What happened to the family in this 1942 photo? It’s a story of persecution and resilience

“Japanese aliens and citizens have two more days to leave the West Coast under their own power,” The Chronicle reported weeks earlier. “After Sunday night, the Army will take over.”

Eighty years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The mandate designated much of the West Coast as a military zone where Japanese immigrants and American citizens of Japanese descent were barred from residing. It led to the incarceration of 122,000 Japanese Americans, including about 70,000 U.S. citizens — and the erasure of a San Francisco community.

There are dozens of photos like the one of Philip Miyamoto in The Chronicle archive, a haunting visual essay of businesses shutting down, citizens of Japanese ancestry turning in short-wave radios and families on buses or trains out of town.

Except this image is different. The names of Philip Miyamoto and his family were etched onto the negative by the photographer, a rarity in the 1940s.

Instead of a mysterious set of faces, it’s the beginning of a journey. We know the boy in the black peacoat was sent to Heart Mountain Relocation Center in rural Wyoming, and we know he later returned to San Francisco. We know he didn’t live a life of resentment, but one of service that resonated through generations.

And that’s where the story takes its surprise turn: We also know that the boy in the photo became a father, and his son is Paul Miyamoto, now the sheriff of San Francisco.

“Obviously, I wasn’t there,” Paul Miyamoto says. But the impact of internment on his family and on the Japanese American community “is still there,” he adds, “and resonates when we tell these stories.”

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Paul Miyamoto’s grandmother, Asaye Mae Miyamoto, is in the 1942 photo as well, looking away from her family, as if she doesn’t want her three boys to see the concern on her face.

Like most who were interned, Asaye Miyamoto had spent her entire life in the United States. She was born in 1907 in Cloverdale after her family was displaced from San Francisco by the 1906 earthquake and fire.

“All in all, it was quite hard for my parents because of the language barrier and large size of my family,” Asaye Miyamoto, who had eight siblings, said in an oral history taken by Paul Miyamoto before her 2004 death, “but Father always managed somehow to make enough so that we were never destitute, and we grew up a very happy family.”

Asaye moved to San Francisco in her 20s and married Joe Miyamoto in 1932. The couple thrived in the city, raising sons Philip, Don and Keith during the Great Depression, while opening Eagle Cleaners on Washington Street. The dry cleaner made it into one of Chronicle columnist Herb Caen’s first columns in 1939:

“Yawns Dept: Some of our Better People, who have nothing else to do, are amusing themselves by calling up Eagle Cleaners and asking what they charge to clean an eagle!”

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Joe Miyamoto was decorating the window of Eagle Cleaners for Christmas when a neighbor dropped by with news from the radio about the Dec. 7, 1941, bombing of Pearl Harbor.

“With all the fear and uncertainty after war was declared, grandma was a very strong force of calmness,” relatives said in a eulogy provided by Paul Miyamoto.

In the months between the Pearl Harbor attack and forced internment, Asaye Mae Miyamoto maintained regular poker games with friends. In the living quarters at the back of the cleaners, they pulled blackout curtains tightly around the windows and played cards by candlelight while air raid sirens wailed.

After the Chronicle photo was taken, the family was forced to the assembly center at the Santa Anita Park racetrack in Arcadia (Los Angeles County) — a first train ride ever for 8-year-old Philip Miyamoto.

He remembered a statue of Seabiscuit in front of the grandstands, where camouflage nets were being made, and running around the track pretending to be horses. But there were harsher memories, too.

“Our family was assigned to stay in a horse stall smelling of horse manure,” Philip Miyamoto wrote years later. “We slept on mattresses stuffed with hay. To bathe, some of us used a big shower room which was formerly used to wash horses. My mother cried.”

In September 1942, the Miyamoto family was moved again, to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming.

There, in a small city surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire, the children went to school, had snowball fights in the winter and captured rattlesnakes for a makeshift natural history museum. The family lived in a one-room barrack with shared bathrooms and a mess hall alongside more than 10,000 other Japanese Americans. At its peak population, Heart Mountain was the third-largest city in Wyoming.

“In that initial time of turmoil, I remember any apprehensions I may have had were put to rest by my parents,” Philip Miyamoto wrote. “They were protective of me and my brothers just as other parents were of their children. As the wartime months and years went by for children like me, things returned to a normalcy as we grew up, even if our surroundings were an internment camp.”

They left the camp in May 1943 as one of the early families allowed to resettle, and after a stay in Denver, returned to San Francisco in late 1945.

“I remember VJ Day celebrations ending WWII,” Philip Miyamoto wrote. “I remember how much help and support my parents received from old friends and neighbors upon their return.”

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The story of Paul Miyamoto’s family is in his office on the fourth floor of San Francisco City Hall, a room that displays a love of history as much as law enforcement.

