Life at Manzanar: Chiyeko Hiraoka Matoba

Photograph of the Modernaires social club taken in 1944. Chiyeko Hiraoka stands in the top row, fifth from the left. (Courtesy of County of Inyo, Eastern California Museum)

 

For the Hiraoka family, December 7, 1941, began like most Sundays on their farm. The morning was spent harvesting the seasonal crops that would be sorted and then hauled to the local market in the afternoon. However, this day would not be just another Sunday.

Around noon, Leon Hubbard, the Hiraokas’ White family friend and neighbor, arrived unexpectedly. Chiyeko, the Hiraokas’ 15-year-old daughter, later recalled, “He came over and said, ‘Are you listening to the radio?’ We said, ‘No, we were busy working.’ He said, ‘Well, you know, Japan invaded America.’” After letting the news sink in, Hubbard added, “If anybody causes you trouble let me know right away.”1

There would indeed be trouble on the horizon for the Hiraokas, but much bigger trouble than a kindly neighbor could help with.

Chiyeko Hiraoka was the third and youngest child of Taiji and Chiyome Hiraoka. Both of her Japanese-born parents hailed from Kumamoto-ken on the southern island of Kyushu. Taiji grew up on his family’s farm and emigrated to America in 1907.2 He worked as a laborer on the vegetable farms around Los Angeles, trying to earn enough money to build a house for his family in Japan and eventually retire there.

He inevitably grew lonely and longed to start a family of his own. Following the custom of the time, Taiji enlisted the help of a matchmaker who would connect bachelors living in the United States with eligible women in Japan. Courtships took the form of exchanging pictures and letters; the women became known colloquially as “picture brides.”

Taiji was matched with Chiyome, a woman eight years his junior and the daughter of an affluent family from Kyushu. After their 1917 marriage in Japan, Chiyome became pregnant with their first child. The couple was on the ship back to California when their son Michio was born.3 Because neither of his parents was a naturalized American, Michio’s birth at sea made him a Japanese citizen.4

The Hiraoka family grew to include a second son, Toshio, born in 1923, and a daughter, Chiyeko, born in 1926.6 The family spoke Japanese at home, but the children attended public school and learned English as well. As was the tradition in Japan, daughters were not given the opportunities for higher education beyond high school that sons were, a practice the young Chiyeko rebelled against. “The girls were [told] ‘You’re going to get married so you’re not that important.’ I don’t know. I always felt that I was shortchanged, so I grew up being kind of—not ornery, but aggressive maybe.”7

Chiyeko was able to funnel that aggressiveness into athletic activities. “I was very athletic, so I was in sports. I was not an aggressive person, but I wanted to show them I was just as good. I enjoyed sports and many times I was much better than my younger brother in sports. That was my way of saying, ‘Hey, you know, I’m here.’”8

While their parents remained rooted in Japanese culture, the children of the Japanese immigrants participated in the activities and sports common to American kids of the time. The older kids in the community would look after the younger ones and supervise their activities. “You know, they would take a whole bunch of us in a truck and we’d go to the beach and spend the day or…[t]hey’d take us to the movies.” Chiyeko told an interviewer, “We looked up to the older girls, and the older guys would buy baseballs and they would have pickup baseball in the open field.”9 Chiyeko was further Americanized when she was given the nickname she’d be known as her entire life: Chickie.

When Chiyeko was around 12 or 13 years of age, Taiji tried to send Chiyeko to school in Japan. Second-generation children of Japanese immigrants, called Nisei, were commonly sent to live with relatives and attend school in Japan. However, Chiyeko refused her father’s request. She was a Nisei, thoroughly American now, and thought being sent to an unfamiliar land without her family was cruel. In a later interview, Chiyeko recalled, “I was very Americanized. I mean, what girl in Japan would be climbing trees and playing baseball, sliding into third. That was me.”10

On December 7, 1941, Chickie Hiraoka was a sophomore at Garfield High when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Within six months, the Hiraokas and more than 120,000 other Japanese immigrants and their children were forcibly rounded up from the West Coast, transported to remote areas, and incarcerated under harsh and overcrowded conditions in facilities run by the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Chickie and her family were sent to Manzanar War Relocation Center, located in California’s Owens Valley, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Upon arrival at Manzanar, they discovered life was extremely basic, and conditions at their barracks were very crude. One urgent need was organized recreation for the youth arriving at the camp. Within weeks, several recreation centers had been opened in the camp, and they developed a remarkable array of activities for the old as well as the young. Chickie recounted the efforts to make life comfortable for the youth of Manzanar and how there was a focus on sports. “The older children became very active in forming leagues for activities for the children,” she said. “I look back and I think, ‘Wow, that was really innovative.’”11

By far, the most popular recreation in Manzanar was baseball. Makeshift diamonds were mapped out, and scrap wire and wood were incorporated into backstops.12 Soon, more than 100 men’s baseball and over a dozen women’s softball teams were organized. Several leagues were formed, divided by age groups and talent levels.

