Eiko Yamada's Storage Basket

Eiko Yamada’s wicker storage basket that hid the remnants of her silk wedding kimono. Note the original shipping tags to Manzanar with the family number 2811 are still attached.

NPS Collections, Manzanar National Historic Site, MANZ 5170

Article written by Nicole Martin, PhD

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At first glance, this storage basket appears ordinary and unassuming. However, its contents tell the story of an entire life. The basket belonged to Eiko Yamada, and she carried it with her on two momentous journeys: first when she emigrated to the United States from Japan, and second, when she was forcibly removed to Manzanar War Relocation Center. On the first journey she tucked away her silk wedding kimono inside the wicker basket. On the second journey, she once again packed the wedding kimono, but this time, carefully cut into strips.¹

Why did Eiko bring the kimono on her first journey, and why did she cut it up for her second journey? The stories Eiko’s basket tells are powerful. They are stories about leaving home for the unknown and building a new home in a new country, only for that home to be suddenly and irrevocably taken away. They are about what you chose to take with you when all you can bring is what you can carry. They are stories that capture both fear and courage, loss and resilience.

Journey to California

Born in Tokyo in 1894, Eiko Muto married Tamizo Yamada in 1917. That same year, Tamizo left a pregnant Eiko behind when he moved to the United States, arriving in San Francisco. After the birth of their daughter, Lily, Eiko joined Tamizo in California in 1920. She crossed the Pacific alone with the now two-year-old Lily. She also carried with her the wicker basket with her silk wedding kimono tucked inside.

Considering the value and significance of the kimono, it is not surprising that Eiko chose to bring this item with her as she left Japan for the unknown. During the Meiji period (1868-1912), the industrialization of silk production made silk kimonos available to women of all social classes. Living in Tokyo during the 1910s meant Eiko had access to the latest design-made kimonos, complete with exciting bright colors and bold motifs. Wedding kimonos have traditionally held great meaning, the colors and motifs symbolizing a woman’s passage into a new life in a new home.²

By 1930, the Yamada family had made a new life in their new home in Los Angeles. In the census of that year, Tamizo is listed as a gardener and Eiko as “home” taking care of their family that had grown to include six children. By 1940, Tamizo owned his own nursery that Eiko helped run.³ Before WWII, Japanese immigrants and their children played a crucial role in the agriculture economy of the West despite discriminatory laws that made it difficult for Asian immigrants – who were ineligible for American citizenship at the time – to own property. While it is unknown how Tamizo came to own the nursery, he likely purchased it by putting it in the name of one of his citizen children. In the face of exclusionary laws and a racially hostile climate, the Yamada family managed to prosper.⁴

Japanese American family waiting for buses to Manzanar, a War Relocation Authority Center, Lone Pine, California, 1942.

Library of Congress

Journey to Manzanar

Everything changed in 1942 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The order authorized the mass forced removal and incarceration of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast. The Yamada family learned that they would be transported to the far-off Manzanar in Owens Valley, California.

Manzanar was a place steeped in home dispossession. First, the U.S. military forcibly removed the Owens Valley Paiute in 1863 to secure white settler homesteads in the valley. The town of Manzanar formed as an agricultural settlement in the early 1900s, but settlers later abandoned the town in the 1930s after the city of Los Angeles acquired all of Manzanar’s land and water rights.⁵ Finally, over 10,000 Japanese Americans were uprooted from their homes by the U.S. government and incarcerated at Manzanar from 1942-45.

A typical interior scene of a Manzanar barracks, including cloth partitions that lent a modicum of privacy.

NPS Photo/MANZ

Eiko once again faced leaving a home that was dear to her, but now with six children ranging in age from five to twenty-two in tow. She again packed her wicker storage basket with her wedding kimono, but this time, she used a razor to cut it into strips. Lily remembers her mother crying as she cut the silk and hid it in the basket.

Worried that U.S. authorities would confiscate the kimono that meant so much to her, Eiko decided she needed to destroy it in order to save it. With this act, she succeeded in taking a small piece of home with her into the unknown.

When they arrived at Manzanar, the Yamada family found a barren, windy landscape that was scorching hot in the summer. They were assigned to Block 24, Barrack 8, Apartment 3. The housing section was surrounded by barbed wire and eight guardtowers staffed with military police with searchlights and guns. The eight Yamada family members lived together in a 20 by 25 foot room with no privacy beyond some sheets hung to create partitions. Eiko’s daughter, Cherry, remembered the worst indignity being the latrines, which had no partitions separating the toilets.⁶

Lily Yamada’s U.S. Naturalization Index Record. As a person of Asian descent born in Japan, she was not allowed to naturalize as a citizen until the passage of the Immigration Act of 1952.

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Returning Home

The Yamada family bore their incarceration at Manzanar, but it would be the last time they all lived together. Cherry remembers that Manzanar’s living conditions “weakened our family ties.” After the war, only Cherry and her younger brother moved back to Los Angeles with their parents, as the older siblings dispersed to other parts of the country.⁷

The homecoming was, in a way, a third journey into the unknown. Once again, Eiko carried her basket with her silk wedding kimono tucked inside. Tamizo and Eiko managed to find a home for the family to live in after staying in a hostel, but like so many other former incarcerees, Tamizo never recovered his nursery.⁸ He died not long after in 1952. Eiko and Lily, both naturalized as U.S. citizens after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 eliminated race as a basis for naturalization.

Cherry Yamada

NPS Photo

Overwhelmingly, Eiko’s basket tells a story of courage in the face of loss – the loss of home, family ties, and livelihood. Interviewed in 2016, Cherry reflected, “I didn’t understand at that time the enormity of the sacrifices that my parents had to make, giving up their business, losing everything they had, and for us being able to only take what we could carry. The enormity of that didn’t really sink in until I got older.”⁹ When they donated the basket to Manzanar National Historic Site in 2006, the Yamada family preserved that story for future generations.

Home and Homelands Exhibition

This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.

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¹ Unless otherwise cited, all information related to the Yamada family comes from Sarah Bone,“Manzanar National Historic Site Curator Corner: Week One: Immigration and Arrivals History,” YouTube Video, June 15, 2020, which drew from informal conversations between Cherry Yamada Uyeda and NPS staff.

² Annie Van Asche, “Japanese Kimono Fashion of the Early Twentieth Century,” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings (2000): 196-97. Akira Hirano,“Treasures of the Library: Japanese Wedding Ceremonies Old and New,” Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Culture.

³ Cherry Chiyeko Yamada Uyeda, interviewed by Rose Masters, 2016, Manzanar Oral History Project Interview # MANZ 1453 (transcript), Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service.

⁴ For an in-depth look at the Japanese American agricultural experience, see Valerie J. Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-1982 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).

⁵ “People,” Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service.

⁶ Living Conditions at Manzanar: Cherry Yamada Uyeda interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FId8HKcvMCk, Manzanar National Historical Park, 2016.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.