Tamie Tsuchiyama was born on 5/8/1915 on Kaua‘i and graduated from the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, and was an advanced doctoral student at University of California, Berkeley, when she volunteered to be evacuated and work secretly at the Santa Anita Assembly Center, then at the Poston, Arizona internment camp (block 31-11-B). She was hired in 1942 to conduct ethnographic fieldwork for the University of California at Berkeley's Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS).
The book The Politics of Fieldwork, by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, reviews information from her work letters, fieldnotes, reports, interviews, and other archival sources, which describes her experiences as a secretive researcher at Poston. She left Poston in October of 1943, with near mental and physical exhaustion. The book includes information on daily life, fieldwork methods, and politics of the internees and researchers at Poston camp, as well as sheds some insight into the pressures that led to her resignation, in protest, from the JERS project in 1945.
Tamie Tsuchiyama enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) on 11/9/1944 in Chicago, since she knew German, French and Spanish and she was assigned to Japanese language school and military intelligence duty translating official Japanese documents. She was honorably discharged in 1946.
Tsuchiyama completed work for her Ph.D. and from 1947-1951, served in occupied Japan as a Social Science Field Research Analyst, translating documents and evaluating accounting information of Japanese businesses in Manchuria. Since no anthropology positions opened up, she obtained a bachelor of library science degree and became director of the Oriental Library at the University of Texas at Austin.
Tsuchiyama completed work for her Ph.D. and from 1947-1951, served in occupied Japan as a Social Science Field Research Analyst, translating documents and evaluating accounting information of Japanese businesses in Manchuria. Since no anthropology positions opened up, she obtained a bachelor of library science degree and became director of the Oriental Library at the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Tamie Tsuchiyama passed away in Austin, Texas in 1984.
Source: http://thegardenisland.com/news/article_201653f0-6044-55fc-a230-16d328b5dfe9.html