Women’s fastpitch softball was divided into an ‘A’ league and a ‘B’ league. The A league consisted of seven teams composed of older and more experienced players. Of these, the Dusty Chicks were the powerhouse, since their roster had played together before Pearl Harbor as the Los Angeles Chickadees. Among the other teams were the Termites, Jiggerettes, Invaders, and Lucky Strikers. Several of the B league teams served as de facto minor league teams for A league clubs. It was on one of those feeder teams, the Jr. Invaders, that 15-year-old Chickie won a third-base spot.

Despite temperatures that often hovered around 100 degrees, thousands regularly turned out to watch as the men’s and women’s teams competed in scheduled league games. In the women’s A league, the Dusty Chicks ran away from the pack, finishing the 1942 season undefeated.

Over in the B League, competition was a bit more interesting. Chickie’s Jr. Invaders and the 8 Misses and a Hit both won their first three games, setting up a contest in which only one team could emerge undefeated. Thanks to a 12-run fourth inning, the Jr. Invaders came out on top, 19-14. The two teams met again at the end of the season in a best-of-three-game playoff for the B league championship. The Jr. Invaders took Game One, while 8 Misses and a Hit tied the series in a Game Two thriller by the score of 15-13. No record of the final game has been found. However, the July 29, 1942, issue of the Manzanar Free Press noted that at the Victory Dance event, plaques were presented to the championship teams including the Dusty Chicks and 8 Misses and a Hit.

The B League teams did not receive the extensive coverage in the Manzanar Free Press that men’s baseball did, so we don’t have any Chickie-specific game heroics to recount. However, as proof of her excellent play in that initial Manzanar season, Chickie was chosen to play third base and bat leadoff for the all-star team of A and B league players selected to face the Dusty Chicks in a Fourth of July exhibition game.

In the late summer of 1942, Manzanar ladies’ softball began its second season. This time, the teams were divided into American and National leagues, with the latter consisting of the younger players. The Jr. Invaders took the National League pennant. Five of the top seven batting leaders were Jr. Invaders, with Chickie coming in sixth with a cool .429 average. She was voted the National League MVP and was picked to play third base for the National League in the season-ending all-star game.

The game, held on the afternoon of Sunday, October 4, proved to be one of the season’s most exciting. American League starting pitcher Haruko Hamamoto held the Nationals to just one hit until Susie Matsuno hit a fourth-inning home run. The Americans were up by a lopsided tally of 21-1 when the Nationals’ bats suddenly roared to life. Chickie hit a home run in the Nationals’ 12-run rally, but it was too little, too late as the Americans held on to win, 22-13. Besides her home run, Chickie’s fielding garnered some additional Manzanar Free Press ink: “Hot corner guardian, C. Hiraoka drew fans’ blood with her sensational fielding and accurate pegging to the initial sacker,”13 and “C. Hiraoka’s backhand jabs gave the Sunday fans a thrill—proving herself quite a responsible lump on 3rd.”14

During the off-season, Chickie helped found the Debonaires, a social club affiliated with the YWCA for girls ages 16 to 18.15 They soon changed their name to the Modernaires, and Chickie was named the club’s athletic manager. Several sports teams competed under the club’s banner, with Chickie starring for the Modernaires in basketball and making the camp all-star team.

When the 1943 softball season commenced, Chickie was manning third for the Modernaires. The team tore through the season undefeated and faced the Jr. Misses in the championship game. Chickie led off the second inning with a hit and scored the final run of the game, a 4-0 shutout. Once again, her third-base play was recognized, and at the end of the season she was voted a first-team all-star. To close out the season, the Modernaires played the American League’s best players and suffered their only loss of the season, going down by a score of 14-9.

Off the field, Chickie and the other Manzanar teens tried to lead as normal a high school life as they could behind barbed wire. Her Modernaires club sponsored dances, and she dated several boys. Chickie continued her education as part of Manzanar High’s class of 1944 and learned bookkeeping.

Unfortunately, Chickie’s senior year was marred by her father Taiji’s death. Taiji Hiraoka had been suffering from what was thought to be stomach ulcers. Medicine failed to help, and as his condition deteriorated, he was unable to stomach the camp’s heavy food. Eventually, Taiji entered the camp hospital, where a surgeon discovered he suffered not from ulcers but from late-stage cancer. He died on April 29, 1944.

Throughout 1944 there were lots of sports and activities in the camp. The basketball Modernaires didn’t have as much success as the softball Modernaires did, but Chickie was again named an all-star guard as picked by a survey of all the players in the league.

