by Shoko Matsuura Umekubo with an assist from Yoko Matsuura Honda
My love of LEGO® began when I was in the 3rd grade. I remember asking Daddy if I could have Lincoln Logs® because cousin David had them. Instead, Daddy bought me LEGOs. He said that LEGO was better. I wasn’t so sure at the time, but he was right.
My father was always right.
He did not have a lot of time to play with me because he worked 16-hour days; but he did make the time to create furniture out of cardboard for my LEGO houses that I built. LEGO was not so sophisticated back then and I wanted furniture for my house.
Years later I would have a chance to return the favor.
My dad was Masaru Matsuura. Always a quiet man, he never brought up the subject of the camps or his past life. When my older sister Yoko’s daughters had assignments in school, they would sometimes “interview” him; when he was asked questions, he would answer them. But the information always seemed piecemeal. There were a lot of holes that were never filled. This is what we have pieced together from the scattered LEGO pieces of his life and the information that we know now:
He was born in Salinas, CA in 1919. He had three older brothers, and they all did farmwork in the Salinas area. By the time Executive Order 9066 was issued in February 1942, Masaru’s eldest brother, Fred Shigeru, was working in San Francisco; so the three younger brothers joined him in San Francisco so they could stay together as they were detained and incarcerated. They were sent to Walerga Assembly Center in Sacramento, and then to Tule Lake in Northern California.
From Tule Lake, their paths diverged. In September 1943, after the government-sponsored “loyalty questionnaire” attempted to separate loyal from disloyal, Shigeru and Koichi were transferred to Topaz. Masaru and Shohei, the second brother, replied “no-no” to Questions 27 and 28* and remained in Tule Lake; they were later sent to Ft. Lincoln in Bismarck, North Dakota. My dad remembered that there were armed guards on the train that took them to Bismarck. At Ft. Lincoln, Shohei renounced his citizenship and was repatriated to Japan.
At some point, my dad was transferred to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) internment camp at Santa Fe, New Mexico, and then to the detention camp in Crystal City, Texas.