toyoaki “Bob” Yamada

Bob Yamada experienced the incarceration when he was a teenager, at a pivotal moment in his life between high school and college. Raised in Seattle as the youngest of seven children, Bob’s parents were hardworking Issei, doing what they could do to make ends meet. His father worked as a janitor, and his mother was the manager of a small hotel. Bob has fond memories of his childhood, from being able to sneak out at night to having an entire room to himself in the family’s hotel, a luxury at the time. Decades after the end of the war, Bob dedicated himself to the redress movement with the JACL, shaped and influenced by his college education and his politicized experience.

“For my generation, we just starting out life was like one of the greatest experience you could ever have. But from my parents generation who are in their 60s that have spent a lifetime fighting discrimination and making a go of it, and at the point where they are finally able to retire with, all the work they have done, they had the house, they had the family and had a whole community to fall back on and to lose all that…”

My name is Toyoaki Yamada, all the way to high school, it was not until I got in college that I picked the name Bob. People had a hard time with me as a youngster. Yeah. Most of my life, during the young period, I was known as “Lefty” because I was left handed.

Can you tell me when you were born and where?

Seattle, Washington. December 11th, 1925. The seventh son of my family was born. My mother was in her 50s. Last son of seven children.

I wanted to interview you to ask about your internment experiences and your thoughts. So I will start out by asking you if you remembered Pearl Harbor. But please feel free to paint a picture of what your life was like before Pearl Harbor, to contrast.

I was brought up in a lower middle class family. My father worked as a janitor and he left the house every day about 10:00 in the evening and didn’t come back until about seven, slept all day. So we hardly ever saw my father except on Sundays. My mother, the main enterprise we had, my mother ran a small hotel. We leased the building, and she rented rooms and took care of the accommodations. And we had a hotel that had about 30 rooms. 

But the important thing about my life that from the very beginning is that in the very beginning, by the time I was about ten years old, I was able to have a room of my own. So I had a room of my own in the hotel and a lot of fun. And the most important thing is that I could sneak out at night and go to the park.

Right. Well, do you remember the day Pearl Harbor was bombed?

Oh, yes. I guess it was Sunday. And that's the day that I usually go see a movie. So I took off in the morning. I heard the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the morning news, but I still did my usual chore, to go down, to go see a movie. And it was not until I started walking home. It hit me. I was so shocked and I was surprised. And I, for the first time in my life, I felt, you know, gosh, I felt like I would be identified with the enemy because I had a Japanese face that I never had that kind of feeling before.

So had you heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor? Only on the radio.

That’s right, the radio. And then the newspapers came out in the afternoon and so forth. And then when you got home, everybody knew about it.

Did anything happen after December 7th, 1941, that confirmed your fears?

Yes, because I got home and my parents were throwing things away. God.

They were throwing things away?

That's right. Any thing that identified them as, you know, ridiculous because they packed up and got out, you know? And then there were curfews. My father couldn’t go to work, he worked nights and he couldn’t go to work. And he couldn't do anything. And, uh, and about a week later, the FBI came in and searched the house. They didn't take anything, didn't do anything. Took my father away for a day and then questioned him and let him go. That was the extent of the initial harassment we had. Plus the fact that we had. We were restricted as to certain areas we could travel, my parents at least.

And all of a sudden you had your father at home? 

Yeah. 

And he wasn't a happy father. I mean, he was a tense father to have.

That's right. And knowing that. But I really didn't speak with him, because he spoke in Japanese primarily, and his English was very bad. And I could speak to him in English and he could understand some things, but really couldn't talk English that well, beside he was very old.

Right. You were about to be 16.

I was in high school.

Did you have boys or girls your age that you could talk to about this tumultuous time?

Oh, yes. I had my friends that I used to go walk to school with all the time. And there are Niseis.

But do you remember any discussions you had or?

There's nothing. Nothing we could do. Literally nothing we could do. You're sort of stuck in a situation where we have no control. We had curfew. We had restrictions.

