As today marks the 80th anniversary of the Feb. 19, 1942, presidential order authorizing the internment of Americans with Japanese ancestry, I recalled an April day in 2016 in Bridgeton, NJ. On that Wednesday as spring got underway, I spent a delightful morning talking with 92-year-old Frank Hitoshi Ono.
At the time I was doing some fieldwork related to developing a program for the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center in Cumberland County, NJ. The Center presents the stories of relocated Japanese Americans, wartime refugees, and migrant laborers to the “largest vegetable factory on earth.” As part of the research, I met with a number of people including Mr. Ono.
When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Mr. Ono, 18, was living in San Pedro, CA, where his family had a tuna fishing business. Worried that people of Japanese ancestry would act as spies, the United States Government ordered about 120,000 people, mostly U.S. citizens, placed in internment camps.
This forced relocation included the Ono family, the teenage college student ending up at Camp Manzanar, CA. As the war dragged on, a large-scale commercial agricultural enterprise in South Jersey, Seabrook Farms, needed employees due to the wartime labor shortage. Consequently, about 2,500 residents of the relocation centers were permitted to come to the fields of Cumberland County to help harvest crops and support processing operations. Mr. Ono’s family was in that group.
After the war, Mr. Ono got a job with a radio sales and service company in Bridgeton and within a couple of years, he established his own business in Millville, the Arrow Radio & TV Sales & Service Company. As television came in and tubes gave way to transistors and other things he kept up with the times. He operated the business for about 40 years, eventually selling it when he retired in 1985.
He had many talents and hobbies, but in retirement, he focused on educating people about this period of history, and he was deeply involved with the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center.
I thoroughly enjoyed that spring morning six years ago and still recall his rich, vivid stories. I was fortunate to have met Mr. Ono, and have the opportunity to directly learn about a different time and place in our nation’s past. It’s an experience I will never forget so as my newsfeed alerted me to the 80th anniversary of Japanese Internment the conversation from some years earlier was still fresh in my mind. As Mr. Ono remarked, this is a story that more people need to know, and I was thankful that he shared the accounts and his photos with me.
Frank Hitoshi Ono, 97, of Bridgetown passed away on Sunday, September 5, 2021.
For More on Seabook Village and Japanese Internment See
A photo album of the visit with Mr. Ono on Facebook
For the history of Seabrook Village see this article on the Densho Encyclopedia.