Description
Ayame Kai Guild, Published 1997. Paperback, [104] pp. (unpaginated); 32 cm; illustrated with facsimile newspaper clippings, photographs and maps. Introduction by James Watanabe, M.D.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition. Tan paper covers, front collaged from 1942 newspaper headlines with title and compiler in black; rear cover with photographic portrait of the compiler. Light bumping and creasing to edges and corners; mild shelf and edge wear; small scuffed patch at top corner of front cover where a price sticker was removed, with thin surface loss. Perfect bound; binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. A facsimile scrapbook of Seattle-area newspaper clippings saved in 1942 by Yoriko Watanabe Sasaki, an older Nisei, to preserve a record of the hysteria that preceded the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Her brother, Dr. James Watanabe, wrote the introduction, and the Ayame Kai Guild reprinted it in her memory to benefit Seattle Keiro Nursing Home. The clippings, largely from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Times, cover the FBI round-ups, the Tolan Committee hearings, Attorney General Smith Troy's call for mass removal, the resignation of the Nisei clerks in Seattle's schools, the Bainbridge Island evacuation, Puyallup Valley farmers, Seattle's exclusion zones and the move to the Puyallup assembly center (Camp Harmony), with letters to the editor on both sides. One clipping quotes a letter from Puyallup by Seattle pharmacist Edward K. Shimomura, father of the painter Roger Shimomura. Also reproduced are pages from the Camp Harmony News-Letter (July 10, 1942), the Pacific Citizen (June 4, 1942) and the Minidoka Irrigator (December 23, 1944), and the sheet music "Remember Pearl Harbor." Densho's encyclopedia records that Shosuke Sasaki, author of the Seattle Plan for redress and a force behind the Newspaper Guild's 1952 resolution against the word "Jap," married a Yoriko Watanabe shortly before moving to Denver, where she died three years later. Copies are held by Densho and by the National Museum of American History, the latter a gift of Roger Shimomura.