A Brother’s Unending Sorrow

“My Mom received a telegram that said, ‘Emiko passed away in her sleep.’ There were no other details.”

Sometimes, when Roy Ito is on the golf course, or stuck in traffic, or alone in his Montebello home, he thinks back to his childhood.

To a time, nearly 50 years ago, when he was a boy of 12 and his sister, Emiko, was 19. A time when he and Emiko would spend their Sundays laughing at the matinee antics of Andy Hardy. When she would cheer him on as he tried to slam a homer over the fence. Or when she would wait for him after school so they could share a Baby Ruth bar.

He also recalls the darker days after Pearl Harbor, when the Itos were among the more than 112,000 Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps. And when his sister became so ill that she had to be taken away, never to return.

Ito, Emiko, his older brother, Hiro, and his parents lived in a house on La Salle Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles. His father, Naotaro, a produce wholesaler, was arrested the day after Pearl Harbor and sent to a camp in Louisiana because he had once made a charity donation to a Japanese navy fund.

The rest of the Ito family was taken to a holding center at Santa Anita Park.

At the time, “I considered it a grand experience,” says Ito, 60, a retired public administrator. “It was all very exciting for a 12-year-old kid.”

The camp “wasn’t like a prison,” he says. It was, however, enclosed by barbed wire and guarded by soldiers carrying guns.

He, Emiko, his mother, Tsuruko, and his brother lived in cramped quarters. Another sister, Yone, her husband and two children also were at Santa Anita. His eldest sister, Hideko, was in Japan when the war broke out and has remained there since.

Emiko had always had health problems, Ito recalls. When she was 13, she almost died of rheumatic fever, and later missed three years of school. His parents, both immigrants, took Emiko to many doctors and also sought non-traditional cures.

“At the time, I realized she was very sick because she slept in a separate room at our home. But throughout that period she never complained or cried. She was brave and strong,” Ito says.

Emiko graduated from Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles. She was a sophomore at UCLA and Ito was a seventh-grader at Mt. Vernon Junior High School when his family was told to evacuate their home in April, 1942.

“After that my family was known as No. 8751,” he says. Days before they left for Santa Anita, they wrote that number on all their clothing and the few possessions they were allowed to pack.

In camp, “Emiko volunteered to be a teacher for preschool kids,” Ito recalls. “She talked about it a lot. She took great joy in doing that.”

Unfortunately, she was able to teach for only two months.

“Suddenly she became very ill, and progressively she became weaker,” Ito says. Emiko was placed in the camp hospital, then that summer she was transferred to County General Hospital (today, County-USC).

The day Emiko left Santa Anita was the first time Ito saw his mother cry.

“The Japanese are not physically demonstrative of their affection. You never see the first-generation people hug or kiss or anything like that,” he says.

But as Emiko was lying on a stretcher, waiting to be lifted into an ambulance, her mother sobbed. She ran to the stretcher to kiss and hug her daughter. She couldn’t let go.

“My mother became overwrought,” Ito says, tears rolling down his face. “I think my mother knew then that Emiko would be gone forever.”

In October, the Itos were relocated to the Amache camp near Granada, Colo.

Emiko and her family corresponded regularly. Even from her hospital bed, she tried to keep their spirits up. On one occasion, they mentioned how nice it would be to have soap containers to take to the public showers. She arranged for friends to send some to Colorado.

A few weeks later, however, the family received the telegram telling them Emiko had died. Other than the date, Nov. 4, 1942, the Itos could learn nothing more about her death.

A week later, Emiko’s ashes arrived in an urn, and the family held a service at the camp. Ito’s father, who also had received a telegram, made his way to Amache after promising to pay round-trip train fare for himself and two guards.

Six months before the war officially ended in September, 1945, Ito’s father rejoined his family in Colorado. When they were released from camp, the Itos returned to their La Salle Avenue home, which they had rented out.

Soon after, some of Emiko’s friends came to visit. They were able to tell the Itos more about their daughter’s final days.

Emiko’s best friend, Anita Clifton, Anita’s mother and one of her favorite high school teachers, Mrs. English, had visited Emiko in the hospital. When she died, they said, they arranged a funeral service for her, because they wanted her to have a proper farewell.

They also had taken photographs of the service, which they gave the Itos.

Ito says he would love to see the Cliftons or Mrs. English again, and wonders if they are still alive.

“They were so kind to Emiko,” he says, adding that it meant a great deal to him and his parents to know that Emiko had not been alone at the end.

Today, nearly 50 years since his sister’s death, Roy Ito wonders how life might have been if Emiko had lived. She had been a pretty young woman with black curly hair and deep brown eyes, and she had wanted to be a sociologist. He daydreams about the man she would have married, the children she would have had, the weekend visits her family would have shared with his.

He regrets that Emiko had to die without them. He wonders why she had to die so young.

“That was the one real bad experience for me--losing my sister on top of my father having been taken away from us. All this in one year. I felt alone for quite awhile. I missed my sister so much. I still do.”

Once a month, Ito and his wife, Jean, visit his sister’s grave at Evergreen Cemetery in East Los Angeles, where her ashes were interred in 1947.

“We all shared this feeling of gloom then, but Emi was comforting to me. And now,” he says, “so is her memory.”