In her book, “In Love and War: The World War II Courtship Letters of a Nisei Couple,” published in 2015, author Melody M. Miyamoto Walters published the courtship letters of her grandparents Yoshiharu Ogata (1919-2007) of Kauai and Naoko Tsukiyama Ogata (1917-2022) of Honolulu, which they exchanged during 1941-1943.
Walters supplemented the letters, which she discovered after Yoshiharu’s death, with information gleaned from interviews, memoirs, photos and comments from Naoko.
According to Densho, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to preserve Japanese American stories of the past, and I paraphrase, “The letters are charming. It is fun to see the relationship develop. Yet, in an early letter, Yoshiharu downplayed his qualifications in exactly the manner I would expect from a Nisei guy. ‘There are many swell and better fellows than I am. I know you will meet them. When you do, I will envy him.’”
Yoshiharu was born in Eleele, Kauai and grew up in McBryde Sugar Co.’s Wahiawa Camps 2 and 3, while Naoko hailed from a prosperous Honolulu merchant family.
When they first met in Honolulu in the summer of 1941, Naoko, a graduate of the University of Hawaii, was doing clerical work while waiting for a teaching assignment.
And Yoshiharu, a Stout Institute of Wisconsin college graduate, was employed as an industrial arts teacher in Honolulu.
Their correspondence began that summer, when Yoshiharu returned home to Kauai for the summer, while Naoko remained in Honolulu awaiting the teaching assignment.
Over the next two years, they continued their correspondence, meeting only occasionally.
They married in 1943 and made their home on Kauai, where Yoshiharu was employed as a vocational teacher at Waimea High School and Naoko taught at Waimea Elementary School.
He retired from Waimea High School and she retired as a librarian at Waimea and Kaumakani schools.
They had two children: Jon Ogata and Joy Miyamoto.
Their granddaughter, author Melody M. Miyamoto Walters, graduated from Waimea High School in 1993 and went on to the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Arizona State University.
She is currently a professor of history at Collin College in Texas.
