Bill Susumu Taketa: From Florin to Manzanar and Army Language School

Family and school in Florin

Bill Susumu Taketa's father came from Hiroshima around 1913 to join his own father, who had settled near Florin, California. His mother, also from Hiroshima, arrived around 1923.

• Bill was born in Florin on September 27, 1926, followed by a brother in 1930 and a sister in 1932.
• His father died in 1936, leaving his mother to raise three children through the hard years after the Depression.
• Florin had a segregated elementary school for Japanese American children. He attended it until the 1939–40 school year; the schools were integrated when he reached eighth grade.

War and removal

Pearl Harbor came in his freshman year at Elk Grove High School. The months that followed at school were difficult. Having gone to a segregated school, he had never had the chance to make white friends — and removal on May 30, 1942 separated him from the friends he had.

• The family sold what they could and stored the rest at Florin's Japanese Methodist Church.
• The Florin area's Japanese Americans were split among four camps: the Fresno Assembly Center, Manzanar, Poston and Tule Lake. Most of the family's relatives went to two other camps.
• The Taketas were sent to Manzanar with 396 others from the area.

Three years at Manzanar

The family lived in Block 30, Barrack 5, Apartment 1, making do with what they had carried, for three years in the square-mile camp beside U.S. Highway 395.

• High school kept him busy and out of trouble, and he made new friends.
• In spare time he played basketball and baseball on block teams.
• He skipped clubs and class activities to work part-time for the family. In summer he worked at the camouflage factory; his mother was a kitchen helper.
• His teachers urged them not to dwell on the past but to look to a better future.

He graduated with the Class of '45 in May 1945.

The Army

After graduation he left for seasonal farm work in Ontario, Oregon, but was soon drafted and sent to Camp Hood, Texas. The war ended during his basic training. An Army recruiter looking for Japanese Americans with language skills volunteered him for the Military Intelligence Service Language School at Fort Snelling, Minnesota.

Starting over

• After his service he returned to Florin, where the family had resettled, and everyone pitched in to start again.
• He worked odd jobs while taking night classes at Heald's Business College on the GI Bill.
• He found his career at Bank of America, which sent him to Southern Methodist University for three summers, and retired after 31 years.
• In retirement he began a second career: babysitting his two grandchildren.

He called it a wonderful life despite adversity beyond his control, and America "a land of opportunity for those who accept the challenge to build a better future for all its citizens."

Sources

Based on "Bill Susumu Taketa," 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."