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Loftus, Mitzi Transcript Part 1
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| Title | Loftus, Mitzi Transcript Part 1 |
| Date | 2009-04-05 |
| Interviewee | Loftus. Mitzi Asa |
| Interviewer | Hirata, Susan |
| Transcriber | Kodama, Beth |
| Subject | Japanese Americans
Emigration & Immigration
Farming
Agricultural laborers
Orchards
Apples
Harvesting
Women
railroad travel
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| Geographic Subject | Hood River (Ore.)
Tule Lake (Calif.)
Siskiyou County (Calif.)
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| Original Format | Microsoft Word
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| Data of Digital Converstion | 2010-07-01 |
| Original Collection | Japanese-American Association of Lane Co., OR, Oral History Collection
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| Restrictions | Permission to use must be obtained from the Oregon Multicultural Archives, OSU Special Collections & Archives Research Center. |
| Language | English |
| Full Text | Japanese- American Oral History Project Mitzi Asai Loftus Date: October 24, 2006 Place: Eugene, Oregon Interviewer: Susan Hirata Part 1 – 32: 05 minutes SH: My name is Susan Hirata, and today is Tuesday, October 24, 2006, and I am here interviewing Mitzi Loftus. Mitzi, can you tell me a little bit about where you were born, when you were born, and sort of where you grew up and your family life? ML: Okay, I was born in 1932 in Hood River, Oregon, and I was the last, the eighth child in the family, of which I think my father delivered seven of those babies at home. I went to school there until the fourth grade, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and I was very startled. That was a Sunday, and on Monday when I went back to school, a boy called me a Jap and spit on me, and I was very bewildered. It was a boy I'd known all my life, gone through school with since the first grade. That was my first big message of some things that were going to be happening to us in the next many years. Well then, the government said that they were going to ship us out of our homes and put us in camps, and to get prepared. And then, that actually happened on May 13 of 1942. All the people in Hood River were put on a train and sent off to Fresno, California, to the assembly center, Pinedale assembly center, which is where we were first sent. At that time there were seven in our family. My brother Min, my brother Jin [ Gene?] and Dick, my sister Mika and I -- that would be five. And my parents – seven -- ???. and we were 2: 03 given one room in the barrack where we were housed. From there we were sent to more permanent camps that were developed for us, any of which held 10,000 people or more, and we went then to Tule Lake, in California, Northern California, not too far from the Oregon border, south of Klamath Falls. We were there for a year, a little over a year, and then Tule Lake was made into a segregation, kind of detention center, and at that point our family was moved and sent to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, which is where I spent the last year, a little more than a year, of our camp experience. And then we were allowed to go back, leave the camps and go back to our homes if we wanted to, or to leave the camps and go someplace. This was before the war had ended. 3: 03 So in April of 1945, what was left of our family, just four then – Dick and me and my mother and father – went back to Hood River. And I was in the seventh Mitzi Asai Loftus 2 grade by then, and I went to an eighth grade [ eight- grade?] elementary school. So I graduated ?? from that school, went to high school in Hood River, in town, and when I graduated from there I went to the University of Oregon for four years and became a teacher, and I taught school off and on for about 47 years. That's pretty much my life. I've been a native Oregonian, lived in Oregon for just about every year of my life I was allowed to. 3: 55 SH: Let me go back to the time when your family heard that they had to pack up and go to these camps. I've always wondered what that time was like. How did the government let people know that this was going to happen, and at that time was your family afraid or worried? Did you actually even know what was going to happen, or were you sort of stepping into this unknown? 4: 29 ML: I know that there were these flyers that were tacked onto telephone poles all over town in every town that had Japanese people. I don't know if we were sent an individual letter. I think maybe we were. But who knows how they could have found everybody, so maybe everybody didn't get one. SH: I guess that's what I wonder. How did they find everyone? ML: It was in the newspapers, local newspapers, and you know, as I've learned over the years, it was a very well- kept secret to people it didn't concern, so I have met Americans . . . every time I speak someone comes forward and says, " You know, I had this very good friend in school who was Japanese, and suddenly they disappeared and we didn't know where they went." I don't know how many times I've heard that from different people, which means that there was a concerted effort to keep it a secret because the government, ? or? some people in places of power, knew it wasn't the right thing to do, and they were doing something that was probably constitutionally not … SH: So I would assume that these people would have also seen these ads but they were such that they didn't pay attention to . . . 