Momo Nagano: From Manzanar to Wheaton College and a Life as a Weaver

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

Family No. 1046 · Manzanar, California · Address 6-11-5

The night of December 7

Momo's father, Kiro Nagano, came from Sapporo, Hokkaido, in 1918, and went back in 1920 to marry; the couple left Japan the day after the wedding. In his twenties he leased land in Los Angeles, hired farmhands and sold produce at the wholesale market, and in 1933 he opened his own business. On the night Pearl Harbor was bombed, the FBI took him away as a "dangerous enemy alien", and he lost the business.

Momo was 16. The next day at school felt uneasy — one or two unfriendly incidents, but mostly people treated them normally. Her younger brother, 14, refused to believe the newspaper reports that they would be removed from the West Coast, since they were American citizens. When it became unavoidable, her mother volunteered the family for Manzanar early, under the Maryknoll Catholic organisation. On her last day at Dorsey High School, one of the first Japanese American students to withdraw, her geometry teacher announced loudly that it was about time the government moved them out. She found it deeply humiliating.

Her father had begun building a new house in October 1941; they moved in in January 1942 and left two months later. Her mother, too upset to sort things, boxed their belongings and left everything; a non-Japanese friend found tenants, saving the house for the four or five years until they came back. Before leaving, her mother bought them sturdy, warm clothes at Sears, and let Momo pick out a pair of cowboy boots — a thrill.

Manzanar

They went by train and bus on April 2, 1942. Momo had pictured little white family cottages like the ones at Sequoia National Park, where they had vacationed. She still remembers her dismay at dusk as they turned off the highway and saw rows of black tar-paper barracks, some unfinished — home for no one knew how long. They stuffed canvas ticking with straw for mattresses on army cots and shared their unit with a couple and their two-year-old son, hanging sheets between the families. Her mother's metal bucket, filled at the block's single outdoor tap, served for washing and brushing teeth; the latrines were not yet built.

Momo and her brother walked the camp's edge watching cars on the highway until school opened in October. Their childhood friends had been sent to other camps. Classes met in unheated rooms, students on the linoleum floor with no furniture, books or supplies at first. Most teachers, recruited from Los Angeles, came to help, though some came for the pay. On Bill of Rights Day the students were handed flyers listing the Bill of Rights, and it set off an angry argument between teacher and students. The teachers still did their best — dances, a newspaper, a yearbook, graduations. After Momo left, an auditorium was built and her brother graduated indoors, which unsettled her, as if the camp were meant to last.

Wheaton

In February 1944 she left through the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers), which placed students from the camps in colleges in the Midwest, South and East — many colleges would not take Japanese Americans. Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, had a place and offered her a scholarship. After four days by train from Reno to New York, her older brother took her by cab to Wheaton, arriving at ten at night, and had to leave at once. A friendly student led her down a long hallway lined with girls in doorways, curious to see a Japanese person, since most on the East Coast had never met one. The student body president, welcoming her, remarked that she was lucky not to be in Germany, where Jews were being so badly treated; Momo still regrets not answering that she was an American citizen in a democracy. She graduated in June 1947.

The loom

She worked as a ceramist from 1962 to 1964 and then became a weaver, exhibiting, teaching, running workshops and lecturing ever since. Around 1976 she realised where her love of weaving began: before school opened at Manzanar she had worked on the camouflage net project, which lasted only a few weeks because of political protests — and she had loved it, as she loves weaving now.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Momo Nagano," an ID booklet. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/momo-nagano.htm
• Related: Aiji Nagano, her brother's booklet, which she wrote.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.