Claire Ayako Harada Nakashima: A Medical Stenographer at Manzanar

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

Family No. 18359 · Manzanar, California · Address 29-9-3

Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights

Claire's father, Sumajiro Harada, came from Japan in 1905; her mother, Kimino Komatsu, in 1919, in an arranged marriage. For 20 years her father ran the Los Angeles Farmers Supply Store in Little Tokyo. The family, with Claire's younger brother Henry, lived in Boyle Heights, a mix of Japanese, Mexican and white families. Claire went to Maryknoll Catholic Grammar School, where every pupil was Japanese American, then to Catholic Girls High School, where she worked on the newspaper, and after graduating she studied accounting at the Metropolitan School of Business.

"My life changed"

She was at a girls' club meeting in Little Tokyo when news came of Pearl Harbor; no one could believe it. Then the FBI came without warning for her father: two agents searched their books while Claire took a third to the basement storeroom. She believes he was arrested because of his active role in the Maryknoll kendo (Japanese fencing) association. He was held at the former CCC camp in Tujunga Canyon, then sent to the Santa Fe Internment Camp in New Mexico. She never forgot visiting him at Tujunga: prisoners lined up on one side of the barbed wire, their families on the other.

The family had about six weeks. Most furniture was given away; her piano went back to the Barker Brothers furniture company at a loss — the thing her mother most regretted losing. Family friends Mr. Kobayashi and Mr. Sumi helped pack belongings that a neighbour stored in his basement, and another neighbour took the family dog, the hardest thing to leave. They later learned it had been hit by a car. After the war they recovered most of their things, some water-damaged.

Manzanar

Carrying suitcases and duffel bags her mother had sewn, Claire, her mother and her brother took the Santa Fe train from Los Angeles and a bus from Lone Pine, arriving at Manzanar after dark at the end of a full day. They were fed stew, slept on straw mattresses, and found their "apartment" in Block 21 faced the latrines, already partitioned with sheets by a family of five who shared it. A dust storm greeted them that first night — they had been told to bring goggles. Claire was too miserable to cry.

They later moved to Block 29, for hospital workers and their families. Her father was released about a month later, helped, she was told, by Father Lavery, a Maryknoll priest who spoke at his hearing.

Having finished school in 1941, Claire worked as a medical stenographer at the camp hospital, a job she got through her friend Rosemary Anzai, a volunteer who had helped set up medical services. The stenographers took clinic and surgical dictation; she never could bring herself to watch an operation, and when a surgeon announced his first incision during an autopsy, she fled.

Food at their first mess hall was poor — everyone went to Block 15, with better cooks, until meal tickets tied people to their own blocks. At the first Christmas, in an empty hospital ward with a donated tree, they made paper ornaments and chains and sang carols; "O Little Town of Bethlehem", sung while looking out at the dark, still night, brought her to tears.

She felt devastation, hopelessness, fear and uncertainty in camp — but happy times too: maid of honour at her second cousin's wedding in the Catholic church, dances in the mess hall, evening "gab sessions" with hospital friends, learning to crochet, knit and play poker and bridge. What lifted her most was the camaraderie, the compassion people showed one another in a shared hardship.

After

After two years she left for Minneapolis, living in a hostel a couple had made for ten single Japanese American women and working, through Father Lavery, as secretary of the nursing school office at St. Mary's Hospital. The hardest adjustment was the climate — winters as cold as 10 degrees and humid summers. She rarely talked about camp except with people from Rohwer, Minidoka, Gila or Heart Mountain.

Her brother joined the Army's Military Intelligence Service and served with the occupation forces in Japan. Her parents stayed until Manzanar closed, then settled in Long Beach's Truman-Boyd housing project. Claire worked as a secretary in the State Disability Office in Long Beach and Los Angeles. The family gave their family-number tags, mess hall tickets, a government-issue peacoat and other items to the Eastern California Museum, and in the 1980s she wrote letters supporting redress and attended the hearings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment.

Manzanar, she says, taught her she has the strength to survive any obstacle — and she still meets regularly with her friends from the hospital and the stenographers' group.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Claire Ayako Harada Nakashima," an ID booklet. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/claire-ayako-harada-nakashima.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.