Episode 131: Together in Manzanar: A Japanese Jewish American Story [Transcript]

Narration is in bold. 

Jen Richler: Hi, Jen Richler here with Can We Talk? Before we start the show, I want to tell you about another podcast you should check out. It's called Just For This, and it's about Jewish women leaders making their mark. In each episode, Rabbi Liz P.G. Hirsch, CEO of Women of Reform Judaism, interviews women who are shaping their fields. You'll hear from women like CNN’s Dana Bash, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, author Delia Ephron, and many more. You can find Just For This on your favorite podcast app.

Now, on to the show.

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Jen: Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet.

Before sunrise on March 30, 1942, Elaine Buchman Yoneda stood in a long line outside a government building in Los Angeles, her three-year-old son Tommy by her side. A few months before, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States had entered World War II. On the West Coast, a military order called for the removal of anyone with "the slightest amount of Japanese blood." Tommy was half Japanese, and Elaine had been ordered to register him for a detention center called Manzanar in the desert near the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Karl, Elaine’s Japanese American husband, was already in Manzanar, but he was hoping to enlist in the United States Army. That would leave Tommy in the camp alone. Elaine told the officials that was unthinkable.

Tracy Slater: They said, "There's an orphanage there." They called it a children's village. And Elaine said, "Well, if you're taking him, you have to take me." And they kept trying to convince her, "You can't go. It will be too hard for you." And Elaine, as was her wont, was completely unwilling to back down and insisted that if they take Tommy, they take her.

Jen: Elaine Buchman Yoneda had talked her way into Manzanar. It was one of 10 detention centers where the US government imprisoned around 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. Now they're commonly known as Japanese internment camps. Elaine, her husband Karl, and her son Tommy spent the next ten months there.

Tracy: And so she became, you know, the only Jewish American woman on record in any of the camps.

Jen: That's writer Tracy Slater. A few years ago, she stumbled on the Yonedas' story and was instantly drawn to it.

Tracy: I am a Jewish American woman married to a Japanese man—not a Japanese American man, but a man from Japan. And when we had our child, our child became the first Japanese American in our family, the first Jewish Japanese American in our family. And so I became really interested in the intersection of Jewish history and Japanese history, and particularly Jewish American and Japanese American history. I was really surprised to find that there was a Jewish American woman married to a Japanese American man who, along with their three-year-old son, had been incarcerated in an American concentration camp during World War II.

Jen: Tracy dove deep into the Yonedas' story. She tracked down Elaine's and Karl's personal archives, which included diaries and letters from their time in Manzanar, and interviewed Elaine's granddaughter. Through her research, she was able to reconstruct their story in vivid detail.

The result is Tracy's new book, Together in Manzanar, which tells the story of the Yoneda family—and of the tens of thousands of Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in the US during World War II.

In this episode of Can We Talk?, Tracy describes the bleak living conditions inside Manzanar, the tensions that festered among the prisoners, and how the Yonedas became targets of violence. She also talks about how the anti-immigrant and racist policies of the time tore families apart, and how those same forces are reemerging today.

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Jen: Tell us a little bit about Elaine's Jewish upbringing and Jewish identity as she was growing up.

Tracy: Sure. Elaine grew up in a family where her parents were immigrants from Russia. They were laborers and they joined the Jewish Bund and then immigrated sort of in stages. Her father came to the United States, first to New York, and then brought her mother over in the very early 1900s. They were very non-religious, so they were quite against the concept of organized religion, and yet they still very strongly identified as Jewish. They spoke mostly Yiddish in the home. They seemed to have been all Jewish friends. So Elaine grew up with a strong cultural Jewish identity.

Something in her seems to have clicked that she needed to stand up for people who were being oppressed. A lot of that came from her identity as a Jew and her parents escaping a pretty violent time in Europe with pogroms and repression against Jewish people and repression against the Labor Bund. Their belief was that you don't just pray in the face of injustice; you stand up and you fight.

