Kenji Suematsu was living with his parents and siblings in Costa Mesa, California at the outbreak of World War II. His father, an immigrant farmer from Japan, was apprehended by the FBI shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. His mother, suddenly alone with her three children and an uncertain future, suffered a nervous breakdown.
In a panic to get out of Costa Mesa, Kenji’s mother instructed him to drive the family car. He was six years old at the time, and had no idea what he was doing. Decades later, he recalled in an interview with Densho:
She had me sit behind the steering wheel of the car…and gave me the car keys and [said], ‘Get the car started so we can get going.’[i]
As the car began to roll out of control, a neighbor intervened and called for help. The mother was determined unfit to care for her children and sent to a sanatorium in San Bernardino, while her children—suddenly orphaned by circumstance—were sent to a home for Japanese American children in Los Angeles.
Stories like Kenji’s show that family separation during Japanese American WWII incarceration didn’t follow the script we’ve seen at other times in history. There were no auction blocks, no boarding schools, no deliberate separation and shuffling between detention sites at the border. Nevertheless, many Japanese American children still faced family separation as the US hastened to contain an imagined enemy hiding out along its Western coast.
Many cases of family separation involved children being separated from fathers who had been swept up in the raids that targeted community leaders, language teachers, and others whose activities had landed them on an FBI watchlist. But in some cases, children lost or were separated from both parents. For them, the US Government made special accommodations in the Manzanar Children’s Village, an orphanage inside one of the ten US War Relocation Authority (WRA) concentration camps.
The Shonien
Like many wartime orphans, Kenji Suematsu’s experience of separation was not an isolated incident, but rather a painful pattern repeated in different iterations over the course of his childhood. Upon arrival at the Shonien—a Los Angeles orphanage run by and for Japanese Americans—he was separated from his siblings because they fell into different age groups. Though he wasn’t able to see his own family, he began to form bonds with the other children.
But the Shonien itself was undergoing major upheaval. The home’s founder and director, Rokuichi “Joy” Kusumoto was, like Kenji’s father, arrested in the initial FBI sweeps following Pearl Harbor. He was sent first to an internment camp in Missoula, Montana and later deported to Japan where he died in obscurity.[ii]