Art Kumada

Art Kumada, born in the heart of San Jose Japantown, was a veteran of the Military Intelligence Service, whose family evaded the incarceration by relocating to Colorado from San Jose. Though they were technically “free,” the reality of working on a sugar beet farm in Colorado was difficult labor with unforgiving environmental circumstances. Art would eventually be drafted and was routed into the Military Intelligence Service at the end of the war. With his assignment in Japan, Art recalls the heartbreak of witnessing the defeated nation of Japan, though the Nisei soldiers were widely accepted and liked by the citizens. When he returned, Art was a gardener for nine years, and settled back in his original hometown of San Jose. 

Art passed away in 2009 at the age of 85. 

Here we are with Mr. Art Kumada, and it's April 17th. Can we start by you telling me your full name?

My given name is not Arthur or Art. That came later in my life. I was born Tsukasa Kumada. 

And where were you born?

I was born here in San Jose, 1923. Born 1923 July 5. I’m the first son and second, there’s four of us. 

So your whole family was born in San Jose?

My oldest sister was born in San Jose. And then shortly after I was born the family moved to Hollister, San Juan Bautista area. They became uh garlic farmers. And my younger sister was born in San Juan. My little sister that passed away was born in San Juan also. And then my youngest brother Larry was born in San Jose. Just before evacuation in 1940. 

When you were born, your parents farmed then?

When I was born, they got married here. They were bush berry farmers, not too far from Japantown on Younger Avenue between Third and Sixth Street, so they were close to Japantown. I was born upstairs of where Shiseido is now. I guess there was a midwife there and I was born on the second floor. Shortly after I was born, the family went to farm in Hollister, San Juan. 

Well, we'll talk about your parents now. Were they Isseis?

They were Isseis but my mother was born in Hawaii. But the courthouse burnt down, and we have no birth records. We have no way of knowing. Her mother passed away soon after she was born. My grandfather could not support the family in Hawaii working on a plantation and taking care of three kids. So he went back to Japan.

So your grandfather, your maternal grandfather left Hawaii and went back to Japan. And even though your mother was an American citizen at birth, the birth certificate has since been burned down with the courthouse.

So all the while that she was here in America, she couldn’t prove anything. Her aunt was married to my father’s uncle. And that’s where we got our name, Kumada. My father came to America as a Yoshii. He was an Obatake. And I'm glad I don't have to go through life as an Obatake. And my mother’s maiden name is Katsumaru. And my mother came here when she was 12 years old at the age of 1916.

So Kumada is the name of?

My guess is adopted grandparents.

So did you ever know your biological grandparents?

Yes, I met them both. 1945. And my father's mother and father were alive then. I met them in Japan when I was there during the occupation.

So now we've established your mother's father and your father's father. Maybe we can go on to your life before Pearl Harbor. Can you give paint me a picture of what that was like? Maybe you remember Hollister first.

So when the war broke out, a lot of the Japanese families, they were doing pretty well. But like my folks, they went through the depression. They got wiped out. And so we were always poor.

So they weren't recovering. 

Just getting by.

Do you remember the day Pearl Harbor was bombed?

Oh, yes. That was a Sunday, which we were farming. As a farmer, Sunday is our working day. Saturdays is our Sundays usually. We didn't know what happened until that night, you know when we came home.

And then we farmed this Overfelt land. This was on King and the main Berry Road. That's where their other land was. And we rented that to the two families. Farmed their land there. And of course, Mildred Overfelt was she gave her land to the city. I guess there's the park there now.

Yes. And it's called the Overfelt.

I never really go out that way. But she was a nice lady. When the war broke out, she says we could store what we couldn't take with us to the evacuation. We stored in her barn. So when we came back, we had something.

And we were farming her land with the Hirada family. And then at night, they came home. And then they told us that Pearl Harbor was bombed. We didn't know what Pearl Harbor was. You know, like Roosevelt. He called it the Day of Infamy.

But to me, my Day of Infamy was February 19, 1942, when he signed the Executive order 9066 that made us all move out of California, Washington and Oregon.

