On April 17, 1942 The Chula Vista Star published a small item about a local displaced woman. It started:
“The Star is in receipt of a letter from Mrs. Frank Ohye, who with her husband, operated the Chula Vista Farmer’s Market and now [is] a resident at the Santa Anita Assembly Center at Arcadia.
“We publish the letter as we feel subscribers will be interested in the daily life of the evacuees.”
In reading the first two paragraphs readers of the day, or decades in the future, could be forgiven if they interpreted the item as an update from someone who had moved abroad to a luxury community, or who had been rescued from a sinking ocean liner during a relaxing vacation.
The reality is, Mrs. Frank Ohye—who thanks to the affects of coverture did not appear to have her own name and identity—was a detainee at a Japanese internment camp. She was a political prisoner, writing from an American concentration camp.
The Ohye’s, along with thousands of other families of Japanese, Italian and German heritage, were uprooted from their homes and forced to live in concentrated areas as a result of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, a response to the Pearl Harbor bombing.
Ohye writes of the details of a mundane routine: the start times of breakfast, lunch and dinner and what food is served accordingly, as well as temporary housing. She talks of “finally making use of my college education” and surprisingly even says “we are all hoping we can stay here, permanently.”
“Our living quarters are in the barns, for the new quarters are under construction. We do not mind them at all. Please forward my mother’s paper to us.
“We also wish to send our regards to all our customers in Chula Vista,” the businesswoman writes.
It was around this time in 1942 that the majority of Japanese people in Chula Vista were preparing to be shipped off to prison camps for no other reason than their ancestry.
Eighty-three years later, in observing Women’s History month, we should set aside a moment for women like Mrs. Frank Ohye who endured the indignities foisted upon them by fear, hysteria and bigotry.
