In my grandpa’s wallet, he carried a small patch of cheap cotton fabric, a remnant of his time in the WWII segregated Japanese American 100th Battalion. Decades after his service, he showed this keepsake not to his eldest son or grandchildren, but to my recently immigrated Taiwanese American mother, his daughter-in-law and a near-stranger to his history.
Later, as I began asking questions about our family history, my mom described this patch to me: its single stitches in an array of colors, sewn on by people from my grandpa’s hometown, wrapped in a bit of Saran Wrap. She recalled, “All his neighbors and friends made one stitch each, on this tiny rectangle of rice bag material, to try to keep him safe. Grandpa carried that inside his shirt pocket through the whole war.” Then after a pause she added, “敢死隊 (suicide squad). His friends died next to him. I didn’t know.”
It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I learned the term for this craft tradition: senninbari, 千人針. Literally translating to ‘thousand person stitches,’ senninbari are belts or strips of cloth traditionally stitched 1,000 times—often by Japanese mothers, wives, and sisters—for their loved ones going into battle. The custom originated over a century ago, when Japanese women and women who were subjects of Imperial Japan made senninbari for their sons, husbands, and brothers who were conscripted into the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. During WWII, many Issei (first generation) women in Hawaii, as well as those among the 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in U.S. camps, practiced this tradition, stitching protection for their Nisei (second generation) sons serving in the segregated Japanese American 100th Battalion / 442nd Infantry Regiment to carry with them.
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Curious to learn more about a craft tradition that I had previously thought was specific only to my grandpa’s neighbors and friends, in December 2024 I visited the National Japanese American Historical Society (NJAHS) in San Francisco’s Japantown. There, I held for the first time, in white-gloved hands, a senninbari. This particular thousand-stitch belt was made by an Issei mother, Chiyo Tominaga, who was incarcerated at Topaz, Utah. She stitched it for her Nisei son, Mitsuo Mel Tominaga, who served with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team 3rd BN, L Company.
On one side of this length of cream-colored fabric, there are what appear to be one hundred vertical rows of ten navy blue running stitches each. While the front of this senninbari offers a kind of minimalist beauty, gently turning the belt over, I’m surprised by a compelling chaos: a mess of black threads, anchored by a knot each, overlapping onto each other. What appears at first to be a simple running stitch made by a single long thread is instead revealed to be a thousand distinct stitches, made by a thousand short threads.
Slowly unfurling the piece, my eyes trace the stains marking both sides of the senninbari—some blue along the stitches, some brown, in blotches. Lilith, the NJAHS historian who pulled the piece for me from their stored collection, explains: Vintage fabrics and threads from that era were made differently, and the materials then had less ‘color fastness,’ meaning less resistance to fading or color bleeding. The blues blooming out along the blue stitches are transfers of dye, likely aided by exposure to moisture and movement. The brown blotches are more familiar, not dissimilar to the color and patterning of the neckline of an aged white-collared shirt. Mel Tominaga carried this senninbari on his person while serving in Italy, and these are stains of his sweat from that time.
I paused and noticed my hands shaking a bit—it feels almost illicit to witness something so private and beautiful. Later, reflecting on this experience, I thought about Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 essay on aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, which offers language for considering the connection between an object’s past and its present beauty. Tanizaki writes admiringly of the shadowy, unpolished parts of art, architecture, and everyday objects that “call to mind the past that made them.” He describes a preference for “a sheen of antiquity” over a “sparkling white,” for a “pensive luster” over a “shallow brilliance.” Shadows, he reflects, have the potential to evoke the past in ways that deepen, rather than diminish, aesthetic experience.
Every mark on Mel Tominaga’s senninbari, both handmade stitches and stains, evokes its past and makes this piece what it is now: that a mother would, in the imposed conditions of her time, marshal this kind of community care for her son; that a thousand people would take small but meaningful collective action to insist that this person’s life has value to them; that this son would then carry with him, through the war and over many arduous military campaigns, that object of care. This piece holds the tension between the beauty of acts of care and the systems of violence that necessitate them.
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Reflecting on Japanese American senninbari through this lens today, I’ve found myself thinking about, of all things, crowdfunding.
In an interview recorded in the Densho Digital Repository, 442nd veteran Minoru “Min” Tsubota describes the senninbari his mother made for him from a rice kome-no sack while she was incarcerated at Tule Lake, California. Min talks about her motivation to bring him back safely; how she stood in the street to ask people she had never met before to tie a knot for her son; and how he then carefully carried this object through his service, the combat that left him injured in Italy, and the U.S. liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp. Mrs. Tsubota drew from what was available—rice bag fabric, her own labor, and appeals to her community—to stand in for what she could not physically do herself: protect her son from harm.
The senninbari I’ve encountered, like so many mutual aid fundraisers today, exist as gestures of care and protection in response to overwhelming structural violence: Former colleagues who work as public school teachers fundraise for basic classroom supplies for schools that are inequitably funded—and, in many cases, functionally segregated by race and class. A San Francisco neighbor raises funds to evacuate her family from Israel’s U.S.-enabled genocide in Gaza. Friends have turned to crowdfunding to afford a sister’s Lyme disease treatment, to support a community member fighting lupus and kidney failure, and to pay for a wife’s brain surgery and recovery, while medical debt continues to be the leading cause of bankruptcy in this country.
