Title:

In the New York headquarters of the Common Council for American Unity, Joe Oyama is helping the manager of the Council's foreign language press division to check the newspaper file. Joe was assistant editor of the English section of a Japanese-American daily in Los Angeles prior to evacuation to the Santa Anita Assembly Center in May, 1942. The day before leaving for the Jerome Relocation Center the following October, he was married to Miss Asami Kawachi, who had been studying journalism at Los Angeles City College before going to Santa Anita. At Santa Anita, he was city editor and she was woman's editor of the Pacemaker. At Jerome, both Mr. and Mrs. Oyama were staff members first of Communique, predecessor of the Denson Tribune, and later, as a field workers in the document section, of Magnet, the section's magazine. In April, 1943, Mr. and Mrs. Oyama left Jerome for Des Plaines, Ill., where he was employed briefly as a general maintenance worker for a photo servicing company. In May they came to New York, and Joe went to work as a stone-polisher in a lapidary shop. He gave up that job in March of 1944, because he wanted to get back into journalism and is now working temporarily as a mail clerk at the Common Council for America Unity while looking for a reporter's job. Meanwhile he is keeping up with his Journalistic interest by serving as editor of the News Letter of the Japanese-American Committee for Democracy. -- New York, New York. 4/25/44

Contributing Institution:

The Bancroft Library. University of California, Berkeley.