San Jose REgenerations Oral History Project

Masayo Arii

General Topic of Interview

Masayo Arii shares her experiences growing up in Winters, including her familyÕs involvement with music and stage performances. She tells about her life at the Gila River Relocation Center and her resettlement in Los Angeles as a domestic. She describes the hardships that her parents and her youngest sister faced as they traveled from town to town during the resettlement period.

She tells how Issei community leaders brought several other singers, including her, and instrumentalists together to form the San Jose Chidori Band in 1953. The bandÕs purpose was to provide entertainment for the Issei and the Japanese community. Many of their early performances were held at Okida Hall in San JoseÕs Japantown. The band also traveled to several towns in California to perform Japanese music mainly for events at Buddhist temples.

She describes her career at NASA [National Aeronautics & Space Administration] and the many positions that she held at MarianiÕs. Based in Cupertino, MarianiÕs provided jobs and housing for Japanese Americans as well as for displaced people from Europe.

Biography

Masayo Arii was born in Sacramento, California and grew up in Winters. She went to the Gila River Relocation Center with her family in 1942 through 1945. At the age of nineteen, she accompanied her father to Oakland and Los Angeles to look for a place for the family to resettle. Her father decided it was best to have her stay in Los Angeles to live on her own and work as a domestic. She worked as a domestic from 1945 to 1947, then married Mumoru Arii and moved to Cupertino in Santa Clara County. In 1949, her parents and she and her husband pulled their funds together to purchase land and had Jimi Yamaichi build their first house in Cupertino. The house was sold in 1960, and they moved to a house in Sunnyvale. She worked at NASA from 1948 to 1955 and at MarianiÕs from 1956 to 1989. She has a son and a daughter.