Daisy Uyeda Satoda: From Oakland to Tanforan and Topaz

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

Family No. 20195 · Topaz, Utah · Address 9-10-A-B-C

An Oakland family of thirteen

Daisy's father, Mitsuzo Uyeda, came to Hawaii from Kumamoto, Japan, in 1899, aged 20. Her mother, Matsuye Moriyama, was born on Oahu in 1892, a year after her parents arrived from Kumamoto with the 17th wave of Japanese immigrants. Her father ran a string of grocery stores and restaurants, none of them successful. By 1941 the family — nine girls and two boys — lived in Oakland.

On December 7, 1941, Daisy, 14, was at the movies with friends when the film stopped and all servicemen were ordered back to their bases. On the way home they saw the Oakland Tribune's four-inch headline — using a slur — announcing that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, and ran home frightened.

"One of the saddest days"

A few months later FBI agents arrested her father. Her mother had already packed a change of clothes and toiletries, since Japanese American community leaders all over the West Coast were being rounded up. The younger children clung to his legs begging the agents not to take him, but he was led away in handcuffs. The next day the paper reported that he was a leader of a "Military Virtue Society of Japan" — an organisation that never existed.

At Lincoln Junior High, most classmates were Chinese American, and soon wore badges saying they were Chinese, to set themselves apart from Japanese Americans, the new "Yellow Peril". Daisy, the class secretary, was about to graduate when evacuation orders went up in May 1942. Her mother sold most of the furniture for about $50; the Japanese Oakland Methodist Church stored members' belongings in its auditorium, watched over by a white church member, Lee Mullis, and his father, so everything was intact when they came back. Her mother spent three days and nights sewing, cooking and packing for twelve people, and collapsed on the day they were to report.

Tanforan

For four months the family was held at the Tanforan Assembly Center, a racetrack in San Bruno, with about 8,000 other Bay Area Japanese Americans. They were lucky to get tar-paper barracks rather than the filthy horse stalls — bare but for 12 metal cots and cotton bags to stuff with straw. Food was ladled from galvanised tubs by inexperienced inmate cooks, and most people had dysentery much of the time. Young people gathered at a recreation hall run by their elders; college students and graduates ran lecture classes in the grandstand, grades separated by empty rows, with no textbooks. The same grandstand held talent shows on Saturdays and church on Sundays — Protestants on one side, Buddhists on the other, Catholics in the middle.

For women, the worst humiliation was the lack of privacy: toilets in back-to-back rows, showers without curtains. Half of every day went to queues — for meals, toilets, baths, laundry and the twice-daily head count. After the family pleaded hardship to Eleanor Roosevelt and the FBI, her father was released and joined them.

Topaz

After a three-day train ride they reached Delta, Utah, on September 22, 1942, and were trucked to Topaz, nicknamed "the Jewel of the Desert". Fine alkali silt blew up almost every afternoon, into the barracks, noses and mouths. About 8,200 people came from Tanforan. Each block of about 300 had a mess hall, laundry and separate bathrooms; each room had only cots and a potbelly stove, fed charcoal when there was any. The family of 13 had three rooms, furnished with whatever scrap lumber they could find. Winters reached 30 below and summers about 115, in uninsulated buildings, and the family had no clothes for such cold.

The junior and senior high school opened in October, taking over Block 32, with eight students to a mess-hall table. Many teachers, including a number of Japanese Americans, had no credentials, but several truly cared; with no laboratories, science teachers did experiments while students watched. The best of it, Daisy says, was the chance to lead — in student government, sports, plays, the yearbook and the paper — opportunities rarely open to them in the white world outside. School was their social life, since families lived in single rooms, and her class grew extraordinarily close. The Topaz High Class of 1945 still meets at least once a year and, with a grant, wrote its story from about 50 oral histories: Blossoms in the Desert (2003).

After

Topaz closed on October 31, 1945. Resettling was hard: few had owned homes, jobs were scarce and housing expensive, and Japanese Americans had been barred from the West Coast until January 1, 1945. Daisy's sister Kaye helped open the War Relocation Authority office in San Francisco and brought the family there. Daisy became a clerk-typist for the American Red Cross, one of the few employers then hiring Japanese Americans. Suspicion lingered, and several hundred discriminatory laws against Asians remained; not until the 1950s could Japanese immigrants become citizens, buy property in their own names and live where they chose.

With Kaye, Daisy supported their parents and four youngest siblings, so she could not start college for three years; after two years at San Francisco Junior College she went back to work, married and raised three children. Forty years later she returned to study humanities and Asian American studies, pausing to help write From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America's Concentration Camps (2000), by 11 writers who had been 4 to 19 years old in the camps, and read from it about 20 times across California. The stories must be recorded, she says, so that such a gross injustice to innocent people never happens again.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Daisy Uyeda Satoda," an ID booklet. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/daisy-uyeda-satoda.htm
• More: Manzanar ID booklets.
• Corrected: the booklet spells Kumamoto "Kumamto" once.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.