Albert Mizuhara: A San Francisco Boy at Tanforan and Topaz

A family in San Francisco

Albert Mizuhara's grandfather, Hyusuke Mizuhara, had been a sea captain sailing mostly around Japan — some said he left to avoid being drafted into the Japanese navy. He came to San Francisco in the late 1880s with his second wife, Kin, and their four children followed, among them Albert's father, Katsui Mizuhara (1889–1942).

• The family business, begun by the grandfather in 1889, repaired antiques.
• In 1924 Katsui went back to Japan to marry — just before the Immigration Act of 1924 shut off immigration from Japan.
• Albert was born in San Francisco in 1930, during the Depression, with three older brothers and later a younger one.

After Pearl Harbor

On December 7, 1941, armed soldiers and sailors appeared on the street corners of the neighborhood, with its large Japanese community, while newsboys shouted "War! War!" Albert was 11, in sixth grade at Raphael Weill Elementary School, where nothing changed: teachers and classmates who had known each other since first grade stayed friendly.

• An FBI agent and a policeman came to every Japanese home. They questioned the Issei men and searched the house. Community leaders, Japanese-language teachers, some priests and businessmen were taken within days.
• His father was questioned but not arrested: he belonged to no organization and had lived at the same address for 35 years.
• He was still a citizen of Japan — federal law barred him from applying for U.S. citizenship, while laws in many western states barred non-citizens from owning land or a house. "It was a catch-22 situation."

His one bad moment came half a block from home, when a white woman spat on Albert and his younger brother and called them "dirty Japs." "We were just kids," he said. "Suddenly, we were the enemy."

Removal

After President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, Army notices went up on telephone poles. Anyone with as little as one-sixteenth Japanese ancestry was to be removed, with only ten days to store or sell everything.

• Buyers offered pennies on the dollar. Much of what the family owned was abandoned in their rented home, and a roomful of valuable antiques from the shop was smashed and buried in the yard.
• Their dog and parrot went to neighbors. The dog was put down after biting the neighbors' boy; the parrot came back after the war.
• On May 10, 1942, his last day of freedom, Albert wore an ID tag with the family number, 22687, and carried what he could — tin plate, cup, fork, spoon, clothes and sheets — in a cloth bag his mother had sewn.

Tanforan

A bus took them to the Tanforan Assembly Center, a racetrack south of San Francisco turned into a prison camp with barbed wire and guard towers.

• Many families lived in horse stables; theirs was a bare barrack room with cots.
• The food was terrible, most people got diarrhea, and toilet paper was scarce.
• His sixth-grade class met under the grandstand, in the old betting hall.

Topaz

After five months, an old train took them to Topaz, Utah — in Albert's words a concentration camp of barbed wire and guard towers in a bleak desert, holding 8,000 people.

• The six of them lived in one 20-by-24-foot barrack room for three years — no insulation, boiling in summer, freezing in winter. Fine dust billowed with every step. They shared a mess hall, toilets and showers, and Albert, skinny and poorly clothed, was always cold in winter and hungry between meals.
• His father, ill with tuberculosis, had been sent to a sanatorium in Redwood City. He died a month after the family reached Topaz, at 53. Albert believed the anxiety of seeing his family taken away hastened his death.
• Junior high had dedicated teachers — some white, some incarcerees — but few textbooks and no basic science equipment.
• His pet turtle, carried from Tanforan in the train's washbasin, was killed by the camp's over-chlorinated water.
• A neighbor home on leave before going overseas took Albert to the soda canteen in the military police compound. The soldiers refused to serve him — a Japanese American in U.S. Army uniform.
• About a year after the camp opened, Mr. Wakasa, a 63-year-old man walking his dog near the fence, was shot dead by a guard in a tower who said he had ignored orders to stop. He was hard of hearing.

The good parts

He loved the library, the Boy Scouts and Pee Wee League baseball, made friends for life, and never forgot the sunsets, colored by the dust. Once rules relaxed, the boys hiked the three and a half miles to the Little Drum Mountains and kept lizards and scorpions as pets. From motor-pool junk Albert built a steam engine that nearly set the barrack on fire, and an arc welder that kept blowing the fuses.

Coming home

The family left as they came, with only what they could carry, and returned to San Francisco on September 20, 1945 — "poor, fatherless, and on our own."

• Their first home was a single room, smaller than the one at Topaz. His mother and two oldest brothers found work, and after a few months they rented two small rooms in a crowded flat.
• Albert, 15, washed dishes after school. Half of the eight dishwashers, elderly Chinese men, would not speak to him because he was Japanese — the war was over, but he was still treated as the enemy.
• In high school, his white classmates seemed mature, confident and rich, talking of ski trips and vacations, while he still wore his camp clothes. Most former incarcerees, he said, were in survival mode.

Things got better year by year. Of the five brothers, three became engineers, one a pharmacist, and one opened a dental lab.

Sources

Based on "Albert Mizuhara," one of the ID booklets of Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service, written by park rangers with the people profiled and their families; 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."