Born: 22 October 1893, United States
Died: 12 July 1978
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Hannah Shimozumi, Hana Shimozumi Iki
The following is republished from the National Park Service and was written by Ellie Kaplan. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Born in Hawai‘i and raised in San Francisco by Anglo-American guardians, Hana Shimozumi still had to prove her “Americanness” throughout her life due to her Japanese ethnicity. As a young opera star, Shimozumi encountered frequent incredulity at her unaccented English from those who assumed she a Japanese national. Years later she faced the ultimate assault on her American identity. During World War II she was sent to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center solely because of her Japanese ancestry.
Shimozumi was born in Honolulu on October 22, 1893, nine months after white businessmen overthrew the Hawaiian government. The following year, she arrived in San Francisco where she was put under the care of white guardians. Growing up, Shimozumi learned Latin, French, and Italian, though not Japanese, and started voice lessons at age twelve. In her late teens, she was performing concerts around the Bay Area when she was discovered by the opera producer Fortune Gallo. Shimozumi joined the new Gallo English Opera Company’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, a comic opera set in Japan. Shimozumi was credited as the first woman of Japanese ancestry to play the leading soprano role of Yum Yum. As she toured the U.S. and Canada in 1919 and 1920, the press lauded Shimozumi for her beauty, voice, and acting skills; however, they also exoticized her, making clear that part of the draw of her performance was her Japanese ethnicity.
Shimozumi married George Iki, a Japanese immigrant who was studying to be a physician at the University of California Berkeley in May 1921. Shimozumi gave birth to their only child, Marsha, the following March. The new family lived for several years in San Francisco, where Iki worked as a doctor and Shimozumi gave the occasional performance, before moving to Sacramento in the late 1920s.
When the United States declared war on Japan in December 1941, the Iki family’s fortunes plummeted. Under the powers granted by Executive Order 9066, the Iki family was forced to sell their house, medical practice, and most of their belongings and forced to move to the Walerga Assembly Center in Sacramento. From there, the U.S. government relocated the Iki family into the Tule Lake War Relocation Center several hours away. Tule Lake was the largest of the ten U.S. concentration camps, reaching a population of 18,700 people, and held Japanese Americans primarily from western Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, including Sacramento. Although “internment camp” is sometimes used to describe these camps, many historians and Japanese Americans view the term as an euphemism and prefer the phrase “concentration camp.” Much like the other Japanese American women forced into these camps, Shimozumi continued in her role as family caregiver. She worked to transform her family’s assigned barracks into a home and looked after her elderly white aunt, who accompanied the family to Tule Lake. However, there were also significant changes in family life: Shimozumi was no longer responsible for preparing meals, which instead were taken in mess halls, and she likely found her family spending less time together, as was the case for most families in the camps. Her husband continued in his work as a doctor, unlike the majority of men, whose work, status, and authority radically changed while confined in the concentration camps. His expertise resulted in the family being moved to other concentration camps, including Gila River in Arizona.
Released in the final months of the war, Hana and George moved to Los Angeles, where he practiced medicine at an interracial health clinic. In the mid-1960s, the whole family moved back to Sacramento and enjoyed Iki’s semi-retirement until his death in 1974. Shimozumi died four years later on July 12, 1978. Hana Shimozumi’s life experiences, in American opera houses and concentration camps, demonstrated that the acceptance of non-white Americans as full Americans citizens was precarious throughout the twentieth century.