1. Two notable exceptions are Gorfinkel, Claire, ed., The Evacuation Diary of Hatsuye Egami (Pasadena, Calif.: Intentional Productions, 1995)Google Scholar; and Chang, Gordon, ed., Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and His Internment Writings, 1942–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

2. A neighbor.

3. A neighbor.

4. Sakujiro Kawaguchi, Fuki Endow Kawaguchi's husband. “Dahdee,” the Japanese pronunciation of “Daddy,” was the name that, first his children, then everyone else, used to refer to him.

5. An old family friend.

6. A neighbor.

7. Kaneko Endow was the daughter of Mama's older sister in Oregon. Sho Endow was the older son of that family.

8. On December 8, 1941, Japanese ships sank the H.M.S. Prince of Wales, a battleship, and the Repulse, a cruiser, the only allied ships of their size in the western Pacific. Shortly after attacking Pearl Harbor, Japanese carriers launched a devastating bombardment of American ships and airplanes in Manila.

9. The wholesale flower market in Los Angeles, whose vendors were predominantly Japanese American.

10. On December 8, under authority of the Trading With the Enemy Act, the Treasury Department froze all bank accounts held by Japanese aliens. Once the regulations were announced, Japanese Americans launched an immediate appeal to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, then touring the West Coast. As a result of Mrs. Roosevelt's intercession, the regulations were eased to permit Issei to withdraw $100 per month for living expenses and to make use of banks in order to restart their businesses.

11. In the original Japanese, Shikata Ganai — a phrase of resignation that has come to symbolize the Issei response to the wartime incarceration.

12. The mother of the Mexican American family that worked for the Kawaguchis.

13. Mr. Sugano, who ran a Japanese school in Compton, was connected to the Kawaguchis through his eldest son Takuya's marriage to Aiko Kawaguchi. Aiko, the daughter of Dahdee's older brother, was educated in Japan, but lived with the Kawaguchi family in Dominguez before marrying Takuya Sugano in 1940.

14. Terminal Island, in the Los Angeles harbor of San Pedro, was home to a large population of Japanese American fishermen and cannery workers in the prewar years. It was taken over by the Navy as a special defense zone in February 1942, and its civilian population was evicted, ultimately on 48 hours' notice. Although the homes and businesses of the Island's residents were completely destroyed by Naval authorities, the Navy refused to provide special compensation for the losses.

15. The source of information for this comment, which clearly refers to the damage suffered by American forces at Pearl Harbor, is unknown. Interestingly, while the government kept secret for several weeks the extent of the actual damage in hopes of concealing it from the Japanese, this estimate is reasonably accurate. In fact, eight battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers, and four auxiliary craft were lost, while some two hundred planes were put out of commission.

16. The husband of the Japanese American couple who were employed as farmworkers by the Kawaguchis.

17. Neighbors and family friends.

18. A Japanese board game played with black and white tiles.

19. As already mentioned, Takuya Sugano was the husband of Dahdee's niece Aiko.

20. Under California's Alien Land Act, Japanese aliens, who were “ineligible to citizenship,” were barred from owning agricultural land. As a result, Issei were forced to form dummy corporations with white friends or to place title to the land in the names of their American-born children, who were citizens. Following World War II, California instituted a series of escheat proceedings to strip Japanese Americans of their land and discourage resettlement, a policy that led to the historic U.S. Supreme Court decision Oyama v. California (1948), which struck down the application of Alien Land Acts to U.S. citizens.

21. Los Angeles Japanese Daily News, founded in 1905 and still publishing.

22. An onion that resembles a scallion but is thicker.

23. A Chinese-style restaurant (“Manshulo” being a corruption of “Manchu”) in the Los Angeles area.

24. The stock flowers were the subject of a family legend. On his deathbed, Dahdee later told Sanae that Mr. Murphy of the Murphy Seed Company once brought over some seeds for a flower called Mathiola. Mr. Murphy said that the flower had mostly single petal stems, but occasionally would produce a beautiful multipetaled flower. He thought that Dahdee, who was very interested in plants, might be able to do something with the seeds. Dahdee stated that he worked for five years on developing the stocks, and had finally perfected the process of growing the multipetaled Methiola, now commonly known as stocks, by the time the war broke out, but that the family was evacuated just as the successful crop was produced, they lost their land and seeds to Mr. Murphy, who profited from the bonanza. However, the legend does seem to be contradicted, at least in part, by the diaries, which indicate that Dahdee had produced stocks at least a year before the war started. It also appears that other flower farmers may have had some of the same flowers.

25. Presumably Mrs. Hamada (no indication of a name in the original).

26. Illegible in the original.

27. Shiro Endo, a family friend.

28. A neighbor.

29. A neighbor and family friend.

30. In original, zoku-zoku, an onomatopoeic word indicating the thumping of the heart, used to indicate trepidation or unease.

31. A buttercup.

32. A Japanese jelly, made from seaweed.

33. An old Japanese New Year's tradition. Families and friends gather to pound steamed, sticky rice into rice cakes for the New Year's festivities. The cooked rice is put into a hollowed-out stump, and men with heavy mallets take turns pounding the rice into a dough to the accompaniment of drums and music. A woman deftly swipes the rice with water between blows of the mallet, turning the rice over and over until it forms a solid ball, which is then shaped or stuffed with sweet bean paste. The rice cake is also used in the traditional New Year's morning dish of ozoni, a soup with a dumpling of toasted rice cake floating in it.

