Masaji Mas Inoshita: From Gila River to Army Intelligence

Family

• His father, Maruju Inoshita, came from southern Japan in 1900 as a sumo wrestler. His mother came in 1916 as a picture bride — sure she had married the handsomest of the immigrants, and dismayed to find he was older than her own father.
• They had ten children; one died in infancy and another at 35. The family moved from Madera to Guadalupe and then Santa Maria, California.

War

In December 1941 Mas was a 22-year-old farmer, exempt from the draft.

• On December 11, the FBI arrested his father as a suspect enemy alien. The family's bank account was frozen, their movements restricted, and they had to surrender guns, ammunition, shortwave radios, cameras and knives.
• Mas had to get rid of the chickens, rabbits, horses, trucks, tractors, cars, machinery and crops. Parting with his father's prize draft horses was traumatic. A white neighbor stored their unsold machinery in his barn and stood by them as friends.
• The Army took them to the Tulare Assembly Center, where they lived three months in Row F, Horse Stall 12.
• At Gila River they had two barrack rooms and much better food. Mas cooked rice and picked cotton for Arizona farmers near Casa Grande.

Army intelligence

In November 1942, Mas volunteered as a Japanese-language specialist for the Military Intelligence Service Language School. After training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, he served in intelligence in Australia, Sri Lanka, Delhi, Burma, central China, Okinawa and occupied Japan.

Back at Gila River, his parents and siblings faced hostility from other incarcerees because he had gone to fight Japan. One brother, suffering in the camp, was placed in a mental institution, where he died.

After

• Discharged in 1946, Mas returned to farm in Arizona, married Betty and had three children.
• The family left camp after three years and started a farm in Arizona. His parents became U.S. citizens in 1954 and landowners in 1956.
• His siblings went on to accounting in South America, construction and a mobile home park, electronic engineering, farming and running a restaurant.

The incarceration was wrong, he said, but it opened opportunities across the country. Those still alive in 1988 received a letter of apology and $20,000 in reparations.

In retirement Mas volunteered as a librarian for six years, then turned to maintaining the Gila River camp monuments and leading tours for schools and civic groups, so people would know what they went through.

Sources

Based on "Masaji "Mas" Inoshita," 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."