Virginia Swanson’s ministry had begun in 1932 when the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Minnesotan had been sent by the Women’s Baptist Home Mission Board in New York to serve as a missionary in the Terminal Island Baptist Church, which offered worship services in both Japanese and English.
There was an issei church on Terminal Island, a young people’s church, and Sunday school. All were well-attended, and the church provided a number of services: clubs and story hours for girls and boys, a young people’s group, and welfare and help for troubled families. An English class and Japanese school were also offered. The young people helped plan and finance a nursery school to care for children whose mothers worked in the canneries. We believed the church was a spiritual source and guide as well as a moral force.[1]
Swanson recalled, “The years preceding the evacuation were marked by intensive evangelistic effort on the part of the Baptist missionaries, the ministers, and the Japanese young people, resulting in scores brought to a knowledge of Christ.”[2] Many children pointed to Swanson’s faithful Christian witness as instrumental in their conversion.
By 1941, there were 400 students in the Sunday school and about 1,000 more in the Young People’s Union. The church offered practical as well as spiritual support through clubs and story hours for girls and boys, a ladies’ organization, an English class, a Japanese-language school, a nursery school and a welfare program for troubled families.[3]
Swanson’s ministry would be carried on in the changed lives of those whom she had served. Frank Endo followed Christ at the age of thirteen. He remembered having perfect attendance all five years and attending a two-hour Bible study every Sunday after the worship service, led by teachers from the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA).[4] Harry Baba was fourteen when all the Issei fishermen were incarcerated at the prison on Terminal Island. He reminisced about that church as the place of his conversion: “In the midst of this turmoil, a young evangelist named Jitsuo Morikawa was preaching at the small Terminal Island Baptist Church. After listening to the Gospel message for several Sundays, I came to the realization that I needed this Savior and Guide to pilot my life through the treacherous days ahead.”[5] Baba and his family stayed with Christian friends in Los Angeles only to be evacuated again just three months later. He remembered with gratitude, “By God’s providence, I was able to be baptized by Reverend Morikawa, the last one to be baptized at the Los Angeles Japanese Baptist Church before our evacuation.”[6]
Most residents of Terminal Island relocated to Los Angeles where Rev. Eric Yamamoto, who had transferred from Terminal Island just a year earlier, had arranged for housing in a Japanese language school. Kayoko Suzukida expressed her gratitude for the kindness of friends.
Our Evergreen Baptist Church friends found housing for us in Los Angeles near the church. While waiting for our inevitable evacuation from Los Angeles to an inland camp, we spent all our free time at Evergreen fellowshipping and commiserating with one another. Jitsuo Morikawa, our pastor, led us in an intensive study of the Book of Philippians. We ended each meeting singing “God Be with You, Till We Meet Again.”[7]
Other families could not find housing as easily. The Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) had not yet opened the assembly centers, so many of the Terminal Island evacuees had nowhere to go. According to Swanson’s detailed survey, many would be homeless in the event of an evacuation. Seeing this problem, the Friends opened three hostels for housing the dispossessed. The largest of these, the Forsythe Hostel in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, could house over ninety people.[8] Walter and Marydel Balderston[9] helped manage the Forsythe Hostel, enroll evacuee children into local schools, and assist in settling business affairs. Esther Rhoads, a Quaker missionary who had gone to Japan as a 21-year old, helped convert the vacant Presbyterian school building into a hostel and even convinced the local Moody Mattress Company to donate and deliver free mattresses.[10] Quaker farmers and pastors in work clothes also brought trucks to move furniture and supplies. Rhoads had cots and food ready for the terrified wives and children of the fishermen, while Orange Grove Meeting Friends stood by to help. Rhoads described her impressions of the Forsythe hostel:
All afternoon trucks and Japanese kept coming. They were tired and dazed as a result of the sudden exodus. . . . We have old men over seventy—retired fishermen whom the FBI considered ineffective, and we have little children—one baby a year old . . . practically no men between thirty-five and sixty-five, as they all are interned either in Montana or South Dakota. . . . I feel especially sorry for the old men. They seem so lost in the high-ceilinged rooms of the Forsythe School. I think they long for the low ceilings, and the cozy feel of their little homes back on Terminal Island. . . . Where are these people to go? There are many Japanese with young leaders able to face pioneer life, but those who have come to our hostels represent a group too old or too young to stand the rigors of beginning all over again.[11]
Members of the Whittier Friends Assembly, Dr. William “Win” Courtland Bruff and his wife, Miriam, served in Norwalk when the Japanese-language school was converted into a hostel for evicted residents of Terminal Island.
