Growing Up in Oakland

This exhibit profiles the seven children of Kishiro and Tomi, who grew up in the 1920s and 30s. How did education affect these siblings' worldview and the questions they pursued? 

Growing Up in Japan

Tomi took her daughter Kimi at age 8 and after finishing the third grade at Lincoln Elementary School in Oakland and her son Sus at age 5 to Japan to be raised and educated. Tomi and Kishiro may have been planning on returning to Japan after a short period. On the trip to Japan in June of 1910, Tomi toted her third child, Chizu, who was a toddler. Tomi did not explain that she was going to leave her two children to be reared in Japan and let them believe it was only a trip. 

Kimi was sent to be with her maternal grandmother in Tokyo, and attended Toyo Eiwa Girls Academy in Tokyo, a Canadian Methodist missionary boarding school. Tomi’s father, Tokichi, was descendant from a family that were known to be sword makers. Ko, Tomi’s mother, was a patron of the arts and held "salons" in their Tokyo home to entertain artists.

Sus lived at first Kimi and his grandparents and then was moved to a boarding school in Azabu and stayed with his paternal grandparents in Naegi during school breaks, a far distance from Tokyo. 

Sending an eldest child back to Japan was a relatively common practice among Japanese immigrants to the U.S. at that time. Those children who were born in the U.S. and sent to Japan to be raised were called Kibei.  Tomi and Kishiro  may have wanted their first children to be raised there in order to understand Japanese culture and to be able to easily re-integrate when the family decided to move back to Japan. . Iyo shared in an interview in 1995, that her parents intended to return to Japan(Source: Iyo's Oral History Interview 1995  

Collections:

See An album of Sus' childhood photos in Oakland and then in Naegi, Japan. 

See photos of Kishiro's family in Naegi, Japan here. 


Browse a collection of photographs of Sus from his years in Oakland High School after returning to Oakland from Japan to his wedding photos when he married Kiyo Kitano in 1940.

After Kimi finished her senior year of high school in 1920 and was about to graduate at the end of March, her mother called her back to be married in the U.S. So, she left Japan without attending her graduation ceremony. Many years later, she would say that missing her graduation ceremony was a great regret later in life. Kimi, an obedient daughter, took a steam ship trip from Yokohama to San Francisco, 19 to 21 days at sea, leaving her life in Japan and returning to a country she had left as a young kid. 

Aspirational & Confounded

The Yamashita kids (second generation in the United States, and the first American born generation, called Nisei among Japanese Americans) had educational aspirations. Six of Kishiro and Tomi's seven children went to Cal Berkeley. 

Kishiro had put all the money towards their education. But college-educated Nisei did not find an easy time getting a foothold in professional fields to which they aspired. Some of the Yamashita siblings got lucky with employment, and some had to rely on employment from family members established in produce (like Chiz' husband Ed Kitow), a field where Japanese Americans were dominant in California in the 1930s.

Sus graduated from Cal Berkeley in 1929 with a degree in Commerce, and went on to Harvard Business School for one year. He returned to the Bay area after a tour of Europe to work at Mitsubishi importer and exporters from 1933-1941.

Chiz graduated from the Cal Berkeley undergrad in 1929 and the UC Berkeley School of Nursing in 1931. She then worked at Agnes Hospital in Sacramento from a year where she was the director of nurses. She continued to practice in Los Angeles and El Centro, roughly twelve miles away from Calexico, California where her husband, Ed ran a large melon and vegetable farm just north of Mexican border.

John graduated from Cal in 1935 in Political Science and Economics and went on to do farm bookkeeping, farm work for Ed’s company, Mount Signal Produce before going back to school part-time at Pacific School of Religion in 1938.

Iyo graduated from Cal in 1938, and went on to work at Mt. Signal as well up until 1941. Kay graduated in 1941 and went on to work for the U.S. Employment Service in Oakland. 

John participated in a mock trial hosted by the University of California Japanese Students Club. The Nisei youth was being put on trial for having initiative and ambition. We can only assume there was a side that was making a speech in favor of this position- that Nisei's have initiative and ambition- hopefully enough to overcome racial discrimination in the job market. And there must have been a speech made to the contrary opinion- that Nisei students do not have enough initiative and ambition.

Tomi’s children were aware of their place in American society as a racial minority, and felt the need to prove themselves. Many Nisei children of immigrants who made it through college found that they could not find jobs in their chosen professions. Instead, many joined their peers in the jobs that Japanese were active in at that time- gardening and truck farming.

