On Thursday, August 1, 2024, author and journalist Gene Oishi passed away at 91. Oishi was a critically acclaimed writer, known both for his memoir In Search of Hiroshi and his novel Fox Drum Bebop, both of which captured powerfully the psychological trauma of anti-Asian racism and wartime Japanese American incarceration. Before becoming an author, Oishi had a long, remarkable career as a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, reporting on local politics and international affairs for the paper’s European bureau.
Gene meant a lot to me. Not only was I deeply moved by In Search of Hiroshi, I shared a peculiar bond with him: we both came from the same small, agrarian region of central California known as the Santa Maria Valley.
Gene was born in 1933 in Guadalupe, a small barrio on the outskirts of Santa Maria that was in all but name a segregated city. Santa Maria was predominantly white at the time, while Guadalupe was made up of enclaves of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Mexican migrants. Even though I grew up in Santa Maria, albeit several decades after the incarceration, I knew very little about the past history of my hometown. When I read In Search of Hiroshi, it opened a new door to my understanding of the Santa Maria area and the town’s darker history.
Over the last years, I corresponded with Gene regularly, and shared the information I found out about Santa Maria/Guadalupe Japanese American community.
I first came into contact with Gene via my friend Greg Robinson. Shortly after I met Greg in 2018, I told him that my interest in Japanese American history stemmed in good part from growing up in Santa Maria and being frustrated by the absence of discussion of the incarceration in school. Greg kindly put me in touch with Gene, and encouraged me to familiarize myself with his writings.
I remember reading the entire text of In Search of Hiroshi in a day, finding myself constantly gripped by Gene’s lyrical prose and his moving stories from his youth. In January 2019, I called Gene to introduce myself. At the time I was finishing my master’s degree at Georgetown University and working several jobs, so I found myself unable to make time to meet him.
I did, however, end up calling him again once I moved back to California in June 2019. I promised him then that I would interview him one day so that I could share his story with others.
Our correspondence picked up after I started my Ph.D. studies in history at University of California, Santa Cruz. In October 2019, I came across the 1943 yearbook for Butte High School at Gila River. As I perused the pages, I found a young girl named Hoshi Oishi in the junior class. I immediately thought of Gene and sent him a copy of the picture. He wrote back that Hoshi was indeed his older sister, and recalled that many nisei boys thought she was pretty. Coincidentally enough, in the same photo was a young Michiko Nishiura, who later became famous as Michi Weglyn.
In February 2020, I made plans with Greg Robinson to attend the annual Association of Asian American Studies conference in D.C., and to go stay with Gene during our trip. Our plans were then cancelled by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. A few months later, during the height of the pandemic, I called Gene to check in on how he was doing. At the time, while searching the National Archives’ online database, I had just discovered documents sent to Gene’s father, Yoziro Oishi, pertaining to the transfer of the family farm to the Federal Reserve during his internment at Fort Missoula. When I showed the letters to Gene, he surprised me by sharing details about the family farm:
My father ran a general store which went out of business when the Depression hit. He went back to farming about 1933, the year I was born. We continued to live behind the store so when I grew up the front of the house was still a store front with display cases, scales, cash registers and such. One of the documents about a tractor for sale wondered why our father was listed as the owner when the oldest son Nimashi ran the farm. My father ran the farms (he had more than one). Nimashi was probably registered as the proprietor to get around the various anti-alien restriction that existed at the time. As a kid, I always found it amusing that our lawyer’s name was John Law.
Gene later shared with me the sad story of how his brother Nimashi was one of the individuals rounded up by the authorities and sent to Leupp Isolation Center in Arizona for being a “troublemaker” at Gila River. When a Japanese American researcher first showed a report naming his brother as one of the Leupp detainees, he broke down in tears.
The document led me to another question about Guadalupe. One of my connections to Gene was through our mutual connection to another Gila River Nisei, Tetsuo “Tets” Furukawa, with whom I had previously become acquainted. In September 2020, I wrote a tribute to Tets for Discover Nikkei in which I thanked him for inspiring me to study Japanese American history. I shared the essay with Gene and asked if he remembered Tets. As Gene later told me, the Furukawas and the Oishis came from the same part of Japan, and indeed had known each other. Most of all, he spoke to the importance of baseball to the Guadalupe community:
My father and Mr. Furukawa were good friends because they were both from the Kumamoto Prefecture. Japanese families remained provincial even in America so we were closer to Kumamoto families than with others. There were prefectural associations all along the West Coast. My father, of course, belonged to the Kumamoto Ken association. Tets was the age of my brothers so I'm sure they knew him. I knew the youngest kid but the Furukawas didn't live in Guadalupe so not very well. I only remember that he had a cool nickname, which I can't recall at the moment.
