Escaped Internment, Endured Racism

Roy Nishimura sat quietly watching a video at the San Leandro History Museum, which is offering a rare showing of art done by Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during World War II.

"This is a small community and I had never heard of her," Nishimura said as he watched a mini-documentary about Mine Okubo -- one of the artists featured in the Topaz Exhibition that will be open from 11 am to 3 pm on Saturdays and Sundays through March 31.

Topaz was the camp in Utah where most Japanese-Americans from the Bay Area were imprisoned in what history judged one of the great miscarriages of modern justice.

The exhibition opened in last weekend during by which then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the roundup of Japanese-Americans.

The art at the San Leandro History Museum -- samples of which are posted with this story -- is rarely displayed outside the museum in Utah near the site of the former Topaz camp.

Nishimura, 78, may be known to many long-time residents as the former owner of the near San Leandro Hospital.

Reluctantly, modestly, Nishimura explained how his own story of living through the war was different than that of the thousands of Japanese-Americans who were confined in camps like Topaz.

Family Skipped Town Before Roundup

Nishimura, who was seven at the time, recalled that his father -- a flower grower who spoke only Japanese -- sensed that the internment was coming and was determined that his family not get caught up in it.

So about a month before the order was signed the family of five -- dad, mom and three kids -- packed whatever they could into a 1939 Ford and drove to a town on the Idaho-Oregon border.

Nishimura said his 19-year-old brother Oliver drove the car that took the family to relative safety.

Soon after they arrived, Oliver enlisted in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the fighting body made up of Japanese-American volunteers. (For the record, Oliver, now 92, survived the war relatively unscathed and lives in San Leandro.)

While Oliver was fighting in Europe, the rest of the family was sharecropping in Idaho. Of that time Nishimura would only say, "Kids can be very cruel."

At some point during the war, the family's lot improved when the Nishimuras hooked up with relatives from three other families in Grand Junction, Colorado, where the clan of about 20 persons was able to work their own farm land.

Homecoming

"We came back when the internees were released," Nishimura said.

But the family's local nursery was gone. They lived for a while at San Lorenzo's Holiness Church until they got re-established.

"I went to San Lorenzo High and to UC Berkeley," said Nishimura, who went on to become a pharmacist.

At the Topaz Exhibit at the San Leandro History Museum, Roy Nishimura and his wife, Irene, chatted with Mary Beth Barloga, who helped arrange this singular exhibit.

"We've had so many people who lived through that era come here from all over," Barloga said. "It's been very emotional."

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