The first information we had is that the Isseis will be locked up. To be taken away and locked up. But nothing about the Niseis. Niseis, they said, were American citizens. They won't touch us. And if the Isseis go, maybe some of us will go with them because you know, we're going to take care of a family type of thing, but be voluntary rather than forced in this kind of situation. But within a month, that whole thing changed.

And we lived the whole winter month of December and January with nothing but rumors. Everything under the sun, knowing that. Not only that but all the leadership, Japanese leadership in the community was taken away and locked up. And all of a sudden, the JACL leadership, the Japanese American Citizens League, who were at that moment in time or were really nothing much of anything, very powerless people that they weren’t in control of anything, were thrust in the leadership positions and forced to become the spokesperson for the Japanese community. And they were not up to it. They did the best they could, but they weren't up to it.

Do you remember when the posters started being put up on February 19th? Did the posters go up February 19th, or did you already know before the posters.

Well we knew before the posters went up because we knew about what happened in Bainbridge. Bainbridge was the first, they rounded them up in 24 hours.

Now, I've talked to some people who got word from the grapevine somehow, maybe even the summer before December 7th, before Pearl Harbor, that if there was a war between Japan, United States, that the Japanese Americans would be locked up. Had you heard rumors like that before?

I wasn't involved politically. I was involved with school work and all that kind of thing. The important thing I would say about the time in December and January was this is a time where a lot of people were, could voluntarily move if you were Nisei. Then they stopped it.

There was sort of a small window of opportunity, 

Right. And a lot of people took the opportunity to go to school in the East.

Was this college students? 

College. And a lot of people have also moved to areas where they thought they would not be evacuated. Yeah. The word that, you know, West coast. So they moved to East parts of state and moved to other parts and they had get all kinds of horror stories about people driving and moving out of the state, going to Idaho and then being locked up in Idaho or being chased out of the town in Idaho. Because “We don’t want any ‘Japs’ here.” But we don't know whether it's true or not. But these are type of stories that were circulating.

We didn't know what to expect, we didn’t know where we were but we had all kinds of stories and so forth. And the most important thing is the military took over. Up to that point, I think it was the civilian population that was in control, but then the military takeovers and then everything went kaput.

When did the military takeover?

February 19th, when we got the order 9066. They established the Western Defense Command and and put us into the hands of the military. The military getting carte blanche to do what they wanted to do with the enemy aliens in their midst. Which is not only the Japanese but the Germans and the Italians. But the evacuation of the Japanese was a total evacuation of the whole community. Men, women, children, even people at hospitals.

Now as a teenager, was this terrifying or was this – you said it was confusing.

Confusing.

From Seattle which assembly center did you go to?

Puyallup. Puyallup Assembly Center. And we stayed there [from] April and stayed there until August. And then we moved to Minidoka. I mean retrospect, it was the way I thought then. And that it totally destroyed the whole world I was living in where I was locked up tight within a class system, within a family system, within a community system that puts you in your place and limits you to doing anything, where all of a sudden I was liberated from all that to be [an] individual. In a sense that the camp forced me to be not more than a member of the family, but to be a part of the whole entourage that’s there. And to be a part of that. But I learned to do things. And the best of all was my sister in law at that point was one of the person that helped organize the library in camp and asked me to help her out. So that's why I got in with good people. And the most important thing about that was that I was a high school student and I ran into all these college kids.

And the most important thing about that experience is that for the first time in my life, I realized that we didn't need to have money to go to college. You could work your way through school and college was not for the rich. It was for anybody that wanted to. If you had the desire, you could work your way through school, You could do all kinds they didn't have to worry about. I'd never knew this.

And these guys just pushed me a little bit, pushed me, pushed me hard, you know? You know, do all kinds of things. You're smart enough. Get out of here.

Now, can you describe the mood with which you moved out? The only home you know?

Well it really didn't bother me. It was a great adventure to me. But the impact it had on my parents was shattering. More so than anybody else. Because for me, at my age, it was a great adventure. And anything like that – I didn't have to go to school, I got to play around and do all kinds of things. But for my parents, it was absolutely shattering. They lost everything. They lost their home, they lost most of the possessions, they destroyed a lot of things they had. You put in storage, but they came back about five years later and the storage room was all raided and half the things were no longer there. Yeah. Terrible.