5: 50 ML: They lived in communities where there were Japanese people, and only some people . . . It's just like any news. Why is it that some people aren't aware of what's going on when it's there? I remember hoping and wondering if any of my classmates were going to come to say goodbye to me at the train station and nobody came. Maybe because they didn't know I was leaving, but probably because it was during the school day and they had to be in school. So nobody came, and I remember how empty I felt but in later years I thought, well that wasn't their fault. Maybe they wanted to come and say goodbye but they didn't know. 6: 36 Mitzi Asai Loftus 3 SH: So, how many Japanese families were in your community? 6: 39 ML: I'm not sure of the number but my guess would be about fifty [ Wow!] in Hood River. SH: And you had to take a train from Hood River? A train took you to . . .? 6: 52 ML: Yes, and they didn't tell us where we were going. We had no idea where we were going, and I was thinking, Oh, goodie! A train ride, my first train ride! And the first thing they did, they had MPs on each car, and we were told we had to pull the blinds on the windows, so we had that whole long train trip [ and] we couldn't look out the windows, which kind of spoiled my first train ride. SH: So did that make it scary? How did . . . Or for you, being younger, maybe it seemed like a fun train ride, but how were your parents feeling? Were they scared? 7: 30 ML: Well, you know how little kids are. They're so curious. Even if the blinds are pulled they're trying to peek out if nobody's watching, or doing things, and so it was a real effort for the older folks to keep the kids in line. I don't know what was going on in my parents' minds, but surely they must have thought how ridiculous this all was. But Japanese people in their culture are always told to accept what's handed out to you, and just say nothing, be resigned. And I suppose pretty much that's what happened. SH: So do you think that it happened particularly well or easily because this was a Japanese population? 8: 14 ML: I think so, yes. Although I don't think the government and people in charge knew that much about the Japanese culture. It just, it was lucky. They were lucky in that that's the way we were. Otherwise they might have had something on their hands they couldn't deal with very well. But the Japanese, on the most part, are very pliable and compliant, do what they're supposed to do, and so they did that. They found that, at the assembly centers, there was very high security, with high fences with electrified barbed wire around the tops and things, but after we'd been kept in those places for three months or so they realized they weren't going to have any trouble with us. We weren't going to try to run away or cause trouble, so when we went to the relocation centers the security measures were just almost completely dropped. In the assembly center we had a searchlight which played over the camp at night, after dark, all night long. And as I slept I could feel that searchlight go past my face in a kind of a cycle. And you know even with your eyes closed, if you have a bright light come past your face, you can feel it or see it sort of. And that was so embedded in my brain that when I Mitzi Asai Loftus 4 went to Tule Lake to the relocation center I would see that light when I'd go to bed at night, and there wasn't a light. And it took quite a while for me to get rid of that. 9: 50 SH: Did people have a sense of what this was going to be, that you were actually going to be living in a camp somewhere else? Did your parents understand that that is exactly what was happening, or were they unsure of what was happening? 10: 11 ML: They didn't know what the conditions would be, but they knew that they were going to be put in a camp. We had no idea what kind of buildings or anything until we got there, and they were basically tar paper, black tar paper barracks like army camps were, ??? soldiers were in, and many of these camps were originally army camps, abandoned army camps. Some of them were built from scratch, I guess. The assembly centers were existing places like fairgrounds, and racetracks, and housing projects for migrants, or something. They were all . . . Because how are going to immediately house and feed a hundred ?? thousand people? I mean, it's a logistical nightmare. SH: How immediately was this? How long did the government plan to do this? 11: 12 ML: Well, Pearl Harbor was December 7, 1941. We were shipped out on May 13, and we weren't the first ones. The people in Bainbridge Island in Washington, and then the people in Los Angeles who were sent to Manzanar – those were before we . . . So less than six months, less than five months after Pearl Harbor the movement began.. So they moved very fast, and I think the early stage of this whole relocation was administered by the U. S. Army and the military. So we lived under very typical military regulations and rules, including how much a person got paid for working, whether you peeled potatoes and washed dishes in the mess hall like my mother did, or whether you hauled, shoveled coal from the train car load the cars into the dump trucks like my dad did, they all got paid sixteen dollars a month early on. My father was in the upper income bracket because nobody wanted to shovel coal so he got nineteen dollars a month [ chuckles], which is as much as the doctors and dentists and so on got for being forced to work in the camp clinics. SH: Being doctors and dentists 12: 28 ML: Yes, and the only people who could not work in the area in which they were trained or educated were teachers. They could be teachers' aides, but they could not be the main teachers, so they brought Caucasian teachers from outside the camp to teach us and then maybe a Japanese- American woman who was really a teacher would be her aide. Aid? Mitzi Asai Loftus 5 SH: What was your parents' livelihood at the time, and how were they able to leave that and your house? 