Sho Maruyama: From Santa Monica to Manzanar to Integrating a Philadelphia Neighbourhood

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

Family No. 2859 · Manzanar, California · Address 16-4-1

Family

Sho's father came to the United States in 1898. His family ran a futon shop in Ueda, Japan, but with so many older brothers there was no place in it for him or his next-older brother, so both emigrated. He worked as a houseboy, on railway gangs, ran several kinds of shops, farmed, and even found and processed indigo in Mexico. Sho's mother came from the same city in 1923 as a picture bride.

The dark night

Sho was terrified by the radio news on December 7 and stayed indoors, too frightened to go out. Soon after, the FBI took his father away and jailed him elsewhere, leaving Sho's 17-year-old brother in charge.

He remembers the night they reached Manzanar after a long bus ride as horrid and foreboding — pitch black, no streetlights or house lights, not a star, cold wind blowing sand. Peering out of the bus, he thought the people looked like demons in goggles, peacoats, plaid coats, heavy boots, gloves and wool caps — nothing like the T-shirts of carefree Southern California. They stumbled a couple of hundred feet through the sand in the dark to collect straw mattresses. Sho, his mother and his brother were put in a 20-by-20-foot room with another family: a mother and her four teenage daughters.

Camp life

Sho graduated from Manzanar High in the spring of '44. With the War Relocation Authority providing clothes, cots, blankets and three meals a day, most boys ran loose with little supervision, and as hungry teenagers they hit several mess halls at lunch and dinner. Socialising was hard: in Santa Monica his friends had all been white, and the few Nisei there had white friends too, while boys from San Pedro, Los Angeles and Hawaii came from big Nisei communities — and gangs. When Sho, batting left-handed at a class picnic, accidentally hit a home run, a gang member decided he had been shown up; at the next day's dance he and his bodyguard took Sho outside and beat him badly, and days later caught him in the block bathroom and beat him again.

A life of causes

After graduating Sho volunteered for the Army, which offered a year of college before active duty. Because of the discrimination he had faced, after his discharge he chose Antioch College, which had no fraternities, sororities or intercollegiate sports. There he found a new, liberal helping profession, city planning, and went on to the federal Poverty Program and the Model Cities Program.

He chose to live in Powelton Village, an inner-city Philadelphia neighbourhood of liberals and Quakers, and took up many causes: integrating the neighbourhood, pushing a reluctant school board to build an elementary school there so children could attend an integrated school, and building a neighbourhood organisation to counter the all-white property owners' association. Forty years on, he says proudly, the neighbourhood two miles from City Hall is still integrated — Black and white, poor and middle-class, students and professors, families and singles, tenants and owners, young and old.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Sho Maruyama," an ID booklet. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/sho-maruyama.htm
• More: Manzanar ID booklets.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.