This is the story of two Japanese-American sisters whose father had emigrated to the United States at the turn of the century. Fate led them to Japan where they experienced World War II on enemy soil. Their family was back in the U.S. and suffering because they looked Japanese while these two girls suffered from severe hardships brought on by the war and from bombs dropped by their own country. Their remarkable story was culled from a family history, a newspaper article, a U.S. military interview, a personal interview, telephone interviews and letters. I am indebted to Mary Yamamoto and Leila Myers for sharing their story with me so that I can share it with you.
In the 37th year of Emperor Meiji's reign (1904), Yamamoto Shigeichi* left his home in the small village of Hashirano in Yamaguchi-ken, Japan in search of the promise of wealth offered in America. He stopped briefly in Hawaii before moving on to earn a wage helping to build a railroad in Wyoming. The contractor of the railroad went bankrupt however, and Shigeichi, who by now had adopted the American name Harry, went to Colorado where he worked as a cook in a restaurant before finding a laborer position in the sugar beet industry there. After being in America for some nine years of struggle, Harry Yamamoto started a small farm of his own, and he began to look for a wife. He exchanged pictures with Urata Moto, a young woman ten years his junior who was living in his home town of Hashirano back in Japan. After encouragement from her parents, Moto boarded a steamship that brought her to Washington where she met her husband, Harry (Shigeichi).
[*complete Japanese names are rendered here as they are in the Japanese context with the surname preceding the given name so in this instance the family name is "Yamamoto".]
Harry brought Moto back to Colorado where they farmed and started a family. The Depression era was approaching and before long the family moved to farm along the North Platte River at the border of Wyoming and Nebraska. They moved a few times and life was difficult yet the family grew to include nine children by the end of 1935. The next year tragedy struck when Moto died in a farm fire. About this same time, Harry's father became fatally ill in Japan. Harry liquidated his farm, and took his nine children to Japan to return their mother's ashes to her homeland, and so they could all begin a new life. His father passed away before they ever reached Japan. Harry (Shigeichi) was the eldest surviving child (his younger brother Taichi lived in a town called Marifu located near Hashirano and was a president of the local Shinyo-Kunsai, or Agricultural Co-operative Bank; and his younger sister, Chika had moved to Hawaii sometime earlier).
Yamamoto Shigeichi had left Japan thirty-three years earlier in search of prosperity and with a belief that he would return home someday possessing a fortune to live out his years in comfort. When Harry Yamamoto returned to Hashirano he was neither wealthy nor the same man who had left. He had struggled and persevered through difficult times in America, but he was unprepared for the reality that he was presented with when he returned to the land of his birth. Harry's stay was brief: he had arrived with his nine children when the rice planting season began and he left accompanied by only three of his four eldest children (Lily, Yutaka, and Tadashi) when the rice had been planted. A photo pregnant with meaning from Harry's aborted return to live in Japan appears in the Hashirano Shogakko (grade school) class picture from Showa 12 (1937) where his son, Kuni, appears seated with his teachers. Kuni sat in the teachers' row rather than with the other students because he had broken tradition by not conforming to the rule that male students have their heads shaved (this rule seems to have lasted at Hashirano Shogakko until about Showa 39). A year after Harry had returned with three of his children, four more children (Coralee, the eldest, Kuni, Jack, and Irene, who was three years old) returned to America. The two remaining daughters: Mary, (the twin sister of Jack) who was then twelve years old, and Leila, who was six, were left in Japan to help care for their aging grandmother. It's not known when Harry was going to send for his two girls, but geopolitical events in the form of the Second World War intervened. Mary and Leila would spend the next eleven years, until 1948, in Japan being Japanese while across the Pacific their father, brothers, and sisters lived in America, land of the enemy.
Harry Yamamoto had given all but one of his nine American-born children a Japanese first or middle name, and both he and his wife had made an effort to teach them about Japanese culture. Their older children were also enrolled in Japanese language courses during the summers. Mary's Japanese name was Takeko and Leila, who had not been registered with a Japanese name, adopted the name Hinako. These were the names they were known by when they lived in Japan and this is their story:
The girls lived with their grandmother in her house which stood along the main street of Hashirano with perhaps a hundred other dwellings. The o-benjo (contemporaneous term for "bathroom") was located down a hallway from the rest of the house. The toilet itself consisted of a hole in the floor that partially concealed a basin for human excrement. Periodically this basin was emptied into another, larger basin that was then topped with straw. When this larger container got full, Takeko and Hinako would attach a pole horizontally to the container which was suspended from it by ropes and hike to their fields to fertilize them being careful not to splash themselves along the way. Of course this was a foul smelling enterprise and not very hygienic, but was a common practice of the day and they had the sense not to eat their vegetables they raised in the fertilized fields until first cooking them.
