By JOANNE OPPENHEIM and NANCY MATSUMOTO
Holidays, both happy and not, tend to stay with us in memory. Our book, “Unforgotten Voices from Heart Mountain: An Oral History of the Incarceration,” chronicles not one Christmas of the incarceration and the period leading up to it, but four, as the book includes letters, diaries and oral histories from December 1941 through May 1945. Their voices express a raft of emotions ranging from wonder to bittersweet sadness.
Just two days after Pearl Harbor, Stanley Hayami, an honor student at Mark Keppel High School in Alhambra, wrote to his sister Sach, who was a freshman at UC Berkeley …
Dear Sach,
Please come home as soon as you can. Everything is O.K. down here, except Pa’s money has been frozen and there is hardly any business. I guess we will have a sad x’mas this year. We will have to save our money and not buy any presents. I hope the war will be over in a hurry!!
— Dec. 9,1941 letter, Stanley to Sach, Hayami Family Papers, JANM
By Christmas of 1942, the popular song of the season was “White Christmas”and the most desired gift of the season was a pair of ice skates….
“My mom worked in Block 30, keeping the women’s latrine clean … she was like a charwoman. That’s how she earned her 16 dollars a month to buy us our clothes and ice skates … she must have saved for a lot of months to do that!”
— Kaz Shiroyama interview with JFO 11/7/04
That same Christmas, churches from the Presbyterian Union all over the country sent gifts to the Japanese American children. In his diary, Stanley Hayami wrote about the gifts and the children’s reaction to Santa and his gifts … and the party he attended….
“I didn’t expect much of this Xmas and instead I [had] about the most fun that I ever had.”
— Stanley Hayami Diary, Dec. 24 & 25, 1942, Hayami Family Papers, JANM
In an entry in Stanley Hayami’s diary on Jan. 8, 1943, he writes:
“Last night I had to go to sleep without writing so this morning I’m writing to make up. Last night I wrote to my former teacher Miss Hudson thanking her for sending me a box of candy and telling her of the Xmas that I had. So that reminds me of the story my Sunday school teacher Yosh Kodama told us, which really makes me feel ashamed of myself.
“Far away in New Mexico in an isolated spot, there are a few very poor Mexicans who attended a certain Mission. There poor people were told by the priest that the kids in Heart Mountain wouldn’t have a very good Christmas this year, because they didn’t have an income, and because they were uprooted from their homes and put into camp. Well, these people were poor themselves but they wanted to help us anyway. They went to their priest and said that they didn’t have much money and the nearest store was about fifty miles away, what could they do? The priest answered by going to that store and buying some gifts and bringing them back. He exchanged these gifts for chickens, vegetables and such that they could spare and took these back to the store in exchange for the gifts. I think that I’ll remember this forever.
“Today in History class our teacher discussed our situation with us. She says that as a whole the general public doesn’t know us and thinks we are all bad. She warns that if we go out for private relocation not to go where there are already too many Japanese, because we would then tend to be conspicuous and would be hated all the worse. But instead, she suggests that we go to some small town where no Japanese live, because then the community will get to know us as individuals.[1] She also says that she thinks we got a raw deal. She doesn’t see where German and Italian aliens are more [less?] dangerous than Jap. American citizens.”
The holidays that followed were decidedly bleaker and fraught with people leaving Heart Mountain … some for jobs, some to serve in the United States Army. The upheaval over signing the loyalty oath or refusing to is reflected in the voices from that time …
On Nov. 25, terrible news reached Heart Mountain. The Sentinelheadline said it all … “One killed, three wounded in France, Ted Fujioka Dies Performing ‘Special Mission.’”
Thanksgiving 1944 was a particularly bleak time, with the flag flying at half-staff. Only a year ago, Ted had been the patriotic one who led the dedication of this same flagpole that now paid tribute to Ted and the many Nisei sons who would “Go for Broke” for their country.
Frank Hayami was “home” on furlough when the news came. He and many others who had finished their basic training were allowed one last visit with their families. It was ironic that he was wearing the same uniform as the guards who stood at the gates of the prison camp where his father, mother and kid brother, Walt, were incarcerated. Sach was in New York and Stanley was doing his basic training in Florida. In just a few weeks he’d be shipping out for the battlefields of Europe to defend his country just as Ted Fujioka had done.
Joy Takeshita was in the tenth grade at Polytechnic High when war broke out. She loved to sing and at Heart Mountain, joined George Igawa’s jazz band as its vocalist. When Ted Fujioka joined the Army, he described her in one letter as “the nicest girlfriend waiting for me.”
