Mickey Mouse Geta (Japanese Sandals)

Jingo Takeuchi, the imprisoned father, had immigrated to the U.S. 37 years earlier. Months after Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, he was arrested by the FBI under suspicion of espionage and sent to the Santa Fe, New Mexico, enemy alien internment camp.

Left behind were his seven American-born children and wife, Kiwa, in the northern California city of Alvarado. Goro, for whom the geta were made, was seven. 

No one was sure why Jingo had been arrested by the government.

It may have been his leadership in promoting the martial art of kendo, Japanese fencing. Or it could have been that the three eldest children had been educated in Japan, a not uncommon practice for immigrant families at the time,  but viewed with suspicion by the U.S. government. An intelligence report stated ominously, “He is very much attached to his homeland and is a potentially dangerous alien enemy.”¹

Declassified government records later showed that an unidentified informant had reported Jingo as suspicious.²

Two months after he was arrested, the rest of the Takeuchi family was rounded up and taken from their home in Alvarado. They were sent to the Tanforan racetrack, south of San Francisco, and five months later to Topaz, Utah, as a result of President Roosevelt’s executive order that forced 110,000 American Japanese, most of them citizens, into detention camps.

On the day the Army took the Takeuchi family from their home, Goro’s younger brother, Mamoru, displayed his national pride by dressing in a necktie and a U.S. military uniform. At the departure point, he was tagged, numbered and registered as an enemy. 

Family and friends started a letter campaign from the camps to plea for Jingo’s release. In careful cursive, Goro wrote from Block 37 at Topaz: “Please let my father come home. He is not a bad man. If he could come home we will be all very happy. I and my brothers are young yet so we cannot take care of our mother.”

Letter from Goro Takeuchi to the Alien Enemy Control Unit, Department of Justice, Feb. 6, 1944. National Archives.

Mickey Mouse on kimono and geta

Jingo was born in Kumamoto, Japan, in 1888. He arrived in the U.S. in 1905, at age 17, and never returned to his homeland. If he had gone back in the 1930s, he would have seen that Japan had enthusiastically adopted Mickey Mouse as a decoration for everything from kimono  to candy wrappers.  

A New Year’s card from the mid-1930s shows Mickey planting a Japanese flag on two mochi rice cakes, a holiday delicacy, to the delight of Betty Boop and Minnie Mouse. 

So it was not far-fetched that Mickey Mouse would land on Japanese geta made by immigrants in the U.S. 

What was unusual in the cultural history of geta was that the carved footwear made a comeback in the camps, each of which held around 8,000 to 18,000 innocent people in remote areas of the U.S.

Painting by Kango Takamura, Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 10, 1942, courtesy of Manzanar National Historic Site and the Kango Takamura Collection. Artist Takamura and Jingo overlapped at Santa Fe but it is not known if they knew each other.

Soon after the camps opened, everyone began to wear geta. The wooden sandals elevated the foot above dust and mud. They also protected the wearer from getting an infection in the shared shower and bathing facilities.

Immigrants led the cultural revival of the native summer sandal. 

At Puyallup, Washington, 58-year-old Toyonosuke Fujikado turned his barrack room into a workshop and made 700 geta of different sizes, which he gave away.

“All of us felt a closeness because we were wearing geta,” wrote the poet Bunichi Kagawa, in 1945, in an essay titled “Geta” in the Tessaku literary volume published at the Tule Lake segregation center (April 1945, 24-29). Their distinctive clacking sound could be heard in all the camps. 

For people who had little or no prison income, normal street shoes were an expensive luxury but geta were available and easy to maintain. “We wanted to protect our leather shoes,” explains Flora Ninomiya, who was seven when she was exiled to Colorado from Richmond, California.

Geta also became an unexpected symbol of “ethnic intensification” during a period of racial stress.

At a time when Japanese Americans were reviled because of their race, the ethnic footwear became an intergenerational expression of creativity, pride, delight and defiance. For the immigrants, especially, geta must have felt like the footwear equivalent of comfort food. 

Geta sprouted on friendship pins and some were even turned into precarious foot-high platforms, according to Miné Okubo.

The sandals were carved from a wooden block with two stilt-like supports called “teeth” (歯 ha) that elevate the foot.

Unlike rubber flip flops, there is no right or left side to geta. The strap that holds the sandal on the foot — the hanao — is pulled through three holes drilled in the wood.  

When a weathered geta with multiple holes was found at the Amache camp in Colorado, archaeologists were initially stymied, but survivors recognized the form. 

Reunited in Texas

After two years, Jingo was finally reunited with Kiwa and the boys in Texas, at the Crystal City Internment Camp. Many families were reunited there with the expectation of eventual deportation to Japan. When Japan surrendered and the war ended, Jingo, Kiwa and the four boys applied for “non-repatriation” in August, 1945, to remain in the U.S., but their application was rejected.

Kiwa’s hair was jet black in 1942 when she entered the camps but it had turned white by 1945, and her heart condition had worsened. Two months after the applications were rejected, she died of heart failure. Her blood pressure was recorded at 264 over 190, according to her government death report. She died at age 50. 

Not long after Kiwa died, Jingo’s order of alien enemy internment was vacated and he and the boys were released from Crystal City. They finally regained their freedom in 1946 and moved to Santa Barbara to be near Jingo’s adult daughter, Reiko, and her husband, Caesar Uyesaka, who had been incarcerated during the war at Poston, Arizona. 

Jingo and Kiwa’s oldest son, Kenji, had been transferred from Topaz to the Tule Lake Segregation Center for registering his dissent on a loyalty questionnaire. In all, Takeuchi family members had been dispersed to seven different camps over the course of five years: Santa Fe, Lordsburg, Tanforan, Topaz, Poston, Tule Lake and Crystal City. 

A home in the Smithsonian

Goro remained in Santa Barbara. He married, had four children and ran two gas stations with Mamoru. After he died in 2015, Goro’s son, Michael, began to go through his father’s belongings.

His father had saved everything. “There were Tupperware 40 or 50 years old. Dishes. Cool Whip containers…camping equipment from the 1950s.” On a shelf behind a glass dish, “we came across the geta…that his father made for him.” 

Michael set aside his father’s sandals but was unsure what to do with them until he attended a reunion of Crystal City survivors in Las Vegas and met Noriko Sanefuji, a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Michael offered to donate the wartime artifact and they were accepted. 

“My grandparents were indirect casualties of war,” Michael said. The Smithsonian was preparing an anniversary exhibition in which the geta would help people understand the family’s suffering and sacrifices. 

Besides, Goro had once visited the Smithsonian and “although he was never one to visit museums,” he always talked about it, Michael said.

The wartime incarceration left a difficult legacy for the Takeuchi family. Years of separation and trauma may have contributed to bouts of physical anger and alcoholism that occurred after the war was over.  

The wooden sandals thus embody a complicated and entangled set of memories. For Michael, they are like a three-dimensional postcard on which Jingo seems to be saying to his family, “Wish we were together.” The geta also symbolize Jingo’s love of his native land and the U.S., his adopted country.

When the naturalization laws changed, Jingo applied to became a U.S. citizen. “I believe he wanted to prove that he wasn’t a disloyal person to the U.S.,” Michael said. Jingo received his U.S. citizenship papers at the end of 1954. Two months later, he died from a blood clot. 

Michael thinks that all four of the boys must have received their own pair of geta from Jingo, although no others have been found. For now, the sweet mouse that was born in a desert prison walks alone, bearing the fading memories of a family’s desperate confinement.