mitsuye yamada

Today at 100 years old, Mitsuye Yamada remains one of the Nikkei community’s strongest artistic voices, with her poetry and writing giving voice to the Japanese American experience for many decades. Born in Fukuoka, Mitsuye came back to the United States permanently at age 10, before the outbreak of the war.

“It was terrible because they came and searched the house. They took all the dishes out of the cupboards and looked between the dishes. And they took all the picture frames off the wall, looked behind the picture frame. They took the rugs up and looked under the rugs. They looked in the closets between the clothes, you know, took all the clothes out. And they left a mess.”

While incarcerated in Minidoka, Mitsuye and her brother answered no/no to the loyalty questionnaire, which actually prompted their ability to leave camp and attend the University of Cincinnati. At age 96, Mitsuye published another collection of poetry, remaining active and an inspiration in the world of Japanese American writers. This interview was conducted in 2006. 

Okay. My full name is Mitsuye Mei Yasutake, was my maiden name, Yamada. My father spelled it M-E-I. So the family called me Mei since I was little. And so that kind of stuck with me I think. My father was in the United States in 1909 and went to school here, and he and my parents were married in 1919. And they were living in Seattle, Washington. My oldest brother was born in 1920. And I think in the year 1922, my second brother was born. And they were both had some very serious health problems when they were babies.

And so when my mother became pregnant again, I was only a year apart, I was born in 1923. And so he decided that he had too much work and so forth because my mother was ill and kids were ill. So he decided that she should go to Japan and have a third child. And, of course, here she was, pregnant with two small children. My older brother, Tosh, was only six months, which is really quite young. And she was few months pregnant with me. 

My father was bilingual. And it was kind of rare in those days, you know, not very many Isseis spoke English.

Not enough had time or luxury to really study English, and not too many of the Issei men were educated enough even in Japan, right? 

Yeah. Well, my father was only 16, I think when he came. He was said he was born in 1890. He wanted to enter the university, this is his application for Stanford University. He came on a student visa rather than a work visa which was also kind of unusual. He said before he came, he said he wanted to study rather than work here. Then he was working for a family as a houseboy while he was going to school for lodging as well. I think it took him about a year to learn enough English to go to high school so he went to Lowell High School in San Francisco. 

And then from Lowell High School he applied and it was called Leland Stanford Junior University at that time, so he went to Stanford. And then in 1919 or in 1918, I think World War I was still on at that time, right? Because I remember my mother talking about the fact that the year they got married, the war was still on and that everything was so uncertain that they hardly had a wedding ceremony. You know in Japan, we have very elaborate ceremonies. So she said, “I borrowed my older sister's wedding dress and we had a very informal wedding in Japan.”

So what happened was my dad went back to Japan in 1918 and my mother's older sister was married to a doctor in this village where my dad's home town is. And so she said, my older sister came home and she said, “There's a young man in our village who has just come back from Japan, who just came back from America and he's looking for a wife. So how about you?” And so my mother said the story is very funny because as she said – I think her father was dead by that time. Her father died and she was about eight. And she said her oldest brother was running the business. We had the lumber company.

And they were in the next room and she said, “My older sister and my brothers were in the room and having this discussion about whether or not they should send Edette to America with this young man. And she said, “I now remember my older sister saying, ‘Kawaisou,’ [how sad] to send her away to America. You know, it's like exiling a person, to, you know, a foreign country.

To the moon!

I know. And so, she was against it. And then she was surprised, she said, “My other sister said, ‘No, I think that these days, you have to be a modern woman, and open minded about this opportunity for her to travel to a foreign country.’” I said to her, “Well, did he talk to you about it? Did they discuss it with you?” She said “No, I was just sitting in the next room crying, listening to all this discussion. They didn't ask me anything. They were just discussing me.” She said we had a family council that she wasn't even a part of it. 

How old was your Mom?

She was 18 I think. But she said she was very young for her age. She was born 1899. So they got married and then she went to live with the in-laws because my dad said, “I have to go back to America to get a job, finish my schooling and get a job.” So she said that she lived with her in-laws for about a year before she came to this country. She came in 1919, 1920. They were married in 1919. So she was about 21 when she came over by herself.  

