“A leading scholar in the ethnography of contemporary Japanese and Japanese American culture and the impact of globalization… a pioneer in the ethnographic study of [these] communities…”
—Joseph L. Chartkoff, American Anthropologist, 20131
An Immigrant Son’s American Melting Pot (1921–1942)
My father’s life began like many Nisei of his generation in the early decades of the twentieth century. Iwao Ishino was born on March 10, 1921, to immigrant parents who had crossed the Pacific Ocean seeking a better future in America, the “land of opportunity.” They came from the Kyushu region in the Fukuoka prefecture of southern Japan.
His father, my grandfather, Tomota Ishino, was born in 1888. He was the second son of a Zen priest in Ukiha, Fukuoka. According to Japanese custom, since Tomota was not the eldest son, he would not inherit the position of head priest of the family temple and grounds, so he needed to seek his livelihood elsewhere. Therefore, at age 19, he ventured to San Francisco in August 1906 to assist in the city’s rebuilding efforts following the Great Earthquake of April 1906, working as a day laborer.
Once the work dried up there, he moved to San Diego and took on various jobs: itinerant fruit picker, busboy in restaurants and hotels, and cook for the railway. Also, Tomota attended night school to learn to read and write English. Eventually, he found steady work as a salesman at a Japanese department store, Iwata Shokai. After saving enough money, he started his own fresh fruit and vegetable stand.
Then Tomota decided to marry and start a family at age 32 after living by himself for 14 years. He sent back home to Japan for his future picture bride, Tei Yoshizuka. She arrived in April 1920 at the age of 21. My father, Iwao, was born eleven months after Tei's arrival. Later, two brothers and two sisters would be born into the family.
As a youngster, my father helped at the family fruit and vegetable stand, sorting and stacking produce. His mother also assisted at the stand, learning to speak English by serving customers, handling money exchanges, and managing the bookkeeping. These must have been wonderful times for my father, as I remember his pride in knowing and showing me how to select the best and freshest fruits and vegetables when I was growing up.
However, when the Great Depression struck in 1929, lasting for ten years, Tomota lost his fruit and vegetable stand. He then took a job as a custodian at the Barcelona Apartment Hotel near Balboa Park, where he worked until his retirement 30 years later. Tomota also rented a two-story house on Twelfth Street to accommodate his family and took in boarders to help cover living expenses.
Tei managed the seven boarders living on the second floor and their five children on the first floor. During his summer breaks from school, Iwao assisted his father with janitorial duties, worked as an elevator operator, and served as a general “go-fer.”
The working-class neighborhood and schools where my father grew up were diverse—Asians, Mexicans, and Blacks, though predominantly White. His social life revolved around the First Japanese Congregational Church. To raise funds for its operations, the Church hosted community events for the immigrant Issei by sponsoring Japanese performances, films, and other social activities.
For the Nisei children, the Church organized picnics, field trips, and sports competitions. Iwao’s father served as a deacon, wrote the Japanese section for the Church’s weekly bulletin, and participated in performances. His mother, a Women’s Guild member, often supervised the menu and prepared food for Japanese banquets hosted by the church.
Perhaps the only distinctly Japanese aspect of Iwao’s upbringing outside his home was attending the Buddhist church for educational rather than religious reasons. Like many Issei, his parents wanted to ensure their son could adapt in case the family decided to return to Japan. So, as a precaution for his future, he was sent to Saturday Japanese language school.
Still, Iwao aspired to fit into the predominantly White mainstream culture. He saw himself as an all-American boy in the USA’s “Melting Pot.” He joined the Boy Scouts to fortify this identity and engaged in typical American sports like baseball and football.
The public school system also reinforced Iwao’s desire to adopt U.S. values, believing children of immigrants should assimilate into American culture. Later, he shared that his classrooms were required every morning to pledge allegiance to the flag and the USA, and since he had given his oath, he felt honor-bound to uphold it throughout his life.
Then on December 7, 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Iwao’s American dream turned into a nightmare. All Nikkei were reclassified as “enemy aliens.” As President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated, it was “a date that would live in infamy,” and for all those of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast and for us, their descendants.
“We were [natural born] American citizens. When the War broke out, we thought something might happen to our parents” [who were born in Japan and could not become US citizens]. We never thought it could happen to us. But it did.”2
Evacuation Experience: Santa Anita Racetrack (April-August 1942)
“I blocked out the details of this thing—exactly how I felt. I think I’m suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.”3
—Iwao Ishino, 2010
My 21-year-old father recalled that on April 1, 1942, his entire family was ordered to report to the San Diego train depot to register for “evacuation” from their homes and lives. They received a family group number, and details about what they could carry in two suitcases each. They were instructed to get their affairs in order—home, school, work, finances, etc.—as the government could not predict how long the Nikkei would be “relocated.”
A week later, the Ishino family and 1,238 Nikkei were transported from San Diego to the Santa Anita Racetracks. This was one of 15 temporary detention centers where Nikkei were temporarily housed until more permanent camps could be built to accommodate the over 120,000 Nikkei ordered to move inland from the West Coast by President FDR’s Executive Order 9066.