The Bruffs visited almost daily to check on the welfare of the evictees and to offer loans and other assistance. They also looked in on the Imamoto sisters, whose parents had taught at the Japanese school before being arrested by the FBI. On the evening before the Imamoto girls were interned, the Bruffs took them out for a farewell dinner. The couple also visited the Imamotos and other internees at Santa Anita, bringing discarded library books from the Los Angeles Public Library, symphony records for a music appreciation class, and sheet music for the chorus. Later, Mrs. Bruff accompanied Quaker missionary Esther Rhoads on trips to Tule Lake and Manzanar.[12]
Throughout the evacuation, while demonstrating acts of kindness, Christians bolstered the Nikkei with words of encouragement. Hazel Morikawa recalled, “Even as rumors of our impending removal spread, Dr. [Ralph] Mayberry . . . led the way to give us reassurance of help and raised our spirits at a time when feelings against us were everywhere inflamed. He was a man of faith who heard the call and answered.”[13]
Virginia Swanson would continue to tirelessly serve the Japanese American Christians during the years of internment and resettlement. She visited many of the camps, the soldiers at Fort Snelling, and hostels in various cities to aid the resettlement She also spoke at many Christian churches to help cultivate an understanding of Japanese Americans. Then “after the war, Miss Swanson married Rev. Eric Kichitaro Yamamoto, who had been pastor at the Terminal Island Baptist Church until 1940. They served at Evergreen Baptist Church in Boyle Heights. In 1999, Virginia Swanson Yamamoto passed away at age ninety-two, after a lifetime of service to the Japanese American community.”[14] Her life’s work could be summed up in her own words,
As I reflect upon the past, I recall how deeply moving it was to see the courage and inner strength of the Terminal Island people. Amid fear and despair, there was also concern for others, expressed in loving acts of kindness. One had to cling to the hope that God would somehow create good out of this trial. In time, this hope was fulfilled.[15]
[1] Ibid., 163. “The Japanese Baptist Mission began as a Christian Friendliness project in 1916 when women from the First Baptist Church of San Pedro came to Terminal Island to teach English and crocheting to the Japanese women. Mr. Shibata, the Japanese pastor at the Gardena Mission, came over to teach the Bible. Meetings were held first in Fisherman’s Hall” (“December 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor and War with Japan,” American Baptist Quarterly 17, no. 2 [June 1998], 95).
[2]Virginia Swanson Yamamoto, “From Terminal Island to Trailer Camps,” 36-37.
[3] Seigel, In Good Conscience, 2006), 22. Even Lt. Com. Kenneth D. Ringle recognized this influence in his government report: “The effectiveness of religion is best exemplified by the conditions on Terminal Island before the evacuation. Even in that very Japanese community, the Baptist Church was the center of community life. The Sunday School at that church was the social center of all nisei activities” (Kenneth D. Ringle, “Effect of Religion,” in On the Japanese Question in the U.S.: A Compilation of Memoranda [19 June 1942], accessed at http://www.mansell.com/eo9066/1942/42-01/ringle.html).
[4] Frank Koo Endo, “An Island in Time,” in Triumphs, 14.
[5] Harry Baba, “The Long Journey,” in Triumphs, 10.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Kayoko Asai Suzukida, “A Midwestern Nisei’s Wartime Experiences,” in Triumphs, 126.
