By Audrey Fong
In 1942, a Japanese American family relinquishes their daughter to the state to protect her from being sent to forced relocation camps during the war. Seventy years later, her nephew will receive a call from a funeral home, asking for his mom. They want to reconnect his “lost” aunt with her family.
This is the story of farmer and writer, Mas Masumoto, and how he discovered his aunt, Shizuko, was still alive and living in a nursing home a few miles from his family home. In his memoir, Secret Harvests, Masumoto explores his family’s history to learn how Shizuko became a ward of the state during WWII, what her life was like during the 70 years she was institutionalized, and how history shaped his family’s journey in the U.S.
We met up over Zoom to talk about his memoir, alien land laws, farming, and how to share care with the world around us. This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Audrey Fong: Obviously, there was, and still is, a lot of mystery surrounding Shizuko’s life – how she became lost, how rumors of her death were circulated, and what her daily life was like for her in the institutions she called home. What was it like discovering that Shizuko was still alive? Did you know from the beginning this was a story the public should know about? If not, when did you decide you wanted to share it and what changed your mind?
Mas Masumoto: When I found out she was still alive, I was shocked, because she was just a vague name that I had seen on a family tree. We had no documents, no records. There is a mausoleum in Fresno where a lot of Japanese Americans’ ashes are. The Sugimoto family, (Sugimoto being my mom’s maiden name), had a number of these plaques. But there wasn’t a plaque for Shizuko, which interested me. If she had died, why didn’t they put a plaque there?
Initially, the story unfolded privately within the family because I needed to ask hard questions of my mom, aunt, and uncle. Then, I asked hard questions to my cousins, and finally, to myself. Did I have a right to explore this? These were very difficult times in my family’s history: was it right of me to try to superimpose my ideas and values on it? That was a tough period of trying to work this all out, not knowing it would ever become a book. At that time, it was more just exploring my family’s secrets and how much of a right I had to them.
Shizuko and I first connected in 2012. By 2013, she had passed. About a year or two after that, I began to think—this is an interesting story. Let me explore it. Then it became a three year process of exploring how to tell this story. Even at that point, how public should I be with all these details? What is it within my perspective that I need to realize is my perspective? I was not there at the time and I need to try to understand that. Those were my early decisions.
What changed my mind was that I would mention the story to people and they’d go, “That’s amazing.” They wanted to know more.
AF: At the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, we talked about the importance of telling this story without judgment. What was the process of navigating and writing these stories like for you? What choices did you make to edit out as much judgment as possible?
MM: That probably was the biggest issue. If you looked at some early drafts, they were rough. In one draft, I tried to remain distant on the whole thing, to tell the story the way a journalist would with just the facts, but the problem was we didn’t know much. There were big holes.
The turning point came when I realized just because we didn’t know all these details—facts, dates, places—doesn’t mean that Shizuko didn’t have this whole life that unfolded for her 93 years of life, let alone 70 years of institutional care.
Trying to tell this story without judgment, I had to be careful because I wanted to tell this story with emotions. Certainly, journalists are thinking you don’t want to get your emotions involved because it will bias what you write. But that’s what’s at the heart of this story—emotions.
That was probably the biggest challenge, and as I navigated through this, I thought, at what point do I go ahead and explore those emotions? At other times, I realized, wait a minute, I wasn’t there in 1925 in healthcare for Asian and non-Christian immigrants. I don’t know what it was like, so I can’t make a judgment on that. I can’t make a judgment when the family was being interned in August of 1942. What do they do with Shizuko? I wasn’t there. I could try to piece everything together, but the emotional moment was beyond me. But I can try to tell the story as best I can. It was this constant balance of respecting emotions because obviously it was an emotional time, but at the same time, tempering my judgment about that.
That’s why as I wrote the book, there were times I wanted to make it clear this was my voice saying, “Boy, that was a difficult decision.” Others might inject the idea that it was politics that drove a lot of decisions, and that angers me. That’s my emotion. Did my parents and family, aunts and uncles, get angry? I’m sure they did, but they never talked to me about it.
AF: At one point, you talk about how after both sides of your family, the Sugimotos and Masumotos, left the wartime incarceration camps, both sides purchased farms. You write, “They quietly planted roots in a foreign soil. To escape the past in order to be accepted by buying a piece of America. This is how it works: remuneration and ownership of identity.” Could you talk about how land ownership affected your families’ ties to the U.S. and why it’s important for the public to understand the history of alien land laws?