13: 03 ML: My father was a farmer. He was the son of a rice farmer in Japan and that's what he wanted to be when he first came to this country as a bachelor, so he worked for nine or ten years. No, I guess six or seven years till he was able to save enough money, and found a place he thought he wanted to settle. And he bought this piece of marginal property in Hood River, up on a hillside way up in the boondocks. And he didn't know anything about apple orcharding, but that's what Hood River valley was known for, so he became a fruit orchardist. And he started that farm up on that first piece of property. He eventually owned two more properties, and that third propery is the one where I was born, since I'm the youngest in the family. And that's where we were living when we were sent away. We were . . . In that period of time between December and May he had to hurriedly make arrangements for storing some of our household goods with people, because we were told, when you go you can take only as much as you can carry. And so he found people to lease the home orchard where we lived, and a second orchard which was not too far from there, but the original homesteaded property that he bought, he couldn't find anybody to lease it because it was too remote and nobody wanted to do it. So that ranch really went to pot because you cannot leave a fruit orchard for three years untended. It just goes to pot. And that was one of my father's heartbreaks. The other one was the man, the neighbor of the man who leased the second property was not very kind and he kept threatening my father that something was not . . . that the ranch was not being taken care of properly, and he really wanted to buy the property and that was his way of doing it. And when we went, none of the Japanese knew where we were going, how long we would be there, would we ever be allowed to come home, all that uncertainty which must have been just terrible for my parents and all the older generation. So we were in Heart Mountain when this neighbor started agitating about our property, and my dad didn't know what to do. He couldn't leave the camp. He couldn't hire an attorney. We had no income, so he finally relented and sold that property to the neighbor, and he never really recovered from the pain of that situation. 16: 00 And for many years he could not drive past that property. That property was across from the country club in Hood River, and ?? out in the country, and when we'd go for a Sunday drive he would never go with us because he wanted to know where we were driving. And my brother, who was the driver, would say, " Well, we're just going for a Sunday drive. We don't know where we're going." So my dad would say, " Well, I don't think I'll go." And it wasn't till years later I realized he was afraid we were going to drive past that orchard, and he couldn't bear it because he had cut down all the old trees that were not very productive and planted, replanted that orchard with new young trees. And in those days we didn't have dwarf, semi- dwarf trees which tend to bear very soon. You had to wait seven years for them to bear. And so when Pearl Harbor came along it was just about the time that orchard was beginning to bear fruit. So my dad never Mitzi Asai Loftus 6 enjoyed the fruits of his labor, and that was very painful for him, to see that beautiful orchard that he had created himself and never could . . . So that was a hard one for him. 17: 19 SH: And he sold it at a huge loss? Or just the fact that he had to sell it at all? ML: I have no idea what he sold it for but his hands were tied. He was in camp, he couldn't come back and negotiate, and the man was just pressuring him over and over, and my dad was pretty sure he was just greedy and wanted to buy the property, but he thought he had no choice. 17: 51 SH: I would imagine there were a lot of stories like that within the camp, that it was happening to many people in the camp. ML: If there were such cases, and if they talked about it, since I was only in the fourth to seventh grade I didn't hear them or I wasn't aware of them. But I used to be a really good eavesdropper. All my life I was. I think if those conversations took place in my home with visitors I would have heard them. I have an idea that if that happened to other people they may have mentioned it to one or two of their closest friends but they didn't broadcast it and complain about it because Japanese people don't do that. 18: 33 SH: It might have also been shameful, perhaps? ML: Well, for whatever reason. " Don't cry over spilt milk" is pretty much a Japanese cultural value, so . . . SH: Tell me about your siblings and how did they go through this situation. 