INTERVIEW WITH NANCY YAMAHIRO
Nancy Yamahiro (NY) interviewed by Katrina Crosby (K) on Sunday, August 13 in San Mateo, California.
Katrina Crosby (K)
Nancy Yamahiro (NY)
Nancy Araki (NA)
Jacqueline Yamahiro (JY)
K: It’s Sunday, August 13th at 1:09pm, and I’m sitting here with Nancy in San Mateo. So, to begin with can you state your full name and where you were born.
NY: Nancy Lynn Yamahiro and I was born in Lexington, Kentucky.
K: Can you please share your connection with the American prison camps where Japanese were held in World War II?
NY: I’m going to be a little bit picky about that question because I’m an attorney because I don’t know what you mean by my connection. Like, how do I know about them?
K: Well, not how you know about them but how you’re related to someone who was in one?
NY: My father was interned during World War II in the Hunt camp in Minidoka, Idaho.
K: As a daughter of Roy, can you share what he was like as a father?
NY: He was a very devoted father, I think. He would get up in the morning and shovel off the pond so we could go skating in the winter. He taught us to swim in Lake Minnetonka and diving off his shoulders standing in the lake and holding us so we could learn how to float. He took us hunting with the dogs, sent me running through the fields so I could flush out the pheasants for him.
K: And did he ever tell stories of his time in the prison camp?
NY: Not when I was little. Not sure at what age he started talking about it, probably at the same time I became aware that my parents were different races or that there was such a thing as racial disparity between people because, certainly as a kid, you’re not born with some…And looking at my parents, I’ve never looked at my father and said, “he’s Japanese,” he just looks like your dad and so I learned about race from the way people responded to my parents; who were mixed race. I mean it’s a mixed-race marriage, so from my mother’s side, her father had problems with my dad because he was Japanese and didn’t come to her wedding. It was only through my dad’s persistence that very creative work as both a father and a psychologist that he won my grandfather over so we could have a relationship with our grandparents, which I’m grateful for. My mother’s father was an alcoholic and so my father took a bottle of his favorite thing to drink and had, basically, an all-night discussion with my grandfather, who was the type of alcoholic that just got happier the more he got drunk. So my dad spent an all-night party with my grandfather and then they became friends and from that my sister and I could go visit and we had a relationship with him, which was very meaningful to both my sister and I.
K: And from your father’s experiences, did any of his stories from his life stand out to you the most?
NY: I think certainly he remembered being held in the paddocks at Santa Anita racetrack from where they were being relocated, they went to these relocation centers first. I remember him talking about the little boy who drowned in the irrigation canal and when I visited the Japanese Museum in Portland, Oregon, there were pictures of kids playing in this irrigation ditch and there was a story about a little boy who drowned in that irrigation canal and I remembered my father’s story and I thought there is verification that this wasn’t something just from my dad’s memory, but it was something that was known to all the people in the camp and was considered a huge tragedy. But that was very emotional for my father and he also remembered an elderly couple from camp who later… when we got the records from the Freedom of Information Act… the social workers who were in charge of trying to figure out what to do with my father and his siblings in camp since they didn’t have parents, had written about this attachment my father had formed with this elderly couple. My dad had been very sick with a kidney infection while he was in camp and was hospitalized for a time and they were reluctant to move him away from this couple after he’d been sick for so long and my aunt and my uncle were already out of camp and in Wisconsin, but my father had remained there not wanting to separate from that elderly couple and so, it’s interesting that he remembered them. He didn’t remember a lot about camp, but he remembered them, he remembered the boy drowning in the canal, and also remembered being in a little gang of boys and being, sort of, a bad little boy sometimes. But he drove a milk truck or coal truck while he was in camp, so he would just drive it around to deliver it to all of the different barracks.
NA: It’ll probably be coal because milk was really…
NY:Not available?
NA: … not available and it was just for infants. Like I never had milks in the camps, I was too old.
NY: But I went back to Minidoka with my father, when he drove me out to Portland. I went to school Lewis and Clark from Colorado and on the way out to college, we stopped to try to find the camp in Minidoka and had a pretty rough time finding it. It was way before they built a visitor’s center there and we were excited because we saw the sign by the side of the road. So, we stopped at the sign and the sign was about some prehistoric dog bones that had been found out there but there was no sign out by where ten thousand people or over many there were at the camp who were interned there during World War II, but my dad recognized the stone guard station that was by the road and said, “Oh, oh, oh,” and pulled in there. We got out and there was literally nothing besides this guard house and sage brush in the desert out there. My dad was very quiet when we were out there and he cried at one point, which really got me emotionally because there were not many things that brought my father to tears and he really just didn’t talk about it on the car ride out of there. I sort of intuitively knew it was, sort of, not a good time to be asking him about it. But I did ask him about it and we did talk about it after that, but that day was obviously very emotional for him. And when we got to Portland, we got to see his house where he had lived and he went across the street and both my mom and I, maybe my mom already told you about it…
JY: I didn’t.