Jen: Like Elaine, Karl was the American-born child of immigrants. His parents came from Hiroshima and settled in California just before the turn of the twentieth century. That's where Karl was born and lived until he was seven.

Tracy: His father couldn't really make enough of a living in California, so they moved back to Hiroshima. So Karl grew up mostly in Hiroshima, in Japan, although he was an American citizen and born in the United States. And then he left Japan because he was vehemently anti-imperialist, vehemently anti-fascist, and very pro-labor, which was not okay to be at that time in Japan. And he also did not want to serve in the Imperial Army and was going to be drafted, so he left Japan when he was about nineteen and came back to the United States.

Jen: Elaine and Karl's shared passion for labor activism brought them together.

Tracy: Elaine was working for the International Labor Defense Fund—which helped bail out people who had been arrested at labor protests  or anti-fascist protests. Karal had been arrested at a labor protest and had been beaten quite severely by what was called the Red Squad, which was a pretty brutal anti-labor police force in California. And he had been lying in a jail cell for a couple of days, all bloodied, and they got a call at the Labor Defense Fund office saying, "Come pick up the"—the word they used was "Jap"—"come get the Jap, he's gonna die." And Elaine went with a colleague to bail him out, and that's when they met.

Jen: Elaine was married at the time and had a young daughter named Joyce, but her marriage was on the rocks and ended soon after she met Karl.

Tracy: The way Karl tells it, he was immediately blown away by Elaine and her bright and vivacious presence. And they really had this incredible bond and this incredible passion that was political, interpersonal, and even in some ways cultural. Even though they came from different ethnic cultures, their view of the world, their sort of sense of themselves as Americans in the world, and in the United States at the time, was very similar.

The early years that they were together were pragmatically quite hard in many ways, because it was hard to be an interracial couple. They had a really hard time finding anyone who would rent an apartment to them. They finally found someone who would rent to them. They actually had to leave the state of California in order to get married because interracial marriage was illegal then; they had to travel sort of undercover to Washington state in order to get married. In 1939, Elaine gave birth to a little boy named Tommy, Elaine and Karl's first and only child together. Elaine and Karl and Tommy and Joyce were all living together in San Francisco, in the Fillmore area, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.

So quite soon after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the US entered the war, there became pretty strong cries to incarcerate the Japanese American community on the West Coast. The underlying justification was that the bombing of Pearl Harbor was likely supported by fifth columnists or saboteurs in Hawaii, and they may also be on the West Coast of the mainland. So this was actually disproved relatively quickly, that there were saboteurs, but the proof of the disproval and the research that the Navy Intelligence Service had done themselves into the potential risk for the Japanese American community on the west coast—both of those sort of pieces of knowledge or news were either buried or ignored. Really because of racism, and also likely because of a desire to have the land that a lot of the Japanese American farmers had been able to turn into quite successfully arable land, for those reasons, the the cry in the media and among politicians in congress and among quite an alarming percentage of the United States public quickly shifted from an exploration of locking up the Japanese immigrant community to what we will do about the entire ethnic or ethnonational community of Japanese Americans. And the cry quickly turned into a very loud demand that the entire West Coast Japanese American community, including Japanese American citizens, be locked up in concentration camps.

And "concentration camps" was the term that was used by politicians, by the media, and by many in the American public. So it was clearly a race-based mass incarceration. One hundred and twenty thousand people were removed from the West Coast and incarcerated, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. So that's eighty to ninety thousand American citizens locked up in camps with no due process.

Jen: Karl was on one of the earliest transports to Manzanar. He actually volunteered to be among the first to go. Why was that?

Tracy: Yes, he did volunteer to be among the first to go. He tried to enlist right after Pearl Harbor. He tried to enlist in the US military. He and Elaine both deeply wanted to support the Allied war effort. They were obviously deeply opposed to and terrified by the Nazis and also by the Japanese imperialists who were vehemently anti-communist and vehemently imperialism. And he was turned away, as were all Japanese Americans; they had been categorized as basically enemy aliens.

