Some pages from the past

Thanks to those who shared the Poston High School yearbooks with us...

Here's a page from the Post Ano, 1945 Yearbook

 (Poston camp 1)

 

Here's one page from the "El Chapparal" 1943 Yearbook

 (Poston camp 2)

 

Here's a page from the Poston 3 High School 

 "Campus Echoes" Yearbook, 1944

 Here's a page from the Parker Valley High School (Poston 3)

 "Campus Echoes" Yearbook, 1945

UpDate: Poston Block Books

CAN YOU

The Poston Block Books are 'smokin'!

To see which ones are NOW available for ordering, CLICK HERE

Victory Gardens

Japanese Internment and Victory Gardens

Published: Feb. 23, 2012 

By CINDY MCNATT / THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
 

.....Alert reader Don Hull from Costa Mesa pointed out a bit of untold history regarding the Victory Gardens I mentioned in last week's Garden Trends column.......

     Although Victory Gardens were touted as the patriotic thing to do, he wrote, "Victory Gardens were the propagandistic answer to the chaos created by FDR's roundup and imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans in early 1942." 

     It was Feb. 19, to be exact, as we remember the anniversary of Executive Order 9066 issued by Franklin D. Roosevelt this month.

     The only source that has a bit of news about the Japanese internment/Victory Garden connection is the San Francisco Museum at sfmuseum.org that says Japanese truck farmers in California were responsible for a $40 million a year industry in fruits and vegetables.

     By March, 200,000 acres had been confiscated, sold off or given away to "non-Japanese" farmers mostly from Dust Bowl regions. Those farmers weren't nearly as efficient or experienced at growing crops in California. Food and labor shortages followed.

      In a San Francisco News story dated March 9, 1942, the government asked that rural schools adjust their vacation schedules so children could help out during the harvest seasons.

These were called "Victory Vacations" and promoted as not only patriotic but also good for health, exercise and fresh air. 

        Although Japanese internment wasn't mentioned in the report, a photo caption stated that the evacuation of the Japanese farmers resulted in shortages. 

 

     A Victory Garden handbook for home growers from 1943 explains, "Our farmers produced a record amount of food in 1940, then broke that record in 1941 and '42. Their goals are still higher in 1943, but civilian and fighting demands keep mounting, while farmers must make out with less labor."

      It is interesting to note those Victory Garden pamphlets and other government messages leave out the fact that thousands of experienced farmers were locked up at time. 

      Gary Hayakawa, a nursery consultant in Irvine, was born in an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas.

     "My father was arrested by the FBI because he was active in the Japanese School," he said. "Three of my sisters were interned in Arizona. We lost everything – my parents only took what they could carry. "

     Hayakawa's family was in the nursery business and not directly related to the food supply, but thousands of other farmers were.

     Still, nurserymen could be relied upon to supply the seeds, fertilizers and tools that 20 million Americans needed in the 1940s to grow more food at home.

 Source: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/farmers-341701-japanese-victory.html

Day of Remembrance: Nisei Cartoonist Honored

Jack Matsuoka

Day of Remembrance Presentation Planned at State Capitol; Nisei Cartoonist to Be Honored for Educating Kids About Camp

     SACRAMENTO — The California State Assembly is scheduled to declare a Day of Remembrance during its Friday session in order to increase public awareness of the events surrounding the internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

     A member of the Assembly also plans to recognize a Nisei cartoonist who was among those interned.

      A Day of Remembrance resolution is presented every year on or around Feb. 19, the date when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in 1942.

     This year's resolution stated, “Feb. 19, 2012, marks 70 years since the signing of Executive Order 9066 and a policy of grave injustice against American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry.”

     This action “deferred the American dream …by inflicting a great human cost of abandoned homes, businesses, careers, professional advancements, and disruption to family life,” the resolution says, adding that President Ronald Reagan officially apologized for the government’s actions by signing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

     The resolution mentions the Supreme Court cases of Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Min Yasui, who challenged the constitutionality of the government’s treatment of Japanese Americans. Their cases were reopened 40 years later and their convictions were reversed.

