Shikata Ga Nai

Shikata Ga Nai

Cadet Nurse Corps Nurse Alice Kanagaki

US Army Cadet Nurse Corps member Alice Kanagaki's experience as a nurse during the war was drastically different from her counterparts across the nation. Kanagaki, a young Japanese American woman born and raised in Vacaville, California, spent the better part of her high school career in an internment camp near Phoenix, Arizona, called Gila River Camp.

Kanagaki joined the Cadet Nurse Corps in 1944, leaving the Gila River and serving alongside 124,000 other young women answering the call for nurses to train and fill the ranks in hospitals at home left empty of qualified nurses due to World War II. Of those numbers, about 3,000 were fellow women of color.

Kanagaki served as a Cadet Nurse at the Madison General Hospital School of Nursing. She claimed that her years there were the best of her life, and that she Madison was a wonderful place to be because it allowed her the freedom to come and go as she pleased. Internment camps like Gila River were notoriously bereft of the amenities of home, and were known to be overcrowded and constructed with little thought for individual privacy. It makes sense that escaping this kind of environment, where you were unable to move freely, would be a relief. What is even more troubling, is that Kanagaki describes her life in the camp as almost vacation-like in some ways, and Gila River was considered to be a more "lenient" camp than some of the others, and yet it was still a relief for Kanagaki to reach Madison.

Thanks to executive order 9066, issued by President Roosevelt after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, thousands of Japanese Americans were forced into these relocation centers. One of the few ways to get out of the camps during the war was to volunteer to serve in the military in some capacity, and that included nursing and nursing school.

Alice Kanagaki not only chose to train to serve her country as a young Cadet Nurse, answering the desperate need for nurses in stateside hospitals during and after the war, but she chose to do it in spite of the obvious hatred and discrimination she, her family, and her fellow Japanese American citizens were suffering at the hands of the very people she was working to serve and heal. One of the photos here is of Kanagaki in her Cadet Nurse uniform, and the other is of her at 90 years old.

"The Japanese people are not the kind of people to sit back and feel sorry for themselves. They are creative, resourceful and they make the best of a bad situation. Shikata ga nai." --- Alice Kanagaki

Unknown Photographer, Alice Kanagaki

Japanese American Museum of San Jose: "Alice Kanagaki," originally published on Tessaku by Diana Tsuchida, Accessed April 25, 2020: https://www.jamsj.org/manabu/alice-kanagaki

Wisconsin State Journal: "Japanese-American Left Internment Camps in 1940s to Study Nursing in Madison, Archivist Finds," by David Wahlberg, May 15, 2017: https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/health-med-fit/japanese-americans-left-internment-camps-in-s-to-study-nursing/article_c37bff0b-59c6-53a9-9c43-6df2eb513f53.html

Japanese American Museum of San Jose and Diana Tsuchida AND Wisconsin State Journal

Accessed April 25, 2020

Black and white and color photographs (jpg)

English

Still Images

Alice Kanagaki US Cadet Nurse, WWII

Japanese American nurses in WWII, US Cadet Nurse Program in WWII, Japanese American Women in World War II

black and white photo and color photo