Chapter 4. - Interracial Friendship Across Barbed Wire: Mollie Wilson and Lillian Igasaki

Summary

Abstract

This chapter explores interracial friendship as an act of political solidarity during the World War II US incarceration of the Japanese through the lens of female friendship. Specifically, it examines the relationship between Mollie Wilson, an African American teenager, and a number of her Japanese American friends who were incarcerated during the war. Wilson and her friends corresponded regularly during and after incarceration illustrating the intimate means by which interracial solidarity was expressed, expanding conceptions of political solidarity within the field of Afro-Asian studies.

Keywords: Afro-Asian, interracial, solidarity, WWII, incarceration, gender

“What's cooking, good looking? How art thou?” Lillian Igasaki inquired of her friend Mollie Wilson in a letter dated March 31, 1944. Igasaki and Wilson both attended Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles in the years leading up to World War II. At the time Igasaki penned her letter in 1944, Wilson was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles while Igasaki was incarcerated at Manzanar, one of ten Japanese concentration camps located in the western interior of the United States. “How's ole’ U.C.L.A.? Having your fun?” Igasaki asked. That spring, while Mollie attended to her studies at UCLA, her friend, Lillian, was preparing to leave Manzanar and “resettle” in Chicago. Lillian Igasaki was one of 120,000 Japanese incarcerated during World War II after President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 mandating the forcible incarceration of all residents of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. Soon after, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9102 which created the War Relocation Authority (WRA), a federal agency authorized to oversee the forcible removal and incarceration of the Japanese. After spending two years at Manzanar, Lillian received permission from the WRA to “resettle” in Chicago where her sister, Michiko, had resettled a year prior. Mollie Wilson, an African American teenager, and Lillian Igasaki both grew up in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles where a friendship blossomed between the two girls and endured beyond wartime separation.

In the months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, hysteria swept the nation and the West Coast specifically. In Los Angeles, Mayor Bowron proclaimed that Los Angeles was “sitting on top of a volcano” as it was home to the “largest concentration of [the] Japanese population in the United States.” “Both alien and American-born Japanese must go,” Bowron decried, “if the coast is to be safe.”