Rosie M. Kakuuchi: Growing Up at Manzanar High

Before

Rosie's family of five lived in Los Angeles: her father worked in the produce market, her mother as a seamstress in a cousin's dry-cleaning shop. Rosie was 16, a tenth grader — "naïve, immature, and insecure" — who loved movies, miniature golf and football games with her friends.

After Pearl Harbor the family was afraid to go anywhere, staying home by the radio. When removal was announced, the principal of Roosevelt High School called an assembly to tell Japanese American students they were welcome to stay in school as long as they could. Rosie never forgot how loving and supportive her teachers and classmates were.

• The family had less than three weeks to sell the furniture her parents had worked so hard for.
• They packed warm clothes, sturdy shoes and long johns, not knowing the weather ahead. Relatives used one address so they could stay together.
• The train felt like transporting criminals: shades drawn, hard seats, a rickety ride. Her older sister was pregnant.

Manzanar

They were bused in past barbed wire and guards with machine guns, into wind and dust, lined up for Army rations and straw mattresses, and marched to their quarters.

• They shared a room with two other families they did not know, separated only by hanging sheets, with one stove and one light bulb.
• For a teenager, the worst was the latrines without partitions and showers without stalls — "embarrassing, humiliating, and degrading."
• School began in September 1942 with no chairs, desks or books; students sat on the cold linoleum. The furniture came in time. "Bless the dedicated teachers!"

High school life

Rosie preferred ball games and friends to studying, but she was student body secretary one semester and class secretary another, acted in plays, and won a waltz contest. At the senior prom the surprise dinner was rabbit — they thought it was fried chicken — and she was chosen a prom princess. The fashions were bobby socks, saddle shoes, pompadours and borrowed letter sweaters.

She remembered two people above all: music teacher Louis Frizzell Jr., who staged an operetta and was always positive, and Ralph Lazo, a 16-year-old Mexican American classmate who left his own family to go to camp with his friends because the removal was unjust.

Her mother, freed from cooking, learned flower making, arranging, sewing and English — things she had never had time for.

A family tragedy

Because of the camp's inadequate hospital, Rosie's oldest sister, only 23, bled to death giving birth to twin girls. The twins died the next morning.

After

• After graduating, Rosie worked as a clerk in the personnel office for $12 a month.
• Before the camp closed in September 1945, she and her sister left to find a place for their parents. "Remember, we lost everything." A friend returned the belongings she had kept for them, and they found a live-in custodial job at a hotel for their parents, who later rented, then bought, a home in Boyle Heights.
• Rosie worked at the Los Angeles County Public Library, her sister for the school district. One day, stopping for the ice cream sundaes they had missed in camp, a waitress at Newberry's refused to serve them — their first encounter with prejudice.
• She married on March 20, 1949, had three children, and worked in the Los Angeles and Montebello school districts, retiring in June 1991 after 28 years at Montebello. She moved to Las Vegas in 1992.

Her advice

Don't be shy — ask questions. And remember two Japanese words: gambare — push yourself, don't stop until you reach your goal — and gaman — endure, which "carried us through the trying years before and after camp." Hang in there.

Sources

Based on "Rosie M. Kakuuchi," 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."