S. Frank Miyamoto
Name | S. Frank Miyamoto |
---|---|
Born | July 29 1912 |
Died | November 7 2012 |
Generational Identifier |
Pioneering Nisei sociologist and one of the principal field workers on the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS).
Early Life and Education
Shotaro Young Miyamoto was born in Seattle, Washington, on July 29, 1912 to Issei parents Kakushiro (1872–1929) and Saki Hashiguchi Miyamoto (1876–1958). Both parents were from Miyazaki prefecture on the island of Kyushu and had met and married there. Saki had previously been married and divorced and had two sons by her first husband who remained with the husband's family. As a young man, Kakushiro had a stable job with an importing/exporting firm in Korea, but the couple fell onto hard times when the firm shut down while also having a daughter, Tsuruko, in 1903. One of Saki's cousins ran a furniture store in Seattle and encouraged them to go there as well. Kakushiro went alone in 1904 and worked in various jobs until he could afford to bring Saki and Tsuruko over a year later. For the next five years, he worked sawmills saving money to start a business; in the meantime daughters May and Nobu were born in 1907 and 1908, though Tsuruko died from complications of a tonsillectomy just before Shotaro's birth. In 1910, Kakushiro was able to take over the furniture store when Saki's cousin decided to move back to Japan. The store became an almost immediate success, and the young family prospered by the time Shotaro—who was given the Western name "Frank" by his older sisters—was a young child. A younger sister Fumiko, born in 1914, completed the family. [1]
When he was a young child, the family lived on the edge of the Japanese district of Seattle, and Frank began school at a Methodist church kindergarten and then Main Street School, both of which were almost entirely populated by other Nisei children. But when he was in the second grade, the family moved to the Beacon Hill area, and Frank attended Beacon Hill School, which was almost entirely white. He also attended Japanese language school for nine years. He later credited the experience of seeing the contrasts between the white and Japanese American worlds with inspiring his interest in sociology. While his early childhood was relatively affluent—the family spent summers at a beach house and the home was filled with books and records—family fortunes took a downturn when the Immigration Act of 1924 banned Japanese immigration, which dramatically cut into business at the furniture store. The onset of the Great Depression further hurt the store, and his father passed away in 1929 when Miyamoto was still in high school. From the age of fourteen, Miyamoto began spending summers working in Alaska canneries, something many young Nisei men from the Pacific Northwest did. He would spend the next twelve summers in Alaska, which helped pay for his college and graduate school expenses. [2]
In 1930, he began studies at the University of Washington, though he had to drop out for a time for financial reasons. Initially an engineering major, he changed to sociology upon his return, largely due to the influence of Jesse Steiner, the chairman of the sociology department and former missionary in Japan who took an interest in Japanese American students. Under Steiner's guidance, he continued on to a master's program, where he met a fellow graduate student named Forrest LaViolette , even moving in with LaViolette and his wife. For his master's thesis, Miyamoto studied the Japanese American community in Seattle. With Steiner's help, the University of Washington Press published the thesis as "Social Solidarity among the Japanese in Seattle," which has come to be seen as a classic work in the field. Miyamoto also met Nisei piano prodigy Michiko Morita while at the university, and the two started dating. Again with Steiner's help, Miyamoto entered the famed Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago in 1939. After finishing his exams, he returned to Seattle in 1941 to work on his dissertation and got a teaching position at the University of Washington. [3]
Wartime Incarceration and Fieldwork
Along with all other Japanese Americans on the West Coast, the Miyamotos were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to concentration camps. Like many young Nisei couples, Frank and Michiko married in the weeks after the outbreak of war given the uncertainty of what would happen to them. They subsequently were sent to the Puyallup Assembly Center , along with Michi's parents. Since the Moritas owned a home in Seattle that they were able to lease out, the family was able to store some belongings there. However the renters subsequently broke in and took what they wanted. At Puyallup, the family was held in the worst section of the camp, the area under the grandstands, which Miyamoto remembers as being "damp, dark, musky." [4]
