Japanese Americans

Presidio of San Francisco: Headquarters, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, 1942
A notice from the military notifying all persons of Japanese ancestry that they were to be removed from Seattle, Washington, by May 1, 1942. Separate exclusion orders were issued all along the Pacific Coast with increasingly short notice periods. This notice, dated April 24, gave Japanese Americans only one week to leave. Roughly 14 by 22 inches.

Two Original Posters for the County of King, State of Washington. Western Defense Command and Fourth Army Wartime Civil Control Administration, May 15, 1942. The posters measure 14" x 22". They are printed on cream colored thin paper with the text in bold, black ink. The posters inform people of Japanese ancestry that they were going to be excluded from: "All that portion of the County of King, State of Washington...". In the first poster they are told to report to the "Civil Control Station located at 122 Kirkland Avenue, Kirkland, Washington on May 17, 1942" between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM. It also describes the criminal penalties for not reporting. The second poster features detailed instructions for reporting. There were 110 locations in California, Oregon and Washington where people of Japanese descent were told to report and two posters were issued for each place. They were printed in a very small run, with only enough for the posting in each area and two sets of file copies and one set for a California library.

A complete set of the three high school yearbooks produced by students at Butte High School, at the Gila River Internment Center in Rivers, Arizona. The camp opened in August 1943 and closed in November 1945. Most of the internees were from the Central Valley of California. These yearbooks are for the classes of 1943, 1944, and 1945 and include 7th through 12th grades. The most striking factor about these annuals is their tremendous sense of normalcy. Despite the fact that all the students are Japanese and that they were essentially in prison, the yearbooks and the student inscriptions could have been written almost anywhere. The best-known graduates of Butte High were Miiko Taka (Betty Shiakata) who played opposite Marlon Brando in the film Sayonara, and Michi (Michiko) Nishirua, who wrote Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camp. Noriyuki (Pat) Morita, who starred in the film The Karate Kid and had a recurring role on the TV series Happy Days, attended 7th grade at Butte. All are pictured in these yearbooks.
This set belonged to Miyeko Omura of Salt Lake City. Her family had lived in Salt Lake for at least five years, according to the 1940 census, but they were relocated to Arizona from Stockton for some reason. Under her senior class picture, Stockton is crossed out and Salt Lake City is written in pencil. Omura was editor of the school newspaper and on the yearbook staff. Her whereabouts after the war are unknown. With extensive inscriptions, especially in the 1945 volume. A striking look at daily life inside a Japanese relocation camp.

The first two (of three) yearbooks from Canal High School, part of the Gila River Relocation Center in Rivers, Arizona. The yearbooks cover 9th through 12th grades, with individual pictures of the senior class and group photographs of the other years. There are the usual club pictures, candid shots, and portraits of class officers. The 1943 annual offers a horoscope section, with many students listed by name, along with their hometowns, and fates. The fates offer no hint of the prejudice that put the students in an internment camp, and, in fact, many of them are still goals not yet achieved by any Asian American: first lady of the land, Veronica Lake, Yankee’s manager, America’s poet laureate. One of the more bizarre photographs is a picture of a blackface performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The 1943 annual includes a page dedicated to the men who volunteered for the army, “without questioning the right or wrong of the Pacific coast mass evacuation.” The 1944 yearbook is particularly notable for its six three-color serigraph pages, including depictions of the camp and patriotic mottos. The original owner, Kimiko, could not be definitively identified as there were several girls in the class of 1944 with that name.

Katsuichi Satow was born in Wakayama, Japan and was one of the first Hawaii residents interned during World War II to receive reparations from the U.S. Justice department in 1990. He was a pastor and Japanese language schoolteacher in California before World War II. In 1942, he and his family were detained at the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona. Following the war, Satow worked and served as a pastor in Ohio. He moved to Hawaii in 1967 and was a pastor in Waimea, Kauai, from 1967 to 1981.