Chapter 1

Introduction

         Everyone in America will remember where they were on September 11, 2001.  The news of the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York by hijacked planes was a sad and devastating blow to America and her allies.  The effects of the sudden and violent attack on the United States, the loss of thousands of American lives, and the millions of dollars lost in property, were immeasurable.  As a historically significant day, the comparison to the attack on Pearl Harbor over sixty years ago cannot be denied.  The differences between Pearl Harbor and the attack on New York are many.  But at Pearl Harbor the Americans knew right away who attacked them.  The Japanese military made no secrets in the actual attack, displaying the rising sun on airplanes and warships;  Japan was the enemy.  In the WTC bombing it was not obvious at first who attacked us;  as the evidence mounted, it became clearer. 

         One similarity of these two events is striking:  the immediate fear that gripped innocent people in America.  Whether it was Japanese Americans in 1941 or the people from the Middle East in 2001, the fear was the same.  What would happen now?  Would they be taken away and jailed, or worse, killed outright as traitors?  In 1941, my family was very afraid for my grandfather, who had been born in Japan;  they worried about what would happen to him.

         In Arizona in 2001, after the September 11 bombing, an innocent man was killed by an angry vigilante.  The victim was from India and wore a turban;  he was shot in broad daylight in front of his gas station.  He had spent some time that day looking for an American flag to fly to demonstrate his patriotism.  During WWII, 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes and put in concentration camps against their will.  I am very lucky this did not happen to my family; this is their story.

Every family has a family history;  as the generations reach back, a history unfolds, there is a time and a place for everyone.  Every family history is a treasury of riches, there for the unfolding.  Family histories can tell us, in the present, the choices and decisions made by our forebears.  A family history can tell us who our ancestors were and how they lived.  Then we reflect, would we have done the same?  This is the story of one family, and yet it encompasses three continents.  From the islands of Japan, it reaches west to the edge of Europe and Spain.

My paternal grandfather, Joseph Kutaro Nishimuta, was of the samurai class, born and raised in Japan.  Kutaro, born on February 24, 1881, came to America at the age of twenty-five, sojourning with many other Japanese men.  He arrived in San Francisco in the fall of 1905 and lived through the Great Earthquake of 1906.  Kutaro was an Issei, the first generation of Japanese to come to America.  Kutaro was a typical Issei, although he was of samurai descent and well educated.  He came to America at the height of the immigration period, 1905.  Only two years later the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907 was signed.  This agreement forbade laborers from Japan to immigrate;  only businessmen or the wives of those established were allowed.

         Because of immigration laws, the Issei could only immigrate to America from 1885 to 1924.  The Japanese first started to immigrate to the United States through  Hawaii.  The Hawaiian monarchy set up agreements with the Japanese government in 1885 to allow Japanese laborers on Hawaiian sugar plantations.  The immigration of the Issei to Hawaii and the Western United States lasted until 1924, a period of only thirty-nine years.  America’s xenophobia limited the number of European immigrants and forbade Asian immigration, resulting in the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act.  This law stopped the immigration of the Japanese and was in effect until after WWII.  It wasn’t until 1952, with the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act, that Japanese citizens were again allowed to immigrate to America  (Ichioka, 1988, p. 3).

The children of the Issei are called the Nisei, the second generation.  The Nisei were generally born between 1910 and 1940  (Kitano, 1993, p. 7).  This was the generation of my father and his seven siblings.  This thesis is their story.  They lived through the Great Depression, the miseries of Pearl Harbor, and the prejudice of  WWII.  I am a Sansei or third generation Japanese.

Kutaro’s wife, Louisa Patricino Lorenzo, was born in Andalucia, Spain, on February 28, 1889.  She was a very devout Catholic and was a postulant in a convent for seven years before she had the opportunity to come to America.  Kutaro meet his bride in Nebraska in 1914.  They were working for the same wealthy banking family, the Hamiltons.  He was a chauffeur and mechanic, she was a cook and maid and she took care of the children.  They got married in Council Bluffs, Iowa on February 18, 1915.  Afterwards, they moved to Oklahoma, they had eight children, and lived on various farms, raising fruit and vegetables.

When Kutaro and Louisa first married, they had to face discrimination on many different fronts.  They were both fired from their jobs because Lousia’s employer wanted her to marry a white man, not a poor Japanese man.  They could not get married in the state of  Nebraska because of the anti-miscegenation law.  Kutaro could not buy land in certain states, like California,  because he was considered an alien, ineligible for citizenship, and he could not vote.  These are only a few of the many social and political obstacles that this couple had to contend with.  But through it all they survived and managed to raise eight very optimistic and spiritual children.

