JN: Great. Well, thank you for being here. To begin, could you please share your name, when, and where you were born?

RH: My name is Ross Harano, and I was born on September 17, 1942, and I was born in the Fresno Assembly Center in California.

JN: Thanks, Ross. And could you tell me a little bit about your family? When did they come to the U.S.?

RH: Well, I have a big family. My father was one of nine and my mother was one of eight. And so I could tell you how my mother and father met. Back in the '30s and '40s there were these big Christian assemblies going up and down the West Coast. And my mother's family was... my grandmother was a Christian in Japan, so my mother and her sisters went to this conference, maybe three, four hundred Nisei showed up, and my dad went to it also. And he was from Berkeley, and she was from Hanford, California, and they met. And they were married in 1941 in Berkeley, California, and they lived in Berkeley when Pearl Harbor was bombed. When the orders came down for evacuation, my mother and father moved at the last minute to Hanford, California, where her family was at, because she was very, very pregnant with me. So she, we evacuated out with my mother's family rather than my father's family.

My father's family went to Topaz. We ended up in the Fresno Assembly Center, and that's where I was born in September. By October, we're on the train to Jerome, Arkansas. We got there October 30th, so I was a little over a month old, and on the dirty train for three or four nights, and she had this little baby, which was me, but she fortunately had three sisters to help her out. And I'm sure, the way I was, I'm sure they needed a lot of help. So we arrived in Jerome, and we didn't stay that long.

My dad knew he wanted to leave camp, and Harvey Aki was a friend of the family, and he taught my dad refrigeration. I don't know how he did it, but he did, but my dad was able to get out as a gardener and got a job in Alton, Illinois, so we left camp in April -- I'm sorry, in August, August of '42. August of '43, I'm sorry, and we went to Alton, Illinois, where he worked as a gardener and basically did a lot of work on the farm. And we stayed there for two years, and my dad was able to get a job in Chicago working for Bowman Milk. So, the spring of '45 they came to Chicago, and of course they couldn't find a place to live, because Chicago is and was a very segregated city. So when they'd see an apartment for rent, they go there to find out they don't rent to Japanese. Finally, as the uncles, my uncles came out of the army, we figured out that they needed to buy a house, so they were able to buy a house, a tenant, you'd call it a townhouse, on the south side of Chicago, on Oakenwald, which is the last street by the lake, Lake Michigan. And they pooled their money for a down payment, and as a result of that, my grandparents left camp, and they lived with us, my mother's three sisters and their spouses lived with us, and of course, my parents and me and my other uncles, we had fourteen people in that, fourteen relatives in that property, which was a lot of fun, because I was the only kid for four years. And I really, really enjoyed what I remember of that life.

So we lived on the south side of Chicago, and it was a changing neighborhood, that's the only place in those days that Japanese could live. It's estimated, what, 40,000 went through Chicago. I'm meeting a lot of folks here at this pilgrimage who went to Chicago, stayed for a bit, then returned to California, or went some other place. So, by 1950 there was about ten thousand left, and we were among that ten thousand. We lived on the south side until 1961 when the whole neighborhood was torn down to build projects, but in my sixth grade, the neighborhood changed overnight. There was, the blockbusters came in, they would call up a street, everybody on the street, and then tell everybody, "Well, Black folks are moving in," and they said, "You can sell your house right now, and it may be worth five thousand but we'll give you forty-five hundred for it." And overnight, the neighborhood, which was basically white German, primarily German ancestry, left. So, if you look at my grammar school pictures, all of a sudden we had an integrated grammar school. Then next you know, I was the only non-Black in my class in my seventh and eighth grade, which was great for me. I made a lot of good friends, and we still are good friends. And then I went to Hyde Park High School, which was the only integrated school, high school in the city of Chicago at the time. So it was a fascinating time for me that I really didn't grow up among Japanese, I grew up among different ethnic groups, and I've always felt the better for it. And so in '61 we moved to the north side in Uptown, which was, a lot of Japanese lived up in the neighborhood, also. So that's my background, and where I lived and everything.

JN: Great, thank you. I have some follow-up questions. There's a lot that I want to ask you about, including more about your family's incarceration experience, but first I wonder if you could share more about, you know, what it was like growing up in that area, where you weren't, you were one of the only Japanese Americans, for example, at your school. Do you remember, you know, how that affected your sense of belonging, or who you were friends with?