[8] The others were the Blue Hills Hostel and the Norwalk Hostel which could house over seventy people combined. These facilities were loaned to the Quakers and had been formerly used as boarding schools by the Presbyterian Home Mission Board. According to AFSC records, “When the order came to evacuate within forty-eight hours, the hostels were ready and volunteer trucks and drivers available for the moving. For two days and nights they poured into the hostels, the largest single group finding refuge in ‘Forsythe Hostel’ in Los Angeles, located in Boyle Heights. Forsythe Hostel was formerly used as a boarding school for Mexican girls by the Presbyterian Home Mission Board, which loaned the property to the Friends for this project. It had been partially used for some years as a Japanese language school. The building is very large and houses at the moment 90 people — 23 families, mostly women, children — school boys and girls, and old men. Cooking is communal so far, but it is hoped that arrangements may soon be made for each family unit to be able to cook and eat separately as a family. Thirty lunches must be prepared each morning for as many school children. In Norwalk Hostel 42 people — 10 families — are housed in a former language school under similar arrangements. Kiyoshi Ishikawa, the Friends pastor there, is the leader for this group as well as for the group of 25 persons — 8 families — in the Blue Hills Hostel a few miles further on. There is a Caucasian or two living in each Hostel” (Japanese American Relations Committee, Pasadena AFSC Information Bulletin 2 [15 March 1942]). The AFSC also reported, “Frederick Dirks, a young Nazarene C.O., while waiting for his assignment to camp, rendered particularly fine service as the Caucasian resident in the hostel at Norwalk, especially among the teen-age boys. . . . The Service Committee provided several cars for bringing the very old from Norwalk to Santa Anita. . . . Whittier Friends served a lunch of hot cocoa, sandwiches and fruit to the Norwalk group at the assembly center in Downey” (Japanese American Relations Committee, Pasadena AFSC Information Bulletin 4 [27 April 1942]).
[9] In October 1942, the Balderstons would move to the Poston Relocation Center where Walter developed a community activities program funded by the AFSC. “He recruited internees to teach classes in calligraphy, woodcarving, flower arrangement, dressmaking, language and other skills. He lobbied for an outdoor stage where internees could perform Japanese drama and dance. His programs gave much pleasure, especially to hard-working Issei who had leisure for the first time in their lives to pursue arts and crafts. Marydel worked as a substitute teacher, and raised their first child, who was born during their three-and-a-half years at Poston” (Seigel, In Good Conscience, 284).
[10] “Joe Moody of the Congregational Christian Church led the twelve-truck fleet from his mattress factory to the harbor and kept the trucks running as long as they were needed” (Matsumoto, Beyond Prejudice, 17-18).
[11] Letter from Esther Rhoads in the Conrad-Duveneck Collection, Hoover Institution Collections of War, Revolution, and Peace (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University). Rhoads had served in the Friends Girls School in Tokyo prior to World War II, but was refused permission in 1940 to return to Japan after a furlough in the United States. She became a member of the Civilian Public Service (CPS) staff in Philadelphia. Then on February 19, 1942, she flew to California to help the AFSC’s Pacific Coast Branch in Pasadena open the Forsythe hostel. Rhoads would later re-open the same Presbyterian school building during resettlement and only charge returning Japanese Americans one dollar-a-day until they could find employment. She also would to Japan in 1946 as the principal of the Girls School and a regional director of the Licensed Agency for the Relief of Asia (LARA).
[12] Seigel, In Good Conscience, 54. Later, “when he visited the Santa Anita Assembly Center, Dr. Bruff gave physical examinations to the Japanese Americans who were being held there” (Sugimura, Quiet Heroes, 70). “In the three months since Christmas of 1942 Rhoads had visited almost every internment camp. She went three times to Manzanar in California, twice each to Arizona’s Poston and Gila River, and she also visited the camps in Colorado, Arkansas, and Wyoming” (Sugimura, Quiet Heroes, 75). Eleanor Stabler Clarke recalled taking those trips to Manzanar with Esther Rhoads: “The remarkable part of the situation was the mood of the people facing this unprecedented situation in a calm manner” Eleanor Stabler Clarke, “Memories of Struggle,” Friends Journal: Quaker Thought and Life Today 38, no. 11 (November 1992), 12.
[13] Hazel K. Morikawa, “Exodus: Remembered Moments,” in Triumphs, 79. Morikawa added that John W. Thomas and Marlin “Spike” Farnum lent a hand.
[14] Seigel, In Good Conscience, 28.
[15] Yamamoto, “Terminal Island Days,” 165.