MM: Alien land laws were de facto laws that targeted Orientals from owning property, both from early Chinese Americans immigrants to Japanese Americans to all these later waves of Asians.
In the book, I write about how Japanese Americans came to this area in California in the early 1900s and how Armenians had also started coming. They were escaping genocide in Asia. One of the questions was, are Armenians Asian or European? There were court cases that defined Armenians as white Asians, and therefore they could buy property. It changed the whole community structure because when you can own property, it means that there is a certain wealth and value you can have. In terms of business, you open a raisin processing plant—a lot of Armenians opened raisin processing plants and no Japanese Americans did. Why? Because they couldn’t own the plant or the property, and it marked a different trajectory for these two communities, for any community. Certainly Asian Americans had this whole barrier that made them separate and different from other immigrants in that sense.
Buying property in America was crucial and it still is to a certain extent. But it was especially for prior generations. My father knew that if you wanted to become American, if you wanted to plant roots in America, you had to buy land, because that’s when you’d have ownership, that’s when you’d be respected. It was also a way of defining a space for them physically, emotionally, socially, and politically in America.
My father knew that if you wanted to become American, if you wanted to plant roots in America, you had to buy land, because that’s when you’d have ownership, that’s when you’d be respected. It was also a way of defining a space for them physically, emotionally, socially, and politically in America.
Mas Masumoto
AF: In another section on memory, you talk about how much of your family’s records have vanished, saying that, “If our family had wealth, we’d have photographs.” This portion struck me, because several times in Secret Harvests, you discuss how poverty affected your family including how it limited their ability to medical care and in the aforementioned quote, how it affected the records and memories of your family. Yet with Secret Harvests, you’re preserving a part of your family’s story. How did you navigate which parts of this history to include?
MM: We tend to think history is defined by certain artifacts like photographs, property, and written history. We grow up thinking, this is how the Revolutionary War was done; there’s these dates and times. That’s why history tends to be focused on war. My own sense of history was always focused on what happened in between. How about the people who weren’t in war? How about the civilians in war? Where’s their stories? These questions are overlooked all the time.
When you start thinking of history in Secret Harvests, it was the whole idea of what are these other dynamics that impacted our family history? Clearly, one was poverty because if you couldn’t afford medical care, you didn’t even worry about it. When I tried to piece it together when Shizuko got meningitis, why didn’t they go to the hospital? I realized, firstly, that many hospitals were Christian at the time and my family were non-Christians. Secondly, they didn’t speak English. Would a hospital in 1925 have a Japanese translator? Probably not. Even in today’s world, how many hospitals have translators? Medical care was often impacted by these other social or economic classes, whether it’s money or status.
Therefore, when you stop and think of my family history, there are very few photographs. No photographs of Shizuko. That’s why, growing up, I didn’t know we had this other aunt. In fact, if I looked at a family tree and I remember in the mausoleum, there were two names on our family plaque there. One was a son who apparently lived to about 5 or 10 and a daughter who was born in 1915. The only thing on her plaque was the number “1915.” Was she stillborn? Did she die as an infant? There’s no other record of it than the plaque. They both died before my mom was born, so she has no memory of them. We forget that infant mortality was common back then, and it’s not just infant mortality, children died frequently in that era. A lot of people had big families because they anticipated two or three kids would die, either through an accident or an illness.
So, when you start looking at that to piece together history, you want to make sure you include something that goes beyond the facts and figures; you want to include, as I said before, that emotional aspect as part of that history and try to uncover those stories that are unfinished. One of the reasons I wrote Secret Harvests was this idea that all of us have families with secrets, questions, and holes, and that’s part of the reality of how our families carved a life.
AF: One line you had shared with me at the L.A. Times Festival of Books was “We saved face by not having a face.” What does that line mean to you?
MM: Growing up, I didn’t quite understand internment. My parents rarely talked about it. As I grew up, I began to realize my face looked different from my classmates’. I happened to go to a school that was very integrated, very few whites, a lot of Latinos, some Asians mixed in. We all had different faces. You begin to realize America is a land with a lot of diversity mixed in. The interesting dynamic is when you look at our history books, it’s mainly white faces you see, so you go, do the other people not count?