NY: It was very very strange. He showed us the house. He described it to us before, there’s these little steps that go up in the middle of the drive way because the middle of the drive way was step. Yeah there’s little steps in the middle. And I can’t remember if he went up to the front door of the house there but all of a sudden, my mom and I are standing in front of the house, my dad crosses the street, goes through the side yard of the house across the street, and were like, “where is he going?” He went to the back door and my mom and I are walking around the side of the house, he’s knocking on the side door at the back of the house and this lady opens the door, this little old lady opens the back door, and she looks at him and said, “wow you got to be a big boy, Roy.” This woman recognized my dad from, I don’t know, how many years and he hugged her like a mama and these people initially took care of my father and his brother and sister when his father had died. They were very close to that family. I mean, when I think about internment camps and my relationship with my father, I think of that whole trip. It was very meaningful because, also while he was there, it might’ve not been that trip but another trip when he came back, he said, “let’s go someplace,” and I said, “okay.” He took me to this little tobacco store and it was across the road from, like a farmers market, and we walked in there and I was like, “what are you getting?” and he was like, “I don’t know. Just pick something.” So, I got something and he took out his checkbook, and my dad never wrote checks for anything and people had credit cards and stuff, so I was like, “what are you doing?” and he said, “just wait.” And so he handed the check to the guy behind the counter and it was a Japanese man and he said, “Oh Yamahiro. Are you Kunzo’s son?” and he said, “yeah,” and he said, “are you Roy? Oh you got to be a big boy.” Because my dad was six feet tall, which was really tall for a Japanese guy. So they talked for a while and he started talking to my father in Japanese and my dad was struggling with that and so they were sort of speaking half Japanese half English. He had known my grandfather and he told him something about the people down at this old restaurant where my grandfather, apparently, used to play poker in the back was still open and that some of the people that might still know my grandfather may still be there. So we went back there and they said, “oh we don’t play poker in the back here.” But we already told them we know that they already do because my grandfather used to play here.
JY: And they remembered.
NY: Yeah. So, he ran into some of the people. I didn’t know their names but it was really meaningful to my father and I could see he was remembering places and stuff back there from when he was quiet a young boy. But I know going back to the house was very emotional for him. After my father died, I went back to this house with some friends of mine and I went up and knocked on the door and there was somebody there house-sitting. I said, “I know you don’t have any reason to believe me but my grandfather lived in this house and my father and his brothers and sisters were born in this house.” And they said, “Oh you want to come in and look around?” and I was like, “Yeah!” So, I went in and looked at this tiny house and there been stories like my dad set curtains on fire from lighting his pumpkin inside the house, which he was told not to do. So, I was walking around trying to figure out which room that was and it was really nice to be in that home. It sort of think that the energy of all the things that happened sort of stayed in the home and it was nice just to go in there and see the place. Touch the same walls that they were in.
K: So, did his experiences in the camp and with what was going on during that time with, like the prejudices and racism, did that change your perspective of the country that you lived in?
NY: I know that at the time I first heard about him being in camp, I was young enough to not really know how I was feeling about that; which was really rage and “gee that was really unfair.” I mean I think that is your first response as a little kid: “That’s not fair. Why did they do that?” And I think in the long run, was a good deal of why I became an attorney. So, in terms of how I see the government? Yeah, I don’t see it as safe or such a sure thing as everybody else seems to think. If your government can turn on one of its citizens, it can turn on you at anytime. You know, you just put yourself in to some situation which you can either look, act, or be related to somebody who they call “the enemy” and then you become guilty by association. And it’s a lot about which, you know, reminds me of everything that’s happening today; is it you make enemies out of people who are not your enemy. And that’s a terrible part of the U.S history, it’s a terrible part of world history, and not being able to separate who is the enemy and who is not your enemy.
K: You kind of answered this question when you said that it helped you become an attorney, but how did that experience shape your personal identity, since you had such a close connection with something that other students just read in class – in their textbook?
NY:I certainly feel like I choose my friends to be people who “walk their talk,” who are involved in politics, who don’t burry their heads in the sand, who say what they mean and mean what they say and not to take things for granted; that things can be taken away from you. And I see that working with people who are falsely incarcerated, I know that the day I got my first client at a prison, who served thirteen years for being wrongfully convicted…I get emotional just talking about it again… it was probably the happiest day of my life. And you know, other people who have children talk about being the birth of their children as the happiest time of their life and the day he walked out of prison was just a very remarkable day. I felt, like in that case, I righted a wrong. And it’s too bad I couldn’t be around and preceded my father somehow, but I’ve gotten to know some of the men who fought the internment process during World War II. I was able to meet or learn more about…I’m a good friend of Jeff Adachi the public defender in San Francisco, whose mother and father were both in internment camps. He’s done a lot of films and stuff within the Japanese community so I like to, sort of, stay involved and keep that history alive and I do the Days of Remembrance every year. I guess it just makes me a more involved human being.
K: And if you had advice for future generations that you could provide, what would it be?
NY:I guess I would echo what Ms. Araki said about the importance of learning your history. That, you know, these are…with the discussion of interning Muslims or people of Islamic faith and what they’re doing about immigration in this country, is making enemies of people who are not our enemies. And is replaying history that is very recent in our lifetime and it’s dangerous and it’s tragic and I really think people really need to be involved. To stay silent in the face of that, I think, many of very well-respected leaders, like Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and John F. Kennedy, is…you have to be involved. And being silent makes you part of the problem.
K: And is there anything that I did not ask that you would like to share?
NY: No. I’m really very excited and thankful that you’re doing this line of study and research. I’m glad you’re bringing it out to your colleagues at school; I think it’s a great thing that you’re doing.
K: Well, thank you so much.
