Collection is open for research.
Gift of Frances Toyooka, July 2019 (RL2019-087).
Frances Toyooka was born in 1921, and was a second-generation Japanese American. At the time the United States entered World War II, she was living with her husband, Jim Toyooka, and the family of Jim Toyooka's brother, Nobu Toyooka, on a farm in Troutdale, Oregon. In May 1942, the U.S. government incarcerated the family in the Portland International Livestock Center. In September of that year, they were moved to the Minidoka incarceration camp in Idaho. In 1943, Jim Toyooka and Frances Toyooka moved to the Twin Falls Labor Camp, where Jim Toyooka did farming work. In 1947, the family moved back to Oregon, eventually settling in Vanport. Following the Vanport Flood of 1948, they purchased a house in the Parkrose Heights neighborhood of Portland, Oregon.
Following the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by Japan, and the entry of the United States into World War II, the U.S. federal government began placing restrictions on Japanese Americans. In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the secretary of war to prescribe areas in the United States from which people might be excluded. Following this, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, who viewed Japanese people as an "enemy race," created military zones on the western coast of the United States from which all people of Japanese ancestry were to be forcibly removed to incarceration camps away from the coast.
In May 1942, Japanese Americans living in Oregon were compelled by military order to relocate to assembly centers either at the site of the Portland International Livestock Exposition Center or in California's San Joaquin Valley. That summer, they were transferred to incarceration centers further inland that were officially named "relocation centers." Most of those from Oregon were incarcerated either at Tule Lake in California or at Minidoka in Idaho. Over the course of the war, some incarcerated people were permitted to leave the camps either to provide agricultural labor or to serve in the United States armed forces, most notably in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
In December 1944, the U.S. War Department declared that Japanese Americans were free to leave the incarceration camps starting January 2, 1945. However, due to efforts by white Oregonians to prevent the return of Japanese Americans and Japanese Americans' fears of violence against them, many of those from Oregon who had been incarcerated only gradually moved back to the state over a period of time. Most of those who had been incarcerated had lost most of what land and property they had owned prior to the war. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation that provided $20,000 as compensation for any surviving Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated.
Source: "Japanese American Wartime Incarceration in Oregon," by Craig
Collisson, Oregon Encyclopedia,
Frances Toyooka memoir, Coll 891, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
The collection consists of the memoir of Frances Toyooka, a Japanese American woman who lived in Oregon and who was incarcerated during World War II. The bulk of the memoir describes Toyooka's experiences during World War II: Her living situation at the time the U.S. entered the war; incarceration at the Portland International Livestock Exposition Center and at the Minidoka camp in Idaho; and then living in a cottage at the Twin Falls Labor Camp, Idaho, where her husband, Jim Toyooka, did agricultural work. The memoir also descibes Toyooka's return to Oregon after World War II, her exeriences living in Vanport, Oregon, experiencing the Vanport Flood of 1948, and subsequently moving to northeast Portland, Oregon. The memoir, typed by Toyooka's daughter Janet Thibault from an original handwritten version, also includes an introduction by Thibault and some handwritten corrections.
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