The Tale of Elaine Yoneda, a Jewish Woman in a Japanese American Concentration Camp

Just past dawn on March 30, 1942, Elaine Yoneda stood on a Los Angeles sidewalk, unsure where to turn. She looked up at the building before her, solid concrete and stretching half a block: the South Spring Street civil control station, where she’d been ordered to bring her three-year-old son, Tommy, for deportation to a concentration camp.

Elaine was the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants and the wife of a Japanese American man. Her husband, Karl, had gone to Manzanar a week earlier. He was one of the first Japanese Americans in a camp that would eventually hold 10,000, the majority U.S. citizens, who’d been forced to relocate off the coast and imprisoned en mass.

As for Elaine’s son, it was him the army wanted now, she’d been told over the phone the night before, by a priest. Not you, the priest had explained. Not if you’re white, he meant—even though she’d given birth to a half-Japanese child.

The clergyman was from the Maryknoll mission, a Roman Catholic order that had long worked with the Japanese American community and was now assisting with their removal from the West Coast. Alien or citizen, healthy or sick, loyal or lost: all had to go.

But as for Elaine, “Oh, you don’t have to go; you don’t have to go,” he’d said as she’d clutched the handset in her parents’ apartment the previous evening, the darkness shrouding their home in the Jewish enclave of Boyle Heights.

Nor will you be allowed to, he’d suggested.

Her son was a different story. The three-year-old, like anyone along the West Coast with even “the slightest amount of Japanese blood,” was to be rounded up—”evacuated,” US army officials called it—and sent to a camp.  But if anyone believed Elaine was just going to surrender her child, she thought as she waited in line the next morning with Tommy, well then they really knew from nothing.

Despite Elaine’s determination to protect her son, joining him behind barbed wire would not shield her family as a whole. If she went to Manzanar with Tommy, she’d have to leave behind Joyce, her white daughter from her first marriage.

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Earlier that spring, when the Wartime Civilian Control Administration (WCCA) announced the forced removal and incarceration of the entire West Coast Japanese American community, they mandated that having any Japanese ancestry at all targeted one for imprisonment (what they called “exclusion” and “evacuation” to “assembly” and “reception” centers). One official document clarified that “the slightest amount of Japanese blood was sufficient to impose liability.”

But WCCA officials also repeatedly insisted that, as evidence of America’s democratic intentionality and humane practices, their procedures were meant to keep families together, incarcerated (“evacuated”) as a group to one or another of the concentration camps (“assembly centers”).

In the case of mixed families like the Yonedas—whom the WCCA had apparently failed to anticipate—administrators were stumped. What to do about incarcerating people who were not Japanese at all?

One so-called solution materialized on May 8, 1942, with the announcement that “the non-Japanese spouse of a person of Japanese ancestry or the non-Japanese parent of a part Japanese child may elect to accompany his or her Japanese ancestry spouse or child into an assembly or reception center.”

There was a caveat, though: the non-Japanese mother, father, wife, or husband had to sign a waiver attesting that  “the undersigned does hereby request the privilege of accompanying” their child or spouse to be imprisoned—”in all respects as if he or she were a person of Japanese ancestry.” Becoming “as if Japanese” meant that once in camp, the person became a prisoner. Change your ethnic category, change your eligibility for freedom.

Despite this official pretense that everyone in camp was Japanese (or “as if Japanese”) it was clear to all involved that throughout spring and summer 1942, a growing population of mixed-race and non-Japanese people had been sent to one or another of the ten concentration camps for Japanese Americans. By that summer, an estimated twenty-one hundred people in mixed-race families had been incarcerated.

Now, officials became concerned about the “infectious Japanese thought” to which mixed children in camp might be exposed. This time, the solution materialized in a document alternately called the Mixed-Blood or the Mixed-Marriage Policy.

This policy, announced on July 3, 1942, created a complicated matrix of racial and gender categories to delineate who should remain behind barbed wire, who might be eligible for freedom from the camps, and who among this latter group could return home to the West Coast, or alternately must remain exiled from there, allowed only to resettle east of Arizona, Idaho, Montana, or Utah.

