Once Owned by a Manzanar Resident

[Japanese Returnees on the Road to Recovery] Fukko senjo ni odoru kikan doho

Matsumoto, Motomitsu [Honko]

Notes: A very scarce and important book documenting the resilience of the Japanese American community in Los Angeles during and after their internment during the Second World War. This book, published less than four years after the end of the war, is in part a memoir of the author's internment experience augmented with excerpts from the Los Angeles newspaper Rafu Shimpo (where he may have been an editor). But Matsumoto, being a journalist, also apparently interviewed hundreds of other internees and provides key details of their experience during internment and their efforts to return to a normal life after. He also collected more than 100 photographs taken during and after internment for this book. There are 120 halftone plates at the front of the book and inset halftones in the final section about specific internees.

Matsumoto was born in Japan in 1879. He spent many decades in the US as a journalist and editor for a number of Southern California Japanese-language newspapers. He and his family were interned at Manzanar during the war.

"A work on the internment camp experience of the Japanese from Los Angeles. Divided essentially into four sections, it covers the beginning of the war, forced internment, internment life, and the return to Los Angeles and economic recovery. Includes 400-odd biographies presented as examples of Japanese-Americans who have reestablished themselves."—Buried Past, 927.

[8], 120 (plates), 336, [1] pages. Text in Japanese.

OCLC: 835355159 (Waseda). Presumably there is also a copy at UCLA, but there are very few institutional holdings.

Edition + Condition: First edition. A very good copy in the original blue cloth covers, lacking the errata slip (supplied in photocopy). With the ownership signature of a woman who was interned at Manzanar and returned to Los Angeles after the war.

Publication: Los Angeles: Rafu Shoten, 1949.

Item No: #308072

Sold