JN: Well, thank you for joining us. So, today is Saturday, May 23rd. It's 9:05am Central Time, and we're here in Little Rock, Arkansas. I'm Jennifer Noji, I'm here with Brad Shirakawa. And yeah, to begin, could you actually just say your name again, and say where you were born, when you were born?

BS: I'm Brad Shirakawa. I was born in Fresno. I live in San Jose, California, now. Did you want to know when I was born? Oh, July 8, 1955.

JN: Thanks. And could you tell us a little bit about your family background, so, you know, when did your family come to the U.S.? Where did they settle?

BS: My dad's side, they came, his father came around 1905-ish, and ended up settling in a little place called Fowler, well, in the Fowler, California, area, which is not far from Fresno. My mom's side, I believe her father was in Hawaii for a while first, and then came to California and settled in what's called Biila. No, I'm sorry, he settled more in, I'm not sure, because I haven't been able to track every piece of his journey, but he was in Selma, which is another little town, little south of Fresno, and then he moved to Kerman, where some of the family members were born, and then eventually to another farm town called Biola, which are all in the Fresno vicinity. They're all small farming towns where Japanese were mostly growing Thompson seedless grapes. My dad's side, his father was Tokyo, T-O-K-I-O Shirakawa, his wife was Kikuye Hamai, and she's distantly related, very distantly related to Shinzo Hamai, who was the mayor of Hiroshima a couple years after the bomb went off. And then on my mom's side, her father's name was Kahe Kaneichi, and his wife was Misao Kaneichi, but she was a Yokota.

JN: Thank you. And so, you know, in thinking about the lead up to World War II, which is decades away, is there anything you want to share about what their life was like in these different areas?

BS: I could probably tell you more about my dad's side, so that would be Tokio and Kikuye. He didn't speak English, of course, much when he got here, but he ended up settling in an area, I think, initially in Sanger, and he felt what little sort of quotes or documentation we have about what, how he felt, said he came here and felt like there was a good opportunity to become prosperous, because his goal was to earn this arbitrary figure of two thousand American dollars, which was a heck of a lot of money back then, and then return to Japan, that was really his goal. It didn't work out that way, of course. He ends up eventually coming to own about 20 acres of farmland in the Fowler vicinity, and then he somehow trades with somebody somehow to get 40 acres, and that ends up being kind of his place more permanently, because he moves a couple times in that time period, too. And he becomes quite a businessman. Even though he was a farmer, he branched out into insurance later and a farming co-op, and he sort of becomes a sort of a leading citizen of sorts in the Fowler area, which was quite tiny. My mother's side, I don't know that much about what his journey was after he got into the Fresno vicinity, other than he was also working on a Thompson grape farm, 40 acres, and that's about as much as I can tell you about his side.

JN: Well, thanks. And I wonder if you want to share a little bit about your parents, when they were born, what their names are.

BS: Okay, my father was Ernest Ernie Shirakawa. He was born in 1924. My mother was Helen Kaneichi. She was born in 1929. They don't really meet until after the war. They meet at Fresno State University, which was back then held on the campus, I think, of Fresno City College. And so, if you look at the Fresno State graduation yearbook, I think from 1950 something, you can see their pictures in the yearbook, and they're kind of next to each other. And that's where they meet us at Fresno State. So they get married, and two years later, in 1955, I'm born.

JN: Thanks. Well, just... I know we're going through, you know, this background really quickly, but I wonder if you want to share now what their experiences were leading up to the war, and then with the outbreak of the war.

BS: Well, let's see. My dad worked on the farm initially. His father's farm, Tokio's farm, didn't like it. He told me a story once where he said when he was bad, his father, Tokio, would, you know, he tied him to a tree. He tied my father to a tree to discipline him. He said, he says grandpa, which means his father, his grandpa had a temper. But he ended up speaking very good English, Tokio, and my dad ended up kind of going into business. Eventually he starts selling insurance because his father, Tokio, does that, Ernest starts selling insurance. My mom was working as some sort of kind of secretarial work, office work before the war, and I think she may have worked for an insurance company, but not my dad's insurance company. That's what she was doing. She grew up on a farm also, and she ended up picking grapes and putting them on the trays, turning them into raisins, that kind of thing. And, of course, she had a lot of girlfriends and they were all having a good time on a little farm town, but it was also a lonely existence for her, because the farms were all separated by quite a distance. So she was very pleased to go to the Biola Community Center, which was the Japanese center, and they had Japanese language schools and just get-togethers and stuff for the community, so that was fun for her. That was kind of her lifeline.