Wow. Adventurous. 

So you wanted to know about my childhood? 

Yes.

It was a very, very happy childhood. I don't really remember too many details. We just had a wonderful childhood. My parents were great. I mean, I had to take a lot of lessons, like piano lessons, and tea ceremony, but then it didn't last very long.

They wanted the cultured girl.

And so I know it didn't last very long because by the time I got to high school, I was very involved in debate and so I skipped Japanese school all the time because debate was always after school.

What were your hobbies that you chose for yourself?

Yeah, I liked books. I worked in a creative writing magazine. And I was really interested in literature and very interested in books we used to read. And so I majored in English in high school as well, concentrated in English and creative writing courses. I was still in high school when the war broke out in December 1941 because I was a year behind. I think I was in Japan. I went to Japan when I was ten.

Would you be willing to talk about that? You remember Pearl Harbor?  

The thing is, my father was gone. You see, I came pick him up. Oh, and my father disappeared. He never came home.

Do you remember when the FBI came to your house?

Yes.

It must have been terrifying. 

It was terrible because they came and searched the house. They took all the dishes out of the cupboards and looked between the dishes. And they took all the picture frames off the wall, looked behind the picture frame. They took the rugs up and looked under the rugs. It was very thorough. They looked in the closets between the clothes, you know, took all the clothes out. And they left a mess.

I'm sure.

But them saying nothing. They didn't leave anything unsearched. They searched all the cupboards and and bookshelves, we had a lot of bookshelves.

And so did they question, your father in front of the family or?

He wasn't home. He had founded a senryukai. He was interested in senryu.

And that’s poetry?

Poetry, yeah. So every first Sunday of the month, they used to get together and they would write senryu. His name is Kaichiro Yasutake. He was known as Jack Yasutake. And his pen name was Jakki. So his American name become Jack. 

So he was at the meeting.

He was at a meeting and this FBI agent went to look for him and they arrested him at the meeting. My dad was explaining that they used to have this butcher paper in a restaurant. They put the butcher paper on the wall and then the members would write the – I think they were usually finding themselves a topic.

That would make sense.

And then they would each quietly write for about an hour. And then when they got it together, a calligrapher would write calligraphy on the wall. So then when the FBI arrived there were all these little calligraphy, right next to each other. And so they were vertical and then when they finished, the members voted on which ones they like the best. And so when somebody says, “I like number two,” and the calligrapher would take red ink and he would put a small circle on top of one them. And then if somebody said, “I like so and so,” they would put another one, and then if somebody said, “I like that one also,” then he would put another one. So there would be like a whole bunch of circles. And so then you could see – 

Like a bullseye right?

Yeah, right, exactly. So there were many circles, some had one, some had two or three. And so the FBI apparently arrived when they had all this senryu on the wall with this red target. They came, they said, “What is this?” And they said, “Those are poems.” And he just tore the thing off the wall and crumpled it up. And took it as evidence.

Oh, that’s just so graphic. I mean, can you imagine if the FBI sees this.

Some guy with his brush, yeah. And so I mean, he was arrested, but then he was kept in the guest room at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. And so that kind of created problems for my dad, I think, because he thought the other people who were in the general population group, in large groups, thought that it was rather strange that he got special treatment. He asked if some of his friends could join him. So I think that got a little bit better when his friends were with him in his room, and then he was then shipped off to Bismark or they went to Santa Fe. And then to Albuquerque.

Did he write poetry while he was in camp?

Yes, he did. I have a book of this poetry, but they haven't been translated. A few of them have been translated. Then my mother. When Mike and I left camp in 1943, my mother was left alone with my younger brother Joe in camp. And so she wanted to join my father in the camp. And so I went to Washington. I remember asking to apply to have my parents and my brother moved to Crystal City where they had a camp for families.

My mother was a little bit leery about that, you know, because she didn't want to go into a camp. She was afraid for my younger brother's future, if he would become a convict or an ex-con, you know, after he gets out of this place. It was kind of interesting that my mother would be thinking about things like that, but she said, you know, I really don't want to do anything to jeopardize Joe's future. And they said that there would be Peruvian families. And, you know, I think there were quite a few Koreans in Crystal City. So my mother and my dad and my younger brother Joe were in Crystal City.