The YMBA baseball League was a big deal. I have fond memories of going to see the Guadalupe team play at the public school playing field. My hero was Massie Tomooka (also from a Kumamoto family) who was our ace pitcher. Someone always played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” on some primitive public address system, giving it a festive mood. They took their uniforms and equipment to the camps apparently because I recall seeing games at Gila.
I enjoyed your “A Journey to Guadalupe.” In answer to your earlier question, my father owned two properties on Main Street, the storefront we lived behind and next to it another that was rented to a Japanese restaurant. Both had been torn down and replaced with a single large commercial building when I last visited Guadalupe in 1983.
We continued our discussions periodically throughout the following year. Several times I passed through Guadalupe during trips with my family, and took photos of the town to send Gene.
In September 2021, I proposed doing an interview article to Gene, and he gladly accepted. After several rounds of my posing questions and Gene answering, I wrote up our conversation on his career and his views on Japanese American history, prefaced by a brief biography.
Aside from highlighting the notable events in his journalistic career, such as the controversial 1968 incident when then-vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew saw Oishi sleeping on a plane and derisively referred to him by a racial epithet, I wanted readers to appreciate Gene’s methodical style of writing.
The interview was special to me in that not only did I get a stronger sense of who Gene was as a person, but we also connected on many other points, such as our mutual love of music. The article was my first submission to the International Examiner, and appeared in their January 2022 issue.
After the interview, I maintained contact with Gene, sharing updates on my work for Discover Nikkei and other publications, and just speaking generally. Sometimes our conversations drifted to topics related to world events. In March 2022, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he shared with me a revealing note that he had written to a fellow reporter in Germany:
I was 8 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and even at that age I realized that the world for me had turned upside down because my mother with whom I was very close had for months been dreading just such an event. I lost not only my home but spent the next three years in an American concentration camp. It took me decades to come to terms with my identity and my place in this world, but now I am feeling lost again.
I do not recognize America which I had finally accepted as my home, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine makes me feel like I'm reliving the 1940s. All the turmoil both in America and the rest of the world makes me feel as I did when I was a child. Of course, as an old man living comfortably in a retirement home I have little fear for my own security, but I have the same sense of helplessness that I had as a child as to the world I am living in.
As someone who has spent nearly nine decades on this earth I should know that the wheels of civilization grind slowly, starting and stopping and sometimes slipping backwards. But we are running out of time. The earth itself is telling us so. Perhaps we can comfort ourselves with the thought that the earth and all of us on it are but a speck of dust in an universe that rolls on in unknowable ways. That, perhaps, is just another way of putting my trust in what some people call “God.”
In April of this year, In Search of Hiroshi was finally republished by Kaya Press. I was thrilled to see it appear again in print. As a way of saying thanks to Gene, I decided to propose a review of the book to Gene’s former employer, the Baltimore Sun. Gene was skeptical that the paper would find any interest in a review of his book, but I told him that submitting any work is always a crapshoot, but that regardless of whether they printed it or not, I was glad to bring his book to their attention.
Lo and behold, I was surprised to receive a phone call one afternoon from the Sun’s op-ed editor expressing interest in my piece, and was happy to learn that Gene received several compliments from friends as a result of the piece once it ran.
The last time I heard Gene speak was in June 2024, when Discover Nikkei hosted a webinar on In Search of Hiroshi. Not only did I enjoy Gene’s conversation with Ana Iwataki and Koji Lau-Ozawa (himself a fellow expert on Japanese Americans from the Central Coast), but I was touched to see how the talk brought together many writers—including Naomi Hirahara and Sesshu Foster—who were interested in Gene’s work and his roots from Guadalupe. Most of all, I was glad that Gene was finally receiving the recognition he deserved for his work.
My last exchange with Gene came just a little over a month ago in June, shortly after I completed my PhD at UC Santa Cruz. I sent him several photos of myself with my advisor Alice Yang and my friend Karen Tei Yamashita at my graduation ceremony, along with the copy of my dissertation that I had promised to send once it was finished.
Gene Oishi should be remembered as an integral part of West Coast literature and a part of the Japanese American literary canon. He was one of a few authors who captured the damage that the incarceration wrought upon the psyche of many Japanese Americans like himself. As an author, his legacy will go on to influence many future writers, including myself. As a friend, I will dearly miss him.
© 2024 Jonathan van Harmelen
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