Japanese-American Internment: A 1949 Munich Passport
A Munich Passport That Tells an Uncomfortable American Story
In 1949, a young woman named Miyeko Takita walked into the U.S. Consulate General in Munich, Germany, and applied for a passport. On paper, that’s an unremarkable bureaucratic moment, thousands of Americans abroad did the same thing that year. But Miyeko’s path to that consulate window ran through two places most people don’t associate with the word “American”: Tanforan Assembly Center and the Topaz War Relocation Center. Her passport is one of the more quietly devastating documents in my collection, not because of what it says, but because of what it implies about where she’d been just seven years earlier.
I want to walk you through this document and the history behind it, because it sits at an intersection I find myself returning to again and again as a collector: the place where a single piece of paper, properly read, forces a reckoning with history that textbooks tend to skip past.
What Happened to the Takita Family
Miyeko Takita, born in 1924, was sent with her mother, Aoyagi Takita, and her younger sister, Aiko Takita (born 1926), to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, in the spring of 1942. By October of that year, the family had been moved to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Millard County, Utah. They stayed there until October 1945, during which time the sisters were involved in the camp’s school, music programs, and Protestant church.
By 1949, just four years after walking out of Topaz, Miyeko was working as a special services librarian for the U.S. government, stationed at the Special Services Library Depot at the Nuremberg Military Post in occupied Germany. Her passport, issued that year in Munich, carries an Allied Military Visa bearing a GRATIS revenue stamp and early German border crossing stamps from the Allied controlled zones into the nascent Federal Republic. It’s a document that captures a country rebuilding itself, stamped by a woman whose own country had recently locked her up without trial.
The passport was signed by Sam Edison Woods, who served as Consul General in Munich with the personal rank of minister from 1947 until his retirement in 1952. Woods had built an unusually layered diplomatic career by that point: assistant trade commissioner in Prague starting in 1928, commercial attaché in Prague and later Berlin through the late 1930s, and consul general in Zurich during the war years, where he also ran intelligence operations under diplomatic cover. He’s a fascinating signature to find on a document, and one I’ll likely come back to in a future piece, because his own wartime work deserves its own write-up.
Two Concentration Camps, Not One
Here’s a detail that surprises most people, including most Americans: the United States operated two distinct kinds of concentration camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, and the term “concentration camp” isn’t editorializing on my part. Franklin D. Roosevelt himself used it, along with other senior officials of his own administration. The intent behind these camps was nothing like the genocidal machinery of Nazi Germany, but the term describes what they functionally were: mass detention of an entire ethnic group, roughly two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens, without charges and without due process.
The euphemisms came later. “Relocation centers” sounds almost administrative. The reality was that approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most living along the Pacific Coast, were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in the interior of the country.
The mechanism was Executive Order 9066, which Roosevelt signed on February 19, 1942. The order itself never mentioned Japanese Americans by name. Instead, it authorized regional military commanders to designate “military areas” from which “any or all persons may be excluded,” language vague enough to became the legal basis for excluding everyone of Japanese ancestry from Alaska and from military zones covering all of California and parts of Oregon, Washington, and Arizona. Roughly 5,000 people relocated out of the exclusion zone voluntarily before the order took full effect in March 1942. Another 5,500 community leaders had already been arrested in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor and were in custody before the order was even signed.
Tanforan: A Racetrack Turned Detention Center
1.) A crowd of onlookers on the first day of evacuation from the Japanese quarter in San Francisco, who themselves will be evacuated within three days.” By Dorothea Lange, San Francisco, California, April 1942.
2.) Japanese-American Concentration Camp environment.
3.) Hayward, California. “Members of the Mochida family awaiting evacuation bus. Identification tags are used to aid in keeping the family unit intact during all phases of evacuation. Mochida operated a nursery and five greenhouses on a two-acre site in Eden Township. He raised snapdragons and sweet peas.”
Miyeko and her family first landed at Tanforan, and the choice of location tells you something about how hastily this was assembled. Tanforan Assembly Center opened on April 28, 1942, at a former racetrack in San Bruno. Until it closed that October, it held roughly 8,000 men, women, and children, the majority of them U.S. citizens, who had been evicted from their San Francisco Bay Area homes with no charges filed and no legal process. Tanforan was never meant to be permanent. It functioned as a holding pen while the government finished building the more permanent camps further inland, and most of its population, including the Takitas, was eventually shipped to Topaz in Utah.
Topaz: Life Behind the Fence in the Utah Desert
The Central Utah Relocation Center, known as Topaz after a nearby mountain, opened officially on September 11, 1942, in Millard County, roughly 140 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Over its operating life it processed more than 11,000 people and held over 8,000 at its peak, making it briefly one of the larger population centers in the state of Utah.
