Ed Miyakawa

Ed Miyakawa, interviewed on February 21, 2003 in Eugene, Oregon. 

My name is Edward Takeshi Miyakawa. I was born in Sacramento, California on August 29th of 1934. 

Can you paint me a picture of what life was like before Pearl Harbor? What you remember of it?

I remember Sacramento Japanese town, which we were a part of it but we also lived outside of the Japanese town and my father had a house that wasn’t in a Japanese ghetto area, so we had a lot of Caucasian friends. And I distinctly remember the house and what it looked like and the neighborhood that I lived in. And I had Japanese American friends and Caucasian friends and I went to Caucasian school. 

One of my most vivid memories of my childhood however is that there was the Miyakawa side of the family, and my Miyakawa grandfather was a very successful businessman in Sacramento Japanese town. But before I was born, he left the United States and resettled back in Japan even though he was very Americanized and very successful. And I literally never met him -- I went in the military later and I was headed to Japan and before I got there, he died. 

What was the business that he was involved in?

He had a pharmacy business, and then he also had formed a small Japanese hospital in Japantown. So that was my understanding of what his business was - a pharmacist and him running this small hospital, but he wasn’t a doctor himself. 

But the people that I remember really very clearly because it was my mother’s side of the family, ojichan and bachan, and they were quite different than my other side of the family. The Miyakawa side had a tremendous emphasis on being Amercianized, and that’s why the Miyakawa side was very, very well educated. My father was a Harvard graduate, my brother was a Harvard graduate. My father studied International Law at Harvard. 

I never talked to anybody who was an Issei-- 

Well, my father was actually Nisei but he came to America when he was ten years old. And a very strange thing that they did. My obachan and ojichan Miyakawa, they left my father in Japan because he was going to be adopted out to carry on another family name. And so obachan and jichan came to America and had a couple other children and then they went back to Japan and got my father and brought him back to American. And so he was an alien in the sense that he could never become an American citizen. So the Americanization process in the Miyakawa family was a powerful force because my father, not only did he go to Harvard but his brother went to Harvard, and they were both baseball players and my dad was a successful baseball player - I think he was an all-state catcher in California. And then he became an Ivy League catcher, and studied international law. And he had a third brother and he ended up being a medical doctor. And one of the most interesting things to me was they had one daughter. And my dad’s sister was Agnes Miyakawa. She studied music and she was a very successful singer, and she literally studied opera and she became an opera singer. And she actually sang the role of Madame Butterfly. And she was this 5 foot tall woman, beautiful Japanese woman. So the Miyakawa side of the family was totally Americanized. 

I share so much about the Miyakawa side because it had a tremendous influence on my life. And I never met my grandmother and grandfather on that side because they left before I was born. 

Do you know when they left? 

I was born in 1934, so my guess is it had to be between 1930 and 1934. And so then the side of the family that I remember very vividly was the Shigeno side, my mother’s side. And those are the people I really knew as grandparents and they were at the other extreme in the sense - they were farmers in Florin. And those are the people that we used to always go see. And the interesting thing is they had five children, and they became all college graduates as well. And then Rosie, my mother’s second sister, she married a Henry Tani and he was a president of the Japanese American Citizens League of San Francisco. 

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