          The Nishimuta family, like other Nisei families who chose farming as an occupation, had similar experiences to the truck farmers in California and Oregon.  For example, they grew the same crops.  The Nishimutas are unique because they were not interned during the war and stayed on their farms.  Many rural Japanese did not have the strength to go back to farming after the war and took on urban work.  This family was also different because they were mixed race Nisei who did not speak Japanese.  However, they were similar to other Japanese families because of the importance of spirituality and religion in their lives, but they were raised Catholic because of their Spanish mother.

This research focuses on oral history interviews with the seven living children of Joseph and Louisa Nishimuta.  Besides oral histories, I have used historical documents such as immigration papers, letters, newspapers, and many photographs.  My goal for this project is to document the immigration of my grandmother and grandfather, to show their strength through adversity, to trace the lives of their children, and to learn from the past.  I did not know my grandparents;  they both passed away when I was very young;  but I know them through the memories and pictures they left behind.  They and their children survived many difficult years.  This is also the story of a matriarchal spiritual leader, my grandmother, Louisa Lorenzo Nishimuta.  The Nishimutas’ strong religious faith helped them cope and survive.

My thesis is that the Nishimuta family was an atypical Japanese American family.  They were very different from most Nisei families.  First, they were a multiracial family, unlike most other first generation Japanese American families.  Secondly, they did not live on the West Coast where most of the Japanese settlements were and they were fortunate in that they were not put into the concentration camps during WWII.  Third, they were Catholics, which is not common to Japanese American families.  Their uniqueness stands out and sets them apart.

The main question that I am asking in this paper is how did the Japanese immigrants, and especially the Nishimutas, survive living in such harsh and trying times?  The Great Depression and Pearl Harbor are but two of the difficult historical events that shaped the lives of the Issei and their Nisei children.  Just day-to-day survival was very difficult for most new immigrants, who were at the lowest end of the social economy.  It was difficult for the new immigrant Japanese to find work in America.  Because they didn’t speak good English, it was hard to get jobs, and they faced racial prejudice in hiring practices.  They could only get low-paying, menial work.  Japanese men and women worked as gardeners, domestic servants, and in shops and service industries.  Domestic work was the largest employer of Japanese women before and after WWII (Glenn, 1986, p. 81).  New immigrants to America have the hardest time making a living wage.  The Japanese took over many of the jobs vacated by the Chinese, and today many Mexican immigrants on the West Coast have taken over the low wage jobs of the Japanese.  This work includes domestic work and agricultural work, picking and packing vegetables and fruit.

This research is very different from any previous studies on Japanese or multicultural social groups.  First, there has been no previous research on any Japanese families living in the state of Oklahoma from 1917.  Most of the scholarly research has focused on Japanese families living in the Pacific Coastal states, those who were put in internment camps during WWII.  Because the Nishimutas lived outside the militarized zone set into effect after Pearl Harbor, they were extremely fortunate in that they did not go to the camps.  Still, their lives were transformed by the outbreak of WWII. 

This research is also unique because it studies multicultural identity, which has only now come to the fore-front of academia, although there have always been mixed race relationships.  It was only in 1967 that racial intermarriage was allowed in many states, after the groundbreaking case of Loving v. Virginia tore down the old anti-miscegenation laws.  Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple, lived in the state of Virginia.  They married in 1958, but had to be married in Washington D.C. because of the anti-miscegenation law in Virginia, which stated that interracial marriages were illegal.  They returned to Virginia and in 1959 they were prosecuted and convicted of violating the state’s intermarriage laws.  They were sentenced to one year in jail, but the judge promised the sentence would be suspended if they agreed to leave the state and not return for twenty-five years.  Forced to move, they returned to Washington D.C., where in 1963 they initiated a suit challenging the constitutionality of the anti-miscegenation law.  The Supreme Court in 1967 unanimously ruled the Virginia law unconstitutional and 16 states had to erase their anti-miscegenation laws (Matsumoto, 1993, p. 85).

As a multiracial woman, this is also a search for my own cultural self-identity.I am what Gloria Anzaldua describes as the “new mestiza.”  Anzaldua says, “She lives in a pluralistic world, and has a pluralistic way of thinking” (Anzaldua, 1987, p. 79).  Not being a pure blood, I do not feel that I belong to a single race completely.  When a stranger asks about my cultural background I say that I am one-quarter Japanese, one-quarter Spanish, and half English, with some Irish.  But this is only to help people understand my parents.  Blood flowing through a body cannot be divided up like a pie.

         I am the sum of my parts;  I feel a part of these cultures, but in a way I do not feel a part of them, like an outsider looking into a secret club.  My racial heritage does allow me to understand diversity, to see through many different eyes.  While writing this thesis I felt many mixed emotions about the war between Japan and America.  I experienced an inner conflict that was also felt by the Japanese Americans who lived during those tumultuous times.

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