Pictorial Travel Diary - Day 2 - Family Life at Manzanar
The first morning at camp, Haruko Niwa looked out at the front entrance step, where her teenage son, Aki was ‘crying with a drop of the tear like a marble.’ She knew ‘he was deeply hurt’ and missed his friends and school in Westwood. Another mother, Yuri Tateishi, remembered the uncertainty she felt, ‘going into a camp with four children…You don’t know what the education for the children will be or what type of housing or anything like that.’
With food, housing, health care, and a clothing allowance provided by the War Relocation Authority, family life continued under altered conditions in camp. Room assignments kept families together, but often required them to live with strangers to achieve a total of eight per room. Privacy was scarce. Rosie Maruki Kakuuchi, a teenager at Manzanar, found using the latrines and showers with no partitions particularly ‘embarrassing, humiliating and degrading.’
The ‘Children’s Village’
Social workers Harry and Lillian Matsumoto managed the Shonien Japanese Children’s Home in Los Angeles before the war. Initially, Lillian recalled, the Army ‘thought that the children could be dispersed like the rest of the people.’ She and her husband encouraged the U.S. Army to ‘build separate quarters’ for orphans and the Army agreed to establish an orphanage at Manzanar.
Orphans from three institutions—Shonien, the Salvation Army Japanese Children’s Home in San Francisco, and Maryknoll Home for Japanese Children in Los Angeles—formed the core of the “Children’s Village.’ They were joined by children removed from foster homes and adoptive families; children separated from their parents due to FBI arrests; and infants born to unwed mothers in War Relocation Centers. At a Children’s Village reunion fifty years later, Janet Sachiko Sugimoto Packard reflected: ‘They were my only family. I never knew my father. I was so fortunate I had my first family.’
‘The pain I felt in the shameful experiences of camp were for my children rather than for myself. The laws of the U.S. prevented us from becoming citizens, but my children had been born and raised here and were always told to be good Americans.’
Rose Bannai Kitahara, quoting her mother Shino Bannai, 2000
With food, housing, health care, and a clothing allowance provided by the War Relocation Authority, family life continued under altered conditions in camp. Room assignments kept families together, but often required them to live with strangers to achieve a total of eight per room. Privacy was scarce. Rosie Maruki Kakuuchi, a teenager at Manzanar, found using the latrines and showers with no partitions particularly ‘embarrassing, humiliating and degrading.’
The ‘Children’s Village’
Social workers Harry and Lillian Matsumoto managed the Shonien Japanese Children’s Home in Los Angeles before the war. Initially, Lillian recalled, the Army ‘thought that the children could be dispersed like the rest of the people.’ She and her husband encouraged the U.S. Army to ‘build separate quarters’ for orphans and the Army agreed to establish an orphanage at Manzanar.
Orphans from three institutions—Shonien, the Salvation Army Japanese Children’s Home in San Francisco, and Maryknoll Home for Japanese Children in Los Angeles—formed the core of the “Children’s Village.’ They were joined by children removed from foster homes and adoptive families; children separated from their parents due to FBI arrests; and infants born to unwed mothers in War Relocation Centers. At a Children’s Village reunion fifty years later, Janet Sachiko Sugimoto Packard reflected: ‘They were my only family. I never knew my father. I was so fortunate I had my first family.’
‘The pain I felt in the shameful experiences of camp were for my children rather than for myself. The laws of the U.S. prevented us from becoming citizens, but my children had been born and raised here and were always told to be good Americans.’
Rose Bannai Kitahara, quoting her mother Shino Bannai, 2000
posted by Nana @ 14:44
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