JN: Great, thanks. Are there any other specific memories or stories you want to share about those prewar years before I ask you about wartime?

BS: I don't have that much about that time period, other than especially in Biola, there was quite a community, lots and lots of Japanese, but nothing that specific.

JN: Yeah, thanks. Then I'm, just to shift into, you know, the outbreak of the war, what were your family's experiences during World War II?

BS: Well, my mom's side goes to Jerome and Rohwer, mostly, there's one side that went to Poston. Then on my dad's side, Tokio, he gets picked up by the FBI. He was, you know, "saboteur," supposedly, and there's a little confusion there. His daughter, my aunt, says that he was picked up on either December 7th or December 8th, Pearl Harbor. But Tokio's Issei internee card, the alien enemy docket card, says he was picked up on December 12th. I do think there's a little room for wiggling in there. I don't really quite know what that means. He was picked up, maybe he was picked up on December 7th or 8th, and taken to a local jail, and then they actually finally transport him out of there, maybe on the 12th. I'm a little unclear about some of the, how the government fills those forms out. Anyway, he ends up going to Los Angeles first, I believe, and then to San Francisco, the family ends up finding out that he's in San Francisco, but then he sent to Fort Missoula in Montana, and they lose track of him. And eventually he goes to Fort Sill and to Camp Livingston and Santa Fe, in some order.

JN: Wow.

BS: And then finally, in 1943-ish, he's finally returned to the family in Gila, because he's cleared. It just took a year-ish for that whole process to happen. On my mom's side, Kahei and Misao, I don't know much about how they felt about all that process, other than they just went to Jerome and then later to Rohwer. So, getting there is, I don't have much knowledge of that part.

JN: Do you know why Tokio was, you know, taken or suspected as a so-called "saboteur?"

BS: Well, he was a leading businessman, kind of the commonality of all those things, and he was suspected, at least his daughter told me that he was suspected being a Black Dragon for sending money back to that organization back in Japan. I don't really know that he did that, but my, but his daughter again says, "I don't think my father was a saboteur or a spy or anything like that." And then also there's an FBI document that I have that says he was seen in a car and the man driving it was a known Japanese national spy, that's what this report essentially says. I'm sure that's really the hardcore reason why they picked him up. Yes, he was a businessman, but I think that kind of sealed the deal for why the FBI wanted him. He was just seen in a car.

JN: Interesting. Yeah, thanks. Well, then, thinking about, you know, the war, their wartime experiences in these respective camps, are there any particular memories or stories that you were told about their time there?

BS: On my mom's side, what she basically said was she was... she was around twelve when she went in, and so like most of the young kids, she was mostly... she said she was either bored or having a good time, just playing around with friends, and eventually she goes to the schools and meets people, but she didn't see it as this horrible thing, because she was a little too young. But she did say that when she went to the Fresno Assembly Center, that she was quite ashamed because that was one of those places that had, the toilet was just a piece of board with a hole in it, and there's no dividers, and so she was very ashamed of that experience, the camps were better. And as far as my dad's side, in the camps itself, is that what it is? Don't know too much about their particular stories, other than what happened to Tokio. Yeah, and then on most of my dad's side, by 1943, ends up going to Chicago. They relocate out, and I don't know how much detail you want me to go into there?

JN: Yeah, I mean, if you want to give us, you know, an overview of what that resettlement experience was like.

BS: Okay, his sister becomes a nurse, or going to nursing school in that area, and he follows a little bit later. He got a job with an organization called the Cuneo, C-U-N-E-O, Press, and I have some documentation about that, and there's a WRA photograph, I think, shot by Charles Mace, of him working a printing press. Now, we were all a little shocked to see that picture. But eventually he ends up going to Marietta College in Ohio, and it's from there that he finally gets inducted into the army, and then the army puts him into some rather unknown unit called the ASTP, the Army Specialized Training Program, and so I have pictures of him with that patch on his arm, so that's how I figured this out. I just thought he was in the army, I thought, oh well, he said he was going to be an interpreter, so I figured he was MIS, but he was not, he was with the ASTP, a failed U.S. Army program. So they're trying to recruit tens of thousands of men, not just these days, any man. So it's a non-segregated group. I have pictures of him with white guys and a Japanese American, and you could learn science, drafting, I don't know about architecture, but kind of drafting languages, those kinds of things. So they're not at a specific location, they're at many different colleges in America. Like my dad went to the University of Pennsylvania to learn better Japanese through the ASTP, and of course his Japanese was not very good

And so the war ends, he's... but the army program, sorry, the army cancels the program sometime in 1944 because they didn't get tens of thousands of people. It just didn't work. So, I think they didn't quite know what to do with my dad. He's not in the 442 he's not in the MIS, he's in this program that died, and eventually he ends up going to Seattle to ship overseas to be an interpreter, but not with the MIS, as far as I know. But then that was about a year after the war, when he gets to Seattle, and the war is over for a year, here or take, and he says the army said, "You can just go home now." I'm sure it was a little more complicated than that, but they basically sent him home, he never had to go overseas, so that's what happened to him.