RH: Well, I always felt belonged, and I always knew that was different, and I was very fortunate that all the kids ahead of me, all the Sansei kids at Oakenwald grammar school, were very bright, very, very bright. And so, when I was one of the last remaining Japanese at the school, I really, they really went out of the way for me. Evidently, I was told I was very shy my kindergarten, first and second grade. So, the third grade teacher, she told me she was prepared to help me. Well, I guess I came out my third grade also, and I'm all over the place, but they paid special attention to me. And I have a lisp, and classic, my TH's and all that, and when I was in fifth grade, I was, they always made sure that I was part of, we had a lot of, I guess, programs at the grammar school, it was a very good school, and somewhere along the way, in sixth grade, I was always the emcee for the, for the program for St. Paddy's Day. They have a lot of Irish teachers there, and so I was, did a lot of public speaking in grammar school. So I've always felt that my grammar school teachers really, really, really spent a lot of time with me. I took advantage of the fact that kids before me were bright, they expected me to be bright, so I took advantage of that, I guess. And when I graduated college, I visited all my grammar school teachers, I found them. And I just had so much fun talking to them, and really, really, really thank them for giving me, or at least giving me a well-rounded education. And at Hyde Park High School, it was integrated, and I found out later that our class was an experimental class, the freshman class. Our division, they took all the valedictorians and salutatorians from the grammar school feeder schools and put us in one division, yeah, one little division. So I'm in my class and we took all the classes together, almost. I come home, I tell my mother, "Gee, my high school's so tough, all these kids are bright, they're really smart." It scared me, actually. But we survived, and as we were in January class, so our class only had 108 when we graduated, so it was a very small group. Then we still keep in touch in terms of our fortieth, fiftieth reunions, things like that. So to me, I look back on being Japanese was always an advantage to me, and I took advantage of the brightness of the people before me.

JN: That's great, thank you for sharing. And did you end up staying in Chicago for most of your life?

RH: Yes, we lived on the south side until 1961. We were one of, the last of the Nisei, or Japanese families, to move others. We moved to Uptown, and my mother never learned how to drive. So she, when we moved to the south, lived on the south side, we lived right across the street from the old Kenwood L, the last stop. She just had to walk across the street, get on the L, and go to work. She was working at Hart Schaffner Marx as the seamstress there. So we moved to the north side, we lived a block and a half away from the L. So it's always been very convenient, and event to this day, when we moved to the north side, they had an apartment building. And my grandparents lived there, we lived there, my sister lived there, my cousin lived there. And then I got wanderlust about a building across the alley, so we had family in both buildings. So I've always had family, and it never occurred to me not to live in Chicago. As long as my parents were alive, I always knew that I'd live in Chicago.

JN: That's great. Well, thank you. And just to go back a little bit to, you know, when you were born, so you were born in the Fresno Assembly Center, and you said that your mother had sisters there to help her, but I wonder if you want to share more about, you know, your family's experiences of having a child at... in Fresno in an assembly center, and then, you know, going to Jerome from there.

RH: Well, it's... I'm the oldest of the Sansei on my mother's side and I'm in the middle on my father's side. So, on my mother's side, because we lived with my grandparents, I have all of the family records, I have their passports, their wedding certificate, all these things from my mother's side. On my father's side, I seem to be the archivist for the family, so I have all those documents too, for my... from my father's grandfather, from my father's side. So, in terms of my mother's side, when my grandparents died, I found my grandfather's diary. It was a book, it was a form book that you could fill in and everything, and it was all in Nihongo. So, I was... I tried to get it translated. I talked to my Japanese friends, they looked at it, "Oh, kawaii so ne," but they couldn't translate the Meiji kanji. So my cousin in Honolulu, I contacted him, and he found a lady that could translate the Meiji kanji, so we had it translated. So, from my mother's side, we have his diary, which I then scanned and emailed to all my cousins. Here it is, this is Grandpa. And over the years I've been scanning all those documents on both sides of the family and shipping it out to the Sansei generation.

What we're finding out also, that my Sansei cousins never passed it on to their Yonsei kids. So on my father's side since 1975 we've had family reunions every two years, every two years. So what I've done, and we had it in Chicago in '85, 2005 and last year in Chicago, every twenty years we'd host it. The family reunions have been all over the country. It'll be in Des Moines next year. We've had it in Baltimore, we've had it in LA, Las Vegas, Orlando. Every cousin will bid on it, and they're in charge of doing the reunions. So, at this last reunion, what we did is I said, "Okay, every clan I need someone to be the archivist," so they have to be Yonsei or Gosei, so I've shipped all copies of everything I sent to the Sansei generation to them, because we tell family stories and we want to be able to pass down the Harano story to the next generation, the next generation, so that they're aware of their story. Because what's going on is that my cousins all intermarried except for one, so we have blue-eyed blondes running around our reunion. My great-granddaughter is, like she was blonde and bluish eyes, and so you look at the Harano family reunion, you'd say, "This is a Japanese American reunion?" So it's a lot of fun, but we take our family very seriously, we take the history very seriously. We have a family directory of everybody, their date of birth, when they got married, when they passed away, so it's just passed on. It started off this thin, five pages, right now it's about twenty pages. So we believe that's important that this family story is told and passed down every two years to the Harano side.

