topaz, Utah · Address 20-4-B

Berkeley

Kazuko's father, Yoshio Oyamada, came from Japan in 1913 at 15, landed in Seattle and worked farms as far as California's Imperial Valley. Her maternal grandparents went from Japan to Hawaii to work for a white family, whom they followed to San Francisco's Pacific Heights, where her mother, Shizue Inada, was born in 1909; the family later moved back to Japan. A friend of her father went to Japan to find him a wife — the first choice didn't want to emigrate — and her parents married in an arranged match in Oakland on June 30, 1927.

They settled in Berkeley. Her father worked in a laundry, then became a nurseryman and gardener, turning their rented property into a nursery of shrubs, trees and potted plants and gardening for wealthy families in the Berkeley Hills. Kazuko was the eldest of four: Akiko, Michie and Seiji. She and her sister were the only Japanese Americans in their class but never felt singled out — until, after Pearl Harbor, one of her closest friends left her out of a birthday party. After school came Japanese language school, which she enjoyed for the games, and the family kept Japanese holidays such as Boys' Day, Girls' Day and the Emperor's Birthday.

On December 7, a friend told her Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. Her father refused to believe Japan would do something so foolish. That evening a film she was watching was stopped to order all servicemen back to their posts.

Leaving

After Executive Order 9066 (February 19, 1942), each family was given a number; she still has her father's identification card, with 13683 on it. Her father sold or gave away most of his nursery stock and stored the rest at the Japanese Methodist Church in Berkeley. With their car sold, a Chinese friend of her father drove them to the First Congregational Church to assemble.

At 12, Kazuko took her first bus ride — to the Tanforan racetrack in San Bruno, on May 1, 1942, home for four months. After a childhood among few Japanese Americans, she was suddenly surrounded by them. The family got a room at the end of a barrack, not a horse stall, though the walls were so thin they heard everything. To a naive child it felt like an adventure: ping-pong, card games, grandstand talent shows — her block's girls danced in newspaper hula skirts. School was thin, with few supplies or books.

Topaz

Her first train ride took several days, shades drawn, to Delta, Utah, then by bus to Topaz: blocks of black tar-paper barracks and swirling white dust, and hot, dry air strange to Bay Area people. The six of them lived in one room about 20 by 25 feet, with communal dining halls and bathrooms offering little privacy. The men used spare building materials for furniture; her father built bunk beds and a chest of drawers. He cooked in the mess hall and her mother waitressed while other block women minded the children. Most people thought the food was good; it was her first taste of apple butter, which she has never touched since.

Topaz brought their first snow, and snowball fights. Junior high was a normal school of clowns, brains and goof-offs, all Japanese Americans, and far better organised than Tanforan's. They pledged allegiance to the flag every day — ironic, she reflects, in a place like Topaz. She cheered Block 20's strong baseball and basketball teams, went to a summer camp at Antelope Springs in the mountains, joined the Girl Reserves, danced at block parties and in the yearly Obon festival. One sad day, an assembly announced that Johnny, a neighbour who had volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, had been killed in Europe; his girlfriend ran from the room in tears.

After

When the West Coast reopened, Kazuko returned to Berkeley at 15, living in a hostel in the same church where their things had been stored, and then as a live-in "schoolgirl" earning her room and board; she never lived at home again through high school and college. The woman she lived with in high school suggested nursing: she earned a bachelor's degree and worked as a nurse for 38 years. Her mother and younger siblings came back late in 1945; her mother did domestic work, and her parents took buses everywhere, a car being beyond their means. She never heard them complain — their ganbatte, "hang in there", attitude carried them.

When her children wrote school reports on the camps, their questions led her to the congressional hearings on wartime relocation, where she heard of hardships she had been too young to see — teenagers stripped for immunisation shots, families torn up and resettled. What pulled everyone through, she says, was the bond of a shared experience and the friendships it made. Her generation took things as they came; young people today would rebel. Her lesson: treat others as you want to be treated, see people as individuals, and never stereotype a whole group, as the government did to them.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Kazuko Oyamada Iwahashi," an ID booklet. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/kazuko-oyamada-iwahashi.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.