The stories you hear from camp are often stories of what kept people going — the humorous incidents, baseball, dances, poetry clubs; love and dreams for a better, shared future; the everyday, human things that people clung to to keep from being consumed by the yawning abyss that had opened under their lives:

Engagement gift card, handmade in Topaz, 1943


My mother and father were married during the war. But their story started long before Pearl Harbor. This is how they met:

My mother’s family lived on Pine Street in San Francisco. Their next-door neighbor in the 1930s was my dad’s older brother and his family. When Bachan (my grandmother) traveled to Japan to buy merchandise for their store on Grant Avenue in 1935, she took my mom with her. My mom was 16 and this was her first trip to Japan. They paid a courtesy call to their next-door neighbor’s mother, Mrs. Sasaki, in Hiroshima. The Sasaki family had lived in San Francisco and Berkeley for over twenty years, and all the children except the older brother had been born in the US. While Bachan and my mother were eating strawberries in the living room with Mrs. Sasaki, my dad and his sister came home from school on their bicycles. My dad was too shy to be introduced and peeked at the exotic visitors from America from the kitchen.

Bachan, Mom, Mrs. Sasaki, Miyajima, 1935

Mrs. Sasaki was so kind, and insisted on taking them to Miyajima to eat momiji manju and see all the sights. A year later, my dad returned to San Francisco to stay with his brother and became “the boy next door.”

By 1941 my dad was in America on his own; his brother’s family had returned to Hiroshima, where his mother and sisters still lived. My dad was working days and going to school at night, one of the single young men in Japantown who often benefited from my grandmother’s open-door policy when it came to feeding guests.

My mom and dad’s first date was on December 6, 1941. They went to see a Jack Oakie football movie. My mother must have been smitten as this was not at all her kind of film. (On their next date, they went to see her choice, “How Green Was My Valley.”) After the movie they were going to go to Blum’s, but couldn’t find parking, so they went all the way out to the Koffee Kup on 18th and Geary.

My dad had received his draft notice before the attack on Pearl Harbor and reported for duty in January. While my mother and her family were incarcerated in Tanforan, and then Topaz, he was stationed at places like Camp Shelby, Mississippi and Fort Riley in Kansas. They stayed in touch through letters. In November, 1942 he visited my mother at Topaz while on furlough.

 


Nov. 13, ’42

To my mother, 4-5-E, Central Utah Relocation Project, Topaz, Utah
From my dad, Ft. Riley, Kansas

Tomi-chan,
I got back safe & in time so I didn’t have to go to guard house or no A.W.O.L…

Train reached Salt Lake City 7:45 pm which left Delta 3:45 pm & Ogden 8:15 pm. Cheyenne 9:45 am on 12th & left there 11:55 am. reached Denver 3:30 pm & left there 5 pm. reached Junction City 6:00 am on 13th. Still had about 19 hours left so I could’ve stayed with you 19 hours more…

 

Nov. 14, ‘42

On the day I came back from my furlough I did K.P. What a life…

Oh! what a sad world this is but let’s keep our chins up always & wait for our future happy day…

 

In June 1943 their engagement was announced, and the congratulations began pouring in. They were married at the Millard County Courthouse in Fillmore in September of 1943. My mother borrowed a navy blue suit from her sister. Their witnesses were a Nisei couple they didn’t know who had ridden on the bus from Topaz with them and were also going to the courthouse to get their marriage license. After they were married, they took the bus back to Topaz. They were 25 years old.

The following day my mom and dad took a bus to Delta and a train to Salt Lake City for their honeymoon. A school friend of my mom’s who had relocated to Salt Lake City made a hotel reservation for them (the Hotel Wilson on East 2nd South St.), and they spent much of their honeymoon seeing friends and acquaintances who had relocated to Salt Lake City and Ogden.

 


October 29, 1943
To my mother, 4-5-E, Topaz, Utah
Fom a Nisei friend teaching at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts):

I was so happy & thrilled to hear the exciting & wonderful news…

Mom and dad, 1943

 

 

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Images © R. A. Sasaki. All rights reserved.