Aiji Nagano: From a Manzanar Barrack to the U.S. Army and UCLA

Manzanar National Historic Site publishes short "ID booklets" on Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Aiji Nagano's was written by his sister, Momo Nagano; it is retold here in hubnx's own words.

Family No. 1046 · Manzanar, California · Address 6-11-5

Before the war

Aiji's father, Kiro Nagano, came to the United States from Sapporo, on Hokkaido, in 1918, and went back to Japan in 1920 to marry; the couple left the day after the wedding. In his twenties he leased land in Los Angeles, hired farmhands and sold his produce at the wholesale market, and in 1933 he opened his own business.

In October 1941 he began building a new family home, designed by Aiji's older brother Dike, then still an architecture student. On the night of December 7, 1941, the FBI took Kiro Nagano into custody as a "dangerous enemy alien", and he lost his business.

Aiji, 14 and in junior high, could not believe the newspaper reports that everyone of Japanese descent would be removed from the West Coast — not in America. When it became unavoidable, his mother chose to go to Manzanar early, as a volunteer, with another Catholic family, under the Maryknoll Catholic organisation. The family had moved into the new house in January 1942, with the father still held; they lived there only two months.

Manzanar

On April 2, 1942, they went by train and bus to Manzanar, carrying mostly clothes — they could take only what they could carry — and leaving everything else. They arrived at sunset, registered, were handed canvas ticking bags and were led to a barrack full of straw to fill them for mattresses on metal army cots. Then they were taken to Block 6, Building 9, Apartment 2, which they shared with a couple and their two-year-old son, hanging sheets between the families for some privacy.

Aiji's mother had brought a metal bucket, which they filled at the block's single outdoor tap, amid trenches still being dug for the water system, to wash and brush their teeth each morning. The latrines were not yet built; there were only portable toilets. As construction went on, the family got an apartment of their own in the same block, Building 11, Apartment 5.

Aiji and Momo spent their days wandering the camp and watching the cars go by on the highway. Their childhood friends from the neighbourhood had been sent to a different camp. Aiji found work as a messenger boy for one of the administration's departments until school opened in October 1942.

A whole block was set aside for classrooms, but students sat on the linoleum floors of unheated rooms with no furniture, textbooks or supplies. The teachers, recruited from Los Angeles, did their best to recreate a normal school year, with dances, a school newspaper, a yearbook and graduation ceremonies. By the time Aiji's class graduated in June 1944, an auditorium had been built, so they graduated indoors instead of outside in a firebreak.

The Army, and after

At 17, having finished high school, Aiji volunteered for the U.S. Army from Manzanar. The Army schooled him until he turned 18, then inducted him into the regular army and shipped him to Germany.

Meanwhile his father was given a hearing and released from the enemy alien detention camp in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and allowed to join Aiji's mother and Momo at Manzanar. When they were released in 1945, his parents were allowed to move to Denver, Colorado — outside the Western Defense Zone from which Japanese Americans were barred — and lived there for a year. By the time Aiji came home from Germany, the family was back in their Los Angeles house.

Aiji earned a bachelor's degree in business administration at UCLA, became a computer programmer in the early days of the technology and later a systems analyst. He was a stand-in father to the four children of his brother Dike, who died in 1965 at 44, and to Momo's four children after her divorce. Aiji Nagano died in 1981, aged 54, after, as his sister put it, a lifetime of doing the right thing.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Aiji Nagano," an ID booklet written by Momo Nagano. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/aiji-nagano.htm
• More: the ten War Relocation Authority centers; Manzanar ID booklets.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.