Can new book help recreate erased history of Tacoma’s once-thriving Japanese community?
The interviews — roughly 40 in total — were conducted nearly two decades ago.
Traveling to places like Oakland, Los Angeles and Chicago — in addition the conversations they were able to carry out right here at home — University of Washington Tacoma professors Lisa Hoffman and Mary Hanneman had their work cut out for them.
Some 60 years after Tacoma’s vibrant Japanese community was exiled to internment camps during World War II, Hoffman and Hanneman sought to track down those who were young adults at the time.
In the Japanese language, this second generation is known as “Nisei.”
Gathering this perspective, in the form of oral histories included in the duo’s new book — “Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma,” which was in late December — was incredibly important, they argue.
The book is way of preserving lived experiences, understanding what urban life was like for early Japanese immigrants and reminding people of a piece of Tacoma’s history that’s been deliberately erased, they said.
All told, due to various professional and personal commitments, the project took Hoffman and Hanneman almost 20 years to finish.
Hoffman, a cultural anthropologist by training who works in UWT’s urban studies department, hopes the book will be part of a “larger effort ... to learn about Tacoma, and in particular (the Japanese) community,” she said.
She also hopes it will help guide city decision making in the future, providing an example of how policy choices and urbanization colluded to expunge part of the city’s history from the local landscape.
‘If we look at urbanization over time, we see the erasure and the disappearance and the silencing in many ways — the forgetting, in very structural ways in the built landscape of the city — of the Japanese customs and contributions,” Hoffman said by phone this week.
As an example, Hoffman cited interviews where aging second-generation Japanese Americans born in Tacoma returned to the city, only to find it changed completely. Not only were the buildings and businesses they remembered long gone, but so too was the culture and community they remembered — like it had been wiped off the map.
“There’s actually quite a bit at stake in thinking about how cities do and do not remember,” she said.
The history of Tacoma’s relationship with its Japanese community is fraught and ugly, which is one of many reasons why documenting, reconstructing and remembering it is so crucial.
Prior to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1942 wartime executive order banishing Japanese residents in cities throughout the U.S. to confinement camps, Tacoma had one of the largest Japanese populations per capita in the country, local historian Michael Sullivan has noted.
Beginning in the late 1880s, Japanese immigrants began arriving in Tacoma. By the 1920s and 30s a full, thriving community of thousands had been established, largely centered downtown near Broadway.
For a glimpse of how that all quickly changed forever, over the course of two days in May 1942 more than 700 Japanese Americans were forced to leave the city, Sullivan and writer Tamiko Nimura told The News Tribune in 2018.
Only one in seven ever returned, they said.
“In many ways, the removal of the Japanese in Tacoma, the way it played out, was as dramatic as anywhere,” Sullivan explained at the time.
Hoffman and Hanneman’s journey began in roughly 2004, prior to the demolition of the historic Tacoma Japanese Language School that year.
When UWT concluded there was no realistic way to save the old school, the two academics hatched the project. Together, they “had desire to try to capture some of the social history around that building, in the face of its destruction” Hoffman said.
The researchers soon began locating and interviewing Japanese Americans who had grown up in Tacoma, recording hours of recollections about life in the city, and what it was like to be a bridge between their parents and future generations.
“They told these great stories of walking down the streets, of going to school, of eating roasted sweet potatoes and of sledding on the streets,” Hoffman said. “When they told those stories to us, they looked and said, ‘But I don’t see any of that now.’”
According to Hoffman, the importance of the Tacoma Japanese Language School in the lives of the city’s Japanese community can’t be overstated.
The school — which was located in the 1700 block of Tacoma Avenue South — served as a social hub for this community from the time it opened in 1911 to its closure in 1942, she said.
Now, like so much else, it’s gone.
Starting at the language school was the key to unlocking the “rich histories” there are to tell, Hoffman explained, connecting people to place.
Importantly, the language school was unique because there was only one in Tacoma, and virtually every Japanese child and family living in the city at the time had a connection to it, Hanneman said.
During the day, Nisei children in Tacoma would go to public schools, like Stadium and Lincoln.
After school — and on the weekends — they could often be found at the Japanese Language School.
Hanneman said one of the main purposes of the language school was to provide Japanese children with a tangible link to their past, through language and culture.
While many Japanese parents had established roots and families in the United States, racism and immigration policy of the time also made their status in the country feel uncertain.
They wanted their children to be prepared to leave, just in case, Hanneman said.
“Parents were not allowed to become U.S. citizens — as so-called aliens — and so there was always this fear that the families might have to leave the country,” Hanneman said. “They wanted their children to be able to manage, should that sort of occasion arise.”
While the second-generation Japanese Americans Hanneman and Hoffman interviewed nearly two decades ago were not forced to leave the country, many were forced to leave Tacoma in one of the darkest moments of the city’s history.
Having spent so many years working on the project prior to its recent publication, both authors said one of their great regrets was that many of those they spoke to are no longer alive.
It’s another reason why remembering is so important, they said.
“It’s not just acknowledgments or having a memorial, although that stuff really matters,” Hoffman said.
“It is about preserving.”
This story was originally published January 11, 2021 at 5:05 AM.
