Yayoi Okuno Hirashiki: From Terminal Island to Manzanar

Terminal Island

Yayoi Okuno Hirashiki's parents married in Japan and came to San Francisco in 1905. Their seven daughters and a son were all born on Terminal Island, between San Pedro and Long Beach.

• Her father and a brother owned a commercial fishing boat that worked the waters of Southern California, Mexico and Panama.
• Her mother and two oldest sisters worked in a fish cannery; the younger children went to school in San Pedro. Yayoi was in eighth grade.

After Pearl Harbor

On December 7, 1941, the FBI took her father and confiscated his boat. On Monday the children did not want to go to school: people stared, and they felt guilty because they looked like the enemy.

"Our roots were cut from under us." They could take only what they could carry — one suitcase or duffel bag each.

• Having heard how the U.S. Army had treated American Indians, her mother gave each child $25 to pin inside their underclothes — for food or shelter if the family were separated.
• Used-furniture dealers descended on Terminal Island, buying household goods, some almost new, for ten cents on the dollar or less.
• A childless neighbor, whose husband the FBI had also taken, had to sell her things too. Yayoi helped her face the "gruff" buyers who bullied her into selling for almost nothing.

Manzanar

They were bused from West Los Angeles to what Yayoi called the Manzanar concentration camp, guarded all the way by soldiers with guns and bayonets — "But for whose protection?"

• The dust blew everywhere: in their eyes, mouths, hair and room.
• She had not known there were so many Japanese Americans.
• Rich or poor, everyone was in the same situation: eating and showering together with no privacy, whole families in one room.
• She remembered a protest in which a young man was killed by a "nervous" military policeman.
• One irony: in camp, her parents could finally rest from the daily work of providing for the family.

Families divided

In 1946 her parents, her oldest sister with her husband and baby, her brother and her youngest sister left for Japan. The other sisters stayed in the United States. Their mother told them: "If Japan is good, we will help you. But if things are better in America, you help us."

Starting over

• In Los Angeles, Yayoi stayed with an uncle and worked with her youngest sister as a "house girl" — cleaning, cooking and babysitting — sending money to her parents every month.
• Working, she went to beauty school, passed the California license exam, and became a full-time beautician.
• Her low point: at 19, an old man spat on her: "Jap. Go back where you came from!"
• Her parents died in Japan in 1950.

Despite everything, she grew up fast — and still thought this is a good country.

Sources

Based on "Yayoi Okuno Hirashiki," 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."