While at Puyallup, he was contacted by Dorothy Swaine Thomas, a demographer at the University of California, who was putting together the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS), a large scale research project on the incarceration. Thomas knew of Miyamoto through his Seattle study and had reached him through Steiner. She hired him as one of the oldest and most experienced of the Nisei fieldworkers; he was the only incarceree fieldworker not associated with the University of California. Thomas arranged for the Miyamotos to transfer to Tule Lake , since that was where the project was initially headquartered. They arrived at Tule Lake on June 16, 1942. [5]
Along with fellow fieldworkers James Sakoda , Tamotsu Shibutani , and Robert Billigmeier , Miyamoto documented various aspects of life at Tule Lake through his journal and various reports. Looking back at this time, he remembered feeling "distressed" over Thomas's approach of just having researchers note anything that seemed important without any kind of hypothesis or other instructions. But he nonetheless produced hundreds of pages of material, much of it focusing on the growing unrest at the camp. Though he tried to blend in, he and the other researchers were inevitably regarded with suspicion by other inmates, and after he opposed an inmate petition to refuse to register during the "loyalty questionnaire" period, he began to receive threats. Thomas arranged for his and Michi's departure from Tule Lake subsequently. The couple left on April 13 for Chicago. [6]
Postwar Academic Career
Miyamoto continued his work with JERS in Chicago , reporting on Japanese American resettlement there and conducting oral history interviews with other new arrivals. Again with Steiner's help, he was able to secure a faculty appointment at the University of Washington in 1945, and was able to return to Seattle with Michi's family. The couple had two children subsequently, a boy and a girl, born in the late 1940s. He also completed his doctoral dissertation in 1950, which was based on his Tule Lake research. [7]
Miyamoto remained at the University of Washington for the rest of his career. After becoming a full professor in 1963, he became the chair of the Department of Sociology from 1966 to 1971. He was named as associate dean of arts and sciences in 1975 and was the acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1978–79. He retired in 1980. [8]
His teaching focused on social psychology, collective behavior, and race and ethnic relations. He became the sociology chair in the context of student protest and later helped to establish the Asian American Studies program and well as other ethnic studies programs. [9]
After his retirement, he received a Pioneer Award from the Seattle Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League in 1982. Through a gift from his extended family, the College of Arts and Sciences created the S. Frank Miyamoto Endowed Professorship in Sociology in 2002, awarded to a sociologist who advances research in Miyamoto's areas of interest. [10]
Miyamoto died on November 7, 2012, at the age of 100. [11]
Major Works by S. Frank Miyamoto on Japanese Americans and/or Wartime Incarceration
"Social Solidarity among the Japanese in Seattle." University of Washington Publications in the Social Sciences 11.2 (Dec. 1939): 57–130. Seattle: Asian American Studies Program, University of Washington, 1981. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984.
"The Career of Intergroup Tensions: A Study of the Collective Adjustments of Evacuees to Crises at the Tule Lake Relocation Center." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1950.
"The Japanese Minority in the Pacific Northwest." Pacific Northwest Quarterly 54.4 (Oct. 1963): 143-49.
(with Robert W. O'Brien). "A Survey of Some Changes in the Seattle Japanese Community Since Evacuation." Research Studies of the State College of Washington 15 (1947): 147-54.
"An Immigrant Community in America." In East Across the Pacific: Historical and Sociological Studies of Japanese Immigration and Assimilation. Edited by Hilary Conroy and T. Scott Miyakawa. Santa Barbara, Calif.: American Bibliographical Center-Clio Press, 1972. 217-43.
"The Forced Evacuation of the Japanese Minority during World War II." Journal of Social Issues 29.2 (Spring 1973): 11-31.
"Problems of Interpersonal Style among the Nisei." Amerasia Journal 13.2 (1986-87): 29-45.
"Japanese in the United States." In Dictionary of Asian American History . Edited by Hyung Chan Kim. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. 7-12.
"Dorothy Swaine Thomas as Director of JERS: Some Personal Observations." In Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study . Edited by Yuji Ichioka. Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989. 31-63.
