Featured on my Facebook page, and posted here for archiving.

Chiyo Koji Shiogi (1892-1999 – yes, she lived to age 107) was the first Japanese convert to the Church to emigrate to the United States: baptized in 1909, she arrived in Portland in 1912, bearing a recommendation from her mission president that read in part:

“She is a faithful saint in every way and has been a great help to us in teaching Sunday School classes and in taking part in Bible classes. She is a college educated girl and comes from a good family and is quite used to refinement. I hope that the saints and missionaries there will always treat her as a saint should be treated and not let any dislike they might have for her race cause her to be insulted or to hear harsh words. … I wish that if there should happen to be an anti-Japanese feeling among any of your saints that you will do your best to see that she is guarded from unfair treatment.”

This 1915 picture shows Chiyo, with her American-born son and her husband, Sadaji Shiogi, and his brother, working on their berry farm in Oregon. Because of laws forbidding the naturalization of Japanese, neither Chiyo nor her husband could become American citizens, despite their compliance with all laws, their living, working, and paying taxes in the United States for 30 years, and their educating their American-born children for useful citizenship.

At 7:30 in the evening of December 7, 1941, the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, FBI agents came to the Shiogi home and arrested Sadaji, searching the home and confiscating every scrap of Japanese writing. Chiyo and her youngest child – an American citizen – were interned in the camp at Minidoka, Idaho, where they spent years behind barbed wire. Chiyo’s former mission president, U.S. Senator Elbert D. Thomas, worked tirelessly to find Sadaji – who was not then freed, but was transferred to the Minidoka camp to join his wife in her imprisonment until 11 September 1945.

Finally, more than 40 years after Chiyo Koji Shiogi came to the United States, the McCarran Act of 1952 eliminated race-based prohibitions against naturalization (but only after battling major opposition, including a presidential veto) and cleared the way for Chiyo and Sadaji to become US citizens. This Latter-day Saint convert and her husband took the Oath of Allegiance on 11 November 1954.