From Thorns to Blossoms

A Japanese American Family in War and Peace

Mitzi Asai Loftus, David Loftus

• Publisher: Oregon State University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781962645058
• eBook ISBN: 9781962645065
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

Mitsuko "Mitzi" Asai was not yet ten years old in the spring of 1942 when President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 sent 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—about two-thirds of them US citizens—from their homes on the West Coast to inland prison camps. They included Mitzi and most of her family, who owned a fruit orchard in Hood River, Oregon. The Asais spent much of World War II in the camps while two of the older sons served in the Pacific in the US Army. Three years later, when the camps began to close, the family returned to Hood River to find an altered community. Shop owners refused to serve neighbors they had known for decades; racism and hostility were open and largely unchecked. Humiliation and shame drove teenaged Mitzi to reject her Japanese heritage, including her birth name. More than a decade later, her life took another turn when a Fulbright grant sent her to teach in Japan, where she reconnected with her roots.

In From Thorns to Blossoms, Mitzi recounts her rich and varied life, from a childhood surrounded by barbed wire and hatred to a successful career as a high school English teacher and college instructor in English as a Second Language. Today, Asai descendants continue to tend the Hood River farm while the town confronts its shameful history. Originally published in 1990 as Made in Japan and Settled in Oregon, this revised and expanded edition describes the positive influence Mitzi's immigrant parents had on their children, provides additional context for her story, and illuminates the personal side of a dark chapter in US history. It's the remarkable story of a transformation from thorns into blossoms, pain into healing.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. What Are You?
• Chapter 2. Pa and Ma in the New World
• Chapter 3. Return Visit to Japan
• Chapter 4. “Midhusband” and Parenting Eight Children
• Chapter 5. Family Life and Training
• Chapter 6. Father as Zen
• Chapter 7. World War II
• Chapter 8. Tule Lake “Relocation Camp”
• Chapter 9. Heart Mountain “Relocation Camp”
• Chapter 10. We Go Home at Last
• Chapter 11. The Years of Social Isolation
• Chapter 12. The 1950s
• Chapter 13. Masako
• Chapter 14. Fulbright Teacher in Japan
• Epilogue
• Notes
• About the Authors