When my grandparents and my folks were young, they had to hide to get along and establish a home for themselves. They had to be discreet. The more they could hide, the more they could survive, earn money, and get by. Certainly after WWII, theirs were the faces of the enemy. America was trained that these were the faces of the evil empire that we should hate. Suddenly the war is over and you’re supposed to accept them? No. It was hard. My folks and a lot of Japanese Americans, in order to find a home in America, had to hide their faces and they literally did.
When I was growing up, there were a lot of Japanese American family farms that grew produce—peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums. No one had their names on the box. When you look at different groups, there were labels of Armenians, of Italians, of other farmers who had their name on their box. It’s because of the racism of WWII. If some consumer said, “Wait a minute—that’s a Jap farm, that’s a Jap peach!,” they’re not gonna eat it. So, they hid their name. It was part of hiding their faces in order to survive and I totally understand that.
AF: The book plays with traditional memoir formats by including emails you sent to your family, ending each chapter with a short poem, and mixing in italicized stories within the main story. What made you choose to play with mediums and how do these various mediums come together to better tell your story?
MM: I went through 65 drafts of this book. If you go through draft eight, you could see where I was struggling with how to tell this story because there was so little I knew about Shizuko and there were all these other complex dynamics that I started piecing together about our family. Initially, I wanted to keep Shizuko’s story separate because I didn’t know much. I wasn’t able to fill in a lot of gaps no matter how much I asked because when she became a ward of the state, we no longer had rights to get her medical records. I spoke with some folks who said, “Well, you could get an attorney and file some forms.” I realized that it would probably confuse the story because if I knew that in 1962 she was in this barrack or place, would that really help me? Would finding a medical record help me? I realized that no, I wanted to keep these stories separate. The italicized story in each chapter was Shizuko’s story as best as I could tell it without imposing any thoughts. This was her story from what little I knew and the fact that I didn’t know a lot was part of the story too.
Other parts of the book that weren’t italicized were where I expanded the story into looking at what my family said, my interpretation, my input, my questioning, and my thoughts about it. I wanted to end each chapter with a thought that was stuck in my mind as a theme built around the phrase shikata ga nai, which means, “it can’t be helped.” I grew up with my family always saying that and it frustrated me. Yet, I hope if you read the passages of shikata ga nai, it evolves. In the beginning, it’s “it can’t be helped, so you give up” and then midway through the book, “oh you say that because you realize there’s not much you can do,” which is different than it can’t be helped. At the end, hopefully it’s more, “now I understand why my parents said, it can’t be helped.” It didn’t mean they gave up; it meant they understood the situation they were in.
There was also a way of ending these chapters with a question because again, there were so many things I didn’t know and would never find out. I wanted to allow the reader to pause at that point and think, do I know everything about my family?
AF: A common theme throughout is care – both for your farm and the land it’s on and for the people in your life. Do you have any final thoughts on how we can all live with more care in our lives, how we can enact this philosophy on a daily basis?
MM: One of the biggest discoveries that came with writing this book was the power of relationships. This whole story of Shizuko would’ve never happened if it wasn’t for this woman at a funeral home who wanted to try to match the family when Shizuko had a stroke and was in hospice. Then there are these people who were the caregivers at her facility. When Shizuko had a stroke, she was comatose for about three months. This wasn’t an intensive care unit; they had no IVs. They had figured out a way of stirring her just enough to give her a liquid diet and they did it for three months. These weren’t high paid nursing homes; this was a basic assisted care center. It was the relationships they formed; that was the key.
If anything, the whole idea of personal relationships has become so important in the world we have. It’s almost in direct contrast to the dynamics you see in the world now, which is very polarized. It’s as if we’ve forgotten to have conversations. If I could foster one thing, it would be the belief in conversations and relationships. Hopefully, after they read Secret Harvests, people will stop and think about their own family, their own histories that they went through and begin to have that relationship with history, their family, and other people around them and try to take that different perspective that leads to conversations.
Secret Harvests is available from Bookshop, Charm City Books, Japanese American National Museum, The Last Bookstore, Queen Anne Bookstore, and 27th Letter Books.
Audrey Fong is your stereotypical Southern Californian. She loves the beach, drinks more boba than the doctor recommends, and has an Insta-famous dog that she is hoping to get into modeling. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.