YORK​,​ Harry

I ran away before even finishing elementary school. After that, I worked here and there doing odd jobs—like an errand boy. When I was about six, I went to Yokohama, hoping to get on a ship, but they said I was too young and wouldn’t let me on. Still, somehow, I managed to board a ship bound for Australia. I ended up in Singapore, where I was taken in by a Japanese naval officer who treated me like his own child. But I could tell something was off—the atmosphere was changing, the air of war was starting to spread. Since I could speak Malay, I worked as a kind of interpreter. Later, I went to what’s now Indonesia, to a place called Hifumi, and then boarded a British ship as part of the crew. We went all the way around Europe. I hadn’t planned to land in America, but when the ship reached here, they said I looked the part, so I got off. If I hadn’t, and had gone back on that ship, I would have gone down with it—the ship later sank with sixty-five people on board. Back then, many Japanese were rough types—thin, scrappy, half-outlaws. When I came to America, I did just about everything you could imagine. Worked in restaurants, washed dishes, peeled potatoes—everything. But I’ve always believed life isn’t just about hardship. I thought, there must still be something good waiting for me. Even when I was washing dishes, I wasn’t just satisfied with that—I kept my hopes and ambition. I did housework jobs too, but some people lost their minds in that kind of life. Some Japanese women were kept like servants by their husbands, practically imprisoned. Others got mixed up in shady business or ruined by it. Work like that—well, it can break people. No matter how hard things got, I tried to live independently. In those days, I slept on the subway, in parks, even on street benches—once someone threw water on me while I was sleeping. When I was about twenty-seven, I was walking down Broadway, and someone stopped me and said, “Hey, we’ve been looking for someone like you!” Just like that, I became an actor. For a while, I was one of the best-known Japanese faces in New York. When there was an “Oriental” role, it came to me first—if I turned it down, they’d look for someone else. During the war, I worked at the White House—yes, the White House itself—serving under the Roosevelts. I had no papers, no passport, nothing. But Mrs. Roosevelt was very kind to me. Then I was nearly drafted into the army. Mrs. Roosevelt said, “If you’re going to send that small man off to war, it’s too cruel,” and she arranged for me to be transferred. So instead, I went back to being an entertainer. I traveled all over the United States performing. Even during the war, I could move freely around the country. I was the only Japanese person at MGM who went on a screen tour with the others. There were about five hundred of us, and though I arrived late and looking rough, it worked out fine. I earned a bit of money—won around a thousand dollars from a card game after betting twenty-five—and used that to go to a small school. That’s how I got my start in the life I have now. I retired from acting in 1953. My last film was On the Waterfront. I played a snowman in that one. But you know, acting—that was just one part of my life story. This portrait is part of the DMHJNY's new exhibit Issei: Portraits Of The First-Generation Japanese New Yorkers which is on view here: https://www.historyofjapaneseinny.org/issei/