And as it became clearer that the entire Japanese American community was going to be forcibly removed and incarcerated, including citizens, Karl thought the best way to support his community in anticipation of the incarceration was to go to Manzanar and help build the camp in order to try to ensure that it was as habitable as possible. And he had also been told that the families of the early volunteers would be the last to be incarcerated. He and Elaine assumed that Elaine and Tommy would remain free anyway, because they kept thinking, who would possibly think to lock up a three-year-old? That seems completely preposterous. 

But he was heartened by the assurance that if he went and volunteered, this would be an extra layer of safety for his family. And also, he had no means of supporting himself; this was the only job he could get, and he had been promised union wages. So he felt that this was a chance to earn a living, a chance to do something that might support his community. The media and certain figures in the army who were running the forced removal were calling it an "evacuation." They were saying this is for the safety of the Japanese American community because there's so much hatred against them. They said they were building "cities in the desert" where people can ride out the war.

Jen: Karl boarded a train for Manzanar on the cold, gray morning of March 23, 1942, along with 1,000 other Japanese American men. They arrived well past sunset.

Tracy: He sees a very barren landscape with a very rudimentary camp being built that was much more desolate than he expected. He also sees armed guards and realizes that this really is going to be a concentration camp.

Jen: Karl also learned that not only were there no union wages, there were no wages at all.

Tracy: Karl had actually sent Elaine a letter within the first couple of days of being in Manzaar, saying it is environmentally brutal here. There were horrible dust storms. The food was making people sick. And he said, "No matter what you do, do not bring Tommy to Manzanar." He meant even for a visit. Tommy had been an ill child from the time he was born; Elaine had spent most of his three years in and out of hospitals with him. He had terrible asthma and very severe allergies. And Karl had sent Elaine a letter saying, "Whatever you do, do not bring Tommy anywhere near Manzanar."

Jen: But there was nothing Elaine could do to keep Tommy out of Manzanar, and so they arrived just a week after Karl. Elaine decided to leave Joyce, who was now fourteen, with her parents in Los Angeles. Despite Karl's warning, Elaine was shocked by the conditions in Manzanar.

Tracy: There was no hot water. There was no running water in the barracks. There were no toilets; there were these portable outhouse contraptions on wheels and they would be pulled back and forth between the barracks and then emptied into a large sewer ditch. There were horrible dust storms, and everybody suffered physically from the conditions of the camp. Tommy suffered very very deeply. There were times when they didn't know whether Tommy was gonna survive.

Jen: And yet as harsh as life was in Manzanar, Elaine felt ambivalent about calling it a concentration camp. Can you talk a little bit about that ambivalence?

Tracy: Yeah, Elaine and Karl in Manzanar maintained a deep desire to keep their connection with the leftist community outside of camp, and a deep deep desire to support the Allied war effort. They were repeatedly told through the media that they consumed in camp—they were allowed to get newspapers—and they repeatedly heard, over and over again, that the only fight that matters is the fight against the fascists, and in order to support that fight, we must not cause any problems for the American government. And Elaine and Karl readily embraced that view. It's important to remember, they were in Manzanar in 1942—for almost all of 1942, it really looked like the Axis powers were gonna win.

Jen: The other major thing unfolding is that Jews are being killed in death camps in Europe. Did that factor into the way, especially Elaine, as a Jewish woman, would’ve been thinking about it?

Tracy: Yes, it factored in so much. They were getting bits and pieces of news from Nazi-occupied Europe about what was happening to the Jewish population. And they were constantly comparing the American camps to the Nazi camps. And you know, the Nazis used the term "concentration camp" as a way to obscure the truth of their own enslaved labor and extermination camps.

Jen: In what other ways would you say that Elaine's Jewish identity shaped the way she experienced life in Manzanar?