There’s a poster honoring the 442nd Infantry, a legendary division made up of second-generation Japanese American fighters that was one of the most decorated during WWII. Paul Miyamoto’s great-uncles Shig, George and Mitch all served with the 442nd, fighting in Italy and France.

And there’s a framed quote from Teddy Roosevelt’s speech, “The Man in the Arena.”

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles. … The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again.”

Paul’s father, Philip Miyamoto, used history as a form of communication. He sent the Roosevelt quote to Paul in 2011, after the younger Miyamoto lost his first sheriff’s race to Ross Mirkarimi.

“My dad sent me that (quote) to kind of get me through,” Paul Miyamoto said. “To give you some insight into his personality, one time for Valentine's Day, he gave my mom a quote from FDR. (Not) the most romantic thing, but that’s part of how he expressed himself.”

At some point during adulthood, Paul Miyamoto thought to ask his surviving elders the obvious question: Why did they return to San Francisco?

The Chronicle describes an inhospitable scene as citizens of Japanese ancestry were forced out of the city and racist language ran in the hometown newspaper. One Chronicle article was headlined “Jap Town Sells Out.”

“San Francisco’s ‘Little Tokyo’ is going out of business,” the report began. “... Along Post Street, between Octavia and Webster, you can buy anything from a pool table to a begonia plant, cheap the signs tell you.”

The Miyamotos were among the majority who lost their homes and businesses during incarceration.

“I've asked both my grandmother and my dad, you know, why did you guys come back here?” Paul Miyamoto says. Part of it, he says, was the familiarity. “(B)ecause they had been here. The family had been through the 1906 earthquake, so they had been here prior to internment for 30 years.”

After they returned, the Miyamotos set up a new dry cleaning business, Spruce Cleaners, and lived a block away on Spruce Street in Laurel Heights. Philip, Don and Keith went to Washington High — the older brothers were classmates with singer Johnny Mathis — where they excelled academically.

Philip Miyamoto served as a medic in the Army during the Korean War, then went to UC Berkeley for law school. He practiced law for 50 years — as a lawyer for the state of California, and later as an appellate judge for the state. He married Ella Miyamoto, a Chinese woman, who became heavily involved in the Japanese American community, arranging flowers in Japantown every Saturday. She still serves on the board of the Lowell High School Alumni Association.

And the Miyamotos had two boys: Peter, a concert pianist and music professor at the University of Missouri, and Paul, who pursued a law degree before becoming the sheriff of San Francisco.

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When the sheriff is off the job, the five people in that black-and-white photo never feel too far away.

Don and Keith Miyamoto are still alive and in the Bay Area. And Paul Miyamoto lives in the family home in Laurel Heights with his wife, LeeAnn, and five children, including triplets who will attend Washington High next year, just like their grandfather did. They’re the fifth generation of Miyamotos to call Spruce Street home.

There are reminders of the family’s history throughout the house. A photo of Paul’s great-grandfather Frank Miyamoto and an alcohol permit issued in 1906 for his Stevenson Street restaurant. A photo of Philip, Keith and Don as children, holding an American flag. A patch from the 442nd created by great-uncle Mitch, a cartoonist who redesigned the problematic insignia (a yellow arm holding a sword) into a fist carrying a torch of freedom.

Paul’s mother, Ella Miyamoto, lives on the bottom floor, where her in-laws Joe and Asaye Mae lived before they died. The younger generations live up top. Paul Miyamoto likes that his children can go downstairs, where the vibes of the elders are still strong.

“Symbolically,” he says, “it’s like moving on and moving up.”

After his 2011 election loss, Paul Miyamoto stayed on with the Sheriff’s Office, worked alongside Mirkarimi and his successor, Vicki Hennessy, and rose to the rank of assistant sheriff. When Miyamoto won his second election and was sworn in on Jan. 8, 2020, he became the first big-city Asian American sheriff in California history.

In his inauguration speech, Paul Miyamoto related his family’s experience of incarceration — and how they responded — to the challenges he’d face as San Francisco’s sheriff.

“They responded with strength, grace, and grit and became civil servants,” Paul Miyamoto said in the speech. “The Miyamotos became the change they wanted to see. They embodied resilience.”

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He preached compassion and forgiveness, and said we must have faith in the potential for recovery and redemption. And he quoted his father, “Never give up.”

Philip Miyamoto was too sick to attend his son’s inauguration in person, but he watched a live video stream. After the swearing-in, Paul’s first stop was the hospital to see his father. Philip Miyamoto died the following month.

“I was very fortunate to have him around and to be as influential as he has been on my life,” Paul Miyamoto says. “I wasn’t the person in the internment camp. But fortunately I benefited from their experience through who my dad made me.”

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub