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TI: And I wanted to go back to a name that you mentioned in the first part, Snowden. So we went back and looked in the book, Snowden Becker. So she worked at the Japanese American National Museum, and she was the one who provided lots of help. She sent you the digitized versions of the diary, or not the diary, but the letters, and then she also told you about another story, the story of Stanley Hayami.

JO: Yes. While I was online looking and seeing Miss Breed's story, I also saw some of the images that Stanley Hayami had written, and in that same book -- All They Could Carry, I've forgotten the exact title of that book, but there were excerpts of the diary in there as well. But the entire diary was not digitized online. But some of the art was there, and it was very awkward, even when they got the diary up online, it was one page at a time, but it was not necessarily in sequence. (...) When I finished with Miss Breed, I was floundering for a while, what am I going to do, and there wasn't any question that somebody needed to do that story, no one had done it.

And again, I went back to Babe, I think, who put me in touch with Walter Hayami, who was the only sibling that I could reach, and he was the younger brother of Stanley. And I asked if he would be interested, if I could interview him. I was working actually on a book about Heart Mountain, I was interviewing people from Heart Mountain, and that's how that came to be. Walter told me that his parents had given Stanley's diary to the museum for safekeeping, that they never wanted anyone to make money on it, and fortunately, nobody has. But that he wasn't sure what I wanted to do with the diary. And I said, "Well, all by itself, the diary is a historic document. But young people don't know the setting, and they don't know the history, and they can't jump into it," I thought. So I wanted to know more about the family, and I wanted him to share with me. And at some point I asked him whether or not there were any letters his family had written while he was in the army. And he said, well, there were, and they were in his garage, and he hadn't looked at them in years, and he would look for them. Well, as it was, I think it was Miko, his wife, who helped him find those letters. Because about six months, maybe eight months later, I actually received photocopies of the letters.

TI: Before we go to the letters, going back to Walter, when he thought back to his brother, his older brother Stanley, so Stanley, his diary was pretty much during the war, before and during the war, and then his letters you're talking about were during the wartime when he went into the military?

JO: Right, but the diary doesn't begin until November of 1942. He started writing, the war had started, Stanley was already, had been incarcerated, did not write about the assembly center. He did not write about... he didn't write very much about, even about the beginning of the war. There's a little of that in the diary. So he does write about that time, but the surround is not there. Where did they live, where did they go to school, what did they do? There are hints of where he went to school because he's in correspondence with some of his friends.

TI: Well, and the big contextual thing that you bring out really well in your book is he was killed in action in Europe.

JO: Yes.

TI: And going back to Walter, so was it a very painful thing for him to talk about his brother, or how did he remember or discuss his brother?

JO: He and Stanley were just a few years apart, and they had had the longest time in camp together because their older siblings had left. And it was painful; it was painful to talk about. His wife had also lost a brother in the war. And so the two of them, you had a sense that the two of them had shared this terrible loss together, although they had not been in the same camp. They didn't know each other during the war, they met afterwards. They were young teenagers when the war ended. Stanley was only nineteen when he died, and he died just days before the war in Europe ended. He was in the last offensive battle that the 442nd fought. But the research, no one had really researched what had gone on for Stanley when he left camp.

The business of getting in touch with the people that Stanley knew, who show up in the diary, was also very difficult. Most of them were gone. And that's always been my problem with doing this research, I'm late. And my rush was to reach as many people as possible. I did find one of his classmates who turned out to be an artist, in part inspired by Stanley and his sister. It was always Stanley's desire to be a writer and an artist, and he was drawn and quartered because his brother wanted him to be an engineer or an architect, something "sensible." And Stanley was an artist dreamer, so his diary is very moving in that regard. He was not a very political person, his brother is much more political. But he's older, and that separation, the three, four year difference between Nisei who were already in college, and who had their lives, who were on the brink of going out into the world to start their careers, whose careers and lives were turned upside down, for them, it was so much different than for the kids who were still in camp. And I found that to be true in Miss Breed as well.

There was something about Miss Breed that I would like to recall, and that is that the letters to Miss Breed were all full of sunshine. They were, they never complained. They knew to whom they were writing. It wasn't that Miss Breed wouldn't have taken their criticism or the harshness, but they and Stanley put a gloss on things. They did not speak in the same way that Stanley's older brother Frank did when he wrote years later about his life as a prisoner of his own country.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.