The resolution also cites the accomplishments of the Nisei who served with the 100^th Battalion, 442^nd Regimental Combat Team and Military Intelligence Service, the presentation of the Medal of Honor to 20 Nisei veterans by President Bill Clinton in 2000, and President Obama’s granting of the Congressional Gold Medal to the three units in 2010.

Recognition for Cartoonist

     On the same day, Assemblymember Luis Alejo (D-Watsonville) will present a commendation to cartoonist Jack Matsuoka (Poston 211-9-B) for utilizing his talents to educate young people about the camps.

     A native of Watsonville, Matsuoka was interned as a teenager in Poston, Ariz. Now residing in San Jose, he was a cartoonist for the Pacifica Tribune, the Hokubei Mainichi and other Bay Area publications, and became known for his caricatures of local athletes, particularly members of the San Francisco Giants and San Francisco 49ers. He also did a comic strip called “Sensei,” later published in book form.

      In the 1970s, Matsuoka wrote and illustrated “Camp II, Block 211,” a book for young readers about his camp experience. With his daughter Emi Young as editor, the book was republished in 2003 as “Poston Camp II, Block 211” with additional text, drawings and photos. The new book was funded by the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program and published by the San Mateo-based Asian American Curriculum Project.

     In conjunction with the book, an exhibition was presented at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose and bilingual storyteller Megumi created a show about Matsuoka’s life story.

     Alejo, who presented Matsuoka with a city proclamation as mayor of Watsonville, wanted to honor the cartoonist again at the state level.

     Matsuoka will not be able to attend this time, but a member of his family will accept the honor on his behalf.

Source: http://rafu.com/news/2012/02/day-of-remembrance-presentation-planned-at-state-capitol-nisei-cartoonist-to-be-honored-for-educating-kids-about-camp/

"White Bird of Poston”

Poston Opera Performed at Japanese American National Museum 

May 8 2011

     The Los Angeles Opera’s In-School Opera for Secondary Schools presented the original piece “White Bird of Poston” on Sunday, May 15, at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo.

     Composed by Eli Villanueva with librettist Leslie Stevens, “White Bird of Poston” is a 47-minute opera featuring four professional principal singers, three professional musicians, and original sets, costumes and lighting. The participating students will sing and perform the parts of the chorus, including as Japanese American inmates, U.S. soldiers and even animals.

     The story concerns a 15-year-old Japanese American girl, Akiko, incarcerated in a World War II government-run camp in Arizona with her family. The camp is located on Native American land. Facing the challenge of her false imprisonment, Akiko meets a Native American boy, encounters a talking coyote, and communicates with the spirit of her grandmother. Lessons in courage, faith and even understanding of one’s own prejudice are major themes in this work.

     The story was inspired in part by the watercolor paintings of Chizuko Judy Sugita de Quieroz, who was imprisoned in Poston camp I, block 38-7-C as a 9-year-old. She has exhibited widely and has published a book, “Camp Days, 1942-1945.”

Source: http://rafu.com/news/2011/05/poston-opera-to-be-performed-at-janm/

Salinas-Area Poet

Ann (Terakawa) Muto

May 3, 2011

The National Steinbeck Center is set to host Anne (Terakawa) Muto (Poston 209-5-B) on Friday

(May 6, 2011) as part of its Meet the Author series. She  will discuss her book of poems, "Open Passage", which explore her confusion and frustration as she searches for answers about how the World War II internment experience affected her Japanese-American family.

 For twenty years, Ann (Terakawa) Muto, writer and poet,  did not know that her family lived in a "concentration camp" during World War II nor why her birthplace--Poston, Arizona--no longer existed.  Ann was born in 1944 and lived at Poston (209-5-B) with her family.  After the war her family returned to Salinas, California, where she graduated from Salinas High School and Hartnell College.  Following degrees received from the University of California at Berkeley and San Jose State University, she worked as a teacher and administrator. 