My mom, who was in Jerome and Rohwer, one thing she really liked about being there was she got to see her older brother Takeo, who was in the 442 training at Camp Shelby, so he got to visit them in the camp, so she really liked that, that's the one sort of really strong memory that she really had, I think, beyond just kind of playing around. As far as my grandparents go in the camps, I don't know much about how that, how that happened, or what happened, except for Tokio, who ends up back in Gila in 1943 and then sometime in 1944 he gets a release, a leave, I think it was a short term leave, and he goes, I think, to Minneapolis and Chicago, and maybe a couple other places, one to visit his family, his daughters, who are in Chicago, because we have photographs of them there, and Tokio is also going there to look for places to maybe resettle the family permanently outside of California. He's thinking, "We're not going back to California," but, of course, they do. But that was part of his goal, was to get out of camp for a while to go look at those places. So he returns near the end of the war, he's back at Gila a month or so before everybody's kind of released, and then finally the whole family goes back to the Fowler vicinity.

JN: I'm just curious, do you know what that experience was like for Tokyo, looking for potential areas to resettle in? Are there stories of how he was received by some of the local communities in those areas?

BS: No, we don't know anything about that part, unfortunately.

JN: I wonder.

BS: Yeah, I don't know if he was... I don't know that he was the nicest man. [Laughs] His wife, my grandmother, when he died in the late '60s, I don't think she was that sad about it. He was, he was kind of an, you know, the sort of typical, at least in our minds, the stoic, you know, nose to the grindstone, "you're going to do this because I tell you," kind of man, that's kind of my impression of him.

JN: Got it. Well, thanks for sharing that. Well, you know, and we have about ten minutes left, so I wonder if you wanted to talk about you, you know, you already told us when you were born, but you want to say a little bit more about how your parents ended up meeting and how you ended up coming into the picture?

BS: Well, again, they met at Fresno State, they get married in '53 I'm born in '55. He has an insurance business, my dad, and he's pretty darn successful at it. His father was also in insurance. My mom ends up working at the Fresno Housing Authority, at least at some point she does, and I go to high school there, of course, I'm going to the... in Fresno, I'm going to the Japanese Congregational Church, which is the Christian, one of the two Christian churches in Fresno that are Japanese. There's the Fresno Methodist Japanese Church, which is just a few blocks away, just on the edge of Fresno, China, Japantown. I call it China Japantown because they were the same things, and not far from there was the Fresno Buddhist Temple. So, there were three Japanese churches in that area. We didn't necessarily always mix, but I grew up in the, in the Congregational Church with a bunch of guys, and by 1969-ish, when I'm fourteen, four out of my friends at that church all were using 35 millimeter single lens reflex cameras, nice cameras of the area of the era, and I was a kid who kind of did what my friends did. They played the guitar, I played the guitar. They were taking pictures, I thought, well, I'm going to take pictures, which is why I'm a professional photographer today. So I worked at the Fresno Bee delivering newspapers for about a year or something. That was the hardest job I've had in my life, and I earned enough money to go buy it myself at age fifteen.

JN: Wow.

BS: So I spent two hundred, two hundred fifty bucks on a new camera, and then I started taking pictures. It eventually leads to me, it's a long route, but eventually I get my photo journalism degree from San Jose State. I start working at a newspaper in Hollister, California, really small town. I did that for a little over seven years, and it's why I'm kind of the documentarian, photographer, producer of media that I am today, about Japanese American history, that's kind of the short version of that road,

JN: And you know, throughout all this time, what do you think really motivated you to pursue this career?

BS: Well, in part because I just liked photography, and I didn't know if I was any good at anything else. [Laughs] I was not your 4.0 student exactly, I got a D in algebra my first semester of high school algebra... yeah, I'm quite proud of that, actually, so I kind of knew I was going to be a photographer, I went to City College of San Francisco to get my first photo degree. They were supposed to be the second-best city college in the nation, and I think they probably were. It's a fabulous program. I went to San Jose State to get my BA in photojournalism, and that was kind of a long road too. But eventually that kind of leads me to today, where I'm producing for the last twenty-plus years or so, a lot of Japanese American history. I try to combine all the journalism and research and the kind of things that you folks do to... I kind of do whatever comes my way. It could be Japantowns or families' albums, the 442, the camps. So I feel like I have some knowledge of some things, and a lot of knowledge about not a lot of, not no knowledge of some of this other stuff, which is why these pilgrimages are so great.

