Elder Statements: Eva Hashiguchi

Hashiguchi knows sacrifice. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, her Japanese-American family was forced to give up its strawberry and Tokay grape farm in Florin, California, and spent two years in a Japanese internment camp. Upon release in 1944, they relocated to Dubach, Louisiana, before Hashiguchi came to Cleveland with her older sister in 1945. Once married, she had three children and worked as a baby sitter, a manager of SeaWorld’s Japanese Village and as a manager of the jewelry department for May Co. 

Dec. 7 was a Sunday. I was 16 years old then. We were getting ready to go to church and heard Japan attacked Pearl Harbor that very day. We went into shock.

All of us were evacuated in April 1942. We went to the Fresno Assembly Center because the big camps were not ready yet.

We were given burlap sacks, and the military police pointed at a haystack and said, “Go fill it because that’s your mattress.” 

After four or five months, I went to the Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas. We lived in barracks. All nine of us were put into a 50-by-90-foot room. 

I felt safe because I had my family with me. They had a high school in Jerome, and that’s where I got my diploma.

Shikata ga nai means face whatever you’re facing. With anything bad that happened to me, I tried to make good out of it.

I formed an A & B basketball team. I played softball. As soon as I got my diploma, my teacher said, “Eva, you’re so good at athletics, would you take over the classes?” 

At 18, my dream came true. I was a gym teacher for more than 200 girls in the camp.

I block out a lot of anti-things against me. I’m not afraid. My father always said, “You’re just as good as the next person. You’re a U.S. citizen.”

My dad said, “When you start something, finish it and finish it at the best of your ability.” I’ve lived by that.

Farming in Louisiana was a lot different than in California. In California, you push an electric button and it would irrigate your crops, whereas in Louisiana, they put their seeds in and they sat on their front porch and waited for the rain to irrigate them.

But not my father — he got us galvanized buckets, and all eight of us had to go to the bayou and carry water back to water our seeds. 

Our backbreaking job did well because my dad had the best crops.

My family is very important to me. After my 90th birthday I said, “I’m on borrowed time, so as long as I don’t hurt anybody else, I’m going to keep doing whatever I want.”

I wanted my kids to have some Japanese culture in them. I wanted them to learn, to write. I wanted them happy in whatever they did.

I play bridge, I played tennis, I bowl with this club of Japanese-Americans, and I cater Japanese food to people who want it.

Almost every other day is perfect for me. I make it that way.