34. Dishes traditionally made for the New Year's feast. Kamaboko is a fish cake, tamago yaki is a kind of sushi made with an egg crust, and kombu maki is a sushi wrapped in seaweed.

35. Toshiye, consulted recently about this episode, relates it differently than its presentation in the diary. According to Toshiye, Mama always complained to her about Dahdee and his faults. The issue about Dahdee's drinking and the embarrassment it caused the family upset Toshiye, and when she spoke up to Dahdee about it he slapped her for being impertinent and told her she did not understand the situation. Toshiye feels today that she had been manipulated by Mama into this outburst, and feels that Dahdee was justified in his anger over her outburst and in expressing that anger by slapping her. She insists that Dahdee only slapped her once, and that that was the only time he ever laid a hand on her. The incident, she says, demonstrates the extreme stress affecting the entire family.

36. A colloquial Japanese expression.

37. Mama usually wrote her diaries in special diary folios imported from Japan. When the war started, Mama was unable to get these particular kind of books and thus was forced to settle for an American notebook.

38. There were several Kawaguchi families living in the area. They were all friends of Fuki and Sakujiro Kawaguchi and may have been distant relatives. These Kawaguchis, like many of the people in the area, were from the Shizuoka Prefecture, which contained the peninsula of Miho. Shizuoka, along with Kumamoto, Hiroshima, and Yamaguchi, was one of the main sources of Japanese immigrants to the United States.

39. This probably refers to some test seeds for flowers. There is no such word in ordinary Japanese.

40. Japanese families honor the members of the family who have passed away, especially parents and grandparents, by cooking special dishes to put on the family altar on the anniversary of their death. Family members light incense at the altar and observe the anniversary with great reverence.

41. Fried bean curd cases stuffed with sweet rice.

42. A religious organization, referred to as the Self-Realization Fellowship in the United States. It issued books and monthly pamphlets setting forth its activities and creed. The group also organized gatherings in which speakers expounded their views, which were subsequently printed in the pamphlets and other publications. Mama followed the group's teachings avidly, hoping to find a solution to her continued ill health

43. Unknown, though presumably one of the men Dahdee dealt with in the sale of flowers or seeds.

44. The second son of the Sugano family, Takuya's younger brother. There was one other brother, the youngest, named Tetsuya.

45. A tractor attachment.

46. The man who farmed the land adjoining the Kawaguchi's land.

47. The place name is added to distinguish between grandparents.

48. Japanese rice cakes.

49. A neighbor.

50. In January 1942, the U.S. Justice Department, hoping to deter subversion and deflect pressure from anti-Japanese forces for more repressive action, ordered enemy aliens (who already had been registered by the government in 1940) to submit a new registration form and be fingerprinted and photographed.

51. On January 29, following requests by the West Coast defense command, the Justice Department issued a proclamation creating 88 “vital defense areas” on the West Coast and ordered enemy aliens to leave these areas by February 24 (later changed to February 15). Like the registration of enemy aliens, this action failed to quell pressure from West Coast leaders for drastic action against both Issei and Nisei.

52. Friends of the family.

53. The minister of the Buddhist church.

54. The Japanese bridal cup used in wedding ceremony.

55. A neighbor.

56. California Governor Culbert Olson, a liberal Democrat, became an outstanding proponent of mass evacuation, but feared the effects of evacuation on the state's heavily Japanese farm-labor population. Accordingly, in late January 1942, he invited a delegation of Nisei leaders to Sacramento and pressured them to develop a voluntary migration scheme involving government-sponsored concentration camps, from which the Japanese American men would commute for day labor in the fields. Olson's transparently self-serving scheme aroused the ire of his Nisei guests, and the meeting broke up on a discordant note.

57. A shipping company.

58. In fact, the Japanese finally took possession of Singapore on February 15, 1942 — a major defeat for Great Britain and the Allies.

59. A Chinese restaurant.

60. A friend of the family.

61. Mrs. Kubota, sometimes referred to as Ito-san, was Mama's best friend. The Kubotas also came from Miho and had a farm in California's Imperial Valley. They often came to visit for a few days, and Mama stayed in close touch with Mrs. Kubota throughout her life. The Kubotas moved back to Japan on the last ship to leave Los Angeles before the war and never returned, although three of their children came to live in the United States after the war.

62. Japanese soy sauce.

63. A Japanese phrase meaning endless discussion. The phrase refers to a conflict from Japan's feudal period involving endless deliberation that came to no resolution. The text suggests that the author was aware of the President's signing the previous day of Executive Order 9066, an event widely reported in West Coast newspapers, and was waiting to discover what the ramifications of the order would be.

64. Illegible in the original.

65. The fiftieth day of the year is a lucky day in Japanese culture.

66. Rice dumplings are customarily given out in Japanese homes to celebrate a child's one-hundredth day of life.

67. On February 23, 1942, an offshore Japanese submarine shelled an oil refinery in Goleta, near Santa Barbara, causing minor damage. The shelling was the only military action on the West Coast mainland during World War II.

68. A neighbor.

69. A friend of the family.

70. Illegible in original.

71. This refers to the dolls displayed on Girl's Day. These dolls are beautifully detailed and costumed members of the Imperial court — Emperor, Empress, and courtiers, musicians, and servants. These dolls are heirlooms, passed on from mother to daughter and brought out only on Girl's Day. This was the last showing of the Kawaguchi family's heirloom dolls.

72. Red rice.

73. The Japanese pronunciation of passenger, meaning passenger car, as distinct from the word machine, which refers to a vehicle such as a farmer's truck.

74. A friend of the family.