What’s at stake?
David “Mas” Masumoto, author of 12 books and longtime Fresno area farmer, discussed the Fresno-specific legacy of World War II prison camps for Americans of Japanese descent in a conversation about his latest book.
For years, David “Mas” Masumoto regularly drove past the former Golden Cross nursing home on A Street in Fresno. Little did he know his long lost aunt, who his family believed was dead after having been separated from her for over 70 years, was very much alive inside.
This is just one of the family secrets Masumoto delves into in his latest book, “Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm” – the first selection for the Fresnolandia podcast’s monthly book club.
The central “secret” of Masumoto’s memoir concerns Shizuko, his maternal aunt who developed an intellectual disability partly due to an untreated bout of meningitis as a child living in the Central Valley in the 1920s.
When Shizuko was just a little over 20 years old, 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent like her and her family were forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned during World War II following the infamous Executive Order 9066.
While the rest of her family was sent off to the Gila River prison camp in Arizona, Shizuko instead was taken to the first of several state-run institutions for people with disabilities. The rest of the family didn’t see her for another 70 years, until Masumoto received a fateful call in February 2012 about an aunt named Shizuko who was in hospice care in Fresno.
The veteran author sat down with the hosts of the Fresnolandia podcast to talk more about what he calls “the hardest book I’ve ever written.”
“The story was really about: How does my family grapple with unknowns?” he told Fresnoland. “That’s why the heart of this book is about family secrets.”
But he unearthed even more hidden stories in the process: about Fresno’s role in the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the work of caregivers, to name a few.
Stories written in dust
Masumoto, a farmer and son of generations of Japanese American farmworkers, used to write his story ideas down in the dust on his tractor while he was out in the fields.
“The only problem is,” he said, “by the end of the road, the dust covered the note that I wrote on the fender.
“Which was actually probably appropriate,” he said, “because it was sort of like writing bad poetry.”
Though he started off with “bad poetry,” he later discovered his preferred genre, creative nonfiction.
“I would write these short stories, and the irony is they were actually nonfiction. They were actually based on truth,” he said.
“So I began to write about real life.”
Masumoto now has 12 publications to his name, according to the Masumoto Family Farm website. “Secret Harvests,” his latest, published in 2023. It was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award in the autobiography category.
Part of the “real life” that haunts him in his latest book is the previously untold story of his aunt Shizuko, who moved from facility to facility after she was first separated from her family in the 1940s.
But with that came the story of Japanese Americans’ incarceration, including that of his own parents and grandparents.
Hidden history of Japanese American imprisonment in Fresno
In narrating his family’s experience in the prison camps, Masumoto traced the shadow Japanese Americans’ imprisonment casts over Fresno, specifically.
“Highway 99 became a dividing line,” he said.
Americans of Japanese ancestry living west of the 99 were forced to leave their homes first, while families who lived east of the 99, like Masumoto’s relatives, weren’t incarcerated until months later in 1942.
One of the facilities that became a detention center for families living west of the highway was the Fresno Fairgrounds. The other in Fresno was the Pinedale Assembly Center, which has since been rededicated as a memorial.
Masumoto recalled stories of his mother’s visits to friends who were living in the horse stables at the Fairgrounds.
“They were behind bars,” he said, “behind wires and fences. My mom would just walk in to visit them and then leave saying, this is just a wild moment (in) history.”
In “Secret Harvests,” he also wrote about some farmers’ initial objections to the incarceration of Japanese Americans – but not for the reason you would hope.
“I read a couple articles where it was the local farm bureau – or the farm bureau of that era – said: No, no, we should delay internment,” he said, “because we need to have the Japanese Americans finish harvesting the raisins.”
Fresno State history professors have documented the local agricultural community’s callous reactions to the effects of Japanese American imprisonment on a farm labor shortage.
Invisible communities in ‘Secret Harvests’
At the same time that Masumoto’s parents and grandparents were living through this betrayal from their country, his aunt Shizuko’s life played out very differently.
She moved from one state-run facility to the next after she was first separated from her family in 1942.
Ultimately, she ended up at a nursing home in Fresno – just a short drive down the 99 from Masumoto Family Farm in Del Rey, Masumoto learned in early 2012 before Shizuko’s death in August 2013.
What kept her alive well into her 90s, Masumoto said, were her caregivers.
For example, after Shizuko suffered a stroke and was for the most part immobile, he wrote about her caregivers’ slow process of gently stirring her awake to feed her each day when she couldn’t feed herself, and rubbing her joints to help stave off bedsores.
With “Secret Harvests,” he wanted to make these caregivers’ painstaking work “as visible as possible.”
“We happen to live in a world, in a society, that doesn’t reward them. They don’t get paid well. They’re not honored much. They become invisible,” he said, “just like the people they’re caring for.”
These concerns have been echoed by several local caregivers, employed through Fresno County’s In-Home Supportive Services program, as they advocate for higher wages.
Read ‘Secret Harvests’ with the Fresnolandia book club
“Secret Harvests” is the first selection for the Fresnolandia podcast’s monthly book club. You can listen to the full interview with Masumoto on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
“Secret Harvests” is available for purchase directly from the Masumoto Family Farm, or on Bookshop.org.