But I remember going to school the next day. Monday. Yeah, just like that. That was strange. That made the difference. So that made you either enemy or friend. We were the enemy. They forgot about us as friends before Pearl Harbor, you know?

So you were 16.

I was a senior in high school.

So you no longer have the friends you used to have other than —

Japanese American.

Right. So were they Caucasian? Mexican American?

Yeah, they were Caucasians. A few Mexicans. This is a few. Mostly Caucasians.

So do they just look away when you looked at them or they just didn't talk to you or were they meaner than that?

They weren't mean or anything. They just didn't have anything to do with you after that.

Yeah. Like you didn't exist.

Yeah.

So before Pearl Harbor, did you notice any animosity from your Caucasian friends or.

As far as I moved to our age group, the Caucasians were not hostile. They were not like the way they treated our parents.

So we're still on December 8th. Do you remember anything about that day or the weeks after that? There were curfew and travel restrictions.

Travel restrictions. You couldn't go beyond the five miles that up without a permit. But it didn't affect us because we were within five miles to school and Japantown. And so it didn't bother us too much as far as distance is concerned. But then we went to Colorado. About 3,000 West Coast Japanese-Americans, I guess, went to Colorado. I understand. There was this Governor Ralph Carr of Colorado at the time. He welcomed us and that cost him his political career. He and Governor Stassen at the time to me were true Americans. Governor Stassen in Minnesota. 

We went on a train, took us I think two days and three, two nights and three days on that train. And that was another strange feeling, you know, the we were afraid to leave our seats, but I don't remember ever going to them. At that time, Mrs. Hondo was pregnant with her youngest, when we were evacuated. And then we went with another family. Three families we left California together.

When we went to Colorado, we went to this family farm for sugar beets. Colorado is well known for their sugar beets. [The farm] furnished your cabin, your home. And then you leave there and you take the sugar beets for the year.

Just so long as you thin the crop. You did two hoeings in the summer to keep the weeds down. They did the irrigation. The biggest thing is the topping of the sugar beets in the fall. I can never forget that. You start in the fall but then it snows and you're in there. Then it becomes frozen so it's hard to cut. You've got to cut, cut and it's heavy. It was it was hard on my my two sisters. They often cried at night. “Why didn't we go to camp? Why did we have to come here?”

Did you cry?

I didn’t. 

No. It wasn't hard on you.

Oh, it was hard. But, you know, I didn't cry. I didn't like it. But then we had to work. If we didn't work, we didn't eat, right? Family, worked for $0.25 an hour. The five of us working, we made a dollar and a quarter an hour with it, but we pulled all our resources together. And goes into the winter. And then, of course, the snow comes. And that's just, it's miserable.

But the girls, they stayed right with us. My mother, my two sisters, side by side. We topped beets. Then, of course, my brother was a bit over a year old and we left him in the car. We watch them and then we do work that way.

So, did you graduate from high school in Colorado? 

Yes, in Colorado. In 1943. I was 19 years old.

How was it going to school? I imagine most of the kids were white. And how did they treat you?

Yes most were white, but of course this was during the war years. But then, like I said earlier, the Nisei kids more or less stuck together.

Were there quite a few Nisei kids? 

And there were local people there. Japanese from there. Mostly farmers. And a lot of the evacuees settled in Brighton. So we had lots of friends among ourselves.

I see. So were most of the Japanese Americans recent settlers in that they fled the Western states?

Most of were evacuees.

So the Japanese-American population in the Brighton area sort of quadrupled?

Yeah it really grew. So when they started to draft the Japanese Americans, the Niseis, the next town was called Fort Luckdone, north of Brighton. That was in Weld County. The two counties got together and they wholesale drafted all the Japanese-Americans whether they were native born there, native Colorado people or evacuees. They just drafted all of us.

Was that surprising?

It was shocking. I mean I guess when they were forming the full 442nd of course you know, they didn't have that many volunteers from the camps. They just drafted, wanted to get rid of us. That's the way I feel. They drafted all the Nisei men that they could get. They even drafted me with my eyes. This eye is gone, its dead you know.

Oh, no, I don't know that.

I just have one eye, which is bad. But it's always been that way. I guess as a child. Yeah, I must've had a childhood disease that affected my one eye.

