Rose B. Kitahara: A Nurse's Aide at Manzanar Who Chose No Bitterness

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

Family No. 1107 · Manzanar, California

Family

Rose's grandfather, from Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan, came to Raton, New Mexico, in 1905 to open a boarding house for single immigrant men working the mines. Her father, Sakui Bannai, followed ten years later and moved to Colorado in 1920.

Two days' notice

About three months after Pearl Harbor, Rose — 17, a first-year pre-nursing student at Los Angeles City College, living with a professor's family — got word from her brother to come home at once: the family had two days before being removed. In April they left with one of the first groups, after a frantic, confused rush of packing, on an old train with the shades drawn, bound for an unknown place and fate. She felt numb with pain and ashamed of what her beloved country was doing to her family and to a community of decent, law-abiding people.

In the stark, dirty barrack, her mother gathered the children and told them that what was happening was unfair and that no one knew what lay ahead — but that one day they would get out, and if they carried bitterness and anger, they would be of no use to themselves or anyone else. Make the best of it, she said.

Nursing in camp

Rose became a nurse's aide for the Public Health Department, going barrack to barrack through howling dust storms and around open ditches, urging people to finish their typhoid shots. Later she worked in the hospital with newborns and older patients; she loved best the children's communicable disease ward. After a year she moved to the dental department for new experience.

Out

In January 1944 she left for Chicago and found work as a stenographer, having taught herself from the Gregg shorthand manual. After saving for 11 months she was accepted at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, where, three years out of school, she faced a 21-unit first semester.

She returned to California in June 1948, married, raised three sons and combined motherhood with nursing — mainly coronary and intensive care, and setting up her hospital's first rehabilitation unit. Her best years were the last six, as an emergency room nurse. She calls her life one of joy and fulfilment, and credits her mother's advice: meet adversity and injustice without anger or hatred, and know there is a future even when you cannot see it.

Sources

• National Park Service, Manzanar National Historic Site, "Rose B. Kitahara," an ID booklet. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/rose-b-kitahara.htm
• Related: Paul Bannai, whose booklet gives the same family number and father. Rose's booklet gives the family's address as 5-5-1 and Paul's as 5-10-5, so neither is repeated here.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.