On the Maewake side, they have all the same information, and I've been passing things to them, trying to get them to the pilgrimages, trying to get them to attend the army exhibit that took place in San Francisco, and in Honolulu, making sure that the family, everyone is signed, everybody is signed in on it. So that's what we've been trying to do, is make sure that our family, at least, is aware of the family stories. And in terms of the family itself, I had seven uncles who served in World War II. I had the four who served in the 442 and three who served in MIS. On the Harano side, my father had two younger brothers, who served in the 442. My Uncle John was killed on the "Rescue of the lost Texans." So we're going to the Nisei tour this fall to go to Bruyeres to visit the site. And then my mother's youngest brother, Chuck, younger brother Chuck, was wounded at Anzio by mortar shell, and then my Auntie Matsu married Reginald, and he served in the engineering group for the 442.

Interesting about them, he was at Camp Shelby, and he went with a bunch of Hawaiians up to Jerome and met my beautiful auntie, and they met, and they got married. And then on my MIS side, my mother's oldest brother was stationed, he was MIS in New Guinea and Australia, and then in Philippines in the occupation, and my uncle Hutch was in the Philippines in the occupation, and my auntie Ume's husband Sus Okamoto, was in the Philippines and in the occupation. So I had seven uncles who served in the army during World War II. And the interesting thing about Ben, the oldest, he stayed... he was in New Guinea and he was shipped back to the Pentagon as part of a group that authenticated a lot of the documents that were coming out of Japan, including the surrender document. We stayed there, and then he went back to Japan to be part of the study of the effects of the bombing, they did a big report on that. Then he stayed there, worked for the US Army in intelligence until he retired.

My grandfather on my mother's side was very, very original. The oldest son was called Ben Ichi, and the girls were Matsutake Ume, Shochikubai, my uncle Hutch is Hachiro, number eight, and the youngest Jue, number ten. I think there are two stillborns in between, because there was eight left. So he was very original in the way he named my aunties and uncles, and I always wondered, I always wondered about that. Fortunately he lived with us and I was able to talk to him a little bit, just a little bit. He understood English, he spoke little English, though. So I was, I asked him a lot of questions every once in a while. And I asked him, "Gee, Grandpa, why did you come to United States?" And he said, well, he was a pacifist, and so during the late 1890s they were drafting people because of the war with China at the time. So he left, he's the oldest son, and he left Japan to come. He stopped in Hawaii and then came to the mainland, so that's the prewar history of the family, I guess, sort of.

JN: Yeah, wow, thank you. And I guess, you know, I wonder, do you have any memories from camp or from that experience?

RH: No, no, I didn't even know about camp 'til 1961, I was, what, nineteen. Every Sansei you talk to, they say, you know, their parents never talked about it. At those church camps, and it never, and if they didn't want to say something we didn't talk about, hear about, they speak in Japanese. So all I know is that whenever they spoke in Japanese, I must have been in trouble, something was wrong, you know. And my cousin Russell would say, "Yeah, I thought my name was yakamashi." So, no, they never talked about camp, and I never understood a lot about it. I remember my uncle Chuck, who was hit by a mortar shell in Anzio, after Anzio, and his whole back was a scar, and I didn't think about it. And then when I was six years old, we went to North Platte, Nebraska, where the Haranos lived after the war, and I had so much fun meeting my cousins for the first time. And all of a sudden it was a very quiet day, everybody's hush hush, and next thing I remember that it was a very dark room, and there was flags, and that when they reinterred my uncle John's body from Epinal, the cemetery in France, to North Platte, Nebraska, and they had a service there. I didn't know what it was about.