My father never spoke to me about this traumatic time, but his younger sister, Maggie, who was 17 years old at the time, later recounted in a Rafu Shimpo article that their mother used a horse trough as a crib for their three-month-old brother.4 Maggie also described the stench of leftover horse manure rising from beneath the hastily installed floorboards. Other incarcerated Nikkei recall the heat and swarms of flies that invaded their crowded and unsanitary living conditions.
The Ishino family of seven lived in two former horse stalls for five months, from April to August 1942, until they were moved to Poston, Arizona and “interned” on an Indian reservation called the Colorado River War Relocation Center.
Poston Concentration Camp (1942–1944), Arizona
“…in a rain one should always seek the largest tree [Japanese proverb] and to the average Nisei the United States was by far the largest tree, as well as the only one they knew.”
—Alexander H. Leighton, The Governing of Men, 19455
Before his incarceration in Poston (officially named “Colorado River War Relocation Center”), my father attended San Diego State College (now a university) from 1938 to 1942. He studied architecture, business, and economics, aspiring to become an architect.
However, after hearing about a research opportunity from a friend, my father became one of 18 young Nisei with post-secondary education selected to collaborate with anthropologists from the U.S. Bureau of Sociological Research (BSR) on an anthropological study of the “Colorado River War Relocation Center (CRWRC).”
To my traumatized father, this must have seemed preferable to working in the camp’s camouflage factory, mess halls, grounds maintenance, or farmers’ sugar beet fields in the desert sun.
The project’s director, Alexander Leighton, a social psychiatrist and anthropologist from Johns Hopkins University, took my father and his fellow Nisei to the University of Denver for three months to train in social analysis, public opinion research methods, and applied anthropology. Also, I remember my father expressing his amazement when “high tea” was served for work breaks.
Upon their return, the group observed, conducted interviews, and gathered data on the Nikkei incarcerated in the Camp. Their directive was to observe and document the processes and challenges faced by 18,000 displaced Nikkei from diverse California communities. They analyzed the administrative efforts of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the War Relocation Authority. They studied the governance systems surrounding work, education, communication, and social activities. They analyzed how the operational needs for housing, food, healthcare, and religious services were addressed.6
Using his professional background, Director Leighton developed and organized a teaching program for field workers, training them as young professionals engaged in a scientific clinical study. The three anthropology supervisors delivered regular lectures, oversaw their fieldwork, and provided personal consultations. Staff meetings occurred twice weekly to share ideas, address issues, and direct the ongoing BSR project. The entire team generated and evaluated suggestions; many were implemented. Furthermore, college credits from the University of Chicago were awarded to recruits for completed work.
After finishing their field studies, some worked at the Chicago Merchandise Mart Building from September 1943 to January 1944. My father noted, “Five of us and the secretaries… compile[d] our field data, and Leighton drafted the book titled The Governing of Men: General Principles and Recommendations Based on Experience at a Japanese Relocation Camp.”
The book focused on the psychiatric and anthropological aspects of documenting the administrative support provided to Camp’s incarcerated people under duress. The first section recounted the Poston strike from April 1942 to November 1942. It claimed the advocacy of the BSR helped create a non-violent outcome as frustrations were heard and negotiated. (In contrast, the Manzanar administration instituted martial law, faced riots, caused two deaths, and many injuries.7) The second section outlined 46 principles and 102 recommendations for managing and addressing psychological stress of incarcerated people. It examined how belief systems and social organizations shape perceptions and reactions to the stress experienced by both administrators and those being administered.8
Karen Inouye, Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, stated that “Leighton was very interested in the human dimension—that is, the psychological cost—of wartime incarceration.”9
Iwao reflected in 2010, “My life was shaped by this project. It was kind of an escape for me.…I rationalized that my parents and my sisters and my brothers were in camp being taken care of by the system.”10
This research opportunity was something Iwao could never have imagined as a working-class kid. Ultimately, this experience led him to become the first Japanese American to write a doctoral dissertation in anthropology on Japanese culture through Harvard University in 1954.11
Notes:
1. Joseph L. J Chartkoff, “American Anthropologist: Obituaries. Iwao Ishino (1921-2012),” American Anthropologist, Volume 115, Issue 3, (September 2013): 534-537. AnthroSource, August 20, 2013.
2. Iwao Ishino, “From series of oral history interviews, ‘World War 2: Voices of Re-remembrance’,” 1992.
3. Martha Aladjem Bloomfield and Stephen Garr Ostrander, “We Didn’t Know How Our Future Would Be,” The Sweetness of Freedom: Stories of Immigrants (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 224.
4. Margaret Ishino, “Sunrise, Sunset,” Rafu Shimpo, May 28, 2005: 3
5. Alexander H. Leighton, The Governing of Men: General Principles and Recommendations Based on Experience at a Japanese Relocation Camp (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), 74.
6. Karen Inouye, “Bureau of Sociological Research, Poston,”Densho Encyclopedia, June 23, 2024. (Accessed Feb 10, 2025)
7. Brian Niiya, “Manzanar riot/uprising,” Densho Encyclopedia, Sept. 12, 2024. (Accessed Mar 5 2025).
8. Inouye, “Bureau of Sociological Research, Poston.”
9. Ibid.
10. Bloomfield, and Ostrander, “The Sweetness of Freedom,” 230.
11. Chartkoff, American Anthropologist.
© 2025 Catherine Jo Ishino