The camp occupied a one square mile core divided into 42 residential blocks, each with twelve barracks housing 250 to 300 internees, plus a recreation room, a combined washroom, toilet, and laundry building, a dining hall, and a block manager’s office. The barracks were pine planks wrapped in tarpaper, lined inside with sheetrock, furnished with little more than pot-bellied stoves, army cots, and mattress covers. Many were still unfinished when internees moved in, and residents themselves helped complete construction and build their own furniture. Despite the bleak surroundings, internees planted thousands of trees and shrubs and built extensive gardens around the barracks, a quiet act of making a hostile place livable. By the time it was fully built out, Topaz had grown to 623 buildings, including two elementary schools, a junior/senior high school, a hospital, a church, seven watchtowers, a perimeter fence, and a sentry post.
Among the ten War Relocation Authority camps, Topaz was generally considered one of the calmer ones. That changed in April 1943, when a military guard shot and killed James Hatsuki Wakasa, a 63-year-old internee walking near the perimeter fence who appeared to be distracted or unable to hear the guard’s warnings. A second shooting incident a month later, when a guard fired on a couple walking too close to the fence, forced camp administration to reevaluate its security posture. Weapons policy was restricted, fence security was relaxed, and internees were eventually permitted to leave camp for recreation and for jobs in nearby Delta.
It’s also worth noting, since it rarely makes it into the conversation, that German-American civilians and resident nationals were interned in the United States during the First World War, and Italian-Americans faced internment alongside Japanese-Americans during the Second. The wartime detention of ethnic minorities in America wasn’t a single isolated policy; it has a longer and uncomfortable pattern behind it.
Why This Passport Matters to a Collector
A passport like Miyeko Takita’s earns its place in a serious collection on several fronts at once, which is fairly rare. You’ve got an early post-war passport issued at a small but historically active U.S. consulate in occupied Munich. You’ve got the Allied Military Visa with its GRATIS revenue stamp, a detail specific to that brief postwar window before West Germany’s full sovereignty was restored. You’ve got early German border stamps documenting movement between Allied controlled zones and the emerging Federal Republic. And underneath all of it, you’ve got the biography of a woman whose own government had imprisoned her and her family without trial less than a decade earlier, and who went on to serve that same government overseas.
That layering, ordinary bureaucratic document on the surface, extraordinary personal history underneath, is exactly the kind of thing I look for when I’m evaluating whether a passport is worth pursuing for a collection. The stamps tell you where someone went. The dates and signatures tell you who handled the document. But sometimes it’s the gap between issue dates, the seven years between a barbed-wire fence in the Utah desert and a consulate desk in Munich, that tells you the real story.
A Chapter Still Underrepresented in American Classrooms
This period of history is getting more attention these days thanks to advocates like George Takei, who spent part of his own childhood in a U.S. internment camp and has spoken and written extensively about the experience since, including in his graphic memoir “They Called Us Enemy.” But survey work on how American schools actually teach this material suggests it still tends to get reduced to a sidebar, a paragraph or two in a textbook rather than a full treatment. That kind of minimization, even if unintentional, quietly signals to students that it “wasn’t that bad.” A passport like this one is a small but stubborn piece of evidence to the contrary.
Yale university has Miyeko Takita documents in their archive.
Those are materials relating to Aiko Takita and Miyeko Takita’s incarceration at the Tanforan Assembly Center, a temporary detention center at San Bruno, California, and the Topaz War Relocation Center, an American concentration camp in Millard County, Utah, 1942-1945. Included are letters, in English, concerning Miyeko’s college enrollment and letters, in Japanese, from mother Aoyagi Takita to daughter Miyeko concerning family acquaintances all over the United States and daily life at the Topaz War Relocation Center. Miyeko Takita died in 2019.
Also included are Topaz High School class materials (primarily lesson notes), Topaz Music School and Protestant church programs, 2 autograph books, and 3 drawings of the Tanforan Assembly Center. Accompanied by printed incarceration camp pamphlets and newsletters as well as printed sheet music. 2 additional autograph books predate the incarceration of the Takita family. There are also 15 photographs of the Takitas (some with Japanese manuscript captions), circa 1928-1946. Yale Archive link
If you’re building a collection that touches on twentieth-century American history, I’d also point you toward the early history of the U.S. passport itself, which gives useful context for how these travel documents evolved into the kind of consular passport Miyeko received in 1949. And if you’re newer to collecting altogether and wondering whether any of this is even legal to pursue, I’ve laid out the legal considerations around collecting old and obsolete passports in detail elsewhere on the site.
Have a passport with a story like this one, or questions about a document in your own collection? Reach out to me directly, I’m always glad to talk through what you’ve found.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
Featured by CNN, BBC, Newsweek... Awarded by the U.S. Dept. of State
Ask | Recognition | Books | Set as preferred source