JN: Absolutely, I actually wonder if you want to say more about why you came to this pilgrimage. Of course, you have the personal connection to Jerome and Rohwer, but yeah, why do you feel like it was important to come to this pilgrimage?

BS: I think because my mother was pretty passionate about preserving history. She was... when she went to not pilgrimages, because they weren't really available much when she was alive, but when she would go to camp reunions in Fresno, or sometimes maybe a few other places, she had a great time, and she was interviewed a few times by the local paper or broadcast station, and every time she had to talk about her brother, Takeo, who died with the 442, she'd always get kind of teary-eyed. We'd visit the cemetery a lot to see all those graves. Is, and I think that somehow, over the many years of growing up in Fresno, kind of became something in me that eventually led me to do all this research, and because of the families here, my sister's come to the pilgrimage, pilgrimage in the past. So, okay, this is one time I'm going to go to this. I went to a Topaz pilgrimage a couple years ago, that was terrific, it's just a great place to connect and learn new stuff, or learn, unlearn things that I thought I knew.

JN: Do you have any examples of that?

Oh, I feel like almost... I want to say every day, but I'm constantly coming up against... I thought I knew this, and then I read a book, or I talk to someone like yourself, I hear an audio something or other, and it contradicts, or at least changes what I thought I knew. I tell people now, the more I learn about the war, the less I know. Like the 442 is the best example. There's so much stuff that I thought I understood, and I didn't, and so I'm always a little reticent to say this is what happened, because I don't know if I'm going to learn something tomorrow that at least changes that a little bit. Like I'm trying to research this guy, Abraham Ohama, he died in the 442, and if you read this book, it says it happened this way, but if you read that website, it says it happened a little bit differently. There's so many variations on how he died on that one day on one hill. And it's not that important that those little details aren't quite all the same, but it just made me realize that everybody's telling this story a little differently, and I don't really know who knows the absolute truth anymore. Eight years later, you can't really figure it out. You just sort of have to mush it together into something that makes sense for people, and that's going to be the history, whether it's really correct or not. And I realized probably every history book ever written has possibilities of having errors, honest mistakes, usually, but you might come up against a new document that, oh, that sentence in that book isn't quite right. So, unfortunately, that's kind of where I'm at now. [Laughs]

JN: It's a really tough problem, right? History is very much an interpretation of the past, and finding those facts can be very, very difficult. But, I mean, I guess I do have one, maybe our last question. Thinking about your work as a photographer, but also doing this historical work and research and sharing the history, what do you hope to contribute to the way this history is told, or maybe even how the community is still creating their own history now?

I guess I just hope to leave it all behind. I, of course, send material to Densho, but I try to get it to other places. I give to brick and mortar organizations, libraries, and historical societies, because I don't know who's going to be around in five years or fifty. And I'm hoping people take what I've learned from other sources and maybe can build on that, I kind of feel like... I don't know how other people feel, like Sanseis, how they feel. I kind of feel like it's the Sanseis' last gasp. We're going to be around for another maybe twenty years, give or take, and this is our last chance to do whatever we're going to do. So that's part of my motivation, because at some point I'm not going to be able to do it anymore, and the Niseis are practically gone, a lot of those sources are gone. We're kind of the sources now. What am I going to leave behind that's hopefully accurate enough to be a good or correct story? So I try pretty hard to find multiple sources before I tell people this is what happened, even if that doesn't always work. So that's kind of my goal. I don't know if I quite answered your question.

JN: Yeah. Well, thank you.

BS: Well, thank you.

JN: Is there anything else you want to share, whether about your family stories or your stories?

BS: I guess one other thing. There's the Day of Remembrance. I need a vacation from the Day of Remembrance. [Laughs] I don't need to remember everything every day, but I kind of end up doing that.

JN: Well, you know, you, you help us remember things also through your photography, so I think you, you've earned a day off.

BS: Well, thank you. Thank you, I appreciate that.

JN: All right, well, thank you so much. I feel like we covered a lot in thirty minutes.

BS: Yeah, seemed like five minutes.

JN: Yeah. I know. I was like, that one that flew by.

BS: Oh, good, okay.

JN: Thank you so much.

BS: Thank you.