100-Year-Old Woman Caps a Life of Change and Pain With Triumph

A senator rises to call the guest of honor “a great patriot,” and old soldiers fill the hall with applause. A proclamation from the mayor praises an unsung hero who “has always loved America.”

But the hero hears none of this. She sits at the center table, tiny and bent, her face a field of wrinkles, her hearing so far gone the applause sounds to her like distant surf.

Asano Kanzaki is her name. She is 100, and this night she has become a U.S citizen, 81 years after coming to America.

For those who fill the banquet hall, Kanzaki embodies a century of Japanese American endurance, of triumph over injustice and racial hatred. She spent World War II in an internment camp in Idaho while her four sons fought--and one of them died--for the country that imprisoned her.

Few would begrudge her a night of public recognition. But after all the patriotic proclamations are done, a mystery remains: Why would this woman, at any age, pledge allegiance to a nation that extracted such an unjust sacrifice from her?

To answer that, it helps to see Asano Kanzaki not so much as a patriot but as a mother. Hers is a story of honor and family, and of how to keep both alive when cultures collide.

She arrived in Seattle in September 1917, sick from two weeks of heaving seas and of salmon for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

In Japan, she had been a young lady of privilege, slender and graceful, known for her skill in tea ceremony and flower arranging. Here, she was a pioneer in a rough and muddy city, bound to the fate of a new husband she barely knew: Kenichiro Kanzaki, nine years her senior and a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War.

They were Issei, the first generation of Japanese to migrate to America, and they soon learned how the land of opportunity placed limits on the opportunities open to Japanese immigrants. They could not become citizens, own real estate or live in certain neighborhoods.

Kenichiro Kanzaki worked in a laundry. Asano Kanzaki worked at rearing a family. Their first child, a girl, died of pneumonia when she was just two weeks old. But soon there were others, five in five years: Miyoko, Akira, Satoru, Tsutomu and Hitoshi.

The children were Nisei, the second generation, with U.S. citizenship a birthright denied to their parents. To them, Japan was a country across the ocean, and Japanese was a language they spoke with parents, not with friends.

Asano Kanzaki tried to instill in them the spirit of Japan, or yamato damashi. She sent them to after-school classes in Japanese language and the martial art of kendo. The boys preferred baseball.

Through hard work, the Kanzakis made do. Asano Kanzaki cooked, sewed all the children’s clothes and brewed her husband’s beer. He brought home bags of damp clothes for her to starch and iron.

By 1941, after 24 years in their adopted country, they had staked out a tolerable life. They rented a three-bedroom house and bought a player piano for the living room.

Then, on Dec. 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

The next day, Kenichiro Kanzaki was arrested. His service in the Japanese military decades before had put him on the government’s list of suspect characters.

Four months later, Asano Kanzaki and the children were forced from their home, joining 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast sent by federal edict to internment camps.

The internees--two-thirds of them born in America--were accused of no crime. But in the nervous months after Pearl Harbor, anyone with Japanese blood was seen as a potential spy or saboteur.

Decades later, historians would call the mass evacuation one of the most serious violations of constitutional rights in U.S. history.

At the time, Asano Kanzaki led her children from their home with resigned acceptance. “Shikata ga nai,” she told them. “It can’t be helped.”

The day they left, a truck backed up to their house, and the driver offered to buy their furniture. Ten dollars for the piano, he said. They had no choice but to sell.

Kenichiro Kanzaki rejoined them at the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho, where they all lived in a 16-by-20-foot room, their beds separated by curtains.

Behind barbed wire, the Kanzaki boys--young men now--debated the war. Some friends said they could never fight against Japan, but the Kanzaki boys obeyed their parents’ rules of honor: America is your country, and you must defend it.

Akira, the eldest, volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, all Japanese Americans assigned to some of Europe’s bloodiest battles. They fought to show the skeptics that Japanese Americans could be patriots, and Akira proved it with his life, felled by a mortar shell in November 1944 on a battlefield in Italy.

If his mother cried, she never let the children see. But her grief shows in faded old photographs tucked in family albums. Prewar photos show an exhausted mother. After Akira’s death, she seems more tightly wrapped: her lips pursed, her eyes downcast.

