Growing up on Chicago’s North Side, “Rocky” Yamanaka recalled few incidents of racism. “Me and my sister were the only Japanese. But we were curiosities to most of the Caucasians there,” he said.
Follow the story of “Rocky” Yamanaka, one of the few remaining Nisei who remembers life in Chicago before Japanese American resettlement, from his family’s difficulties in the Great Depression, his experiences in being drafted on V-J Day at the end of World War II, and his return to a Chicago that had drastically changed.
Still sharp of mind and looking rather spry for an 86-year-old, Yamanaka, with his thin frame and graying hair, remembers a time before World War II when fewer than 400 Japanese Americans called Chicago their home. Currently, there are only a handful of Chicago Nisei from before the war that are still alive today.
He was born in 1927 in the U.S. to parents who hailed from near Tokyo. His father first arrived in Chicago as a houseboy living with an American family in the early 1900s. Eventually obtaining an education and opening up a restaurant in the downtown area of Chicago, his father later married his mother and brought her back to the U.S. They would have two sons and two daughters, and Rocky was the third-oldest of his siblings.
The diner owned by his father was on Clark Street near Chicago Avenue, and served American fare typical of the many restaurants run by Nisei at the time, since an American audience for Japanese food had not developed in the 1920s and 1930s. But following the Great Depression, his father would eventually lose the restaurant, though he ended up working for another Nikkei restaurateur.
By this time his family had moved from the south end of downtown and settled in a crowded, coal-heated two-flat in the Geneva Terrace neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago. Walking a block and a half to Lincoln Elementary School, he went to classes in a predominantly Caucasian community.
His childhood memories included playing “kitten ball” (also known as “mushball,” a form of 16-inch softball popular in Chicago) with Caucasian neighborhood kids. Early on he evinced a talent for drawing, and even received a summer scholarship to take a class at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Yet through his childhood, experiences of racism on the basis of his Japanese ancestry seemed rare, perhaps owing to the fact that the small Nikkei community was not seen as much of a threat in Chicago compared to areas on the West Coast, where virulent anti-Japanese sentiment had been the norm.
Though his childhood friends tended to be Caucasian, he does remember attending Japanese American events, including community picnics with his family, as well as annual ceremonies honoring the Japanese emperor’s birthday held on the South Side of Chicago. Another important memory involved going with a large group of Japanese to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair to see the Japanese Pavilion there, and having iced green tea for the first time, a relative novelty at the time.
When Rocky turned ten years old, his older brother developed rheumatic fever, a common childhood illness of the period. His brother ended up being treated at the La Rabida Sanitarium in Jackson Park (now the La Rabida Children’s Hospital), and since his family didn’t have a car, it would take them hours by streetcars to go that far south. Later his brother returned home and though bedridden for a while, recovered enough to go to school. Despite his seeming recovery, his condition worsened and he passed away in May 1938.
Following the passing of his brother, his mother got ill for a long time, and then when she recovered, his father also got sick, due to an ulcer exacerbated by these family stresses. Rocky’s father would eventually pass away in December 1939. Both his father and brother were interred at Montrose Cemetery, one of the few cemeteries that accepted Japanese American remains for interment.
Through assistance from the Japanese Mutual Aid Society of Chicago, his family eventually stayed in an apartment on Oak Street that the association ran. This experience provided his first significant exposure to the Nikkei community and through his time there he met other Nisei like himself.
He would eventually learn a little of the Japanese alphabet there but never learned to speak Japanese like some of his Nisei friends. They stayed at the association from about 1939 through 1941, before his mother finally found employment.
When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, his family still lived at the association. Though he was only 14 years old at the time, he can still recall his thoughts today.
Lacking a strong family connection to Japan and being situated in the Midwest, the unfolding of the war seemed somewhat far away to Rocky as he went to high school.
After his mother got a job they were able to rent a place on nearby Wells Street. His mother faced a great deal of difficulty in picking up after his father passed away, but she eventually worked in the restaurant business and ended up managing a restaurant after a couple of years, demonstrating her tenacity in the face of their family struggles.
During this time he attended Waller High School (now called Lincoln Park High School), first at the Waller branch before transferring to the main school for his last two years. At this school he met a number of other Nisei who attended as well.
By the time that he graduated high school in the spring of 1944, he fully expected that he would be drafted into the war effort.
Despite the war ending, Rocky still had to get inducted to fulfill his Selective Service duties. As he noted, he and his fellow enlistees were supposed to be sent to nearby Fort Sheridan by noon of that day.
Following this, the Army sent him to Camp Fannin in Tyler, Texas, where supplies ran low due to the consolidation of the armed forces at the end of the war. Three months later the Army transferred him to Fort Snelling in Minnesota, but since he couldn’t speak Japanese he couldn’t join the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) program. By the end of his service he ended up at the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) school at Camp Holabird in Maryland and joined the art department, becoming a staff sergeant, and the head non-commissioned officer there.
In 1947 he finished his military service. Still only 20 years old, he found that his hometown had drastically changed.
In speaking about the Nikkei that ended up resettling in Chicago from the Japanese American concentration camps, “Even before I got drafted they started coming into this area out of the camps. A lot of them moved to the South Side, like the Hyde Park area.” By 1947, the number of Nikkei in Chicago had rocketed to some 20,000 people.
Later he went to art school on the G.I. Bill and started a career as an illustrator at an art studio run by a former Disney animator.
All told, however, the Nikkei community had changed drastically from what he had known before. “The pre-war community no longer existed when I came back,” he said. “I never did have a community, because I lived in a Caucasian neighborhood, but I had to move into a Nisei group. Then I went in the Army and came back and the Nisei group was completely changed from what I remembered from two years before.
Despite the changes that have taken place in the Nikkei community of Chicago, Rocky continues to live as an embodiment of an era now gone, but for him, and thankfully because of him, it will not be forgotten.
Ryan Masaaki Yokota is editor of Nikkei Chicago, a website devoted to telling the untold stories of Japanese Americans in the Windy City. For more information, visit http://nikkeichicago.wordpress.com.