Wilbur Sato: From Terminal Island to Manzanar

Family

• Wilbur's father came to the United States as a teenager in the early 1900s. His father ran a nursery in Pasadena, produced one of the first floral floats for the Rose Parade, and was an early photographer working with glass plates.
• His mother was born in Rialto, California, and went to school in Little Tokyo and at Roosevelt High. Fiercely patriotic, she volunteered for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps — and was dismayed to learn she had lost her citizenship by marrying an immigrant who was barred from becoming a citizen.

Terminal Island

On the night of Pearl Harbor or the night after, anti-aircraft guns fired around Terminal Island until early morning, the sky crossed by searchlights — a frightening start to the family's odyssey.

The integrated community where they lived was swept up in wartime patriotism: the naval base gearing up, P-38s overhead, a Kaiser shipyard running around the clock, jobs for everyone.

Then, in February 1942, Japanese Americans were ordered off the island within 48 hours.

• There was no time for goodbyes. Neighbors and classmates were perplexed and embarrassed; the family felt ashamed and humiliated.
• Years of friendships dissolved in an instant, with ruinous loss of property and great fear and sorrow.
• At school, Wilbur was curtly escorted from the principal's office to his locker and out the door, without a word of concern or farewell.

Manzanar

On April 1, ordered to Manzanar, the family arrived at Union Station with a sense of duty and even optimism — and found helmeted soldiers with fixed bayonets. Each person got a box lunch: a peanut butter sandwich and an orange. The train windows were shuttered, the cars crowded with families in their Sunday best, hot and nearly silent but for muffled talk and a crying baby.

They reached Manzanar at sunset, where, for the first time that day, fellow incarcerees greeted them with kind words and helped them settle in.

He described what they had lost:

• safety, property, friends and familiar places;
• above all, nationality — and since nationality is part of identity, a diminished sense of self;
• family and community ties strained by institutional life, a culture devalued;
• and most important of all, the rule of law and the primacy of the Constitution.

He quoted the poet Derek Walcott: "Either I'm a nobody or I'm nation." The incarceration shattered Japanese Americans' identity — but Americans also reached out with scholarships, jobs, housing and help settling in the East and Midwest. He recalled a popular wartime song, "The House I Live In," which pictured America as its streets, neighbors and people of all races and religions — ironic then, but a hopeful anthem of healing.

The stamp album

Wilbur was an avid stamp collector — his way of soaring across oceans and learning about the world. Three weeks after they arrived, his mother gave him a packet of stamps for his birthday. It was given with love, but could not overcome his humiliation and loss; he could not dream beyond the barbed wire. To this day, he said, he cannot look at the collection with joy.

After

The family left Manzanar in 1944 for Des Moines, Iowa, and returned to Los Angeles in 1945. His life's work, he said, has been to strengthen families, build communities, honor history and culture, seek justice through redress, empower people to take part in public life, and uphold the rule of law and the Constitution — and on that journey he rediscovered America and his own sense of belonging.

Sources

Based on "Wilbur Sato," 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." The lyrics of "The House I Live In," quoted in the booklet, are not reproduced.