Frank Mori: From Gila River to Army Intelligence in the Pacific

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

Family No. 14145 · Gila River, Arizona · Address 47-14-C

Santa Barbara

Frank was born in 1920 and grew up in Santa Barbara. His father left Japan in 1898, worked two years on a Hawaiian sugar plantation, then came to California, working in landscape construction and horticulture; his mother came as a "picture bride", the marriage agreed through letters and photographs. There were three boys and a girl. His father built a profitable business growing and selling freesia bulbs. Frank grew up among white neighbours, spoke English from childhood and, with poor Japanese, struggled to talk with his parents.

After high school his father sent him on a summer trip through Japan, Korea, Manchuria and China, then at war; Japanese secret police in the occupied lands eyed him with suspicion — to them he was not Japanese. Sailing home, when someone shouted that the Golden Gate Bridge was in sight, he wept with joy and knew America was his country.

War

He was working on the family farm when his youngest brother brought news of Pearl Harbor from the radio. Frank didn't even know where it was. But panic soon spread: a Japanese submarine surfaced about 15 miles north of Santa Barbara and shelled oil tanks on shore, and Frank heard the booms while packing flowers. Hate groups, columnists, greedy businessmen and politicians spread the idea that anyone of Japanese descent was an enemy. He came to hate his heritage and burned anything linked to Japan.

With Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, the family had two months. The three brothers' Ford coupes sold for what a used bicycle costs today; the farm pickup went too, and on the last day his father all but gave away the tomato crop. Soldiers with rifles surrounded the Santa Barbara station. Frank and his brother chose to drive, under armed escort, so they could take more.

Tulare and Gila River

The Tulare Assembly Center was a county fairground turned prison: tall barbed-wire fences, guard towers, floodlights. Their car was emptied and inspected and kitchen knives confiscated; the family got a room big enough for six cots, while others lived in horse stables. Frank felt he had lost the Constitution's protection. Yet people adjusted quickly, volunteering to run the camp; some who had worked hard all their lives treated it almost as a holiday, and some housewives liked not cooking three meals a day. Frank waited tables in the mess hall for $13 a month. A Fourth of July celebration, performed by fellow prisoners who were World War I veterans, struck him as close to absurd. And in the mess hall he met a cheerful young woman with a Hawaiian accent who had come to California to train as a nurse months before Pearl Harbor.

After five months they were moved to Gila River in the Arizona desert — less oppressive, with no high fences or towers, since no one would flee into that emptiness. Waiting tables again, facing an uncertain future, he grew depressed.

Volunteer

Then he answered a notice on the mess-hall bulletin board, and within two hours went from prisoner to soldier: he had volunteered for Army intelligence, with no time to tell his family or sweetheart, as it was the recruiters' last day in camp. Twenty-seven men left Gila with him in November 1942. After six months of language school — during his first furlough he married the young nurse — and basic training at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, he joined the 77th Infantry Division in Hawaii and fought the Japanese Army on Guam, in the Philippines and on Okinawa. The division was preparing to invade Japan when the Emperor announced the surrender, and then helped occupy Hokkaido, where, to his surprise, people thanked them for ending their country's 14-year war. Travelling to Yokohama to sail home, he saw cities flattened to the ground.

Home, what home?

His wife, out of camp, was waiting near San Francisco with their daughter, a year and a half old. When the war ended, the government simply told the incarcerated they could go home — callously, Frank says, since many had no home to go to. His parents returned to the Santa Barbara area, staying at first in a former church used as a hostel. Frank and his wife raised four children and have seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

His advice to young people: face trials without fear — you are tougher than you know, and every hardship makes you stronger. At 25, after incarceration and combat, he was ready for life. Faith in God, he says, changed his heart and taught him to forgive; he holds no bitterness and has forgiven his country completely.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Frank Mori," an ID booklet. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/frank-mori.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.