This collection contains more than 50 letters written by Yasaku Kondo and his children Henry Kondo and Yuri Kondo Morimoto during World War II. The letters between Henry Kondo and Yasaku Kondo were written from 1943 to 1944, and letters from Yuri Kondo Morimoto to her husband Frank Morimoto were written in 1942. Photographs and ephemera from the pre-war period document life in Pasadena, California and include a number of panoramic images. There are also a number of photographs and postcards from the post-war period. There are several legal documents relating to economic losses stemming from World War II forced incarceration.

Yasaku Kondo (1887-1963) emigrated from Niigata-ken to the United States in 1905 and settled in Pasadena, California, where he lived in a boarding house with other single Japanese men and worked as a laborer packing oranges. He eventually became a strawberry farmer and married Kiyomi Ichise (1899-1983), who immigrated to the United States in 1916. They became florists and continued to make their home in Pasadena, where they raised four children, Yuri (1917- ), Misa (1919- ), Henry (1921-1944) and Harvey Tsuneo (1923-1988).

0.5 linear ft.

All requests for permission to publish, reproduce, or quote from materials in this collection must be submitted to the Hirasaki National Resource Center at the Japanese American National Museum (collections@janm.org).

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