Densho Digital Repository - Amy Uyematsu Interview I (Densho ID: ddr-densho-523-1)

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BN: We are here on December 1, 2022, and we're very pleased to be interviewing Amy Uyematsu. We're doing this remotely, and the interviewers are Valerie Matsumoto and me, Brian Niiya. Dana Hoshide is in the background doing the technical support for this. And thank you so much, Amy, for joining us, and let's go ahead and get started. So the first set of questions that we wanted to ask you about were kind of the legacy of the wartime incarceration on your family, and kind of your family's... a little of maybe the prewar history and what happened to them during the wartime incarceration. For readers of your poetry, snippets of the family history turn up frequently, so I think it would be great to get some background. We did interview your mother, Elsie Uyematsu Osajima, which is in the Densho archive and UCLA collective memories. That was also a collaborative interview. So interested viewers or readers can refer to that for more detail on your other side. So I wondered if you could maybe start with your father's side, the Uyematsu side, to begin with.

AU: Okay. The Francis Uyematsus, there were two of them. My grandfather and my dad was also Francis Uyematsu. And Grandpa had a very successful nursery in Montebello. Really, really successful, to the point of my dad would say some of the other Nisei kids would beat him up because he was driven to school and had on fancy clothes. This was during the Depression. So Grandpa's nursery did quite well. When Executive Order 9066 occurred, like many Issei, what are you going to do with your house, with the property, with your businesses, that type of thing? And so in Grandpa's case, he had to -- well, he was able to sell three hundred thousand of his camellias to Manchester Boddy, who was the newspaper mogul and who owned Descanso Gardens. So I guess you could say that the impact of the camps really had a direct bearing right away in that those camellias ended up in Descanso Gardens with Boddy. And for many years, Descanso Gardens would say that Boddy paid a fair price for the camellias. And I know from my family, from my dad, I've never heard that. He'd always said that Boddy got the plants really cheap. And interestingly, research has been done more recently by Wendy Cheng, an Asian American scholar, and she's been able to document the fact that Boddy did get a really good deal on those camellias, and they form a substantial part of the present camellia forest at Descanso Gardens.

So anyway, the Uyematsus were supposed to go to Heart Mountain. I think a lot people in East L.A. and Montebello went to Heart Mountain. And again, this is where the nursery comes in. (...) Paul Bannai, who was quite active in the JA community, even as a young Nisei, he already had a job at Manzanar. And he and Dad were friends, so Dad and Paul came up with an agreement that in exchange for the Uyematsus, being sent to Manzanar instead of Heart Mountain, Grandpa would donate cherry trees and I think wisteria plants to Manzanar. So that's how the Uyematsus ended up at Manzanar. And, of course, Grandpa was much happier about that because he was that much closer to his nursery in Montebello. Manzanar would have been the closest camp to Montebello. Anyway, that's how we ended up at Manzanar.