Yae Kanogawa Aihara

The Kanogawa family traveled four days by train to meet their father at Ellis Island. They were one of many from Minidoka that had elected to repatriate to Japan. At Ellis Island, guards separated the men and women and she was not able to see her brothers and her father until after dinner. She remembered hugging her father in the dining room for the first time since Pearl Harbor. After dinner, she and her mother slept in a big room lined with cots. The next day, all the other families boarded a ship to Japan. Japan had made a deal with the United States to exchange prisoners of war. The United States incaracertated Japanese soldiers at Ellis Island but it needed more Japanese prisoners of war to bring American soldiers home. They categorize Japanese men, like Sho, as enemy aliens (or prisoners of war) and used them to meet their quota. Once they had enough people on the ship to Japan, they closed the doors. Yae’s family and another family from Portland where left behind at Ellis Island.

Instead of returning to Minidoka, the Kanogawa family was moved to Crystal City, an internment camp in Texas that was originally designated for Japanese enemy aliens who wanted to live with their families. She remembered traveling from Ellis Island to Texas by train in August 1943: “we actually went through Grand Central Station to, to get on the train to go to Texas. They paraded us all through that whole big station with the MP guards with the rifles.” By the time her family arrived to the camp, it had become a site that incarcerated Issei Japanese men and their families, German and Italian prisoners of war, and Japanese immigrants from Latin America. During the war, the United States kidnapped over 2,000 Latin Japanese, most of whom lived in Peru, and incarcerated them in Crystal City. Though these folks posed no threat to the Allies, the American government used the Latin Japanese abductees as bargaining chips to bring captured U.S. military personnel back to American soil. Yae did not recall socializing with the Latin Japanese abductees who spoke Spanish and had distinct cultures from her own.

At Crystal City, she attended Japanese school. She was relieved to have her father back with them even if they were still incarcerated. After the war, she and her family moved to Los Angeles where she met Luis Aihara. In 1948, she married Aihara in a Buddhist ceremony. Yae became an active member of the Japanese American community in Southern California, serving as a docent in the Japanese American National Center, participating in the Montebello Women’s Club, and becoming a three-time skydiver. She had a long and fruitful life with her four children and grandchildren.