Wet-rice farming is a highly labor intensive endeavor and even the six year old Hinako was enlisted to help after completing her school day. On the weekends she had to help her grandmother gather kindling and larger logs for three wood stoves and a fire place that lay beneath the o-furo (traditional Japanese bath) at their home. They had to climb up into the nearby mountains to do this and Grandmother Yamamoto had arthritic knees, but in those first few years she could still make it up into the mountains without complaint.
Leila's recollection of this time is vivid:
"One day Grandmother Yamamoto told me to stop working in the field and go home to cook rice for everyone. I was only six years old and I didn't know how to cook rice properly. It came out like soup, but everyone ate it without a word of criticism. After that first mistake I learned to cook rice properly.
"It seems very strange to me now, but we were not allowed to speak during meals. I probably didn't think much of it at the time because I was so tired from working out in the field or gathering the wood. I would often fall asleep in the middle of a meal while my hashi and chawan [chopsticks and bowl] were still in my hands. Grandmother Yamamoto would gently nudge me and I would continue eating."
Hinako's grade school years were difficult because her heavy burden of chores interfered with her ability to play with other children. Typically when she found time, Hinako would entertain herself by fishing, carving wood, painting and making her own toys. She also had a tree swing. There was a room in the large Yamamoto house where rice and wheat were stored, and before Grandfather Yamamoto Itsukichi died, livestock had also been housed there. A beam ran across the ceiling supporting the rooms which were above this storeroom area. The beam itself was a tree trunk that had been stripped of its bark and cleaned but not planed smooth. Using Grandmother Yamamoto's best rope, Hinako made a swing that attached to this "tree-beam" and so she had her private tree swing inside the house. Spending money was not easy to come by. On occasion she would go to the mountains with a classmate and fetch three bundles of wood on her back to sell to a businessman in the village for go sen (five cents) or kick and shove a log down a mountain for jissen (ten cents) which would be enough to buy a whole bag of candy. Finally, Grandmother Yamamoto also taught Hinako how to make zori, a footwear made from rice stalks. Hinako learned to wet the rice stalks before pounding them with a mallet to make the stalks softer for weaving into footwear while holding this "rope" with her toes.
Hinako would also fish either by laying traps catching the fish by hand as she waded in the stream, or fishing with a fishing pole that she made herself. She would use a female bamboo stick as her pole because these sticks were small and flexible. Then she would add string and gather some earth worms before going to the river to fish. Sometimes when she would sleep walk at night she would use her pillow to act out those times when she waded in the water patiently attempting to catch a fish near the rocky bottom.
Fate also led Hinako to begin developing her intellect. Uncle Urata, a millionaire who dealt in automobile parts in Tokyo, decided to send his daughter back to the village of his youth to protect her against the tuberculosis which had already taken the lives of his son and another daughter. Hashirano was a small village without a library to speak of, a solitary, tiny doctor's office, and the only phones that existed at the time were located at the post office and the policeman's office which doubled as his house. Yasuko, lived with Grandmother Urata Hatsu in a house that had a large library consisting of hundreds of books. Hinako began borrowing half a dozen books a week and read them from cover to cover.
Takeko and Hinako's maternal uncle, Akimoto, who was the sonchoo, or mayor of Hashirano. He was respected as an important official and the girls were taught to bow to him if they ever crossed his path on the street. The younger Hinako remembers seeing her uncle while she was riding her bicycle down the street. When she approached him she jumped off her bike, straightened up, and politely bowed.
Learning how to properly be Japanese began with the language. Takeko's comprehension of the Japanese language when she arrived in Japan was so poor that she had to enroll in first grade all over again even though she had already completed the fourth grade in America. (Takeko's class picture in Showa 15* (1940) shows her towering above her classmates with a hair style that distinguishes her from her grade school classmates and their "bowl cut" hair styles). She labored hard and caught up to the rest of the girls in her age group after a few years by completing the first, second, third, and fourth grades in half of the required time. Hinako had not begun school before she arrived in Japan so this was one less hurdle toward acceptance by her peers.
Because they were not born in Japan and their father had decided to return to the U.S. with his family after such a brief time, Takeko and Hinako had never been added to the official family registry that acts as a record of citizenship in Japan. In contrast to the difficulties encountered by the girls during their years in Japan the impact of this may seem insignificant, but it added to the trials they faced. When vaccination shots were being administered to her classmates, Hinako was excluded because she wasn't recognized as a citizen since her name did not appear on the family register. She just wanted to be like everyone else. Uncle Akimoto, who often helped the girls and their grandmother, came to the rescue and convinced the school principal to give Hinako her shots and to treat her like the other children in the future.
[Even to this day, Japanese officially record the date of the year by the reign of the current emperor. Showa marked the reign of Emperor Hirohito. Showa 15 was the fifteenth year of the Showa Emperor's reign which began in 1925]
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