But for my mother, camp life was a great experience. For the first time in her life, she didn't have to work. And in a way, she loved it. And she could socialize with her friends and talk and. And go. Yeah. And. And she loved it. My father was the other way around, he sort of resented the whole experience. The fact that he was locked up because he was Japanese. He lived here all his life, more or less. 

For my generation, for people between the ages of roughly 13 to 17, 18, we just starting out life was like one of the greatest experience you could ever have. But from my parents generation who are in their sixties that have spent a lifetime fighting discrimination and making a go of it, and at the point where they are finally able to retire with, all the work they have done, they had the house, they had the family and had a whole community to fall back on and to lose all that.

For my parents generation, it was absolute catastrophe. And they're at the point where age wise, you couldn't do anything, too old to work. And then what happened to them in camp is a tragedy in a sense, they become in a sense institutionalized in a sense that they're room and board was provided for. They had all kinds of leisure time and they were able to socialize with their peer group, who also had free time on their hands because they couldn't do anything. And they had a good time. But it's a tragedy in the sense that they have nowhere to go. So that when camp closed, they went back to Seattle. They had nothing.

All right. So as long as you didn't look at what you lost or look at the future and ask yourself, God, what's going to happen, if you could just relax and focus on the social life you were okay.

That's right. And I had a lot of fun because I was working in the library and all of the books, we were writing to every library in the area asking for books. And people would send us book. And we organized a good library.

You know, people also want to know who are mean to the Japanese Americans, you know, who did the drive by shooting and spit on them. But people also want to know who was nice.

So the good thing about it is that the Seattle area had no trouble with the Caucasians in Seattle. They were very nice. Yeah, for the most part there wasn't any assaults or any viciousness that I knew. 

So you were part of the team that wrote to all these libraries asking for donations, looking through the leftover victory book drive books to see which ones were worth having in your library. 

And that was a lot of fun. I enjoyed myself. But more importantly, the people I talked with people in a different world altogether than what I was used to.

Well, if Pearl Harbor hadn't happened, that you would have never gone to college.

That's right. Well, I was taking a course on business administration, taking shorthand, typing, accounting. I mean, bookkeeping, that kind of thing. And I was kind of becoming an accountant or something like that. And god I hated it. I hated it. I hated the coursework. And I was doing very poorly in school, in high school I was doing C work. Oh, I did very well in camp school because I had a great teacher.

Had a great teacher, one teacher.

I had two. One teacher especially. She was a hakujin. Mrs. Richardson. She taught literature. She knew I love to read, so she put me on a special program all by myself. To read what I want to read and report to her. So I spent a whole semester at my junior and high school reading the great novels of Russian literature. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. Oh, it was great. And she's the one that more than anybody else just said, “Get out of here go to college. There's all kinds of way to go on to college, work your way through school and do all kinds of things. But in order to do that, you got to get your grades up. And not only that, but you got to get your requirements.”

I see. So Miss Richardson persuaded you to take good high school courses outside of camp so you can go to college.

Get yourself in college. She says, “You know, and you don't have to be rich to go to college. To get in, but you've got to get your grades up. You got to get the coursework out of the way once you got that then you can go to college.” And I was at the University of Michigan and I went to Ann Arbor High School.

For two years I was working full time because they let me adjust my hours, So I could go to school. I took all these college preparatory courses that I didn't have. And finally in 1945, I was finally admitted to University of Michigan, and I ran into one bit of trouble there. In 1945, the fall of ‘45, the war was almost over and all the G.I.s came back and the place was flooded with G.I.s, all older people.

Much more ambitious, they were much more serious and they were older and they lost their time. So they wanted to make up time. But and, but they socially, meeting with them, with the older people that I learned a lot from them. That was a great experience to be with people that are older than I was, who had been through all kinds of experiences and socializing with them. And that's where I became highly political. Because the group I became mixed up with were the very political people.

So these were G.I.s that were political.