In her book of poems, Open Passage, she explores the experience of being a child of internees—the legacy of the sad and shameful time when the United States interned thousands of Japanese Americans throughout the American West. In her poems Muto tries to come to terms with the effects that traumatized her parents, an experience about which they never spoke, but which forever changed them, and in the process, was handed down to their children in vague, yet tangible, forms. As an adult coming to the knowledge of the internment camps, Muto tries to reach through the wall of silence by imagining her mother’s experience.

Muto’s parents succeeded in their efforts to keep her free of “bitterness or anger.” In the poems Muto tells of her struggle to comprehend her parents’ history and her own confusion and bewilderment.

Now retired, Muto continues to investigate her personal history and pursue her love of nature in Wild Places: Yosemite National Park and Point Lobos State Natural reserve.

 

Ann's works: 

 Open Passage. Japanese American Museum of San Jose. collection of poems.

  

Return to the Valley Teachers Viewing Guide and California State Standards Alignment by Ann Muto and Eric Wong.  www.returntothevalley.org

[Return to the Valley (2003) is a documentary and educational project that was produced and broadcast by KTEH, the Public Television (PBS) station for the Santa Clara Valley and Central Coast. It is the story of the Japanese American communities of the Santa Clara Valley (San Jose) and the Central Coast region after World War II.  The DVD has a bonus feature of Dave Tatsuno's Topaz Memories, the only full color film shot at camp by an internee. Return to the Valley focuses on the Japanese American community and the inability to resume large scale farming and fishing.] (57 minutes) 

 

The Issei of the Salinas Valley: Japanese Pioneer Families 

A collection of stories gathered first hand from personal references, friends and neighbors.

Sources:

http://www.thecalifornian.com/article/20110504/LIFESTYLE/105040314/1024/LIFESTYLE

http://jamsj.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/the-roar-of-silence-poems-on-the-legacy-of-the-japanese-american-internment-experience/

http://www.steinbeck.org/events/meet-the-author-ann-terakawa-muto-reading-her-book

Hisaye Yamamoto

 March 25, 2011

Yamamoto, the author of "Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories," was 89 when she died at home in Eagle Rock Jan. 30. After her death, Elaine Woo wrote: Yamamoto was 20 when the attack sent the United States into war and her family into a (block 22-1-C) Poston, Ariz., internment camp. Her most celebrated stories, such as "Seventeen Syllables" and "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara," reflect the preoccupations and tensions of the Japanese immigrants and offspring who survived that era. Among her most powerful characters are women who struggle to nurture their romantic or creative selves despite the constraints of gender, racism and tradition....

A private, somewhat taciturn woman with a wry outlook, Yamamoto began writing in the 1930s and published her earliest stories in such prestigious journals as Partisan Review as well as in anthologies, including "The Best American Short Stories of 1952." But she did not receive serious critical attention until the 1970s, when Asian American scholars began to study her work....

Her breakthrough came with the 1948 publication in Partisan Review of "The High-Heeled Shoes, a Memoir," a shockingly contemporary story about sexual harassment. She weaved intercultural conflicts and bonds into "Seventeen Syllables" (1949), in which a nisei girl's blooming romance with a Mexican American classmate offers an achingly innocent counterpoint to her issei mother's arranged marriage. "Wilshire Bus" (1950) explores a Japanese American woman's silence during a white man's racist harangue against a Chinese couple on the bus they are riding.

Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/03/hisaye-yamamoto.html

Kiyo Sato

Local Author Shares Story With Audiences Around the Country

By Susan M. Osborn

Kiyo Sato’s attitude toward life is to accept what cannot be changed and take a stand on that which she can.

At the October meeting of the Northern California Publishers & Authors, Sato was honored as author of the month. This recognition coincided with the release by Soho Press of the paperback edition of her book, “Kiyo’s Story: A Japanese-American Family’s Quest for the American Dream” (previously published as “Dandelion through the Crack.”).