18: 58 ML: My one brother volunteered in the army in June of 1941. We're talking about almost six months before Pearl Harbor was attacked. He was very precocious and so he had been skipped in school two years, and he graduated from high school when he was fifteen. So he went to work on the railroad. He'd go down to the railroad house and live there during the week, and on weekends he'd come home and visit the family. And he waited until he was eighteen or nineteen – and that was in 1941 -- and he came home one weekend with some papers for my father to sign. And my father said, " Well, what is this?" And he said, " I'm volunteering for the army" because he was too young to volunteer. He was . . . you had to be a certain age to be drafted and another age to volunteer. I think it was different – between eighteen and nineteen or something. And he wasn't quite old enough to be a volunteer. So he had to get his parents' permission to do it. He said, " I'm volunteering in the army" and my father said, " Well, I don't know if I want to sign this or not." And he said, " Well, if you don't sign it I will forge your signature." So my father signed it, and he went in the Mitzi Asai Loftus 7 army, and then my oldest brother was drafted and he went in the army on December 4, 1941, just three days before Pearl Harbor. So what's happening? Why is there an army? Why are they drafting people? I had two brothers in the army already when Pearl Harbor was attacked, so they were well past basic training, getting ready to be shipped someplace, by the time we left our homes. And as it turned out, when my oldest brother was sent overseas first, he was in the intelligence service, and both of them served in the Pacific Theater, against the Japanese. And many many Americans are always shocked to find that out because all they hear about is the 442nd and the 100th -- the famed Japanese- American, all Japanese- American unit that was highly decorated and made a big record for themselves. But many Japanese- American boys 21: 29 did go to the Pacific Theater. And that story is finally beginning to be told now. There is even a book . . . Well, several books have been written about that. SH: So this wasn't a segregated unit? They were . . . 21: 48 ML: No. However, the Japanese- American boys were not allowed to be in anything but the infantry. They could not join the air force or the navy or the marines. Somehow or other there was a man named Ben Kuroki who was an ace pilot in the air force. How he got in the air force I don't know but he was a hero, and he came to speak in the camps to raise money for U. S savings bonds. You know they had bond drives, and they came into the camps and tried to tell Japanese people, " Buy American government bonds for the war effort." And I remember hearing Sgt Ben Kuroki coming in. He was an air force pilot. There was 22: 36 a point at which the government decided, well maybe these guys are not loyal enough. So they quit the draft, quit drafting them for a period of time. Quit drafting Japanese- American boys. Then they started coming in . . . when they saw how compliant we were and how we were going to be easy to take care of in the camps they said, Well, maybe they are loyal enough. And they came into the camps and had drives, not only to sell bonds but to try to talk the Japanese- Americans in the camps to volunteer. And some of them said, " The hell I will! I can tell you where to put that!" And others said, " Sure I'll volunteer. Anything to get out of this rathole!" And some of them volunteered and left, and eventually they started drafting boys again into the army. 23: 27 SH: Did it also work, I mean, we were also in a war with Germany, and Italy, so did that work the same with Germans and Italian- Americans – that they were also . . . ML: No, Germans and Italians as far as I know could be in any branch of the service. Mitzi Asai Loftus 8 SH: I wonder why that was. Was it because they were harder to distinguish? The Japanese were easier to distinguish? ML: Well certainly there was that. I don't know what the thinking was. I don't know how the military thinks. In fact my brother ? Haff?, when he was to have his furlough after basic training, which in those days was three months – you had to do basic training. And he was supposed to have his furlough because he was in in June. June, July, August, and in September he was supposed to have a furlough, and he wrote home and said, " All furloughs have been postponed, for no reasons given." And he was under the command of General DeWitt, who was in charge of the defense of the West Coast, the Pacific coastline. And he was the one who really pushed to have the Japanese people moved out, sent away. In October my brother writes again. He said, " Our furloughs have been postponed another month. No reasons given and in November we get a letter from him saying, " I don't get a furlough. We're being shipped to the coast of California to guard the coast. What was that about? Anybody who tells me we had a surprise attack, I can't, I don't believe. I don't know that they knew where it was going to be, but they were expecting it, maybe they were even. . . there are stories that Roosevelt was kind of encouraging this to happen , with the diplomatic relations that were taking place. So then when my oldest brother got a month's furlough before he was sent overseas, because he was sent overseas first. He could not visit us, because at that time we were in Tule Lake, which is in California, and there were army regulations, or some kind of regulations that no GI's could visit the families if they