You never saw your father after December 7th?

No, we did go visit him. We were standing in the hallway talking to my dad and the people in the general population were being sent out to lunch. We were all kind of filing out to lunch and they were all shouting at my mother and telling her “My name is so-and-so. Tell my wife I'm here.” That was – it was just terrible. Well, you know, these men knew that their family – they just disappeared. Many of them were working. They never came home.

But she had no idea who they were. They would yell out their names and say, “Oh, my wife, please tell my wife.” Very desperate to get…oh, how terrible it must have been for them.

So were they shouting through the walls?

No, they were just walking past and they suddenly saw us standing there and they right away, since they recognized my mother. And so yeah, they were kept in different quarters. My dad was in this VIP room, you see.

That part hasn't been written up too much, about those experiences that I guess is about shame connected with being taken away by the FBI.

Yeah. And many of them were merchants or they were in Seattle. They were just laborers, workers. They had no idea why they were there.

Right. And or even if they were the president of the Japanese association, all they did was organize picnics. 

And my dad, of course, was very...you know, I think that they probably had plenty on my dad. They knew that he had been meeting with Japanese dignitaries, of course. And that was with his job. He was accused of being a conduit for information.

As a young woman or young girl witnessing this, it must have been a pretty big shock to you.

Yeah you know at first I didn’t know what they were saying, I thought they were just greeting my mom, so I was just looking at them. And then there’s all this noise, as I said, they were all talking at the same time. And then afterwards, I realized what they were saying. You know, I remember looking at them because my mother was crying. 

Well, I think that one of the really traumatic things that happened in our family was in my house. My father was taken away because my father was such a competent person. You know, he took care of everything. He paid all the bills and we were never asked to do anything around the house. All we were asked to do is to go to school and get good grades and study hard or whatever. So my parents didn't train us very well [as] independent people. So then when my dad suddenly went, we just felt helpless.

You know my oldest brother was ill. Mike was in bed. He had Tuberculosis and he was in bed sick and Joe was still quite young. Tosh was a freshman at University of Washington, and I was a senior in high school. But then I was the only one who could work at that point because Tosh couldn't find a job. As a young man, I mean, what could you do? And the only kind of job that I could get was as a babysitter for a family.

So did you have to quit?

So I quit school to go to work because we had no money. You know, as of December 7th, we suddenly had no money.

What was your bank account frozen?

Our bank account was frozen. Right. And the only thing we had – and I thought maybe this is what I would talk about – what happened on December 7th is the fact that we three got together, and what we did was we went around the house. Of course the house is a big mess because the FBI had dumped it. So we had to put everything back. And so we went through all the drawers of my dad's desk, looking for money. And then we looked in the pockets of our clothes. You know, the thing is, you leave pennies and dimes around. So we collected some loose change that we had around the house and it was kind of an astounding amount of money, like $50 or something.

We looked in a handbags. We found some money to at least be able to buy some food for the next week or so. And then we, my brother remembered that we had each of us had a bank account in school. They would have bank days and every week we would take $0.25 to school to put it into our bank account at school. So from kindergarten to high school, $0.25 every week, is quite a bit of money by that time so we had several hundred dollars in our bank and that was how we were able to pay for electricity and gas and those kinds of bills. And so we survived, until we were evacuated.

What did you pack? Do you remember?

Yeah, we packed a lot of things that were kind of important to my parents. We put a lot of stuff in boxes, and then Mr. Spangler and Mr. Barnum were just wonderful. The hakujin colleagues were friends of my my dad's boss. I mean, he was very much loved by all of these people. And so they came to the house and they carted off carloads of stuff to store in their basements. 

They took care of that for us and the telephone operator, her name was Mrs. Hoban, she loved my dad very much. She was a single woman and they had a really wonderful relationship. She used to come over for dinner and my dad would invite her over.

This is a telephone operator at the –?

Immigration Service. And she helped rent the house. And so then we had some income from the rental.

Who owned the house?

