Gaye LeBaron: Sonoma County welcomed back Japanese residents after World War II
July 17, 1945
“Gosh, things are sure popping these days at Amache. Everyone seems excited as heck and those having a place to go home to are OK. But believe me, there are plenty who don't know which way to turn.
“They've finally announced the official closing date … as October 15, 1945. Looks like Amache is the first in line to close.
“We've decided to return to Forestville. We figure it will be around the end of September. …”
“I'm sure grateful we have a place … I hear sentiment is improving in Calif. I certainly hope Sebastopol will follow. …”
“All in all, I think home is best - I know that there is bound to be discrimination to some degree wherever we relocate and, by golly, if we have to take it, we'd rather take it in our own hometown.”
-Kazuo Ito to Lea Perry
July 24, 1945
“Glad to get your letter and happy you have made up your mind to return here. Believe me it can't come too soon to suit us. …"
“Understand there are some quite bitter about the Japanese returning. They have nothing to be bitter about as far as I can see. …”
“I believe I told you there is a movement on foot to form a group of sympathetic, understanding people who will try to foster good feeling (between) returning Japanese and those who are now bitterly opposing their return. I understand such sentiment is dying down to some extent. The only thing for you to do is come back and face it.
“We've had it for years and it isn't anything new to a lot of us … only time will wear it out.
-Letter from Elizabeth (Lea) Perry
What we have here is the start of a positive end to a negative story.
These excerpts are from 120 or more letters exchanged by Lea Perry, who, with her husband, Joe, owned an apple orchard on Highway 116 north of Sebastopol and Kazuo Ito, whose family had been growing and processing apples in Sonoma County for several generations.
This remarkable collection of correspondence, known as the Perry Letters, tells the story of the Sonoma County Japanese, uprooted from their homes by Executive Order 9066, President Franklin Roosevelt's directive to the military to evacuate all Japanese from the Pacific coastal areas.
Some 800 Japanese were sent to camp from Sonoma County in May of 1942, loaded on a special train - with armed guards and blacked-out windows.
Most of them were American citizens. Some had sons and brothers serving in the armed forces. Several of their elders - born in Japan – had been taken by the FBI immediately after Pearl Harbor.
Kaz's early letters to Lea, who had agreed to tend to the family's business here, are a flurry of arrangements for their property - both land and chattels (a quirky old word which doesn't express the feelings for the things left behind).
The Ito family owned more than one farm, and the letters point to the labyrinth of legal work necessary to oversee their orchards and their homes.
The first letters are from temporary (six months!) quarters at the Merced fairgrounds. After October 1942, the letters come from hastily constructed Camp Amache in the southeast high desert corner of Colorado - their home for the next three years.
Joe and Lea's son, Tom Perry, found the letters - Kaz's to her plus carbon copies of hers to him - in several drawers and cupboards in the family home after his mother's death.
They are now part of the Japanese-American Citizens League's collection at the Sonoma State University's Schulz Library. They have been digitized by the library's Special Collections staff and can be read by clicking here.
Until December, a video of Camp Amache photos - with excerpts from the Perry Letters are running on a loop in the second floor lobby of the Schulz Library as part of an exhibit in the library gallery curated by Dana Shew of the Anthropological Studies Center at SSU.
Called “Creativity Unconfined” it is a collection of items made at Camp Amache by internees who found some solace in creating beautiful objects from a bleak place.
The opening of the exhibit last month was the occasion for a gathering of survivors and descendants of the incarceration, including SSU's President Judy Sakaki, whose family was interned at another Colorado camp.
Wearing a pin made from tiny shells her mother had gathered from the dry Colorado sand, Sakaki joined the Amache speakers in telling the “camp story.”
“There are so many barracks here I could not possibly count them all, “Kaz writes shortly after arrival at Amache. … and I haven't seen half of the camp yet.”
What he had seen, along with others who have told their stories, were crowded quarters in the barracks, paper-thin walls, the breakdown of traditional family customs. One other camp resident, in an interview recalled his mother in tears at the first meal eaten by her family that she had not prepared. Another woman, longing for home, wept when served a meal in the mess hall containing apples shipped from Sebastopol.
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