It was love at first sight when Michiko Fujii, 18, and George “Ki” Kiyoshi Uchida, 20, met as undergraduates at U.C. Berkeley in 1940. “That was it,” Michiko said. 1 The two dated exclusively and planned to get married after she graduated.
But “9066” changed their plans, she said, referring to President Roosevelt’s executive order that would remove all American Japanese from the West Coast under the guise of military necessity. Worried that they might be separated to different prison camps, they decided to marry immediately. On Monday, April 27, 1942, Michiko and Ki were wed by Reverend Nishimura at her parents’ home on Harper Street in Berkeley.
The family had relinquished their cameras, which were considered contraband, to the government in accordance with the military’s instructions, so they were unable to take wedding photos. However, in the midst of the family wedding party, a stranger appeared at the door. No one remembered how the arrangements had been made or how the stranger knew of the nuptials, but a white photographer from the government, who had asked in advance for permission to take photos, duly showed up with an assistant, took a few pictures and left.
Michiko thought to herself, “That’s it, everybody else in our family got married and they got their picture taken, but we’re never going to get (a copy).”2
Forty-eight hours later, the couple were assigned to barrack 9, cell 16 at the Tanforan Race Track in San Bruno. They had their honeymoon in a horse stall. Michiko remembers eating off pie tins and sitting in the upper section of the stable. From there they could see the infield and the viewing stands under the watch of armed sentries and searchlights. Ki, who had been a senior in the class of 1942, received his diploma in a mailing tube addressed to the stable.
Five months later, in October, 1942, Michiko and Ki were taken with 500 men, women and children on a train to the small town of Delta, Utah, near the desolate Topaz site. It was in the midst of a sandstorm and Michiko was suffering from heat prostration. She was moved by bus to the Topaz camp, where she was assigned to a barrack and collapsed on a military cot. When she woke up, her body was caked with dust and the silhouette of where she had lain was outlined by sand.
During three years behind the fence at Topaz, Michiko gave birth to two baby girls. Without running water, her days were filled with carrying buckets of water from the communal washroom to the barracks. Ki was drafted into the U.S. Army and visited his young family in camp on furloughs from the Military Intelligence Service.
After the war, Michiko and Ki moved back to Berkeley. The couple raised four daughters and after the girls were mostly grown, Michiko returned to U.C. Berkeley and completed her degree at age 44.
On the occasion of her sister Yuri’s 50th wedding anniversary, in 1958, Michiko was asked to make a commemorative album using the siblings’ wedding photos. Not having a photo of her own hurried ceremony, Michiko was forced to make do.
She found a snapshot that had been taken of the couple at Topaz while Ki was visiting on furlough, but there was a problem: Michiko was holding a baby. She decided to carefully snip the baby out, creating a doctored photo of herself and Ki. “I felt kind of bad, but that’s the way it was,” she said. This would suffice as her “wedding photo.”
Not long afterward, the couple’s friend, Tom Kawaguchi, who had been doing research on military history in Washington, D.C. for the Go For Broke organization, said to her and Ki, “I think I saw your wedding picture at the National Archives.”
The couple had, coincidentally, just returned to the Bay Area from a visit to Washington, but excited to hear this unexpected news, they hurried back to the archives where they located two government photographs of their home wedding.
The photographer was Dorothea Lange.
Although Lange is celebrated for her immortal photographs of the Depression, Dust Bowl refugees and the American Japanese incarceration, for Michiko and Ki, she was their wedding photographer. She memorialized a day when they didn’t have a church wedding or much of a celebration; many of their friends lived more than five miles away, the allowable zone for American Japanese to travel without a permit.
Lange herself was in the midst of documenting the government roundup and removal program as a War Relocation Authority photographer. She had been working nonstop, photographing evictions all over central and northern California. She also documented assembly center prisons at Sacramento, Salinas, Stockton, Tanforan and Turlock. Most of her photos, which were seen by wartime censors as uncomplimentary, were impounded and withheld from the public during World War II.
Michiko and Ki’s wedding photos were found shortly before their 45th anniversary. Now they are preserved on the pages of their 50th wedding anniversary album.
| The Photos | |
|---|---|
| photographer | Dorothea Lange, War Relocation Authority |
| dinmensions of Uchida prints | 7 1/2" x 7 1/2" |
| place | 2903 Harper Street, Berkeley, CA |
| date | April 27, 1942 |
| collections | 1. National Archives RG 210-G-C343, 537680 (photo of couple); 537681 (family at table); 2. Uchida family collection. |
| photo: page from the Uchidas' 50th wedding anniversary album | |
Michiko's Childhood Laundry
The house on Harper Street where Michiko and Ki were married was the Fujii family’s second home. Their first was a two-story, woodframe Victorian-era building on Shattuck Avenue that housed the University Laundry, a start-up operated by her father and four other Japanese American families. It also was where Michiko was born on March 21, 1922, and where she spent her early years.
