How Japanese American Girls Boosted Military Morale From Inside Internment Camps

In 1942—at a time when so many Americans on the home front were thinking of ways they could support the U.S. service members fighting in World War II—a group of five teenage girls and their 20-year-old Sunday school teacher came up with an idea: Why don’t they write to soldiers?

But these girls and their teacher were no ordinary Americans seeking to help the war effort. They were among the thousands of Japanese Americans unjustly forced from their homes and detained at the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Arcadia, California, before being sent to internment camps across the American South and West.

The group dubbed themselves the “Crusaders.” They were on a mission to boost the morale of Japanese American military personnel at a time when their relatives and community members were incarcerated back home. Known as the Nisei soldiers, these second-generation Japanese American men volunteered for or were conscripted into the U.S. Army despite the fact that many had family who would remain incarcerated and labeled national security threats for the duration of the war.

By the war’s end, the Crusaders had grown exponentially and reached tens of thousands of soldiers.

The teacher at the heart of the club was Yuri Kochiyama (then known as Mary Nakahara), who would dedicate her life to advocating for the civil rights of people of color in the United States. The Asian American activist later earned a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2005 for her efforts.

When Kochiyama and her family arrived at Santa Anita after being forcibly removed from their home, they were still reeling from the untimely death of her father. On December 7, 1941—the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor—FBI agents arrested Seiichi Nakahara, claiming he was a threat to national security. Already in very poor health, he continued to decline as he was held for six weeks before being released on January 20, 1942. Nakahara died the next day at age 54.

“Knowing her as my grandmother, I can imagine that in the camp situation she was doing everything she could to lift people’s spirits,” says Akemi Kochiyama-Ladson, Kochiyama’s granddaughter and co-director of the Yuri Kochiyama Solidarity Project.

Kochiyama “had always been a very active person before she was incarcerated,” Kochiyama-Ladson adds, noting that the future Nobel Peace Prize nominee had graduated from junior college and was planning to study early childhood education before arriving at Santa Anita. Once incarcerated, her focus remained on education and community. “She was teaching Sunday school as a way for her to find something to do and be helpful—that was always her instinct,” Kochiyama-Ladson explains.

“I had only five kids at first in the class and, coincidentally, everyone had a brother who was in service. And I had a brother who just went in,” Kochiyama recalled decades after the Crusaders began. “And so, each one, the next Sunday, brought their brother’s address, and we started writing. And then we said, ‘Let’s see how many addresses we could get of Nisei soldiers.’”

The group wrote to friends and other relatives as well as their siblings. As time went on, the Crusaders grew beyond a club for high school-aged girls at the Santa Anita Assembly Center into a full-fledged, multigenerational effort.

As the original Crusaders were sent with their families to different internment camps after being processed at Santa Anita, they kept their letter-writing campaign alive. The Crusaders eventually had active teams of volunteers at four incarceration camps: Poston in Arizona, Heart Mountain in Wyoming and Rohwer and Jerome, both in Arkansas. The branches were mostly autonomous.

Kochiyama, her mother and her older brother were sent to the Jerome Relocation Center in Arkansas. About 65 percent of the population there were American citizens, and people of all ages were eager to help with the letter-writing movement.

Diane C. Fujino’s biography Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama describes how middle school-aged children at Jerome approached Kochiyama expressing interest in writing letters, too, leading her to create a Junior Crusaders branch. When elementary school-aged children clamored to take part as well, the Junior Junior Crusaders was born. The youngest letter writers created crayon drawings on postcards that were addressed by the teenage girls volunteering.

Adults, including Kochiyama’s mother, Tsuyako “Tsuma” Nakahara, eventually got involved, too. In addition to writing letters, Nakahara played an integral role in recording addresses for soldiers serving around the world and maintaining other critical records. Incarcerated individuals used their meager earnings to contribute to the effort, then soldiers began sending funds to the Crusaders for paper, envelopes and stamps.

“It grew and grew,” Kochiyama-Ladson says. “They went from postcards to real letters [because of the additional funds]. Thousands and thousands of letters were exchanged. People met and fell in love. People got married… I don’t think [Yuri] planned for any of that. I think that it was her instinct to help people.”

Some 90 people volunteered for the Crusaders across the participating internment camps. They sent letters to soldiers five times a year around Valentine’s Day, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving as well as Christmas and New Year’s. Nisei soldiers weren’t their only recipients, either. The Crusaders expanded the project to include messages to Japanese American orphans who were incarcerated at the Children’s Village at Manzanar War Relocation Center and Japanese American tuberculosis patients who were left behind in sanatoriums across the West Coast.

Wages at the Jerome War Relocation Center were low, with Kochiyama earning $8 per month for her work doing menial jobs. Even so, she dedicated her entire salary to purchasing the paper, stamps and other supplies necessary to ensure the Crusaders had what they needed to run smoothly.

“Postcards only cost a penny each, so my monthly wages of $8 could buy 800 postcards,” Kochiyama said, according to Heartbeat of Struggle. “We didn’t have to pay rent or buy food, so I really didn’t need any of the $8.”

To supplement the effort, she sought donations for the Crusaders, with her twin brother, Peter, among those supporting the project through his Army salary. Kochiyama also created sample letters and poems for the teen letter writers to copy.

According to her calculations, the Crusaders in Jerome were writing to 13,000 Nisei soldiers by 1944. Kochiyama alone was responsible for writing to thousands of those serving, a pace that amounted to hundreds of letters a week.

“I can’t imagine what [Yuri was] going through emotionally during the war, but I think in a situation like that you can wallow in despair or you can get active and do something—and [she] decided to do that,” Kochiyama-Ladson says.

The skills Kochiyama developed managing the Crusaders would have a lasting impact on her approach to growing a movement’s reach through recruiting, training and motivating volunteers. Starting in the 1960s, she became a vocal leader in the Asian American movement, a noted supporter of the Black Power movement and a lifelong peace activist.

The Crusaders wrapped up their work a year after the end of World War II when Kochiyama’s mother and two other members donated the remaining $54 in the group’s funds to the Japan Relief Fund in August 1946, according to City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920-1950 by Valerie J. Matsumoto.

The Crusaders, including high schooler Rinko Shimasaki, had kept notes the group sent to each other, cards they had received from soldiers and drawings with the motto they came up with for the group: “Carry on, Crusaders.” Kochiyama illuminated the experiences of Nisei soldiers by publishing some responses in a “Nisei in Khaki” column in the Denson Tribune, the Jerome camp’s newspaper.

While some of the soldiers responded to letters with basic greetings and a signature, others were eager to share their feelings and experiences. “I read one letter from a soldier who was in basic training at Camp Shelby, and he just talked about how meaningful it was to get a letter and he said ‘from home,’” says Kristen Hayashi, director of Collection Management & Access at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. “Even though they didn’t know each other, it just meant so much to him that someone was thinking of him.”

At the same time, others noted the hostility and fear they experienced during the war. In one particularly memorable letter, volunteer Ruth Shigeko Ishizaki recalled a soldier stating that “he wanted to be buried where he may fall because he didn’t want to be returned to a land where he wasn’t wanted.” Other Crusader letter writers were reminded of the war’s harsh realities when their letters were returned with a stamp merely stating “deceased” on them.

Still, many soldiers expressed deep gratitude to receive letters and noted that they felt more connected to their Japanese American community because of them. Soldier Makoto (Mike) Miyamoto wrote in one reply that he “was sure surprised to get a Valentine from a group of girls I never met before” and assured the girls he wouldn’t never forget their kindness. As he signed off, he couldn’t resist asking a question: “How in the world did you get my address?”