“He always said to me, ‘The war was all about hypocrisies and ironic times.'”
When I was growing up, my father would sometimes talk about his experiences during World War II—scattered tidbits that I grew up hearing and took for granted. And then he passed away, at the age of 88, in 2012.
When my cousin, Nancy Ukai Russell, shared documents she found in his file in the National Archives in Washington, DC, suddenly, those scattered tidbits began coalescing into a story I wanted to tell: Toddy’s story.
My father, Tadao “Toddy” Takayanagi, grew up in Berkeley, where his father had a flower nursery. He was a UC Berkeley student in 1942 and had to drop out to prepare for the internment of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast.