Henry Mittwer

Saburo Henry Mittwer was born in Yokohama, Japan, on December 9, 1918. His American-born father Richard Julius Hermann Mittwer, who had trained as a missionary at Moody Bible Institute, visited Japan in 1898, during the Spanish-American War. According to family lore, he was in the U.S. Navy en route to combat in the Philippines. Whatever the case, R.J.H. Mittwer ended up living in Yokohama, Japan, where he worked as a photographer and distributor of American (silent) films. He married a geisha from Tokyo, Ko Yamasaki. The couple had three sons, of whom Henry was the youngest (the three brothers had a half-sister, Mitsue Ikeda, born of another mother). After the great 1923 Kanto earthquake, the Mittwers were forced to flee their damaged house in Yokohama and camp out in their yard for a time.

After the earthquake, the family moved to Shanghai, and lived there for over two years before returning to Japan. Soon after, R.J.H. Mittwer left for the United States with his middle son, Fred, who was nine years Henry's senior. Henry and his eldest brother, John, remained with their mother in Yokohama. Initially, the plan was to bring the entire family to America. However, during the Great Depression, Mr. Mittwer lost his business. He scratched out a living as in interpreter and notary and ceased sending money back to Japan. At first Henry attended St. Joseph's Academy, a cosmopolitan English-speaking Catholic school in Yokohama. However, during his teen years he was forced to quit school and seek employment as a waiter at a western-style restaurant.

In 1940, as war dawned between Japan and the United States, Henry Mittwer managed to buy a steamship ticket to the United States in hopes of reconnecting with his distant father. Although Henry had birthright American citizenship as the son of a US citizen, he had never been to America, was unfamiliar with American life, and spoke English poorly. He managed to find his brother, Fred (by then married to the writer Mary Oyama Mittwer ), who brought him to meet his father for the first time in 14 years. The elder Mittwer, whom Henry would later describe as looking "frail and defeated," did not recognize his son. Henry settled in Los Angeles, where he intended to enroll in school. He found work at a Japanese store and also met a Japan-born Nisei, Sachiko Egami, the daughter of Issei diarist Hatsuye Egami .

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Henry lost his job. Although Henry was a skilled electrician, he had trouble finding employment because of racial prejudice and his limited English fluency. In 1942, following Executive Order 9066 , Henry Mittwer sought exemption on the basis of his mixed ancestry. He later related that his father took him to see a district attorney of his acquaintance, who advised the young Mittwer to go to a detention camp. (Ironically, his brother John would simultaneously be detained in Japan for being a US citizen). Mittwer volunteered as an early resident of Manzanar , and helped build the camp. In mid-April 1942, the Nichibei Shimbun reported that Henry Mittwer was organizing a dance orchestra at Manzanar, and would serve as conductor. Later he volunteered at Manzanar Hospital. During the so-called " Manzanar riot " in December 1942, Mittwer joined the crowd of protesters throwing stones at military police. Ironically, because of his mixed ancestry, he was harassed by dissidents who claimed that he was an administration spy. Unwilling to live amid such pressures, he applied for a transfer to the Gila River camp, so that he could join Sachiko. There the two were married. Soon after, the couple moved to Topaz , presumably to join Sachiko's family, and Sachiko gave birth to their first child, Eric.

While in camp Henry Mittwer was obliged to fill out the government loyalty questionnaire , including the question about military service. He responded frankly that he would refuse to serve in the U.S. military to wage war on his mother's country. In response, WRA officials separated Mittwer and sent him and his family to Tule Lake . It was at Tule Lake that their daughter Kyoko Gretchen Mittwer was born. While at Tule Lake, Henry Mittwer renounced his US citizenship. (Since Henry had never been a Japanese citizen—birthright citizenship in Japan passed only through the father—this action left him stateless). As a result, Mittwer was scheduled for deportation to Japan after the end of World War II, and sent to the Justice Department Camp at Crystal City . His wife and children were meanwhile allowed to leave camp and migrate to Chicago . With the aid of American Civil Liberties Union lawyer J.B. Tietz, in March 1946 Mittwer brought a habeas corpus suit in federal court, arguing that he had been illegally detained and had been coerced to renounce his citizenship by threats of physical violence from fellow inmates. Federal judge Louis Goodman found in his favor, and Mittwer was released in 1947. His citizenship was finally restored in 1951.