We did, in the name of my oldest brother. So when we were in camp, we had that every month, which was helpful.

Do you know what you packed to take to camp?

Clothes, books. I remember, I thought I could take a dictionary, which came in handy, because there was a whole list of universities in the United States on the back of the dictionary. I remember applying to, I don't know, 50 of the schools [to which] of course I was turned down because I was an enemy alien and they wouldn’t accept me. 

Well, you know, some people have a lot of memories about packing because they were they had to make choices about what to take and what not to take.

And I think it didn't really matter to me very much. I guess I wasn't really very much into things. And I remember taking a few clothes and I remember putting this dictionary. We were told to take two suitcases.

In your case, it might be a little bit different because you had these trusting friends who took the valuables, whereas a lot of people didn't have friends they could trust. And so they were having to throw away things that were valuable to the family.  

Well see, the FBI took all the cameras. They took a lot of photographs, from Japan relatives in Japan. And we had a motion picture projector. And my dad had this toy, which was a 16 millimeter projector. And then we just had a whole box of films, Charlie Chaplin films. 

Clocks. I don’t know why clocks. Maybe they thought maybe there was something in it.

Maybe they were just indiscriminate. That must have been tragic, too, because here they are messing up your house. But for them, for you to watch them almost rob you.

Yeah, and then they left. I think that my mom tried to reclaim them back. My brother went and they had this big warehouse full of Japanese stuff that were confiscated. My older brother Tosh after the war went to pick them up I don't really know whether we got everything back. We had no idea what it was that they took away because we didn't really think about it. I think that we were kind of in such a state of shock at the time that we hadn’t really remembered.

Higher priorities like survival, keeping the family together.

I was trying to think about the memories and the camp and so forth. And I think that the reason why my memory of that is so, not really that significant [was because] we were dealing with my dad and this situation and we didn't really know whether he was going to be deported to Japan. 

And then Mr. Bonhan, whom I met at one point, who was my dad's boss. His name, was Ralph Bonhan. And he was just a sweetheart, just a wonderful person. And he was so sympathetic and so helpful that at one point he said, “Well, you know, one of these days I may be in trouble.”

Oh, sure, sure. Colluding with the enemy.

Exactly. And then his colleagues, one of the people that he used to travel with, used to come and visit us in Puyallup. And then we went to Idaho, Minidoka. When Mike and I left, I wasn’t in camp that long because we left for Puyallup in April and left for Idaho to Minidoka in August, I think, because it was very hot at the end of summer. And then the following year, it was around September, Mike and I left in 1943. We left for Cincinnati. Mike was accepted the University of Cincinnati. Since I could not get into college as an alien.

The Quakers, they were just wonderful. They found me a job in the cafeteria at the University of Cincinnati.

Well, and therefore keeping that part of the family together.

I remember going to Philadelphia and Washington DC to talk to the people in the Department of Justice to try to get my father out. Mike and I left in 1943, and we were talking about the loyalty oath, I guess that was in conversation. And Mike didn't respond yes to the two questions: Are you willing to serve in the military? And of course, he said no. And the other question was, are you willing to forswear allegiance to the emperor of Japan? And Mike apparently had said no, because I didn't swear allegiance. I never had sworn allegiance to the emperor in the first place. So why should I forswear it? 

[Eventually], the Immigration and Naturalization service did the math and they discovered that it was costing them a lot of money to feed us. So then there was a big push in 1943 to recruit guys. So Tosh, my brother, volunteered, so he left in June. The government did the math and they decided that it was costing us too much money and encouraged people to get out. So, they were encouraging people to volunteer for the army. They drafted them and then they encouraged us to apply for jobs and go to school and so forth. 

But what happened was after a year in 1944, I did get accepted into school once I got to Cincinnati, and so I was going to school at the University of Cincinnati. And the FBI came and interrogated Mike and had him refill out the forms. And then they asked him two questions again. I don’t I think he answered yes or no. So they came sought him out to fill out the loyalty oath and he said, “No, I am a pacifist. I would not bear arms.” 

Conscientious objector. 