After the war, Asano Kanzaki and her husband settled again in Seattle, where some shops greeted returning internees with signs that said, “No Japs or Dogs Allowed.”

For the first time, Issei were allowed to become citizens. Asano Kanzaki and her husband took a citizenship course but never finished.

The explanation generally offered by their children is that they were too busy. It’s true that they worked hard--Asano Kanzaki as a seamstress, typesetter and hotel maid; her husband as an elevator operator.

But daughter Miyoko says there was more to it. “I don’t think my father was too sure of wanting to become a citizen here,” she said. “And my mother did anything my father told her.”

Kenichiro Kanzaki died in 1968. A few years later, Asano Kanzaki moved out of their house and into a small apartment, where she remains today.

She lives independently, but she is hardly alone. She has nine grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren, many of whom live around Seattle, and Asano Kanzaki tracks them all in photo albums stacked on her tea table.

The albums trace a family’s evolution, from stiff portraits of a kimono-clad Asano Kanzaki to bright snapshots of great-grandkids in bluejeans, posing with shopping-mall Santas.

The third and fourth generations--Sansei and Yonsei--are lawyers and landscapers, Baptists and Methodists. Daughters married into the melting pot and gave birth to Moores and Lows and McFarlanes.

They are an all-American family, though others don’t always understand that. Great-granddaughters Trina and Kelly Miyahara, 24 and 19, tell of friends and strangers who marvel at their lack of Japanese accents--as if it’s still assumed, three generations later, that anyone with Asian features must have just hopped off a boat.

But even as her family grew more American, Asano Kanzaki returned to Japanese roots. In recent years, as she grew deaf, she stopped speaking English. Always soft-spoken, now she mumbles in Japanese, and her children--their Japanese rusty from disuse--strain to understand her.

She lunches twice a week at the Nisei Veterans Hall, but most days find her at home, peering at Japanese-language newspapers through her bifocals.

For years everyone assumed that Asano Kanzaki, like most Issei, had put the past behind her. But then last fall she was invited to attend a groundbreaking ceremony for a World War II memorial in the state capital of Olympia.

Generals parted as the old woman made her way to the front of the crowd, and it was there, daughter Miyoko believes, that Asano Kanzaki decided she had some unfinished business.

Soon afterward, she was taking a citizenship class in her apartment building. “I’m 100 years old,” she said. “There’s not much time left.”

It was a doomed effort. Even if she could have heard anything, the class was in Korean.

But friends and strangers came to the rescue. Citizenship instructor Greg Gourley saw a chance to show that it’s never too late to become a citizen. Ken Nakano, commander of the Nisei Veterans Committee of Seattle, tutored her in Japanese for the citizenship exam.

“We owe her,” Nakano said. “Our government owes her. I’d do anything to help her.”

Taken aback by all the attention, Asano Kanzaki reacted as many mothers might, Japanese or not. “I may not be worth doing all this, getting all this help,” she told her daughter.

Last weekend--with 300 friends and relatives, two U.S. senators and five state Supreme Court justices as witnesses--Asano Kanzaki rose from her chair to face Richard Smith, district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Please raise your right hand, Smith said.

She pressed her hands together in front of her, as if praying, until her daughter gently guided her right hand skyward.

Smith asked if she swore to “renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty.” He asked if she swore to “bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law.”

He asked her to say, “I do,” and she smiled. Her daughter hissed, “Say, ‘I do,’ ” and perhaps she did, but it was impossible to hear because by then the crowd had exploded in applause.

As tributes poured from the podium, Asano Kanzaki nodded off in her chair. But when the program ended, she grew animated again. Children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren posed with her for photographs, and her face lit up.

Why citizenship? Why now?

“Isn’t it obvious?” asked her youngest son, Hitoshi. “The importance of family has always been with her. She comes from a culture in which, above all, you do nothing to cast shame or dishonor on one’s family. For her to become a United States citizen, it is an additional honor to be bestowed on the family name.”

Asano Kanzaki taught her children the spirit of Japan. They taught her the spirit of America. Together, they bridged an ocean.