This week the lesson I found most interesting was reading and discussing the letters from children sent to Ms.Breed. Personally, I read a letter written by Tetsuzo Hirasaki to Ms.Breed in April. I really enjoyed the fact that Ms.Breed sent the children gifts and sometimes they sent her things in return. In the letter I read she sent him small packages of barber equipment to keep up with his career in the camp. He said in the letter, “I also received the box of barber equipment so that is now complete. It was better that you mailed them in installments, for if you had mailed them all at once I would have had a deuce of a time trying to carry them all. Besides it would have made many of the other people feel bad seeing one fellow getting so much at one time”. Later on in the letter he mentioned that he was sending her a newspaper from the camp to let her know what was going on around him. Another thing that sparked my interest was the fact that the Japanese people were losing jobs to the other men in the area, but due to how difficult their names were they were rehired. In the letter he said, “At first they had the Japanese boys who had had postal experience prior to coming here to Santa Anita working under supervision of a postmaster from Arcadia. They did very well, and things were going smoothly. Then they decided to bring in postal employees from Arcadia to work in the Camp Santa Anita Post office. The Japanese boys were released, and boy did those poor Arcadia men take a beating!!! We did too. They did not know one Japanese name from another and we had to stand in line for hours before we could get our mail. Finally the postal authorities “got wise” and placed the Japanese boys back on the job”. Why this sparked my interest was because on Monday we had mentioned in class something about how Japanese people would change their names to make it easier on the Americans to identify them, so it was really exciting to make that connection. All in all, the most notable part of this week’s class for me was reading the Ms.Breed letters and the beautiful story behind them.
Posted inFYS183
Blogging about Ms.Breed
I was also very interested by Miss Breed and how she interacted with the children through letters. In the letter I read, Miss Breed also sent items to the child. She sent soap and books for her to read. It’s interesting how she sent barber equipment to the child that you read about. It seems like she thought of really helpful things the children may need that nobody else would think of, that also provided hope and a distraction for the kids during this time.