In the postwar years, Henry Mittwer and his family lived for a time at Seabrook Farms in New Jersey, where Henry worked as a welder. In late 1950, they migrated back to the Los Angeles area, settling in Pasadena and then Altadena. There, Mittwer attended John Muir College, an adult night school where he studied ceramics, and pursued his dream of becoming a furniture designer. In the early 1950s, Henry opened a furniture design business in Pasadena. His tables were selected for MOMA's Good Design exhibition in 1952, and a 48-inch steel frame table with plywood top covered in orange linoleum was featured at a summer home furnishings market in Chicago, and heavily publicized in the nationwide press. A coffee-cocktail table he designed was featured in Interior magazine while other pieces of his were featured in the magazine Art & Architecture . In 1957 his furniture was featured in an art show at Long Beach City College. During these years, he and his wife Sachiko joined a Nisei Music Guild and held musical events in their home. They also attended events with the East Los Angeles JACL.

A series of dramatic life events altered Mittwer's life path. First, in 1955 his mother died. The next year, Henry and Sachiko had their third child, Joyce. Henry abandoned his furniture business, which proved insufficient to support a wife and three children, and instead found a job, first as a technician for Sonotone, then as an assembler for the Endevco company, helping construct precision instruments for use in airplanes and rockets. Meanwhile he had become attracted to the ideas of Zen Buddhism, and he made regular visits to the meditation hall run by the Zen priest Nyogen Senzaki, and started regular meditation sessions. Around this same time, Mittwer was struck by serous lung disease, which nearly killed him, and eventually had half of one lung removed. As he later described it, "When you are hit by a severe illness, your life changes. You think about what you are living for. It was Zen more than anything that put me back (after the illness), more than any physical thing." ^[1]

In 1961, Mittwer returned to Japan on a solo visit, hoping that the cleaner air would be better for his lungs—ironically, in his absence Sachiko Mittwer became a naturalized American citizen. While in Japan, he visited the Myoshinji Temple in Kyoto. There Mittwer became a disciple of the chief abbot, Daiko Furukawa, tasked with guiding visitors from America. As Mittwer later related, "They advised me to be a monk. I had no hesitation." ^[2] He took the Zen name Seisen ("fountain of pure water"). In 1968, Sachiko and two of his children moved to Japan to join him. After Furukawa's early death, Mittwer met Hirata Seiko, the abbot of Tenryuji Temple in Kyoto, who invited Mittwer to become his student. In 1971 Mittwer and his family moved in to a house on the temple grounds. In addition to his religious duties, he made pottery, holding exhibitions annually in Tokyo, and practiced Ikebana (flower arranging). He served four terms as president of the Kyoto chapter of Ikebana International. He wrote a book in English, The Art of Chabana: Flowers for the Tea Ceremony , (Charles Tuttle, 1974), and several other books in Japanese, including his 1983 memoirs, Sokoku to bokoku no hazama de ("Between My Fatherland and My Motherland"); Arashiyama no fumoto kara , ("From the Foot of Arashiyama"), a 1992 book of essays about temple life; and Jisei no Kotoba ("Poems for Leaving the World"), a 2003 dialogue with the noted author and Buddhist priest Tsutomu Mizukami.

In his last years, Mittwer wrote an original screenplay, "Akai Kutsu" ("Red Shoes") based on Ujo Noguchi's children's song of the same name, about an American missionary couple who adopt a Japanese orphan. However, he was unable to find a producer. After Mittwer's death in June 2012, a set of screenwriters and filmmakers joined forces to take over the project. "Henry's Red Shoes," a five-minute animated short directed by Takayuki Nakamura, premiered in December 2014.

Mittwer, Henry. Sokoku to bokoku no hazama de : waga boei bojo . Tokyo: Sankei Shuppan, 1983.

Miyajima, Kanako. "Filmmakers Realize Japanese-American Monk's Dream." Asahi Shimbun , Dec. 17, 2014, 1.

O'Neill, Mark. "A Zen Monk with a Foot in Both Worlds." Philadelphia Inquirer , Mar. 22, 1992, C13.

Singer, Jane. "Calm Reflections on a Turbulent Life." Japan Times , Jan. 16, 2010, 5.