When I was attending the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1960s, I met many Japanese Americans. I noticed that when they met other Japanese Americans, they would almost always ask, “Which camp was your family in?”
That puzzled me. “What’s this camp?” I asked. That’s when I first learned about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.
I knew of course that I had been born in Oakland, CA in 1939. But my family had lived in Japan since 1946, when I was six. I had never heard my parents speak of “camp.”
On my next visit home, I asked my father, “Were we in camp?” “Of course,” he said. “Why didn’t you ever tell me??” He replied gently, “You never asked.”
Thankfully, my father lived to be 101 years old; so I had plenty of time to ask him many more questions. This is his story.
Tsutomu Tanigawa (known as “Storm” to his friends) was born in Watsonville, CA in 1909. His parents, Montaro and Tsumo, had emigrated from Fukuoka Prefecture in 1904 to work on sugarcane plantations in Hawaii. Two years later, they moved to Watsonville, where their second son, Tsutomu, was born. Tsutomu grew up in a multi-ethnic community where his friends were of many different backgrounds: German, Portuguese, Spanish.
“Storm” did not consider himself very Japanese, preferring to read in English; swimming in the river rather than attending Japanese language school; eating American food like meat and potatoes over traditional Japanese dishes; and seeing American movies. Once, he dropped off his wife and her friend to see a Japanese film while he and his older brother Kazuo went to an American one.
The Tanigawas grew strawberries, eventually saving enough to buy a house and some land in Japan. While my grandparents returned home to Fukuoka, my father and Kazuo stayed in the U.S. to finish high school.
They continued strawberry farming, moving eventually to Mt. Eden (now part of Hayward) in search of fresh soil.
While visiting his parents in Japan in 1936, Tsutomu met and married my mother, Katsue Kuratomi, a Kibei nursing student who had been born in Oxnard, CA. They returned to California, where my brother Hiroshi and I were born.