My family’s journey to Topaz began on bus no. 2. The family names of Hirabayashi and Mitsuyoshi, my mother’s family, among many others, can be seen posted as lists on a building in Irvington, California.
On May 9, 1942, these families were bused to Tanforan, a racetrack located across San Francisco Bay in San Mateo. Here at Tanforan, my family spent about six months living in horse stalls before the Topaz internment camp in Utah was ready for internees.
Before the war, the Irvington area was primarily agriculture, consisting of many small truck farms, many run by Japanese immigrants. In the Lange photograph, I recognize many of the family names on the evacuation lists from watching my mother address Christmas cards year after year. The Christmas cards were a big deal. For a few years, several of my mother’s friends would gather every Friday night and work on carving linoleum blocks to print as Christmas cards. We would then print seemingly hundreds of cards; and then my mom would patiently address them, night after night, until she reached the end of her tabbed alphabetical address book.
Looking back, I can see how the shared farming experience and the intense internment years created those strong ties—the proverbial “ties that bind.”
About the contributor: Jonathan was born in 1946 in American Fork, UT. His parents, Toby and Sugar, farmed and later opened a produce store near Pleasant Grove before returning to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1956. Jon graduated from UC Davis, served in the Army, and got an art degree from Cal State Hayward. He worked as a graphic designer at the Oakland Museum before establishing his own business as an exhibit designer and fabricator. He volunteers as the Topaz Stories Project’s exhibit designer and lives with his wife, Susan Kai, in Oakland, CA.
Copyright 2018, Jonathan Hirabayashi. All rights reserved.