The policy’s first iteration mandated that a Japanese or Japanese American man and his white wife and “unemancipated” mixed children could be eligible for freedom only if they did not return to the West Coast. A white American man could be released and return home with his Japanese or Japanese American wife if they had young mixed children with them in camp and if the so-called “environment of the family” was “Caucasian.” Otherwise, they would have to resettle outside the restricted area, separate from each other while he returned home alone, or remain imprisoned.

Adult “individuals of mixed blood” who were citizens of the United States could be eligible for release and return to the West Coast if they could prove that their home “environment has been “Caucasian,” or at least had been before they were incarcerated. Otherwise, they too would have to resettle east or remain imprisoned.

Throughout that summer and beyond, these rules created much confusion. Camp administrators were initially stymied by the policy’s sole focus on multiethnic families of Japanese and European heritage, because many mixed families actually had no members who counted as “white” to officials. How to handle Chinese, Mexican, Indian, and Filipino husbands—spouses who would not be identified as white but were citizens of “friendly” (or U.S.- colonized) territories?

And just what was a “Caucasian environment” anyway? Some thought it depended on the kind of food a family had eaten for dinner before the war, others on the friends who visited them at home. No one, though, could answer definitively.

Beginning in late July 1942, in an apparent attempt to resolve some of these questions, a new version of the policy appeared. It offered an expanded category of husbands eligible for release with their Japanese American wives. Once including only “Caucasians,” this group grew to encompass the many cases of non-Japanese but also non-white American men, as well as Hispanic Americans and those who were citizens of friendly or Allied-colonized nations (China, the Philippines, Mexico, India).

These men could now be freed with their spouses as long as they had unemancipated children with them in camp and agreed to resettle east. A later iteration of the policy eventually stipulated that even a white woman who had “sired” mixed children with a Japanese American man could be eligible to return to the West Coast with her young offspring—but only if her husband were “dead or long since separated” from the family.

By October 1942, requirements for freedom for single, mixed-race adults had also changed. As one official explained, any American “whose non- Japanese blood exceeds Japanese blood” might now be eligible to live on the West Coast.

A “Caucasian” home environment made no difference for six-year-old Richard Honda that fall, however. The young boy had been incarcerated all alone and sent to Manzanar. Well before the war, at the age of four months, Richard Honda had been adopted by a white family in California named the Spandrios, after his Japanese biological mother’s death.

Five years later, the boy was forcibly removed from his family and placed in Manzanar’s “Children’s Village,” the only orphanage among the camps. According to an official memo, “The Spandrio family asked to have him returned and claimed that the community would accept the child wholeheartedly.”

The response arrived on November 13, 1942: “The request for the release of Richard Honda, a person of Japanese ancestry, age six years, to residing [sic] in Military Area No. 1 is disapproved.”

*

As for the Yonedas, after officials failed to stop Elaine from boarding the train with Tommy in the spring of 1942, Elaine became the only Jewish woman incarcerated in any of the camps for Japanese Americans, her son the only mixed Japanese Jewish prisoner.

But she was not the only white wife. Among the in-camp population were at least a hundred and thirty-four non-Japanese people, officially categorized as either “Caucasian” or “other” (despite somehow also having been designated “as if of Japanese ancestry”).

These included sixty-three white wives; eight white husbands, and three white women who were separated or divorced from their Japanese or Japanese American husbands but who wanted to stay with their incarcerated children; eight “other” husbands married to Japanese or mixed-Japanese wives; and thirty-one “other” wives.

Nor was Elaine the only mother the U.S. government separated from family members—or even her own child. As one of approximately 2,1000 incarcerated people in mixed families, she was among a population who left behind many non-Japanese relatives.

Her fourteen-year-old white daughter, Joyce, was one of untold thousands who remained outside of camp, only to endure the trauma of long-term and sometimes permanent separation. For the Yonedas, once Elaine stepped behind Manzanar’s barbed wire, she would never live with her daughter again.

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Adapted from Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp, by Tracy Slater, available now from Chicago Review Press.