Dear Miye

the long version

The letters of Mary Kimoto Tomita tell the story of a young American woman of Japanese descent who along with over ten thousand other Japanese Americans was stranded in Japan during World War II. After growing up on a small farm in central California and completing junior college, Mary traveled to Japan in June 1939 to study the Japanese language and culture and to visit relatives. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Mary was on a Japanese ship bound for the United States; the ship turned around and returned to Japan, where Mary remained for the next five years. Mary's letters to her two closest friends, Miye Yamasaki, her childhood friend in California, and Kay Oka, another young Japanese American stranded in Japan, chronicle Mary's turbulent life from her arrival in Japan through her experiences as a civilian employee of U.S. forces in the first years of the American occupation. Mary's wartime letters and journal were destroyed in the Tokyo air raids, but shortly after she returned to the United States in January 1947, Mary wrote a memoir that reconstructed her wartime experiences; selections are included here to cover the war years.