Ex-G.I.s They organized like groups on campus. We had a political group on campus. A socialist group, but the group I learned a lot from them, it was a real learning experience, just to be with people, to learn about everything. Only person that really spoke out about what's happening at that point, only person that really spoke up first about the outrage of the Japanese evacuation was Norman Thomas and he really spoke out, even got a pamphlet about denouncing the U.S. government for what they did. And he was my hero. So when I got to meet him, god.

So now before we were talking about how there were some people who spoke out against the Japanese, mass so-called evacuation, there were people who tried to help you out like the American Friends Committee and the librarians who donated the books. But then there was this The Socialist Party. 

Oh, yes. Oh, God, yes. And that's why I felt a kinship if I became a member of the Socialist Party.

Well, that's interesting. Okay, great. Um, did so do you think these kinds of literature and the work that the Socialist Party do, did it lay out sort of a foundation of what other the redress movement later on was able to work or is it disconnected?

I think it’s disconnected. They all flowed together, but they've done that. I don't give the socialist party any credit for anything because they were in a minority and they were off for deep and up there. They meant well and they said the right things, but nobody was listening to them. Except for Norman Thomas, the only spokesperson that we had that was able to make any kind of impact, you know.

I know you said you had fun and camp, and this is a sort of a sticky question, and that if camp had its good parts, it helped people like yourself to get out of – I don't know if this is the right word to use – but the Japanese ghetto or the Japanese American web. It broke that apart so that you could experience other things. I mean, you sacrificed your family and community life to go out in the world, as it were.

As an individual.

Now, right. Now, if camp was wrong, what would it, in your own opinion, what would have been the right thing for the government to do after Pearl Harbor?

I think what they should have done that was intern some of the Japanese leadership that was in association with the Japanese government, and they should have, and that's about it. They should have left the Japanese alone. Let them become part of the war effort in their own territory.

Given that certain newspapers, radio announcers, labor unions, were so anti-Japanese, what could have the government done to intervene media and you know, just the whole hysteria that had built that?

They could have intervened.

You think so?

They had the power to intervene.

But there had already been decades of cartoons, literature, 

Yes. 

Movies that depicted the Japanese as sinister and treacherous. No good.

Yeah. We were unknown. Unknown entity. All the news that we had a Japanese face to resemble the enemy. Therefore, because we resemble the enemy we were the enemy period. That's the way I see it. There's nothing you can do about that point.

So that you think that the government could have reeducated people as to who the Japanese Americans were?

They could have done other things and they could have, the thing that was wrong is they gave the control of the Japanese problem to the military. And the military took the most expedient way out and instead are trying to cope with the problems of the community out there. They just moved them out because they could do that, that's the Army's way of handling problems. And I say that if it was left in the hands of the civilian organization instead of the army, things might have been different. I can't guarantee they would have been.

So what would prevent something like this from happening again, in your own opinion?

It depends on the situation and I think the mere fact that we had to experience in itself, I get testimony that, uh, police have a history of the thing that was wrong with, this, that this itself would prevent. Might prevent.

That we would have learned from this history.

That's right. You would hope to have learned from this history, but you never can tell. Depends on who was in charge. And the fact now is that we have enough people who have lived through the experience to hopefully to speak out. You know, I don't trust my Japanese community group members speaking about anything.

Were you part of the redress? 

Yes, I was. I joined JACL to help them work through the redress movement. And then when redress came through, I quit the JACL. Yeah, I was at the national convention in Cleveland. At the JACL national convention when we pushed through the Motion for Redress. We lobbied like hell for everything under the sun. I went to the city council and got them to pass a resolution to support the redress in Berkeley and Sacramento. But once you got through I said, well I did my duty. I helped organize people to go out and testify. We had people. We had screened people beforehand to see who should testify.

And these were people who had particularly good stories or people who knew how to speak in public.

Yeah, mainly people with good stories.

Would you say you are proud of the work that you do for redress? I mean, what's your feeling about it? 

No.

You don't take much credit. But who should take the credit?

National office. JACL. I think they did a magnificent job on that. And several congressmen, Senator Inouye and a couple other people. Yeah. Because we had that, you know, they had their public hearing. So we had hearings in L.A., San Francisco. That was important.

