The Dedicated Dentist

by Cynthia Kami, Carolyn Loughlin, and Diane Kami

Dr. Carl Hirota, our grandfather, was not your typical enlistee. The day after Secretary of War Henry Stimson announced that Japanese Americans would be eligible for military service, on February 1, 1943, the 33-year-old San Francisco dentist volunteered for service from Block 12 in the Topaz Relocation Center. He was determined to put his skills to use in the Army’s dental corps.

Born in 1909 in Port Blakey, Washington, Carl was a graduate of  the University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, San Francisco, School of Dentistry. Before the War, he was not only a practicing dentist with an office on Post Street in Japantown, he was also a clinical instructor of operative dentistry and became a staff member of the Department of Oral Diagnosis at UCSF. He was also the president of the San Francisco chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL).

With the signing of Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, Carl made arrangements for his wife, Uta, and five-year-old daughter, Joyce (our mother), to relocate to Salt Lake City, where they lived with the Asahina family, and later, the Hoffmans, a Mormon family. Carl stayed behind in San Francisco to assume the chairmanship of the JACL Bay Area Coordinating Council, serving the Japanese American community during the hectic months prior to the Japanese evacuation in April.