In 1961, I was very active in junior JACL, and we went, there was a big district meeting in Minneapolis, and at that point, there was probably more kid Sansei there than adult Nisei. We had about a hundred thirty, and we're all meeting each other, lot of cute girls up there. And so we went up there, and there was dances and everything, and then one night in the ballroom we're all standing around and Mike Masaoka spoke. And he talked about the camps, he talked about the 442, and all of a sudden my brain popped open, I said, now putting this all together about the camps, about all my uncles and why we're in Chicago and I was really pissed. I came home and I said to my dad, "You know, why in the hell didn't you do something about it? Why didn't you protest, why didn't you do this?" And I still remember what he said to me. He says, "You weren't there." And that has been interesting because I learned, and I know you can't judge things that took place in the past by today's standards. And so you have to have a lot of patience and understanding of people's stands on the "no-nos" and everybody based upon those days. "Who are we to judge the 'no nos'?" To me, they did the right thing based upon what they needed to do, and my dad said, "Yes, yes, I'm getting the hell out of here." He did the right thing for our family. So to me, when people talk about, you know, "no-nos" and things like that, and I know that they would look, the community sort of looked down on them from what I hear and know and read about, I think that's wrong, because they took a stand based upon their beliefs, and I support that. I wouldn't have done it if I wasn't my dad, I wouldn't have done it, but if that was me at the time, I would have probably been the first one up there, just because that's who I am. But who are we to judge these things? We just have to be in their shoes and understand what they did at the time and support what they did.

JN: Thanks. So from that moment when you started to put together the pieces and really understand that World War II experience, how did that go on to affect your life, and where you are now, which is one of the Jerome Rohwer pilgrimage organizers?

RH: Well, it sort of was like I got involved in JACL, Junior JACL. Abe Hagiwara was the one who really started the youth program, and he was one of my mentors, he was my mentor, actually. And so when they started organizing the junior JACL program, and sometime in the spring of '63 he called. I was downstate in Champaign. He called me, asked me, "Would you like to go to Salt Lake City to discuss a youth program?" I said, "Okay." So I flew for the first time to Salt Lake City on a beautiful 707 plane, Northwest, and I have to tell you the aisles were wider, if I remember, and the flight attendants called stewardesses were just like out of the movies. I said, wow, they were just like out of a movie. And so we had this meeting in Salt Lake City, and it was the beginning of forming a national group. From '60 to '63 we were formed, they were forming chapters throughout the United States. In the Midwest we had eight chapters where all the senior chapters were at. So, in summer of '64 at the national convention in Detroit, I showed up there, and also they told me I'm chairing the convention. I said, "Okay." so we organized the.. we had a bunch of kids, probably over a hundred kids there, and we organized, passed a resolution to organize a national Junior JACL. And so I was twenty-two at the time, so they wanted, were looking for leadership for the organizations. "I'm too old," I said, "You've got to get some younger kids involved," so we were able to get a little, two or three years younger group in there. So I get back to Chicago the fall after the convention, and Abe Hagiwara says, "Okay, what we need to do now is to form a young adults group. So I said, "Okay." So we got together some friends, and we began a social, so we had an event to hear Willie Wright, who was a folk singer, and we sent out, told people we had the first meeting, and eleven girls showed up, and only four guys. And the girls, all of a sudden, these young girls that we knew from high school and college, they show up, wow, they weren't wearing their glasses, they were in contact lenses, they had makeup on, I didn't even recognize half of them. So what happened was that out of that group we had eleven marriages.

JN: Wow,

RH: Eleven folks got married out of that group, and they became part of the JACL chapters, on the board and everything. So that was sort of the process, how I got involved. I was chapter president and then governor and some other things at the national level. So I got sucked into it in the beginning, and I didn't get out for a long time.

JN: I'm curious, did you meet anyone while you were part of that organization?

RH: Yeah, actually I met my wife in Detroit at the convention, and then in Philly at the EBC MDC convention, Mike Masaoka announced our engagement. And yeah, that's how I met my first wife.

JN: Wow, that's great. Well, thanks, and you know, just because we're a little bit low on time, I wonder if you want to talk about, from that JACL experience to now, you know, helping to organize these Jerome/Rohwer pilgrimages, how, what motivates you to continue doing this kind of community work?

RH: Well, the first pilgrimage I came was in '24 and it was organized by JAMP, Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimages, and I wanted... I was on a pilgrimage here in 1973 and always wanted to come back and see what was going on. So I signed up for it, and in the process I met a lot of good people here, John Nishio who is chairing this whole event and others, and we just sort of had a good time together. And then when JAMP said that they're not going to organize another one here, so then we got together, our same group got together and helped put together last year's as a pure voluntary organization. And then after that we formalized it and incorporated as a not for profit, and John Nishio's done a tremendous job on that, and it's an all-volunteer group now. And we have a lot of friends, and I enjoy... my first reunion in '24, I enjoyed meeting people from Hanford, where my mother was from, and finding out that we know each other's friends and relatives and everything like that, so to me it's an experience. I meet so many good people here that they may be even related to me, we're finding out, things like that. So cousins' cousins, kissing cousins, all that thing. So I think that... and then when they organized the volunteer group, they needed a certain number of board members, so I'm on the board. I try to be a silent board member. [Laughs]