The Modernaires were not able to defend their softball championship from the previous season. A team called the Pick-Ups defeated the Modernaires in the final game of the season, 9-5. Chickie had two hits in this game and was singled out for her “noticeable fielding.”16

By this time, Chickie’s two brothers had left Manzanar. Beginning in 1943, furloughs allowed incarcerees to work as farm laborers or relocate to certain approved areas of the country. Michio moved to Chicago and Toshio left for Idaho. Left alone with her mother, Chickie decided she needed to move on as well. “I eventually—after graduation and my father dying—I said, ‘Well, I’d better go out and find myself a place and find a place for my mother, so I went out to Chicago and took the train and never rode the train other than going to Manzanar… two days, two nights on this train and traveled there. Then I had a friend, a classmate, who had a very small efficiency. She says, ‘Come and live with me until you find a job,’ which was very nice. In a week, I had found a job.”17

During her time in camp, Chickie became acquainted with a young man named Kishio Matoba, a Sacramento, California, native who was editor of the American section of the Manzanar Free Press. In a strange coincidence, Kishio’s father had the hospital bed next to Chickie’s father and passed away from cancer the same week as Taiji.18 They got to know each other at various camp activities, and the friendship continued after Kishio left Manzanar for the University of Wisconsin in Madison. They continued writing letters to each other, and after Chickie moved to Chicago, he suggested that she visit him in Madison. They married, and Chickie worked as a bookkeeper while Kishio completed his education at UW and later Syracuse University.

The couple resided in Buffalo, New York, and had three children: Jeanne, Susan, and John. Upon Kishio’s retirement, the pair moved back to Madison, where they had begun their marriage. The Matobas remained together for 55 years until Kishio’s death in 2000.

Chiyeko “Chickie” Louise Matoba, née Hiraoka, passed away in her Shorewood, Wisconsin, home on February 17, 2014. Chickie’s daughter, Susan, has researched the camps and her mother’s time at Manzanar. She wrote that Chickie and another incarceree she interviewed “mentioned their distaste for an activist interpretation of internment, indicating that as teenagers in camp, they recall a positive, joyful time of growing up with dances, sports, and peers.”19

GARY CIERADKOWSKI is the artist and writer behind The Infinite Baseball Card Set at S​tudio​GaryC​.com. He is an award-winning graphic artist and illustrator, and chances are you’ve visited or bought something he had a hand in designing: Bicycle Playing Cards, the music department of Barnes & Noble, the Folgers Coffee can, and the graphics for Oriole Park at Camden Yards, still regarded as the best-designed ballpark in the majors. Gary’s baseball writing, art, and research were recognized by the Baseball Reliquary in 2015 when he was named the recipient of the Tony Salin Award for Contributions to Baseball History and again in 2026 when he received the SABR Jefferson Burdick Award honoring individuals who have made significant contributions to the baseball card hobby. His book, which he wrote, illustrated, and designed, The League of Outsider Baseball: An Illustrated History of Baseball’s Forgotten Heroes, was published in 2015 by Simon & Schuster. His latest book is 21: The Illustrated Journal of Outsider Baseball, Volume 2. Growing up as a Mets fan in the 1970s, Gary learned to live with pain and disappointment until he married his beautiful wife, Andrea. The two live happily in Northern Kentucky, unless they discuss the merits of the designated-hitter rule.

 

NOTES

1 Chiyeko Hiraoka Matoba, interviewed by Kirk Peterson, Manzanar National Historic Site, Oral History Project, MANZ 1184 (transcript), September 17, 2007, 12.

2 “Roster of Manzanar Residents, 6/1/42 – 12/31/44,” National Archives via Ancestry.com.

3 Passenger manifest, S.S. Persia Maru, April 13, 1919, Manzanar National Historic Site, Independence, California.

4 Matoba, 3.

5 Matoba, 6.

6 1940 US Census, Los Angeles County, California, population schedule, Monterey Park, ED 19-691, sheet 19A, Family 31, Taiji Hiraoka household, 4743 Third Street.

7 Matoba, 7.

8 Matoba, 7.

9 Matoba, 9.

10 Matoba, 10.

11 Matoba, 23.

12 Tom Caton, “’Life Is What You Make It’ For Manzanar Japs,” Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1943: 2.

13 “Haru Hamamoto Leads American All-Star to Victory,” Manzanar Free Press, October 8, 1942: 4.

14 “Sport Core,” Manzanar Free Press, October 8, 1942: 4.

15 “Debonaires,” Manzanar Free Press, September 26, 1942: 3.

16 “Pick-Ups Capture Crown: End Season Undefeated,” Manzanar Free Press, July 29, 1944: 6.

17 Matoba, 30.

18 Matoba, 28.

19 Susan Matoba Adler, “The Effect of Internment on Children and Families: Honouliuli and Manzanar.” In Suzanne Falgout and Linda Nishigaya (eds.), Breaking the Silence: Lessons of Democracy and Social Justice from the World War II Honouliuli Internment and POW Camp in Hawai‘i, vol. 44, 178-197, https://dspace.lib.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/facf60da-2697-43a9-9253-de86660b3c6c/content.