Michiko’s father, Kurasaburo Fujii, was an immigrant from Kyushu who had left the family farm in Asakura-gun, Fukuoka, to explore the world, traveling to Yokohama and to the Japanese colonies of Korea and Manchuria. He worked as a contract laborer in Hawai’i, probably in the sugar cane fields, eventually arriving on the U.S. mainland before 1900. He returned to Japan in 1903 to meet a young woman his family had picked out for him to marry, but he liked her younger sister, Kikuyo. The two were betrothed.5
Kurasaburo returned alone to the U.S. and Kikuyo spent the next six years learning homemaking skills from her future mother-in-law. In 1909, Kurasaburo returned to take Kikuyo back to the S.F. Bay Area.
In 1914, the couple decided to open a cooperative laundry in Berkeley with four other families: the Kimbaras, Imamuras, Tsubamotos and Tokunagas.
The laundry was successful, perhaps because the families banded together amid a difficult business environment. “Ethnic” laundries run by non-white businesspeople were accused of being unsanitary and undercutting “European” laundries.
Chinese and Japanese laundries should be considered “a source of infection,” according to a 1911 article in the Oakland Tribune.
“The transmission of the various Asiatic diseases frequently takes place through the medium of clothes laundered by Asiatics,” the article stated. Additionally, “they work from twelve to fifteen hours per day and it is not uncommon occurences to see Japanese laundry wagons working all day Sunday.”
The University Laundry indeed offered pick-up and delivery of laundry parcels, using horse-drawn wagons. There was a barn in the rear for two horses.
Steaming hot laundry water was recycled for the “ofuro” soaking tub and the immigrant families lived communally on the second floor.
New arrivals from Japan would visit the laundry for information and advice. Parties were held at which “home-brewed sake would be served and the men would talk and reminisce…..; old songs would be sung, old tales repeated and sometimes dancing would ensue.”6
During the 1930s Depression, Kikuyo fed the homeless when destitute people came to the door. Laundry that was never picked up became part of the children’s wardrobe.
But when the U.S. declared war on Japan in 1941, the 1,300 immigrants of Japanese ancestry and their American-born children in Berkeley were uprooted.
Kurasaburo and his partners lost the laundry, nearly three decades of hard work and tens of thousands of dollars in capital investment.
After the war ended in 1945, Kurasaburo returned to Berkeley, now 67 years old. He found two part-time jobs, as a janitor, which he continued to do until he died in 1959.
The laundry building still stands, having changed hands over the decades, becoming a coin laundry and a car dealership.
In 2017, the city’s Landmark Preservation Commission weighed a proposal to assign historic landmark status to the building.
At the public hearing during which statements could be made regarding the proposal, Berkeley native Kazuko Oyamada Iwahashi, 88, urged the Commission to landmark the building.
“The laundry’s address is on my birth certificate” she said, to the surprise of the meeting’s attendees. She said that her father had worked at University Laundry and that she had spent her infant years there.
right: Kazuko, 88, playing the taiko during a pilgrimage to the Topaz site, April 24, 2017. photo: Nancy Ukai
Her testimony underlined the persistence of the built landscape, embedded memories and the enduring connections between generations of families. The Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to designate the building a historic landmark, recognizing the prewar history of an ethnic community which has few remaining physical traces.
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ALERT: A request to deny the historic landmark status of the University Laundry building has been made to the City of Berkeley. The Berkeley City Council will meet Tuesday, April 3, to hear public comment on the appeal to deny the decision of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Letters in support of maintaining the landmark designation may be sent by email to: “clerk@cityofberkeley.info” AND “council@cityofberkeley.info.” Deadline: Monday, April 2.
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Kazuko’s family also had been evicted from their Berkeley home and nursery business in 1942.
And, like Michiko, she was surprised to learn, many decades after the war, that Dorothea Lange had also photographed a scene from her family’s life as they were preparing to leave. The photo was of her family’s going-out-of-business sale.
photo: Dorothea Lange, 3/19/1942, Berkeley, CA
Dorothea Lange – photographer
The Uchida wedding photos were taken in late April, 1942, about one month after Lange signed a three-month contract with the WRA.10 She documented the packing, sales, and shutting down of businesses, homes and farms in urban and rural communities in central and northern California despite harrassment from the military which was overseeing the roundup and expulsion. Even the WRA, which had hired her, “were at times suspicious of what she was doing” and “restrictions surrounded her as she worked: no pictures of the barbed wire or watchtowers or armed soldiers guarding the camps.”11 Lange was dismissed on July 30, 1942. The photos below were taken over an eight-day period in May, 1942.
Credits
by Nancy Ukai
art direction: David Izu
cover images: Dorothea Lange (coloring added by David Izu), Nancy Ukai, other photos courtesy of the Uchida family
Special thanks to:
Michiko Uchida, Leslie Tsukamoto, Kazuko Iwahashi, Richard Cahan, Steve Finacom, California Historical Society.
Supported in part by a grant from the National Park Service,
Japanese American Confinement Sites program