So then they ordered the University of Cincinnati to expel him. And so Mike was expelled from school, and that was when he left for Boston and he got in touch with the Episcopal Church, living in the monastery. So he had to become a priest, I think.

Would you mind spending a little time talking about your thoughts or experiences around the redress movement? 

Well, I think it was a wonderful thing that was going on, and it was an uphill battle. I think a lot got in the way because there wasn't as much animosity, I think, as maybe before WWII. But there was still I mean, to this day, lingering anger about why should we give money back? Because Japan treated our soldiers really very poorly. And many of them were tortured and so forth. And so that had to be overcome in a lot of ways. The resistance of even the Congress people, the Congress and so forth. So I think the Japanese Americans and I think JACL was quite instrumental in that. JACL had not done very much in the past, but that was going to be one things that they did. 

They put all their energy into this yeah.

And so I stood by and watched it because I didn't really become part of that at all. You know, my health has not been very good for a long time. So anyways, it's another part of my life to deal with, but I haven't been able to do very much in mass groups except a few things that I was interested in. I think the redress movement was a vindication for the Japanese Americans to get their dignity back. 

The bill was passed in ‘88. The first checks came out in 1990 to the oldest people. So some people didn't even notice checks were being distributed until maybe 1992. 

Yeah, I was in the audience and, and that was in 1990. I had been visiting a political prisoner in Washington, D.C. They were being held in the federal prison in DC. And it was Sunday, I was in Washington, D.C. for an Amnesty International board meeting, and then I made arrangements to visit Maryland, some of the political prisoners in the detention being held and the holding cell in Washington, D.C. And so I spent the whole day Saturday for about 8 hours talking to various political prisoners that were in prison. I got home and my mind was just so –  I was about to explode. I mean, there was just so much information I was getting [from] all the political prisoners that I had visited. I met them for the first time that year, I think in 1990. And so then my friend Aiko Herzig said, “I can give you a pass.” They’re going to have this ceremony.

In the hall that we had for a few people who were there with passes, there weren’t very many of us. I sat through the ceremony for the old people who were getting checks. The first redress checks. Some of them were so old they were wheeled onto the stage in a wheelchair and they were just old. They were gone, you know…

Mentally, they didn't know what was happening.

I was thinking that my mother was still living at the time. My mother died in 1997. She lived until 98. She was about 90 at that time. But she was very clear and said, “Why couldn't they have…” There were some Isseis who were very clear headed and so forth and they didn't have to make it look like they were giving money to a bunch of people, that it didn't matter. You know.

That's pretty sensitive what you're saying. 

But yeah, I mean, really. They could have asked my mom. They could have asked. Some 90 year older Isseis who were very clear headed and to make it very meaningful for the ceremony [could have] been right.

Do you think the history of the Japanese American internment and the redress movement actually helps the cause of human rights? The fact that we were able to eke out in apology of sorts from the government. 

I don't know that there has been direct influence. And I think it has to do with the fact that this country, the United States, is what it is. I mean, there are many, many human rights groups in the country. There are many people, many leftist movements in this country where they are looking out after each other. It's important to spread human rights awareness throughout the world. Because in the 1940s, when we were put into these camps, there wasn’t enough pressure from various groups to say, no, this is not the right thing to do. There were very, very few human rights groups existing at that time. Amnesty International was not even in existence until the 1960s. 

I read that there were over 500 groups, including the Native Sons, that were [against the Japanese].  

Yeah. There were very many groups that pressured the presidential groups. Yeah, the pressure groups were the American Legion, of course. The American Legion, Hearst Press, the Associated Farmers in California. That evolved into about 500 different kinds of farmers. They wanted to get rid of the Japanese Americans in California especially. The Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West. Those are the major organizations.

So there was this concerted national effort to try to whip up hatred against the Japanese Americans or the Japanese presence in this country. And so the leftist group, whatever group that was trying to counter them, they just didn’t have a chance to do that. But now I think, the redress movement and these kinds of the success of the redress movement was huge. I think that is a huge thing for it to have happened. I think that we should not minimize the effort that was put into the redress movement and that they were successful in getting it moved. And then they were successful in getting $20,000 for each person who was incarcerated. 

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