Shino Bannai: A Mother at Manzanar, Sending Her Children Out

Written in Shino Bannai's voice by her daughter, Rose B. Kitahara.

A family uprooted

Shino Bannai was a 43-year-old homemaker in Los Angeles, with a husband and five children, when war came and brought six years of fear and uncertainty.

• The family had only a few days to sell a lifetime's belongings, at absurd prices set by merchants who knew they had no choice.
• The one thing she would not sell was the family's china, from which they had shared their meals. She broke it piece by piece in the backyard, so no one else could violate that ritual of being a family.

Letting her children go

Her grief in camp was for her children. U.S. law barred her and her husband from citizenship, but the children were born and raised here and always told to be good Americans.

She knew they had no future behind barbed wire in the desert. Reluctant to break up the family, she still urged them to apply to schools with help from the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers), whose support was a rare beacon.

• Her eldest, Paul — born on the Fourth of July and named for Paul Revere — volunteered for the Army. Neighbors shunned her and asked how she could allow it. She answered that they had always taught him he owed America his patriotism.
• Her three daughters left one by one. She feared how they would be treated and how they would manage, but would not hold them back.
• She was losing her eyesight, and her youngest, Ted, seven, was her help and comfort.

Paul served in U.S. Military Intelligence in the jungles of New Guinea, Borneo and the Philippines, and on loan to the Australian Army. She feared what would happen if the Japanese captured him and saw him as a traitor for his Japanese face.

Afterward

• Her daughters came back to California between 1946 and 1948.
• When the law changed to let her become a citizen, she studied — and, blind by then, was allowed to take the test orally. She passed, proudly.
• She and her husband attended Paul's swearing-in as the first Japanese American in the California State Legislature. She felt rewarded for teaching him to serve his country — the first son of a first son, in a family line recorded for 43 generations of Bannais, and the first born in America.

Sources

Based on "Shino Bannai," one of the ID booklets of Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service, written by park rangers with the people profiled and their families, here written by her daughter, Rose B. Kitahara; 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."