Were the Caucasians being drafted too at the same time as it were?

Yes. But gosh, percentage wise, I think they hit us more. Well, I mean, this is my feeling.

This is when I got my draft notice, I wanted to go see what the camp looked like. Because I never been to the camp, you see, And I lived in Denver, in Colorado and then Heart Mountain was the closest where San Jose people had gone to.

And so in April I went on a bus to Wyoming and to Heart Mountain and. It was a funny feeling, you know, like I could go in, I could walk out. Nobody could stop me. Right? But the people that lived there, the internees they couldn’t do that.

It's just so ironic.

Yeah. We were the same kind of people. You know, there was so many Japanese Nisei being drafted. I was drafted out of Fort Logan, Colorado. And then, of course in those days, Camp Shelby was all gone, the Niseis were not there anymore. They were overseas.

And then after that was Camp Blanding a lot of Niseis were there. Of course they were all they all shipped overseas and we went to Camp Hood, Texas. A lot of the Niseis took their basic there. And then of course the rumors start to fly. “You guys are not going to replace the 442nd. They’ll send you to any outfit that needs you. And you know, I didn't like that. I wanted to be with the Niseis.

So I volunteered. Fort Snelling, that's the Military Language School.

Now, why did you decide to do that? Why did you decide to do that?

Because I didn't want to go into another outfit with all hakujins [white people]. I wanted to be with my Nisei friends that I met in the service. So a few of us volunteered for Snelling that replaced Camp Savage, Minnesota. And MIS started at Chrissy Field in San Francisco. 

Now, about how many graduates worked for the MIS?

They say that 3000 Nisei served in MIS. And then, of course, after the war ended okay, they needed occupation troops. So they I think they drafted enough for about another 6000. I think they say 6000 Niseis served in MIS.

When you graduated, that was after Japan surrendered.

Yeah. Japan surrendered August 15th, something like that of 1945. And then I graduated soon after. A week later. And so they shipped us to a place called Camp Stoneman that's down here in Pittsburgh, California. The camps no longer there.

And from there, we went overseas. We went to the Philippines. And then the war ended, so they didn't know what to do with us. And so we stayed in the Philippines quite a while. Then we went into Tokyo Bay. And we were attached to MacArthur’s GHQ. I was in CIC, CCD: Civil Censorship Detachment. We did censoring of Japanese newspapers, books, magazines, radio broadcasting. You know, they couldn’t do anything MacArthur didn't want to say or do.

That's the way I feel. But I was stationed at Hakata, Fukuoka, so there's a seaport on the inland sea side, and we used to see Japanese soldiers come back from China. And they came back in rags, compared to what we were wearing. And they were in they really defeated this Yeah. Nation.

Well they were ashamed to come back alive. 

They still had that Bushido feeling, you know, after the war or during the war. But they came home to find out my uncle was one of them, you know that. I used to have my family send me candies, things like that. Gum. And I used to give it to those kids. You know because at that time, Japan had nothing. Japan had nothing.

At first they were afraid of us, you know, But then, you know, that's our and that's our, our mothers, you know, our parents land. You know, and we can't, you know, mistreat them, you know. So Niseis were well liked over there at that time. But I felt sorry for the kids in rags. There's no food for them.

You know, your ancestral land. Now that you're American, how do you relate to it? It's kind of an interesting question. 

Yeah. But, you know, to me, I was always kind of, “This was my mother and father’s land.” And everybody that you see looks like me. I said, you can't hate them. I spent not quite a year there and then I came home and discharged. And at that time, Japanese people were leaving camp. 

And so when you were in Snelling, your parents bought a house in Denver and they lived there. What did they do to survive then?

My father worked in a lumber yard in Colorado. In those days, cartons were crates, right? You know, today it's all fiberboard. But in those days, they used the wood, and he would cut up these lumber and then make boxes and crates and things.

But you know, there’s evacuation time. My mother and father. I guess they lost it, huh? After that they became dependent on me. And then my father was still, you know, at that time, I thought he was an old man, but he was only 45. My mother was about maybe 42. But he just gave up, depended on me. So I had to take care of them.