For many years, Sato has told school children her story to increase their knowledge of history and promote intergenerational understanding. Since the book’s publication, she has been making presentations to diverse audiences around the country.

“I want to illuminate not only the challenges of prejudice and oppression, but more fundamentally, to demonstrate the triumph of a family despite those challenges,” Sato said. “I want readers to see life as we lived it, from our early years on a Sacramento strawberry farm, through the trauma of the war years and rebuilding life afterwards.

Sato recently held a family gathering and invited all the members. “I told them our story and gave them copies of my book. Now all the children know the story. Hopefully, they will learn from our experience.”

The experience to which she refers is her family’s struggle to cope with being removed from their Sacramento farm and detained at Poston Internment Camp in Arizona at the outbreak of World War II. “Kiyo’s Story” demonstrates her family’s unrelenting loyalty, indomitable optimism and spiritual fortitude.

On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed U.S. Executive Order 9066, authorizing the relocation to internment camps of 120,000 Japanese-Americans. Over 70,000 of the Japanese-Americans were American citizens. Sato recalls, “It was a devastating loneliness to realize there was not one person in my own country to whom we could turn for help.”

Hastily constructed by Del Webb, the Poston War Relocation Center had a population of over 17,000 detainees. Poston became the third largest “city” in Arizona.

Situated in the desert, the 71,000 acre site was the hottest of all the camps. In summer, the temperature often reached a high of 130 degrees and there were no cool breezes at night. The air was typically very dry. “I put a wet diaper on my head and learned to breathe in the hot air very slowly,” reports Sato.

“My father was the only one who had entered the camp with a bucket hidden in a bedroll. He hung a canvas from the rafters and had the boys splash buckets of water for our air cooler. Children came from all over the camp to lean against the cool canvas.”

Families were assigned space in wood and tarpaper barracks. Housing was primitive and especially hard on the elderly and the ill. The lack of privacy was particularly difficult for Japanese women, who were required to sleep, eat, bathe and use the toilet in the company of others.

Sato recorded, “Here’s the truth: I am now called a non-alien, stripped of my constitutional rights. I am a prisoner in a concentration camp in my own country. I sleep on a canvas cot under which is a suitcase with my life’s belongings: a change of clothes, underwear, a notebook and a pencil. I shower with a half dozen people, eat with 250 people, and sit in the community latrine with people I don’t even know.”

The first student from her block to be released to attend college, Sato graduated from Hillsdale College in Michigan. Subsequently, she earned a Master in Nursing degree from Western Reserve University and served in the U.S.A.F. Nurse Corps where she attained the rank of captain.

In 2008, Sato was awarded the Saroyan International Prize for “Dandelion through the Crack.” She also received the Award of Excellence in Publications from the Sacramento County Historical Society; won the Northern California Publishers & Authors gold award for best first book and was honored by the California Writers Club and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Sato and other members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Nisei Post 8985, developed “Lessons from Our Lifetime,” an educational video and workbook for high school and college students. She appeared in “Passing Poston,” a documentary by New York filmmakers about the camp.

In 2009 she spoke at the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Program in Washington D.C. to mark the 67th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066. A letter she wrote to a high school teacher that was confiscated by a military intelligence officer for evidence in a loyalty investigation is preserved in the Smithsonian Institution Research Information System online database.

Sato says, “The past two years have been pretty hectic. I almost feel like the book has owned me ... traveling to so many places, going to dinners and making appearances at events with wine and hors d’oeuvres. Finally, things have slowed down.

“There are still students in 23 states in the U.S. who have never heard of this historical event, whose textbooks do not even mention Executive Order 9066 which challenged the Constitution.  I’m 87. Now, I want to find new ways to reach the people who don’t know about our experience.”

Source: http://www.senior-spectrum.com/news01_120710/index.html