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How we were treated on plantation after the attack on Pearl Harbor (Japanese)

(Japanese) I don’t know how to describe it. I was just sad. But they treated us well on the plantation. Every day they would give us face masks first. And every morning when we gathered, the plantation owner, our boss would hand this note to gaijin (non-Japanese foreigners). I thought, they wouldn’t give us the note because we are Japanese, so I asked them. Then they told me, don’t say anything bad to these Japanese people because they are good Japanese people, different from the ones in Japan, that’s what they wrote. I felt so thankful. Just a few moments ago I was thinking, they treated us that way because we were Japanese. But it wasn’t like that.


generations Hawaii immigrants immigration Issei Japan migration Pearl Harbor attack, Hawaii, 1941 United States

Date: June and July, 1991

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Robert Nakamura, Karen Ishizuka

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Haruo Kasahara was born in 1900 in Japan and left Fukushima-ken for Hawaii in 1919 to join her parents. She recalled being so homesick for Japan, she cried every day. She worked on a plantation in the fields cutting grass and watering the sugar cane for a wage of 55 cents a day.

Mrs. Kasahara was married in 1922. She met her husband by Omiai. He also worked at the plantation. For him, it was his second marriage. His first wife had died and left him with two children. When Mrs. Kasahara married him, his children were in Japan. Mrs. Kasahara gave birth to six children, however two died at very young ages. (July 1991)

Wakako Nakamura Yamauchi
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Yamauchi,Wakako Nakamura

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