September 20, 2023

Last night I stood before a group of some thirty residents here at Cascade Manor for a book reading of the book I co-authored with a dear friend. Here at the Manor, we had just come off a period of vigilance after an outbreak of COVID among residents and staff, and mask wearing was encouraged but not required.

There was a quiet tone of anticipation with the people to hear me speak about the book. The auditorium was set up with seating for nearly 100, but with the recent bout with COVID and the fact the talk was being televised on the in-house recording system, I thought the seating was a bit overly ambitious. Well, with the turnout it wasn’t all that bad even with the empty seats.

After a brief introduction by fellow resident and program chairman Bill Sarnoff, I gave a brief synopsis of the storyline of Two Faces and its two primary actors. Because the main storyline was what happened with my family’s evacuation and internment, I was curious about how much my audience knew of what was happening when it was occurring on the West Coast. I asked for a show of hands if they knew of what was happening at the time: about 2/3s raised their hands. Second question: show of hands if they learned about it at some point in time afterwards, and nearly all said they knew because they lived on the West Coast. My final question was a show of hands if they knew anyone who had been evacuated and interned, and 3/4s knew someone who had had their lives disrupted by the internment. My audience was quite ready to hear my family’s story during the war.

I chose to begin with telling of my family’s immigration to America shortly after the early 1900s. Both my mother’s parents and father’s parents had immigrated from Hiroshima, Japan, and entered the United States through the immigration processing center on Angel Island in the upper San Francisco Bay. Immigration was handled by this center between 1910 and 1940. After being processed both families settled in the Little Tokyo area near San Jose in southern San Francisco Bay. Both families worked in the agricultural fields there, and in 1931 my father’s parents and mother’s parents arranged the marriage of their two grown children. After the marriage a friend of my mother’s helped them buy a small farm outside the city limits of the town of Atwater in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley. My sister Janet was born in May of 1932, I was born in January of ’38, and my younger brother Gene was born in December of ’39. This was my family on the eve of December 7, 1941.

I chose first to read the dedication of the book that singled out our two mothers who were prominent players in our story, and a second dedication to a second-generation Nisei, an educator, author, and Civil Rights activist, who was a college classmate and friend of Nina’s mother, who testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1980. I then read the first three chapters that gave a snapshot of the relationship between Nina and me, touched on the matter of race following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and opened the window of the power of family.

Then followed a question-and-answer period – with so many up-to-speed on the various threads running through our story I found the questions honed and sharp, and most relevant. I enjoyed the book reading immensely…