Evelyn Glenn: Hi, I'm Evelyn Nakano Glenn, and I'm a professor at UC Berkeley and I'm here to tell you a little bit about my father's family, the Nakanos, their experience in Alameda, and wartime experience. My grandparents came to the United States in 1906, and Akijiro, my grandfather, originally went to Hawaii, but then he came to Alameda, and then my grandmother came to Alameda. They had already had three children, three sons, who they left in Japan in the care of relatives. And then when they came to Alameda, they had five more. My aunt Hideko was born in 1906, my father Makoto was born in 1908, my aunt Sue was born in 1910, my uncle Mas 1913, and my aunt Betty in 1918. Later on, two of the sons who had been born in Japan also came and also lived in Alameda. And my uncle Billy came to the United States and established a so-called Chinese restaurant, which actually carried the kind of colonial name of Manchukuo restaurant. So it was kind of a, I would say, a Japanese-style Chinese restaurant.

My grandfather was a gardener, and my grandmother was a domestic worker. And that was very typical at that time as I discovered through research. That a large number of the men were gardeners and the women were domestic workers, and that has, of course, to do with the fact that there were a lot of large homes in Alameda. I found ads in the Alameda newspaper in which Japanese men were advertising gardening services, so that was very typical.

My grandfather one of the founders of the Buddhist Temple of Alameda, which was established in 1917, and it just had its ninety-fifth anniversary. The Buddhist Temple was very important in the Nakano family because my grandparents and father and aunts and uncles lived in the upper stories of the Buddhist Temple. And I assume my grandfather was probably partly a caretaker. My oldest uncle, Uncle Roy's eldest child Jean Nakano, but who is now Jean Nomura, was born at the temple. Later on they moved to a nearby house on Oak Street.

Another interesting thing had to do with sports, particularly baseball. Prewar, that was a very important kind of activity for young men. Most of the Japanese American communities in California had baseball leagues. And there was an Alameda team and they would play through the Japanese American league. My uncle Mas and my father were both involved in baseball, and my father started playing when he was sixteen, I believe. My uncle Mas also played on the team. My father was an outstanding athlete according to both John Tawada and my uncle Mas. My father, who was a left-handed first baseman was a long ball hitter. In fact, he was dubbed the Babe Ruth of Japanese American baseball. He was a member of an all-star team that was organized by Fresno Japanese Americans, and they did a barnstorming tour of Japan playing college teams there including Kyoto University as well as going to Taiwan and Hawaii. When I was in Hawaii in the 1980s, my father came to visit and showed us the fields where he played, so that was kind of a big highlight of his life. And he had a reputation that even later in life, certainly when his friends from the old times would come around, they would always talk about it. So that's kind of an important part of our family lore.

At the outbreak of the war, there was initially a zone that was set up near the coast where Japanese were going to be removed. And as a result of that, my grandparents and aunts and uncles decided to move to the Sacramento Delta region where my mother's family was from, because they feared that they would be evacuated from Alameda. As it turned out, the evacuation zone was expanded to include the Sacramento Delta, and my maternal grandparents and my paternal grandparents were sent to separate camps because there was a dividing line marked by the Sacramento River. The Nakanos went to Gila in Arizona, which was one of the harshest climates. Of course, all of the camps were in quite deserted areas, often on Indian land, but I think Gila was particularly a harsh environment with sandstorms and so forth.

None of my uncles or my father served in the military, partly because my father was already in his thirties, and they were married and had children. But my uncle Mas and my father left the camps to go to Chicago where there were industrial jobs available. After the war ended, a large part of my family ended up living there for some years. One uncle actually remained in Chicago where his family remains today. Gradually people began to move back to the Bay Area and some of them returned to Alameda. My uncle Mas returned early in the 1950s and did some gardening work and also established a flower shop. My parents moved to Oakland in 1956 and they ran a motel in Oakland. But when they retired in the early 1970s, they bought a condo in Alameda and basically sent their retirement years there. My father passed away in 1993, my mother still lives in Alameda, she's now ninety-six years old and has been involved with the Buddhist Temple of Alameda all of these years. So I guess I feel that my roots in Alameda really go deep because of this sort of multigenerational involvement and rootedness in Alameda. I wrote a book called Issei, Nisei, War Bride about Japanese American women in domestic service, and several of the people that are interviewed were women from Alameda.

I'm very happy that this project is documenting the Japanese American presence and community in Alameda, because the generation, I guess, is passing away, and there's something, I guess, ephemeral, because World War II disrupted the community. And so the physical community no longer exists, so it's all in the memories. So I think it's important to capture the memories of the survivors, so I'm very happy to contribute to this project.