“When I heard the news about Ted it hit hard. You just never get used to hearing that someone so young and full of life is no more. I wrote to his sister and this is the beautiful letter she wrote back to me…
“Dear Joy,
“It is difficult to realize that Ted, the boy in whom we held so much hope, is gone; it is difficult until we receive letters from the War Department, his chaplain, and closest buddy — and more recently, when the Christmas packages we sent him came back to us stamped, ‘Deceased, Return to Sender.’ When such things come there is no recourse but to accept the bitter and painful truth, however unwillingly. The futility of war is never more keenly felt when those we love are taken away from us. I know better now than I ever did before.
“Ted died to preserve those ideals he loved and believed in; in a larger sense, he died so that the rest of us could live more securely — in dignity and peace. We owe it to him, and to the thousands of others who have given their all, to carry on from where they left off until victory is won. And it would be so little, so insignificant in comparison. It is a challenge, to say the least—and believe me, we can’t let them down.
“Most sincerely,
Peggy Fujioka
— Joy Takeshita Teraoka papers
Just before Christmas, a banner headline in the Heart Mountain Sentinelannounced that exclusion was over. Stanley Hayami was on leave when the news broke. In a diary he began in 1945, he told about that Christmas surprise … “The Army was in such serious need of troops … things hadn’t been going so hot on the Western Front. Germans had counter-attacked severely. So this Thursday afternoon, Bingo! I was taken off bivouac with Army trucks … Basic training was cut short.
“The Army hadn’t told us a damn thing — rumors flying thick and fast. Lt. Linderman (the jerk, also a lot of fun) spilled the beans. We were to fly home on furlough!! … I didn’t take off until the next day, Sunday, Dec. 24,1944. By the way Saturday was my 19thbirthday … Amazed at the gentleness and swiftness of air travel … stopped at Lincoln, Nebraska, Cheyenne, Wyo. And Billings, Montana. From Billings I took a bus and got to Heart Mt. at 10:00 a.m. … but it took a couple of hours to get signed in so it wasn’t until 12:00 X-mas Day that I bounced into our apt at 8-2-B — Boy were Pa and Ma Surprised! They had no idea I was coming home so early … I spent a swell Christmas and a few days at home. I ate and ate … Left Heart Mt. for good I guess on the 30th.”
— Stanley Hayami Diary 1945, Hayami Family Papers, JANM
Frank and Stanley just missed seeing each other at Heart Mountain and in New York City while waiting for their troop ships to sail to Europe … They had not seen each other for two years, when they had a brief and all too unforgettable reunion on the bloody battlefields of Europe, in April 1945 fighting with the 442ndRegimental Combat Team, a segregated unit of the U.S. Army, Americans of Japanese descent who served their country while their families remained imprisoned in concentration camps. Years later Frank wrote about that reunion and farewell …
“My younger brother, Stan, was drafted right out of the Heart Mountain Concentration Camp at the age of 18, and he and I were wounded in the same action in Italy. He died of wounds suffered in battle, dead at the age of 19. I was luckier. My mother received that fateful telegram from the Army informing her of the death of her 19-year-old son while still in Heart Mountain Concentration Camp. My mother became a Gold Star mother, not in the comfortable surroundings of her California home, but in the stark harsh concentration camp room set in the Wyoming desert, while still denied the right to American citizenship and access to her home. There was a Christian church using one of the empty barracks.”
— Letter to Frank Hayami to Wyoming historian Mike Mackey
Unforgotten Voices From Heart Mountain
Available on Kindle $9.99
https://amzn.to/3Tn6MCl
and in paperback at bookstores for $24.95
ISBN:979-8987969328
About the Authors
Joanne Oppenheim’s “Dear Miss Breed: True Stories of the Japanese American Incarceration and a Librarian Who Made a Difference” won the Carter G. Woodson Award and New York TimesBest for Teen Age List; her “Knish War on Rivington Street” is the winner of the Sydney Taylor Notable Book Award and the 2018GANYC Apple Award. Her book “Have You Seen Birds?” was awarded the Canada Council Children’s Literature Prize. She is president of Oppenheim Toy Portfolio, a review of children’s products, as well as a contributor to NBC’s “Today Show.” https://www.joanneoppenheim.com/s
Nancy Matsumoto is an award-winning writer. Her books include: “Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake: Rice, Water, Earth,” which won the James Beard Award 2023; and “Displaced: Manzanar 1942-1945: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans.” She is the editor of “By the Shore of Lake Michigan,” an English-language translation of a book of tankapoetry written by her grandparents, forthcoming from UCLA’s Asian American Studies Press. Her byline has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, People, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications. https://nancymatsumoto.com/