Tracy: I think Elaine's Jewish identity shaped some of her fears in Manzanar. There was some antisemitism among the camp population. The older generation in the camp , those who had immigrated from Japan, had immigrated from quite an antisemitic country. The translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been quite popular in Japan in the early part of the century. And as the 1930s went on, Japan became more and more allied with Nazi Germany. And so there was unsurprisingly antisemitism at the camp, just as there was vehement antisemitism in the US culture at the time, in the US military, and Elaine and Karl both confronted some of that. And I think it heightened their fears of what would happen if Japan and Nazi Germany together won the war.

Jen: You were talking earlier about how strongly Elaine and Karl felt about the need to fight the Axis powers, and those feelings put them very strongly in the pro-America faction within the camp, but of course that put them at odds with the pro-Japan faction in the camp. And you talk in the book about these growing tensions between those two factions. So how did Karl and Elaine navigate those tensions and what risks did they face being part of the pro-America group?

Tracy: The really pro-Japan faction—those who would've wanted Japan to win the war—ideologically was quite small, practically non-existent. But as the incarceration went on and as people questioned how they could be American citizens and be denied their citizenship and their civil rights and freedoms, more and more people became disillusioned with American democracy and with the American government, and more and more people gravitated towards this agitation that took the form of a pro-Japan, anti-American sentiment. As the incarceration went on, the "pressure cooker" of the camp built up, and these two "pro-Japan" and "pro-America" factions began butting heads more and more loudly and, at times, violently.

Jen: This tension became especially dangerous for the Yonedas because of their pro-America activism. Joseph Kurihara, one of the leaders of the pro-Japan faction known as the Black Dragons, put Karl's name on a death list. But soon after that, Karl left Manzanar—his request to enlist in the US Army had finally been granted.

Days later, on December 6, 1942, tensions in the camp boiled over and the Manzanar uprising broke out. Men in masks beat so-called collaborators and military police fired shots, wounding eleven prisoners and killing two, including a teenager.

That afternoon, Joseph Kurihara riled up a crowd of several hundred in front of the administration building. Many were part of the pro-Japan faction and responded with loud cheers. But there were also concerned spectators, including Elaine and Tommy. At one point, he said that because Karl Yoneda had "escaped to the army," they would "get his son" instead. When Elaine heard this, she grabbed Tommy's hand and ran back to their barrack.

In a letter to Karl, Elaine described the terror of that night:

I felt so apprehensive it was impossible to sleep. I braced Tommy's toy box against the door so nobody would be able to get in from the outside, then piled the bench and whatever else was available on top of that. The minute hand of my watch indicated it was just past midnight. The 7th of December was about to begin; the year after Pearl Harbor. And when I realized I had no idea what was going to take place, a feeling of suffocation came over me. I was torn between thinking on the one hand, "If only Karl were here at a time like this," and on the other, "No—he has more important business to attend to; I'm just going to have to get through this on my own."

With men holding wooden clubs lurking nearby, Elaine hatched a plan. She turned Tommy's coat inside out so the shiny lining was on the outside and tied a scarf around his head so he looked like a girl. Then they ran in the cold and dark until they met a soldier who brought them to an administration building. The next morning, Elaine and Tommy were taken to the military police barracks for protection, along with a few dozen other prisoners who had been targeted. 

And just a few days after that, Elaine and Tommy were released and allowed to return to the West Coast. A new policy allowed mixed-race prisoners and non-Japanese spouses to go free. Elaine and Tommy had been in Manzanar for nearly ten months. The vast majority of prisoners—mostly people of full Japanese ancestry—would remain in Manzanar for another two years.

Tracy: Eventually Elaine and Tommy resettled in San Francisco where Elaine worked really hard to get work in the war industry and was finally able to. They had some trouble finding housing because Elaine's now four-year-old son was Japanese American and was still seen as a national threat. But they finally found a place to rent from an old leftist comrade, basically. Tommy was again incredibly ill and had to spend months separated from his mother in quarantine in a sanitarium, almost certainly because of the terrible environmental conditions he endured in Manzanar.

Jen: Karl was serving overseas as part of the Office of War Information's psychological warfare team. He was still overseas in China on August 6, 1945, when he learned that his hometown of Hiroshima had been flattened by an atomic bomb. Amazingly, his mother survived. Karl returned home that fall, and the Yonedas started the next chapter of their lives as a family. But life after Manzanar wasn't easy.