Spending time in the archives and, like most people I know, receiving numerous mutual aid requests, I’m struck by how both senninbari and fundraisers remind us of human-made tragedies and policy failures, as well as the commitment individuals and communities can make to each other, despite.
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In attempting to write this piece, I can hear the critique that I am making my grandpa’s senninbari political, a critique based on the premise I’ve internalized that art exists wholly separately from politics.
And focusing on the art absent any of its political context is certainly one way I could choose to talk about senninbari. As my friend and fellow writer Nadine Monem has pointed out, stories about cultural artifacts often insist on focusing exclusively on beauty and resilience rather than the conditions that require it. It would be easy to adopt this approach and invisibilize the politics of senninbari.
But senninbari are inherently political. In Feminism, Interrupted, author Lola Olufemi explains: “The divide between politics and art is not real. It is politics that dictates who creates art, how it is consumed and sold, the conditions in which it is created, the subjectivities that dominate it.”
Whether or not the prevailing power dynamics are named, they nonetheless exert force and shape the lives and art of their time. The politics of the 1940s dictated that Mrs. Tsubota had to create her son Minoru’s senninbari while she was incarcerated at Tule Lake, along with thousands of other Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes. Those same politics drafted my grandpa, the 21-year-old working-class son of an immigrant, into the segregated Japanese American 100th Battalion. Ninety-five percent of these soldiers were likewise sons of immigrants, sent to deployments considered fit for the only American soldiers categorically marked as “4-C: enemy aliens.” The high rate of casualties suffered by the 100th, the first segregated Japanese American unit to engage in combat in WWII, earned it the moniker, “The Purple Heart Battalion.”
Understanding these conditions deepens an understanding of WWII Japanese American senninbari as not just a creative practice of making something, but of making something happen. Against a backdrop of repression and the violation of civic and social rights, the makers of these senninbari express a collective hope for the safety and protection of their intended recipients. Stitch by stitch, each belt insists that lives that are being treated as disposable are, a thousand times over, anything but. Each senninbari asserts care for a life that remains inherently precious, despite and against the imposed constraints.
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In interviews and correspondences recorded by the Japanese American National Museum, 442nd veteran Dr. Susumu “Sus” Ito describes his senninbari, made by his mother while she was incarcerated at Rohwer, Arkansas. Ito carried his senninbari in his pocket through his service in all of the 442nd’s campaigns in Italy, France, and Germany, including the rescue of the Lost Battalion and the U.S. liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp.
Dr. Ito writes, “I treasured it. My mother used to tell me about senninbaris as a child. She sent it to me. I carried it in my pocket. I had a close attachment to it, and to my mother because she made it. I’d like to think that my senninbari helped get me back safely.”
When on July 15, 1946, President Harry Truman presented the 100th/442nd with one of their eight Distinguished Unit Citations, awarded for demonstrated exceptional heroism in action against an armed enemy, he congratulated them: “You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice—and you won. You have made the Constitution stand for what it really means: the welfare of all the people, all the time.” Truman’s statement, while significant in his acknowledgement of the 100th/442nd’s extraordinary service, still operates within a structurally bigoted premise: If some groups need to demonstrate exceptional heroism to earn their Constitutional rights, then for some, those Constitutional rights are conditional rather than inalienable.
Despite and against this deeply racist constraint, by the war’s end, the Niseis’ record included twenty-one Medals of Honor, 4,000 Purple Hearts, twenty-nine Distinguished Service Crosses, 560 Silver Stars, and more than 4,000 Bronze Stars. The 100th/442nd became the most highly decorated unit in U.S. history for its size and length of service, still to this date.
My grandpa, one of many among his battalion mates, was also awarded decorations for his service in the 100th, including a Purple Heart, awarded for valor in the line of duty for those wounded or killed in combat, and a Bronze Star, awarded for bravery in combat. Like his senninbari, he did not talk about those decorations with his family. Unlike his senninbari, to my knowledge, he left his Purple Heart and Bronze Star somewhere in storage.
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Sometimes when I see mutual aid fundraisers now, I think about my grandpa’s senninbari and my great-grandmother Tsuta and the women who made it for him. In the 1940s, Tsuta Matsui was a first-generation immigrant, mother, and wife to her husband Juro, who worked as a janitor at Punahou School. She began knot-gathering for her son when he, like many other Issei mothers’ Nisei sons, was drafted into the segregated 100th Battalion.
Her senninbari for my grandpa, like all the WWII Japanese American senninbari, did not unmake their brutal constraints. Neither do mutual aid fundraisers undo the contexts that require them today. That, of course, is a critical and related though separate project—to build a society that does not require senninbari or mutual aid fundraisers.
And still, he carried those one thousand stitches with him, through his service in the 100th, and for decades more after he returned.