Are you proud this country before or you think it's sort of a matter of course?

No, I'm glad they did apologize. Yeah, they should.

Well, some people have a feeling that the apology is not really a very good.

That's right. The very fact that they did it really shocked the life out of me. I didn't think they would.

Really?

Yeah. I thought that we would be compensated which we were working for. But the letter of apology was something I didn’t expect.

I talked to people who said that the redress money came much, much too late.

Too late, Too late.

And so do you think it's justified that people like yourselves who had fun and camp should get the money in leu of your parents? I don't know if they were still alive. And I know I mean, what was the justice in that? That the people who suffered the most were already gone.

And that was one of the injustices of the redress. You know it should have happened, ten years after the evacuation and five years after the evacuation to have it happen. But 30 years later, I mean, years later.

If war ended in ‘45 and the first checks went out in 1990, that's 45 years. And, you know, some people barely I mean, maybe they died in 1990 and they didn't get the checks.

No, I would say that the redress was necessary. I think the apology was necessary and redress was necessary. But it should have happened five years after. Well, and there's no amount of money that could really cover the losses that people have suffered.

What is the most important aspect of the redress movement and what it achieved?

Well, it got the whole experience of the Japanese-Americans experience out in the public so that it became a matter of not only ancient history, but something that they have to live with and and recognize as an ongoing problem that has at the forces that the legislation set and would permit this to happen are still around.

The people or the process?

The process.

The process. Okay. The legal system that allowed this to happen is still in place.

That's right. And the things that happen in terms of the evacuations were all declared to be constitutional and they have not been overturned.

Well, the California educational system just decided that the Korematsu case should be in civics classes in high school. So that's one way that these stories will live. And books. And how can stories of people who experienced this, like yourselves, you're an endangered species now. How does stories stay alive?

Oh, there are enough people who are writing their stories. Enough people, they're telling their stories, Enough people who are of our generation. Then that's what experience our reporting it. I have no fear of this material being lost, especially the third or fourth generation. But the the fourth generation are much more outspoken and they we want to get the story out. Niseis may not but the Sanseis and Yonseis will and that’s a good thing about them. The Nisei generation is a passive generation for the most part, but the Sanseis are not I'm very pleased with that. And Yonseis are…

Even more.

And more so I'm pleased with that to. So the story will be recorded.

If there is one message and I know you must have many messages to give to future generations, what is the most important lesson in all of this that you hope future generations will learn?

The one thing that I am most perturbed about is that for my generation, with little experience, we have a total, total, cynical attitude toward government and what the government could do that.

The Niseis have a cynical [attitude]? 

Oh, yes. What they've been through. And this stuff and lies, they've been told that not the other things that have happened to them. And now they have a total cynical attitude toward the government and there isn’t much you can do about that, the present because of their experience. But I hope that’s not true of the Sanseis and Yonseis. They should learn from the experience of the Nisei. And especially if they heard the story and realize why the Nisei’s have this attitude and the could do something about it.

Maybe so then your message is this understanding that you hope that the younger generations will have about the niseis cynical attitude?

Oh, yes. Maybe because there's not two things. One is that you should never forget the experience that the Niseis went through, the Isseis and Niseis went through. That's a history lesson that has to be always there. But and for the Niseis to have lived through the history make them cynical for Sanseis and Yonseis, they should be able to look at why the Niseis are cynical, why they are reflecting on the world that they do and live with it and cope with it and make it better. That's a challenge the challenge for the Sansei but they can do it.

But the important thing is to get the story out more. The trouble is the story is not well known, to people in the East who never heard of the evacuation or people who in the West Coast who may have heard about it but never experienced it. So we have to get the story out more and more.

The camp experience. I mean, the whole evacuation, the West Coast is a tragedy of the American government. And American people who in the midst of war time, just totally ignored the whole process. But they weren't sure what's going on. They didn't care. And also, it's a result, of course, a century of a lot of racial hatred on the West Coast against the Japanese.

Yeah, all culminated together. But the important thing is that let this be a history lesson and see if you can learn from that.

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