Nisei Cal Students desperately wanted to avoid the fate of other immigrant groups who found themselves stuck in low wage labor jobs. Japanese American students hoped assimilation would allow them to escape such categories. In 1932, the Japanese American Student Association attending Cal Berkeley put on a mock debate examining the question “Is the Japanese American youth fulfilling his role?”  and another with with the topic of whether or not the Japanese American youths have initiative and ambition."

Nisei students were invested in theorizing the role of the Japanese American youth and in promoting the Nisei generation's access to success. John wrote in his position paper at the mock trial about the obstacles facing Nisei youth:

It is true, ours is a hard row to hoe and ours is to be a struggle against oppression and suppression. No doubt to many of us the barriers that confront us seem insurmountable and the efforts bound to be futile. We are striving in vain says the heavy-hearted Second Generation Japanese. The place of the Japanese-American is meant to be servile….But let us take stock of ourselves! What are we made of?" (To See Full Essay)

To see a collection of all of John's undergraduate papers.

Nisei College students were well aware racial prejudice in the job market as well as broader society.  For some Nisei students at UC Berkeley, cultural pride in Japan was the answer to Nisei acculturation and acceptance into the wider American society. [What are our definitions for acculturation and assimilation?]  With limited experience of Japanese culture as it existed in Japan, American born and raised children of Japanese descent had some romanticized notions of Japanese culture. Most Nisei children spoke Japanese less than fluently. In the Yamashita family, kids spoke English at the dinner table, leaving the parents to follow the conversation in English. The second generation's conceptions of their heritage may have had some gaps, as did their understanding of the political implications and social realities of a militarizing Japan.

The Nisei's particular relationship with Japan and their vision for how their generation could get ahead in a prejudiced society appear as themes in many of the essays John wrote in college at U.C. Berkeley. In one such essay, John compares the lot of college-educated Japanese and African Americans as they face racism in employment.

“Why does the negro boy say, ‘I don’t know why I’m going to college!’ And the deserving Japanese, culturally an American, hands in his application for a certain position in engineering. He is refused! The president of the concern may be a man of high noble character and personality, but he will give as a refusal, 'My colleagues will not tolerate working with a Jap!' The opportunities are practically all closed now and the Japanese in American must be a servile race. For him only position such as gardening, farming, window-washing and small shopkeeping are open. The reason for this condition lies solely in the fact that there is a racial consciousness and a superiority complex which stand in the way of the young Japanese obtaining better opportunities…”

To read the essay in full. Excerpt comes from the bottom of the second page.
To see a collection of all of John's undergraduate papers.

These essays, along with others that John saved from his college years, demonstrate how one Japanese American youth conceived of his place within society- an othered and at times maligned existence. John saw his position as similar to Black Americans, but did not deeply interogate the differences or the similarities. In these papers racial consciousness is not a tool for the oppressed, but rather, something to be avoided for a future of racial harmony. Also at work in these essays is an orientalizing essentialism of the East and a romanticized view of militarizing Japan.

John yearned for a society without consciousness of race, and proposes that the Nisei could become a bridge for racial divide.

"We must contribute towards the bringing about of brotherly goodwill among races...Let us strive all with one accord to hasten the day when men can meet in sincere brotherhood, then peace and true understanding will reign among nations."

In this thesis, racial harmony could lead to harmony between nation states, particularly, the U.S. and Japan. John was interested in combining the best of both cultures to show America that there was something to offer in the Orient. This college writing is a bit essentialist, and at times even defends Japan’s war crimes in Manchuria. In his essay, "The Role of Citizenship in a Changing World," John drafted multiple times for various audiences. In it, he writes of the challenges to democracy in Nazi Germany and in fascist Italy, and how the U.S. must stand as the beacon for rights of citizenship and freedom. "The very fronties of democracy have been pushed back in the last few years until today the United States seems to present the last stronghold of democracy."

After the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Yamashita siblings would burn their college papers on Japan’s cultural strength for fear that these essays could be used against them. (Many families burned all their family photos of famliy in Japan, believing that any photo or letter written in Japanese could be used against them. One oral history source: Documentary Film "Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story") The wartime incarceration would indeed end this line of optimistic thinking. Japanese American Nisei would no longer strive to be the diplomatic bridge between the United States and their parents’ home country.

You are currently in the exhibit "Growing Up in Oakland"

This exhibit explores Tomi and Kishiro's kids. All seven were born in Oakland and spent at some or all of their childhood in Oakland. This exhibit shows pictures and memories of growing up in a racially mixed Oakland community, the experience of sending the first two children to be raised for much of their childhoos in Japan, and the aspirations of this American citizen generation as they navigated life at Cal Berkeley and after (in a racially segregated country).

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