Helen Sugiyama Mishima: From Guadalupe to Gila River

Family

• Both parents were born in Hilo, Hawaii — U.S. citizens by birth. Her father left school after eighth grade for the sugar cane fields and became a mechanic at 18. Her mother finished only third grade, went into domestic work, and learned to read well enough for recipes.
• The family moved to Calexico, California, in 1928 for her father's mechanic job; her mother sewed in a mattress factory. Helen and a younger brother were born there.
• The Depression cost her father his job, and they moved to Guadalupe, south of Santa Maria, where a friend had work for him. Her mother became cafeteria manager and head cook at the elementary school.

Pearl Harbor

The family was in church on December 7, 1941. Afterward they hurried home to the radio; the living room went silent. A neighbor was taken that night, and they feared the FBI would take her father too — but he, like her mother, was a citizen.

Leaving

Her mother sewed large duffel bags for clothing, bedding, tin plates and utensils. Everything else was sold for whatever it would bring — her youngest brother's new Christmas bicycle, the new stove and refrigerator. Helen would not part with her violin; her sister kept her typewriter.

• On removal day, American Legion Auxiliary women served donuts and coffee to adults and cocoa to children.
• Armed soldiers watched as they boarded Greyhound buses for the Tulare Assembly Center. Helen went to the back window and watched Guadalupe disappear, trying to hold the image and wondering whether they would return.
• In camp she wrote to a white former classmate — until a last letter said the girl's father had forbidden her to write to "that 'Jap' girl." "Oh, how that hurt."

Gila River

In summer 1942 they were taken by bus and train to the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona, where the Gila River War Relocation Center had two units, Butte and Canal.

• It was hot, dusty and dry, with rattlesnakes, Gila monsters and scorpions.
• The barracks were unfurnished, with open trenches for water pipes still unlaid. Each block had identical barracks, a mess hall, men's and women's showers and toilets, a laundry and an "ironing room" later used for food storage. Each room had one light socket and Army cots; sheets served as walls.
• Her father collected garbage from the mess halls, then worked as a motor pool mechanic. Her mother became a mess hall supervisor before the family even had a barrack — the only woman supervisor Helen knew of in all ten camps — and later ran the special-diet mess hall.

The incarcerees, she said, did not wallow in self-pity. Young people kept up their education; older people took up crafts, planted gardens, built koi ponds, learned ranching and grew produce and flowers — skills that helped when the time came to resettle across the country. Many young men and some women went into the military, in Europe and the Pacific.

Detroit

A friend in Detroit found her father a mechanic's job, and he went ahead. Eager not to fall behind in school, Helen and the rest of the family followed by train in September 1945, each with $25 and free passage.

Life behind barbed wire was unforgettable, she said, but one cannot live in the past. In her view the experience opened new horizons, scattering people to places and opportunities beyond their wildest dreams.

Sources

Based on "Helen Sugiyama Mishima," 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."