were in this war zone, Washington, Oregon, and California basically. So my brother had to go to Idaho, where there were Japanese people from Hood River in camps. He visited them. My sister by this time had left the camp to go to LDS Business College in Salt Lake City, so he went to visit her and some of . . . friends, other girls, one of whom was Bessie, who became my sister- in- law was also there, and so he visited people like that. He couldn't visit us. 26: 20 Then he went overseas, and they my brother Haff got his furlough before he was going to be sent overseas. He came to visit us, because we were in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, then. But he was so disgusted with the whole situation, he left after a few days without saying anything. We didn't know what happened to him. My mother cried and wondered what was happening. And he wrote a letter to us later and said, " I just couldn't take it anymore, seeing my parents and my brother and sister locked up, while I'm fighting in the army, going overseas. So I had to leave." SH: So it was only the Japanese- Americans on the West Coast that got put in camps. I know you're been asked before. Why didn't your family just 27: 11 go live in another state, and then you wouldn't have to live in the camp. ML: We were allowed and encouraged to do that. But Japanese people aren't people who just pick up and move to a strange place, especially if they're the only family in town, and there were all, mostly farmers. And they didn't have an Mitzi Asai Loftus 9 education, and the older generation like my mother and father couldn't read or write much English or speak very well. It was a scary thing and unless they could round up ten families— say hey, let's all go to Utah or something – then they might consider it, but everything was such uncertainty . . . There was so much uncertainty about everything. Japanese people aren't ones who take risks and do things. They save their money until they have enough to buy something and then they buy it and pay cash. And that's the way they are so very few people did that. I can remember the Sumidas deciding they were going to do it. They filled their big truck full of their household belongings. I remember they came by our house to say goodbye and we all wept and thought, we'll never see them again. And they moved out to Montana, I think. It was Montana or Wyoming. There were just scattered families who did that, but for the most part they just sat and waited to see what the government was going to do. And I've spoken with Ed Miyakawa, who wrote the novel " Tule Lake." I just talked to him last month, in 2006, and he said, " Why didn't your family, why were you in Tule Lake so long? And were you there when it became a segregation center?" I said no, because we had to fill out those so- called loyalty oaths, and my father answered yes, yes, so we were tagged as being loyal, so we were shipped out of there when it became a segregation center. And I said, " Why was your family gone?" He said, " Well, we left before those loyalty oaths came out. 29: 24 And he said, " Why didn't your father go out?" I said, " Ed, your father was an educated man. He had a college degree. My father was a farmer. What is he going to do, going out to this strange world where he can't speak the language, he doesn't have an education, he has no skills, professional skills or anything." And Ed looked a little surprised and thought, well, yeah, I understand now. But right up until now, in 2006, he didn't understand and I wasn't able to tell him what I thought he knew. So it was very interesting that way. So his father left the camp quite soon. They were in Tule Lake a very short time, and then they went out, they found a sponsor in Colorado, I think it is . . . SH: Did you have to find a sponsor? ML : . . . who took them under their wing. Well, . . . SH: Or could you just go and drive out there and pick a sponsor? ML: It's just like after the Vietnam War, how are you going to go, come from Vietnam and come to the United States and make a living for yourself when you can't speak the language, you don't know your way around. You need to have somebody who's going to kind of be there to support you and help you and tell you what to do, and how to get help. And it was the same kind of situation. And the American Field Service Committee, Quakers, and churches were the ones who came forward at that point, and tried to help Mitzi Asai Loftus 10 30: 49 some Japanese people who wanted to leave the camps and resettle. And this was true for East Coat folks, some of them, who were shocked to find out that we were in camps. And some very devout Christian folks stepped forward and said this is terrible, we need to help some of these people. SH: It's interesting that the government didn't take that on a bit. It seems like it may have more, at least, efficient with funds to find, to help families sort of find a different place to live rather than house them in a . . . ML: You have to remember we were at war and the whole, all efforts and everything were for the war, and that's the only thing the government was . . . It's like right now, in Iraq. What are we doing for our own people? We're not only not doing for our own people, we're doing everything for them to lose what they have, their opportunities and health care and education -- everything is being cut for the war effort, so . . 32: 06 |
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