"Reminiscences of JERS." In Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study . Edited by Yuji Ichioka. Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989. 141-55.
"Resentment, Distrust, and Insecurity at Tule Lake." In Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study . Edited by Yuji Ichioka. Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989. 127-140.
For More Information
Densho interviews, S. Frank Miyamoto. Interviews by Stephen Fugita, February 26, March 18, and April 29, 1998 and by Alice Ito and Tatsuya Fukunaga, July 7–8, 2003.
Fugita, Steve. "S. Frank Miyamoto." In Distinguished Asian Americans: A Biographical Dictionary . Edited by Hyung-Chan Kim. New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999. 250–51.
Miyamoto, S. Frank. "Reminiscences of JERS.” In Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study . Edited by Yuji Ichioka. Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989. 141-55.
Footnotes
- ↑ Frank Miyamoto, "A Nisei Autobiography," pp. 3–25, June 19, 1944, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records (JAERR), Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder T1.8406, https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/28722/bk0013c5113/?brand=oac4 ; Frank Miyamoto Interview I by Stephen Fugita, Segments 1,5, 7–8, Feb. 26, 1998, Bellevue, Washington, Densho Visual History Collection, Densho Digital Repository, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-densho-1000/ddr-densho-1000-50-transcript-04abe2c945.htm .
- ↑ Miyamoto, "A Nisei Autobiography," 23–55; Frank Miyamoto Interview I, Segments 17–18; Frank Miyamoto Interview IV by Alice Ito (primary) and Tatsuya Fukunaga (secondary), Segment 1, July 7–8, 2003, Seattle, Washington, Densho Visual History Collection, Densho Digital Repository, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-densho-1000/ddr-densho-1000-145-transcript-8418a6205c.htm ; Kakushiro Miyamoto, Find a Grave Index, Family Search, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QVP7-M6ZP .
- ↑ S. Frank Miyamoto, "Reminiscences of JERS," in Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study , edited by Yuji Ichioka (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989), pp. 141–42; Frank Miyamoto Interview II by Stephen Fugita, Segments 19–22, Mar. 18, 1998, Seattle, Washington, Densho Visual History Collection, Densho Digital Repository, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-densho-1000/ddr-densho-1000-51-transcript-21360af011.htm ; Greg Robinson, After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 32–33; Frank Miyamoto Interview III by Stephen Fugita, Segments 1, 3–4, Apr. 29, 1998, Seattle, Washington, Densho Visual History Collection, Densho Digital Repository, https://ddr.densho.org/media/ddr-densho-1000/ddr-densho-1000-52-transcript-f05f834bba.htm .
- ↑ Frank Miyamoto interview III, Segments 3, 9, and 11; Letter, Frank Miyamoto to Dorothy S. Thomas, May 22, 1942, JAERR BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder W 1.24:1, http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/jarda/ucb/text/cubanc6714_b296w01_0024_1.pdf .
- ↑ Frank Miyamoto interview III, Segments 13 and 16; Yuji Ichioka, "JERS Revisited: Introduction," in Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study , edited by Yuji Ichioka (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989), 7; Tule Lake Final Accountability Roster, Densho Digital Repository, https://ddr.densho.org/ddr-densho-305-10/ .
- ↑ Frank Miyamoto interview III, Segments 14–16, 22–24; Tule Lake Final Accountability Roster.
- ↑ Frank Miyamoto interview III, Segments 24 and 26; 1950 Census, Family Search, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6X1C-VW86 .
- ↑ International Examiner , March 1978, 11.
- ↑ Steve Fugita, "S. Frank Miyamoto," in Distinguished Asian Americans: A Biographical Dictionary , edited by Hyung-Chan Kim (New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999), 250–51; Frank Miyamoto interview III, Segments 28–29.
- ↑ International Examiner , Oct. 20, 1982, 3; Northwest Nikkei , Dec. 8, 2001, 1, https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/s-frank-miyamoto-endowed-professorship-special/docview/367482322/se-2 .
- ↑ Washington Death Index, Family Search, https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QLWM-29NJ .
Last updated Dec. 11, 2024, 4:36 p.m..