But I think today's pilgrimage, I think we were picking up on this, people come to these pilgrimages for different reasons. For some it's closure, we're hearing, for some it's getting all the emotions out, especially for the survivors, for some it's curiosity, so everyone comes for a different reason, so we have to be able to sort of attach those reasons. But today, downstairs with survivors during the session, I think we want to make sure that our story is known and our story can be told ahead by this, we need to tell our kids, our grandkids, what took place. Now, the Sansei we got out there in '45, was the last, So we're all in our eighties now. So it's up to us to pass it on to everybody, the next generation. So, because nobody remembers, the Nisei are almost gone. I mean, my auntie died at age 105 and my uncle Hachiro died in January, he's short of 101st birthday. So it's up to us older Sansei now, in our eighties, to be able to know the story to tell the story

JN: Well, thank you. I wonder if you want to share a little bit about what it's like for you personally coming back to this area, going back to Jerome.

Well, I enjoy it. I enjoy just meeting all the young kids, and to me, everybody's young. My daughter is sixty and she's still my baby daughter. So to me everybody's young, and I just love the enthusiasm, not of the Sansei,� we're too much like the Nisei. But Gosei, �especially the Gosei, I just enjoy their energy and their commitment. They're out there. When we were a Sansei, there was no Asian American Movement, so it was difficult. Now, with all the other Asians here, there's an Asian American Movement that we can participate in. We can meet the leaders of the different Asian groups, and there's someplace now for our younger people to be actively involved, not just in a little constrained Japanese American thing, but in the whole Asian American picture. So, I just enjoy talking to these younger kids. By the way, you're kids. I still call my kids kids, so you're kids to me.

JN: Well, thanks. And, you know, I wonder, what do you hope that these younger folks, these kids, will get out of the experience?

RH: Well, first of all, I think they need to hear what took place and get some heart and soul feeling about it, and plus we have to give them the tools. That's why this, the history, how you find out the WRA files, all the material about the 442, we have to provide the materials for them to take a look at. So not only do they have the heart, but they also have the knowledge, so they're able to answer questions and be factual about what took place, so I think this is important. These sessions will be taking place today about how to, how to know that you're Japanese, and all these things need to be done. How to know about the sacrifices of the 442 and of MIS, of the sacrifices of the great grandparents, the fact they even came over here. So the important thing is that we have to give our younger generation the tools to understand what the story is about, and they have to be able to pass the story down to the sixth, seventh, and eighth generation. Because I remember there's a, looking at the first Nisei book written, there was a New York family, Matsushita, Matsudas, something like that, and they had pictures of the descendants, they're all hakujin. And those are, they're fifth, sixth generation already, way back. So, how do you, even though you don't look Japanese, like my grandsons don't even look Japanese, but they know. So they have to be able, we have to be able to once again pass it down, because people say, you know, "Where you from?" That old nine yard question, and so we have to, we have to give our younger generation the tools to understand the past, so they don't, they know about it, and they are not ashamed of it, I guess would be the word.

JN: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we have a, I think, time for maybe another question or two. So, I wondered if there's anything else you would want to share in terms of any personal stories or family stories, whether related to the war or afterwards?

RH: Well, I have to tell you, I really appreciate Densho. Because I've been able to send stuff in, scan it, and then distribute it, because most of my papers are at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, or they're at the JASC Japanese American Service Committee, the Legacy Center. I've been able to clear out my basement and not feel bad about it because it's all been scanned and digitized. So, you've helped me a lot, because I'm really a saver. I save every piece of paper, and it's all very organized about these things. But once I'm done with it, and I know it's secure, then it goes to different... some went to LA, to the museum there, a lot of it went to the Go For Broke, all my uncle's papers from the military. And then Densho, even I found a whole series of newspapers from New York when the 442 came back, you beautifully scanned all of these papers, Then I donated papers to Go For Broke, so I'm able to clean out my basement thanks to Densho.

JN: Well, we're super happy to do so. Thank you for sharing this wealth of material. Yeah, all those items. Well, thanks, Ross. I guess, anything else you want to share?

RH: No, nothing. No, I'm fine. I can go for two hours, don't worry.

JN: All right. Well, thank you. That was, yeah, great. Lots of, lots of information in a short period of time. I'm impressed. [Laughs]

RH: I talk fast. [Laughs]