When you say lost it, you mean the will to — 

To do anything after. I mean the goal to reestablish himself. He turned it all over to me.

Oh, that was a big burden.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. See, I wanted to go to college, which people say you could have gone on your GI. But I couldn't go. You know. I was married. We had a baby coming along. I couldn't go to college on the GI, a lot of my single friends did, Right. And, you know, they did real well, but I couldn't do that. And I became a gardener. Oh, I was a gardener for nine years.

So when you came back from Japan, where did you settle?

San Jose.

Okay, so then your family moved from Denver to San Jose.

Yes. We bought a home here in San Jose. Right behind here was Sumitomo Bank, where this Caucasian lady lived. We did her garden and we borrowed money from her to buy this house. Because we had no bank reference, we had nothing. But I bought an old house, one acre of ground [for] $7,500. And that's how we got started.

I'm going to jump ahead to the reparations question with the whole movement. Were you ever involved with the testimonies?

I wasn't. You know, I was never involved in that. I just followed it. That was 1988. My mother did not get it because she was gone. There's a certain date cut off date. My mother had passed away after that. But my father got his reparations. I have five grandkids, so I gave them $4000 each for their college education. And then my wife gave $5000 each to our three children. And that's how we spent our reparation money.

What were your reactions to getting a check for $20,000?

I felt that, you know, they owe us this. But to me, no, I didn't think it was the way they should have done it, you know? I mean, I thought that if they're going to give this reparation, they should have paid, they should have had a formula where they would give the internees the days they spent in camp so much and like with us, the only time we lost our freedom.

We went to Colorado on our own and we were free, so we would have gotten, I would felt we, we should have gotten the minimum but the people that went to camp were confined in this camp. I thought they should deserve or get more, they should have worked out a formula with it. So many days in camp they should have been paid for. But I accepted mine. I took my $20,000 and I used it for my grandchildren’s education.

So was $20,000 enough?

It came too late. Yeah. Yeah, we could have used it when they were resettling. But after we got it, we were established already, you know, and most of the Niseis they were doing well. And the children had gone to college, they had a good job.

But it was too late. We should have gotten it sooner when we needed it. Yeah. That's what I feel, you know, But I wasn't going to turn it down.

In terms of modeling for other countries, what do you think is important? 

You know, what happened to the American Indians? Of course they were not citizens like we were, our parents were. Not citizens but they couldn’t become citizens by law. But we were citizens. But like the American Indians, what happened to them? And then what happened to the black people, the slaves, their ancestors? If they're going to give us, they should give them something. But then how are you going to judge that.

There's other people that were wronged also and like our constitutional rights were violated but the Indians, they were not considered, they were, I don't know, would be savages to the white people. Anything that the army did to the Indian was a “skirmish.” What the Indians did to the American settlers, they call it a “massacre.” But there has been so many people that's been wronged by our government.

What do you think of the people who worked for redress? You know, thousands of people testified.

I give them a lot of credit, and I don't know, I'm ashamed I didn’t —I wasn't a part of it, you know?

You're ashamed?

Yeah, well, you know, maybe we could have done more. But it was those few that spoke up. I think I give them a lot of credit.

How about the apology letter? What do you think of the apology letter?

Yeah, I don't think much of that.

If you had to give a message to the younger generations, based on your experience, what is the message?

To the young people, I’m speaking as a Nisei Japanese American. Our parents were wrong, you know, we were wrong, but — I guess you still have to say this is the best country, you know? And we should be real thankful that we live here. Then the young people today, they've got to have faith in their, in their country.

What happened to us is — I don't have any hate even. Just, we still have to live. I don't know that you shouldn't carry this to your grave. You know what happened to us? It's happened and then, I don't know. I mean, we've had rough times, but we've had good times, too, you know? And today I look back, my kids are all doing well. I guess in time, like I keep saying in time they will, they should remember what happened in the past.

They shouldn't hold that. There shouldn't be any grudges, you know. I mean this country has been good to us. Better themselves, which they have. I think they have done that much. They have done well.

Interview conducted by Grace Megumi Fleming. JAMsj thanks Grace for allowing the museum to archive and share these oral histories