Tetsuo Kunitomi: A Boy at Manzanar Who Dreamed of the Army

Manzanar National Historic Site publishes short "ID booklets" on Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. This one, "Some Lines for a Younger Brother", was written by Tets's sister, Sue Kunitomi Embrey; it is retold here in hubnx's own words.

Family No. 2614 · Manzanar, California · Address 20-3-1

Tetsuo "Tets" Kunitomi was born in Los Angeles on April 17, 1930, the youngest of eight children of immigrants from Japan. He went to Amelia Street School, whose pupils were mostly of Japanese ancestry. When he was eight, his father was killed in a car accident.

He was 12 when his family, along with all of Little Tokyo, was sent to Manzanar. At first the camp school had no desks or chairs, and he thought it pointless to study history from behind barbed wire. He spent three years there with his mother and a sister while the rest of the family "relocated" to Chicago, until they could go back to California. At Manzanar he began to dream of joining the service.

Back in Los Angeles in September 1945, he went to Belmont High School. In 1948, at 18, he volunteered for the U.S. Army, and when his two-year term ended he signed on for three more years. He loved military life. After postings in the South and then San Jose, he was sent overseas, and he was in Tokyo when the Korean War broke out. He worried he would be sent to replace soldiers coming back from the front, having seen the nightmares that haunted those who returned.

On a weekend pass he collapsed on a street in Yokohama and died in an Army hospital in 1952, aged 22 — denied, his sister wrote, the fuller life that others who left the camps went on to have.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Tetsuo Kunitomi," an ID booklet written by Sue Kunitomi Embrey. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/tetsuo-kunitomi.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.