Certificate of Birth of Kaoru Shiibashi

The 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” between the United States and Japan prevented male Japanese laborers from emigrating to the United States. The 1924 National Origins Act effectively ended all Japanese immigration. Thus, American citizens of Japanese ancestry living in Japan, who could legally return to the United States, were in great demand to work on Japanese farms in California. In 1931, Kaoru Shiibashi, a 23 year old Hawaiian-born man who had been taken to Japan as a toddler, sailed to San Francisco “to see my native land” and to work on a farm near San Jose, California. When he arrived, immigration inspectors detained him on Angel Island and launched an investigation into his U.S. citizenship. Kaoru provided them with a family photograph of himself as an infant that was taken in Hawaii and with a copy of his Hawaiian birth certificate. However, the inspectors became suspicious when interviews with him and his family differed and no one in Hawaii could identify him in the photograph. Kaoru was initially denied entry, but he was eventually admitted on appeal, and worked as a farm laborer in the strawberry fields for the next 10 years. During World War II, he was among 120,000 Japanese Americans detained under Executive Order 9066. After his release from the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming, he returned to farm in California.