The Gaman Mittens
by Susan Strawn
Chinatown-International District, Seattle, 2014
The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience (the “Wing”) in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District displays a pair of knitted mittens, wooly and gray and embroidered with delicate pastel flowers. The mittens are among many objects handmade in World War II relocation camps in the United States. Some were made of scrap wood and metal, others woven from raveled twine or fashioned from discarded kimono fabric. These are gaman, the artistic expression of people who endured seemingly unbearable adversity with dignity and patience.
On the museum label, I read that Amy Yoshi Hara’s mother, Shizuko (Inagaki) Hara, had embroidered the mittens for her daughter in 1943 while they were held at the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho. Amy Hara had saved the mittens and donated them to the museum.
Surely, I thought, more of the story of the mittens wants to be told.
In the Wing library, filled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the collections manager placed Amy Hara’s mittens on a worktable for me to examine and photograph. Machine-knitted and army-issued, the plain gray mittens were sent as a gift from Amy’s father while he was detained at the Alien Detention Center in Missoula, Montana. Amy’s mother embroidered flowers, whimsical and cheerful, with lavender, pink, green, and yellow embroidery floss onto the mitten backs. I loved the asymmetry of her embroidery. Floral designs on right and left mittens are similar, yet slightly different.
After December 7, 1941, and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had removed Amy’s father from his home in Seattle for his high-profile service in the Japanese American Community. In August 1942, Amy, her mother, and brother Ben had been removed under Executive Order 9066, along with 120,000 other West Coast people of Japanese heritage—everyone with one-sixteenth or more Japanese blood—to relocation or detention centers. The Haras went to the Minidoka Relocation Center on an isolated volcanic plain near Hunt, Utah. They were allowed to bring only what they could carry.
“And here is the Hara family,” the collections manager told me.
He placed Hara family photos on the worktable beside the mittens.
“This is Amy and her mother,” he said. In a formal black-and-white portrait, Amy and Shizuko wear kimonos, Amy’s kimono youthful and exuberant, her mother’s kimono dark and sedate. The photo, a reminder of their former life as free people, was taken in 1939 before forced removal from their Seattle home.
“The Densho Project also has an interview with Amy Hara,” he added. “I’ll send you a copy.”
In the extensive Densho Project—a collection of oral history interviews with surviving wartime internees—Amy describes her family as fortunate to have been able to store their belongings in the family’s hotel in the International District and to have lost few possessions. Many evacuees lost everything. At the nearby Panama Hotel, a new owner had discovered the basement of the building filled with stored belongings of Japanese Americans removed from their homes. In the hotel’s tearoom, through an opening cut in the floor and covered with thick clear plastic, I saw the lighted view of a sampling of stored luggage and belongings kept in place since 1942, never reclaimed. A baby carriage stands out in my memory.
In the museum photo, I studied the faces of Amy and her mother. What had life had been like for Shizuko, the mother of a teenage daughter, living through freezing winters and searing summers in barracks surrounded by barbed wire, armed guards, and searchlights? So little she could have done for her daughter. So Shizuko embroidered the cherry blossoms, a likely reminiscence of her own childhood in Japan. Had she embroidered the mittens as a special gift, perhaps for a birthday or graduation? How did other parents living under such conditions find ways to love and care for children? So many ways. In A Cold Wind from Idaho, poet Lawrence Matsuda writes of a Japanese American mother knitting “as if possessed” for her soldier son, Private First Class Harry, off to the fighting in Italy:
Knitting needles clicked furiously,
Not a missed stitch or hole
For a bullet to find.
I recalled my shock when I had first learned about the forced removal and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. At age fourteen, I had watched a television documentary, a historic narrative with film clips and photographs about the internment. I sat in front of the family television set transfixed by blizzardy black and white images—the antenna on our roof had to pull television programs from sixty miles away in Sioux City, Iowa—and dumbfounded by the humiliation of American citizens herded into relocation camps without charge or trial. Mothers carried babies, small children held hands, families huddled together boarding ferries and trains to barracks hastily constructed on isolated, desolate land.
Why have I never heard of this? I wondered, stunned.
Susan Strawn is the author of Knitting America: A Glorious History from Warm Socks to High Art (Voyageur Press, 2007), a cultural history of hand knitting, and of more than 50 published articles, many on the history of American knitting. Her current project is a memoir, Loopy: How Knitting Saved My Mind and Opened Doors to the World. She lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington.
This piece is an excerpt from a longer essay first published in Blazing Star Journal on the AgArts website. Read the entire chapter here:
https://www.agarts.org/the-gaman-mittens/
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