Letters

Reading the letters today in class was an unbelievably amazing experience for me - as a history major, I love reading everything old that I can get my hands on! But more so than this, it was really amazing to get to read firsthand accounts of someone who had experienced life in Japanese internment camps during World War Two. My group had two different sets of letters - one set was from Amy's sister, Martha, to Violet, and the other set was from Amy to Violet. The letters from Martha to Violet were very difficult to read, but gave a good sense of what life was like for her as a nurse living in the internment camps. These letters were written in 1942 and 1943, and talk about Martha's work as a nurse in a hospital, first in the TB ward and then in the orthopedic ward. These letters also talk about camp life - how dirty the camps were, and how the camps weren't finished when the family first arrived. Items like clothes were also hard to come by - in one letter, Martha asked Violet to help her find a "city" coat and possibly a new suit, since she was hoping to take a job that would relocate her to a city soon and needed nicer clothes to wear. The other set of letters, written by Amy to Martha, were written in the later years of WW II - the first letter was written about a month after Amy's marriage to Tomio, the 2nd was written while she was pregnant with their first child, and the 3rd was shortly after the birth of the child. A common theme in all of these letters was the constant relocating that Amy and Tomio had to do after they were relocated. Amy mentions having lived in Chicago for a time but left during her pregnancy because breathing was difficult for her. From there she moved to Nebraska to work on a chicken farm. The last letter was written from New York, implying another move, and states that she and Tomio were looking for housing in Minneapolis, which is where they hoped to reunite their families.

In thinking about connections to Takaki in these letters, one of the things that stood out to me was the treatment of Japanese Americans who were relocated away from the West Coast during the war. Even though they were far from the west coast and were able to live freely outside of internment camps, families still had to struggle to make ends meet because good jobs were not available to them - Tomio and Amy ended up working in a chicken farm, sexing chickens, for a time, despite Tomio's college education. Takaki also talks about the scarcity of goods like clothing in the camps, something that is clearly exemplified by one of Martha's letters to Violet, asking for her help in buying nicer clothes. As far as a connection to one of our readings in Bold Words, the connection that stands out to me the most from these letters is to the poem "Cincinnati". While Amy and Martha never mention in their letters that they are being mistreated by Caucasians because of their heritage, they aren't really any mentions about any of the places they relocate to being very homelike - like in the poem, each new place offers them a chance to start over, but they don't seem to be very welcomed because of their heritage.