My name is Yoshiko

by Yoshiko Susan Kawaguchi Matsumoto, Pamela Varma Brown

Everything changed for Yoshiko Kawaguchi on December 7, 1941, the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, plunging the United States into World War II. Until then, Yoshiko had lived with her parents and three siblings in rural Downey, California, where her parents had been farm workers for nearly 20 years. Four months after the bombing, the Kawaguchi family and 120,000 other Japanese Americans across the country, found themselves imprisoned, perceived by the U.S. as threats to national security, solely because of their Japanese ancestry. Now 94 years old, Yoshiko Susan Kawaguchi Matsumoto looks back at the five months that she and her family were forced to live in a horse stall at the Santa Anita Racetrack in Southern California, and the two years they were imprisoned in a second internment camp, in the desert of Rohwer, Arkansas. Eventually Yoshiko and her family were released. From then on, Yoshiko's life began to unfold in a series of events more fortuitous and beautiful than she could have ever imagined.

140 pages, Paperback

Published December 11, 2015

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike other books by Japanese Americans about their experiences in the internment camps during WWII in the US, My Name Is Yoshiko author, Yoshiko Susan Kawaguchi Matsumoto, describes being rounded up and interned as unpleasant but tolerable. A couple of times in the book she even made comments about the food being good including lots of shrimp from the Gulf Coast. She describes being treated firmly but generally fair. While this is a bit different and better than many other internees have written about their experiences. She got her perspective from her parents, who were first generation immigrants from Japan, whose attitude was to accept what is and endure. From today's perspective the internment program was a violation of their rights. From the viewpoint of America's leaders after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor it is more difficult to judge fairly. Eventually, still during the war, Yoshiko and her family were let out of confinement by having people who were not relatives vouch for them and they ended up in Michigan (in fact she and her sister worked in a restaurant a few miles from my home but it is no longer there) where they were able to find work while they waited out the war. They took on American names, Susan for Yoshiko, because of resentment of Japanese by many Americans. A fair amount of her book, maybe about half, describes her life after the war including getting married, moving to Chicago, California, and eventually Hawaii where she lived with her husband until his death. She was in her mid-nineties as her book was published. If you decide to read her story, you should also read about other Japanese Americans experiences because they were not all the same.