Tracy: Tommy carried a lot of trauma both from his time in Manzanar and actually from the aftermath of Manzanar, when he continued to be so ill and was separated now from both of his parents, when he was basically quarantined in a sanatorium. He was traumatized by the violence he witnessed in Manzanar, and although physically he regained his health and became a star athlete and an incredibly successful student and an incredibly popular kid, he had mental health struggles that never went away.

Jen: Elaine's daughter from her first marriage, Joyce, also struggled.

Tracy: She certainly suffered emotionally by her mother's—you know what she saw as her mother's choice to go into Manzanar with Tommy and leave her behind with her grandparents. She never again lived with Elaine and Karl. She ran away numerous times, she lied about her age, and got married at fifteen to a twenty-seven-year-old; that marriage didn't last long. She struggled with alcohol throughout her whole life. Joyce is a reminder of what happened to mixed families in and around the camps, which is a story that has not been told at all beyond some scholarly exploration of that. And while mixed families certainly had some privileges, one being that they had relatives who were able to stay out of camp, and so they were able to store their property with them, or in the case of Elaine and Karl and Tommy, you can sort of see it both way—Joyce was spared the experience of going to Manzanar, and yet she also suffered from this family fragmentation that was never able to heal.

Jen: What do you hope people take away from this story?

Tracy: One thing I hope people take away is the story of mixed-race families in and around the camps. There were over 2,000 people in mixed race families who were incarcerated at one point or other in these concentration camps for Japanese Americans. So there were obviously countless others who endured separation from their relatives. Related to that were the policies that the US government came up with to define, categorize, identify and then police these mixed-face families. The reason that these policies are important is not only because they shed light on the experience of mixed race families in and around the camps, but because they offer an extremely strong rebuttal to anybody who continues to believe the incarceration of the Japanese American community was not purely based on racist concepts and on race, that it was not a military necessity at all. If you look at the official "mixed marriage" policy for families of the camps, you'll see an incredible obsession with defining race and with defining who was dangerous based on what percentage of "racial blood" they had and it really highlights the racial obsession behind the entire forced removal and incarceration of the Japanese American community.

Jen: What historical echoes are there for you between the Yonedas' time and what they experienced and things that are unfolding in our country and in our world today?

Tracy: Honestly, the parallels are much starker and more real now than I ever dreamed they would be when I started writing the book. One is the obsession with finding a "danger within" and attributing that to a certain category of American residents. We can see this with immigration policies and the obsession with labeling immigrants as dangerous and then incarcerating them in camps with no due process. 

Another thing that feels very important to remember about this history is that when the discussion about the West Coast Japanese American community began in late 1941, it was a discussion of what to do about immigrants and it quickly morphed into a discussion about what to do about a whole category of people living in the United States, and citizenship quickly became irrelevant. And that is a real warning that I think we need to heed today.

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Jen: Tracy Slater's book is called Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese-Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp.

Elaine and Karl Yoneda remained involved in labor, civil rights, and anti-fascist activism throughout their lives. They also campaigned for historical accuracy about Manzanar and fought for reparations for former incarcerees. 

In 1948, the US government passed the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act. Under this act, Karl was granted a small sum for property that was confiscated from him while he was in Manzanar. Elaine was deemed ineligible for reparations, as were all spouses without Japanese ancestry.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan approved reparations and issued an official apology. The next year, President George Bush authorized a $20,000 payment to each of the 60,000 surviving prisoners. Elaine didn't live to receive compensation. She died in May 1988, on the morning of her and Karl's 55th wedding anniversary. Karl died in 2007.

You can see photos of the Yonedas and of Manzanar at jwa.org/canwetalk.

Thank you for joining us for Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women's Archive. Our team includes Nahanni Rous and Judith Rosenbaum. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. You can find us at jwa.org/canwetalk, or on your favorite podcast app.

I'm Jen Richler. Until next time!